Outside Influences

They didn’t find a company of semi-humans fighters in the tunnels. They did, however, in a surprise to none of them, find some giant insects.

Most of the unnatural terrors skittered away at the sound of their footsteps, but a couple paused to menace them as they approached.

“I’ve got this,” Beth declared as she stumbled forwards towards the thing that she and James had taken to calling a long-tailed cave lobster. James quickly restrained Beth by the shoulder, stopping her from hurting herself. Her state of feverish delirium had been getting worse by the hour, and Bel and James had quietly discussed taking away her knives before she hurt herself. She’d seemed fine after her long rest, but after a short time hiking through the tunnels she’d started acting strange. Now she was coated in a sheen of sweat and her loss of coordination was obvious to all of them.

“Why don’t you let Bel handle this one?” James suggested.

Bel brandished the short sword that she’d liberated from one of the guards. “It’s good practice!”

Beth raised an eyebrow but slowly nodded as her eyes drifted shut again.

“Is she asleep on her feet?”

James examined his patient for a moment. “Looks like it.”

That crisis momentarily averted, Bel examined the long-tailed cave lobster again. It was more scared and defensive than aggressive. It didn’t match with what she’d been taught of creatures beyond the Barrier, but James had pointed out that everything they heard was probably a lie spread by Technis.

The dark-shelled lobster was currently holding its two bright red pincer up high, threatening the group with a nasty pinch if they got closer. If it had been more than a couple of feet high Bel may have been intimidated, but as it was she just wanted the creature to go away.

Bel was waving her weapon at the creature, waiting for it to move past them, when she saw some movement by the wall behind the lobster.

“Heads up,” she called out, “there’s something else here.”

Bel gripped her weapon tightly in her right hand as she lifted an ever-burning candle with her left.

Bel jumped as a pale blur twice the lobster’s size slipped from a crack in the wall and snatched the smaller cave lobster with two of its eight legs. In an eye blink the lobster was sawed in half by the ambusher’s bizarre mouth – a strange arrangement with two vertically oriented jaws placed side by side. It sheared through the lobster so quickly that Bel only understood what happened after a few seconds of noisy chewing.

After enjoying a mouthful, the newcomer turned towards James and made a threatening rattling sound by rubbing its mouthparts together.

That’s enough of that, Bel thought.

Bel glared with disgust, easily overpowering the predator’s resistance. She rushed forward and jabbed her sword at its frozen face, slicing across its eyes but failing to penetrate its exoskeleton.

That broke the overlarge arachnid from it paralysis. It stepped back, waving its front legs frantically in the air.

Bel rushed forward, her blade held up high. The arachnid must have been partially blinded because it didn’t react until she was almost upon it. She slapped its head with one hand, forcing the exoskeleton to liquify. Then she stabbed her weapon straight through to whatever served as its brain. The creature twitched violently and then went still, its legs curling in towards its body.

Bel pulled the energy from its core, but there wasn’t much.

“These really aren’t worth much,” she complained.

She was eager to advance her threshold a few steps. She’d taken her first couple of abilities quickly, but now she wanted to save up for something fantastic. The power to blow up a moon would be nice.

She was also considering just maybe using twelve of her unbound strokes to get a vision ability from Kjar’s constellation. It would let her see wickidness, whatever that meant, and would also improve her vision in dark places. Taking it would be like admitting that she was bound to spend more time in caves though, which made her resist the obviously useful ability.

Bel wiped off the ichor from her short sword on the bristly body of the spider-thing. “Liquify is pretty useful. I’m excited to see what other abilities I can get with my new Path. I wouldn’t mind fighting something more dangerous, just to grow faster,” she told her brother.

“Is leveling slower now?”

“I think so. At least it is relative to my first Path.”

James nodded. “It makes video game sense. And I guess that your core is larger in its magical 4D space, so it takes more essence to grow a new layer? Does that sound right?”

Bel shrugged and her snakes wobbled. “I’ve never understood that dimensional stuff that you and Ventas talked about. My new core feels about the same size.”

James scratched his chin. “Ah, I’ve got it. The amount of essence you would need grows with the surface area of your core. A sphere takes, uh…”

James waved his fingers in the air as he thought.

“Four π times the radius squared, I think. With a second core you've got twice the radius, so it makes sense.”

Beth interrupted them with a sudden snort. “What? Huh? What makes sense?”

James rolled his eyes. “Welcome back, Beth. Bel took care of the monster.” He pointed at the arachnid-type thing’s corpse.

Beth blinked blearily. “Oh. Is that dinner? I’m starving.”

“No,” James replied quickly. “Or… I hope not. Gods, what if the only food outside of the Barrier is giant bug?”

“Oh Bargainer please, please, don’t make these the only things to eat outside of the Barrier,” Bel prayed.

Beth clicked her tongue in frustration. “Aren’t you two hungry? Why waste this thing?”

“We don’t even have a way to build a fire,” James pleaded, “let’s just forget about this dual-jawed spider thing, okay? Maybe it was mutated from radiation. I’m sure there gotta be something normal once we get out of the cave.”

He pulled the map from his pack and started poking at it. “I mean, we haven’t found any landmarks yet, but I think we should come up to a pool soonish. Maybe it’ll have fish.”

Luckily for their stomachs, Beth wasn’t in any condition to really argue. She gave up with only a little bit of grumbling and the siblings shared a sigh of relief as they left the corpse behind.

Bel spend some of the time walking trying out the passive versions of her minor body modification ability. Liquify, by comparison, was easy to figure out. She’d used it to slightly soften the edge of her weapon and sharpen it. Even Beth had admitted that the ability was cool.

Changing part of my own body though…

The passive version of the ability didn’t go beyond making a small patch of Bel’s skin feel as if it had a callus. She needed to see what the active version would do, but she’d been holding off because she didn't have enough free strokes left in her cores after getting her new abilities. Using either of her abilities would mean a couple of hours waiting for her strokes to refill.

But, if all we’re going to do is fight giant bugs…

“Hey, I’m going to try the body mod ability,” she said.

James frowned. “Are you sure that’s safe?”

Bel tossed her hands into the air. “How should I know? It wouldn’t be an ability if it wasn’t safe, right?”

Her brother scratched at his growing beard. “Well, what are you going to try to do?”

Bel looked at her hand. “Sharpen a nail, maybe?”

She concentrated on her finger and tried to focus her ability on reshaping the nail of her pinky to be stronger and sharper. As the mana left her ability inscription, her nail lengthened and curved, turning into the claw that she’d pictured. She felt a pressure in her pinky that rapidly turned into a painful sting.

“Ow, ah, tits, this hurts,” she cursed. Bel waved her hand in the air, desperate for the stinging to go away, but it was only getting worse. After a few seconds of exquisite discomfort her ability ended, her pinky nail warped back to its original dimensions, and promptly popped off of her finger.

“Ah, crows, that hurt!” she yelled.

James rushed over to take a look, quickly numbing her pain as he grasped her hand.

“That was pretty stupid,” he scolded her, “but other than your nail falling off I think it’s fine.”

Bel blew on her faintly stinging digit, staring with consternation at the raw skin now bereft of covering. “That sucked,” she complained.

Her brother shrugged. “Practice makes perfect. How often can you use it?”

Bel felt at her core. “Ugh. I think it takes two hours to recover.”

Beth scoffed. “That’s why you’ve got to keep more free strokes in your core. Not just to resist whatever weird stuff people throw at you, but so you can recover faster. Only little kids fill their cores up.”

Bel pouted, but even as she prepared a retort she saw her sister lean up against the wall and drift off again.

“Maybe we should take a break,” James suggested.

Bel nodded wordlessly.

After a few more hours spent wandering through the cave – and backtracking only a couple of times – they finally found the pool that James had been pointing to on the map.

“As promised,” he announced proudly.

Bel swore to herself that she would learn how to read a map at the first available moment. James was clearly terrible at it.

Beth cracked an eye open for a moment before drifting off again. Her condition was deteriorating. Although James could feel what was wrong with her through his abilities, he’d told Bel that he couldn’t do much about it without access to real medicine. He could, he explained, put her into a protective coma, but that felt like an option of last resort.

Bel hesitantly approached the still pool of water, her candle held high as she searched the cave walls and floor for anything dangerous. The water was exceptionally clear, and very still. Her snakes uncoiled from her head and flicked their tongues through the air, clearly suspicious.

“Hey, could you refill these water bottles?” James asked.

Bel grumbled to herself and went to dig through her brother’s overstuffed bag. He had insisted on raiding everything they could from the cultist’s stores, which included several stoppered gourds for water. They started full, but wandering through the dry, dusty caves had been thirsty work. It didn’t help that all of the rations they’d discovered were dried meats and grain the consistency of sawdust – food probably meant to be boiled, but she had vetoed James’ suggestion that they take a pot.

She pulled out an armful of water jugs and wandered back to the water, but hesitated a couple of steps from it. Something about this water is just… weird.

“What’s up, sis?”

She glanced back at her brother and made a helpless gestured, and one of the gourds slipped free of her arms. She reflexively moved to catch it and all but two of the gourds broke free of her grasp. She growled, angry and frustrated as she watched them bounce along the ground. She stuck out a foot to stop their rolling, not excited by the prospect of chasing after them in the strange pool. She stopped one, but managed to kick another straight into the water.

It hit the surface and rolled across.

Is it ice?

No sooner had she completed the thought when the water -- which was clearly not actually water --split down the middle. The gourd slipped into the opening and disappeared. The edges of the water lifted like a miniature wave. Bel skipped backwards, not eager to see what it would do next. The wave lifted only knee height before slapping down in a wide area around the pool. It caught several of the gourds and dragged them back, where they disappeared into the not-water’s depths.

Bel backed away slowly.

“Bel, are you done yet? I want to rinse of Beth’s bandages.”

Bel turned back to him with an incredulous expression.

“Hey James, let me see that map.”

He looked up, confused. “The map? Why? Can’t that wait?”

She tossed the remaining gourds at him and held out her hand. “No. Give it. Something’s weird about the water.”

He grumbled with frustration, but dug out the map. It was made of hide and covered with little markings that Bel didn’t really understand, but she couldn’t imagine its makers marking this as a place to drink.

“Show me this pond,” she demanded.

“Geez, would it hurt to say please?”

“Please good brother, I want to stop us from dying. If that’s okay with you, could you show me the pond?”

He rolled his eyes, but pointed out a small circle. “Here. What makes you think it isn’t safe?”

“Maybe the teeth that are drawn next to it? And the bones below them?”

James squinted, bringing his candle closer. “Nah, I think those are hieroglyphs. Probably the pond’s name.”

“Sure,” Bel nodded, “it’s named Bitey Bone Pond.”

“Well, what’s wrong with it then?”

Bel bent down to the cavern floor and grabbed at a protruding rock. With a quick application of liquify, she gouged it free of the cave floor and tossed it into the carnivorous water.

It struck the surface and bounced.

“Huh,” James breathed. “Well, that’s weird, but–”

Then the pond repeated its prior performance, swallowing up the stone before striking at the ground around it.

James blinked several time. “Oh, okay. Maybe those symbols meant it was dangerous.”

“You think? It’s not even real water!”

“But it's just a... a slime! It's probably weak. You should kill it for XP.”

Bel gave him a strong sideye. So did her snakes. “It's enormous, James. It would swallow me in a

single gulp.”

She shoved the map back at him. “Let’s find another pond, but one that’s marked with smiles and rainbows instead of bones and teeth, okay?”