Outside Influences

Crecerelle tapped her metallic nails again the wall as she waited. She wasn’t nervous about the meeting, even though it was well outside the safety of the local settlement. Instead, Cress was distracted by the weird feeling of being watched.

It started a few weeks ago, right? she wondered to herself. After my former group kicked me out.

Her lips puckered at the sour thought. I would almost believe that Agrafe got some god to curse me, but not even she would dare ask favors of a god.

Still, just that morning Cress had been walking down a street when a priest had taken one look at her and skipped across an entire river to avoid walking past her. Something was happening, she just couldn’t put a finger on what.

“Boss’ll see you now,” grunted one of the two hired fists. Cress flipped him an irreverent nod as she brushed past his spiky carapace. Kappa were… Well, they were kappa. Cress didn’t usually have a problem with them.

Giants though, they were another story.

“You can shut the door, snakes.”

Cress smiled, but only just enough to be polite.

Boss Krats ran a fairly busy shipping operation, bringing in exotic creatures from outer layers of Olympos back to the interior. Importantly for her, that meant he had a method to get past the naga in the first layer and the rule-loving asura of the second. Her tokens were supposed to grant her passage through the pillars, but the races that thought themselves closest to the divine saw it as their sacred duty to discriminate against the gorgons wherever they could, so even with the tokens she still needed to find a way around them.

Most people don’t even remember the Old World, she silently fumed, they just want an excuse to feel superior.

Krats snorted at her and brought Cress back to the present. He looked at her through a polished mirror to the side of his desk, although his attention went back to his food after the briefest of glances.

“Good morning Boss Krats,” she said, bowing. The traditional gorgon greeting was a hug, and maybe even a kiss, but she would cut off her face before she rubbed it against the disgusting giant.

“Thank you for making the time to hear me out,” she greeted him with her business smile as she sat down in one of the chairs across from his desk.

“Eh,” he grunted. His mouth was full of a fatty meat, and he tore off another chunk and began to chew rather than reply to her. The sounds made her feel sick to her stomach even though she was looking away from his mouth. She was thinking about leaving when he finally swallowed a chunk of flesh so large that she could see the lump traveling down his massive throat. “I wasn’t gonna bother, but I got a friend who told me that he just lost his previous gorgon. I thought it couldn’t hurt to see if you’ve got what it takes to replace ‘er. What’re you botherin’ me for anyway?”

Saying that, he shoved another large chunk of dead thing into his mouth. He waved at her impatiently to start talking while he chewed.

“Well, I have plans to lead a small expedition to the Overworld–”

She stopped and frowned as Krats began to laugh. Bits of half-chewed flesh sprayed bits from his gaping orifice, making her gag with disgust. She leaned away from the unpleasant man and swallowed the bile filling her throat.

He jabbed a finger thick with gleaming rings in her direction. “A cursed creature like you? A gorgon? Goin’ to the surface?”

He waved his hand dismissively while he swallowed the food that he hadn’t spit out. “Waste of time to even talk about that nonsense. May as well talk about pants for a centaur. I’ve got a better proposition.”

He leaned forward eagerly, and Cress couldn’t help but think of a spider ready to wrap a fly in silk. She quietly activated one of her abilities, taking control of the air in the room in preparation for the conversation’s inevitable conclusion.

“See, like I said, I got a friend who’s been puttin’ your little gorgon eye trick to use. He’s been breaking and training the beasts we’ve been collecting three layers out, and it’s convenient to subdue ’em. Last gorgon had an accident though, so now he needs another one of you.”

He chuckled and an evil glint entered his eyes. Cress was confident that she could guess at the kind of accident that had befallen her sister. Her fists tightened unconsciously as her heart thumped angrily.

Krats continued, uncaring of her response. “What say you go with my next caravan. You’ll get to see the sights, get some stories to tell, and come back in oh…”

Boss Krats waved his hands as if he were doing a dramatic reveal. Or perhaps he was truly bad at math. “…maybe five years or so. Long enough for you to pay off the debt you just got for wasting the time of your betters.”

Cress raised an eyebrow. “Is this why you invited me out here instead of meeting in town? You wanted to be somewhere out of sight of the local asura?”

He grinned. “That’s the kind of thing most people would think of before they came out here.” He tapped his head. “You folk really do have snakes going through the brain.”

She tilted her head. “So you think you can take me in a fight?”

“Oh, you’re a bold little snake!” he guffawed.

He jabbed one of his meaty fingers in her direction. “But look, we all know that the Gorgons are cursed. No gods’ll grant you abilities and you’re all too poor to hire people like me to bring you anything with a core worth absorbing. Your people are dirt, your abilities are dirt, and your future is dirt.”

“I see,” she huffed. “And what are you? A pile of shit?”

He snorted. “Not much of a comeback, but it’ll still cost you dearly. Guards!”

There were several long moments of awkward silence as the sneer on Boss Krats’ face slowly faded.

“Guards!” he yelled again, just a hint of alarm entering his voice.

Cress grinned wickedly as her snakes began to rattle.

“Oh no,” she said with sickening sweetness, “it seems they can’t hear you. I must be using one of those abilities that I couldn’t possibly afford.”

She rose from her seat slowly, a wasp far too dangerous for this spider’s web. Boss Krats leaped from his chair, scattering his rich cuts of meat over the floor as he reached for a weapon in one of his desk’s drawers.

Cress clenched her hand and the air in the room thickened, suppressing all sound and movement. The giant wasted several seconds struggling to breath before he wasted several more struggling through the thick air to reach for her throat.

Cress waited until he was only an arm’s length away before she loosened her hold upon a cone of air and shrieked through it. The powerful blast of sound – an ability that she’d lifted from a siren – was focused by her control of the air and ripped a hole straight through Boss Krats’ skull.

She smoothed her snakes as she waited for his body to go limp. Then she relinquished control over the air, allowing the air in the room to thin back to its normal pressure and release the corpse to the floor’s embrace. Gorgons were cursed by the gods, sure, but that didn’t stop her from spending years hunting down underworld beasts with strange and fantastic abilities.

Cress rubbed her hands together with anticipation and she gingerly stepped around the mess. She had just wasted an entire morning on the idiot, so she hoped that he at least kept something valuable in his office. Perhaps a map to the smuggling passage he and the other giants were using.

Cress frowned. If there was a group of giants that was actively exploiting gorgons, then she should do something about it.

I’m only one gorgon though, what can I do? Besides, I’ve got some big plans. What’s the point of them if I get killed in some hole?

The excuses felt hollow. Cress couldn’t help but remember Agrafe’s words; none of her sister gorgons had believed that Crecerelle had their safety in mind. If she walked away from this, wouldn’t she just be proving them right?

She grimaced as she idly poked through the dead man’s drawers. She pulled out anything of worth and stuffed it into her travel bag, but the sudden windfall couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt that clung to her like an itchy rash.

“I’m going to go get myself in trouble again, aren’t I?” she asked herself rhetorically.

She sighed. “Well, it’s not like I’m finding a map here anyway, so there really isn’t much I can do. I suppose that I’ll just wander around feeling guilty for the rest of my life instead.”

In her frustration, she swatted a figure of one of the giant’s gods from his desk. The multi-headed statue of a woman with exaggerated breasts flew through the air and smashed against the decoratively tiled wall. One of the heads popped off and the lower half shattered upon impact, but one of the arms lodged into a small crack in the tile, which left the upper torso dangling. The maimed goddess stared at Cress with an expression that she would have sworn hadn’t been there a moment ago.

She shuddered. Time to go, I think.

Cress took a step forward, but couldn’t help glancing at the goddess again. She looked at the arm that had lodged itself into the tile, and this time she noticed that the hand hadn’t fallen into a crack. There was actually a concealed button, and the force of Cress’ swat had gotten the hand wedged into the small space around it.

She stared at it with a feeling of dread. “There’s no way that happened by accident,” she muttered.

The goddess’s statue wasn’t moving though, and it was only so long before Boss Krats’ guards decided to check on him.

“Oh, seven hells,” she cursed. Cress jumped to the dangling statue and carefully removed it from the wall.

“Sorry about smashing you,” she apologized. “Not that any goddess has cared what we have to say.”

She tossed the statue into a corner. It wasn’t like the goddess would actually forgive her, so why bother trying to appease some fickle deity?

Cress closed her eyes and gingerly pressed the button with a pen she’d swiped from the desk.

She jumped back, expecting a trap, but instead a small panel popped open to reveal a few precious gems, some expertly crafted wands, and a map.

“Ah, dammit. Now I have to go.”

She glared at the smashed goddess. “Thanks a lot,” she bit out.