Homecoming was, somehow, more poignant than Alexander expected. He’d been gone more than a year. Somehow it felt like much longer, and the ache of familiar sights being swallowed by weeds and time did nothing to help that. The road leading into town was largely the same, but his keen eyes noted pavement that spiderwebbed with cracks, most of them new. Wild things grew a little thicker, saplings a bit taller, the edges of civilization fuzzing beneath the influence of Gaia’s encroaching wilderness. But, overall, things were mostly as he’d left them when he’d followed the Adventurers from his home. Been rescued, if he had to admit it.
The silhouette of familiar buildings, minus a few that had burned do to stoves left on, or cars suddenly without guidance crashing into them, greeted him.
“Good to be home, ain’t it?” Ben offered, breaking his usual silence.
Alexander took comfort in the solid presence of the warrior and nodded, not quite trusting words at the moment. The longer he looked at it, the more he was buried by the weight of memories he’d thought left behind.
Petrified forms here and there, visible in windows, seated in trucks where they’d been caught by the Pulse, drove home the reality of his return. These statues had been his friends, neighbors, and peers. Just down the street, inside a cozy two-story house too familiar to him, were two particular statues that he wasn’t ready to face yet.
“Yeah. Hurts more than I thought it would though.” He admitted to the veteran monster slayer.
A solid clap of armored mitt on his own armored shoulder, shifted his balance.
“Good. Pain reminds us of what was lost. And of what we’re going to do about it.” The Oread Steel Heavy Knight said.
A very Ben thing to say. He was surprised to note that the gruff man’s reassurance helped take the edge off. Alexander knew exactly what he was doing here, and why. Best to get to it. Winter came early this far north, and the days would grow short indeed. This time, however, many hands could make light work.
“Thanks. Let’s get to then, eh?” Alexander said and started forward to lead the caravan down the streets of his childhood.
Unremarkable. That was most of what could be said of this humble assemblage of houses, shops, and what would have passed as typical Americana about thirty years behind most of the country. The logging, mining, quarry, and mill towns that characterized middle upper Maine were nothing if not provincial. A combination of low population, heavy snowfall, and being mostly hilly wilderness interspersed with dottings of small glacial lakes and ponds made for a place that was wilder than most of the country, and a people that were close knit.
Folk in rural Maine weren’t preppers, although the Flatlanders could be forgiven for thinking so. They just had to contend with the fact that winter was a real thing, rather than all that pretend stuff that happened when summer cooled off and stayed autumn the way it did down south.
Alexander’s small sad smile at the snow shovels behind sheds, the plow attachments for trucks, firm belief in root cellars, and wood stoves, made him glad that he’d grown up out here. Mom and Pop Gerifalte had craved the simple, slow life of the wild boonies after years packed into claustrophobic births aboard nuclear carriers, destroyers, and the like when they’d gone on their tours out of port. Life off the boats hadn’t been much better, naval bases tended to be in touristy, “overzealously populated” areas, as his old man had put it once.
Faded paint on wood sided houses, empty porches, and almost ubiquitous flags waving in a gusty October wind greeted the expedition that planned to resurrect life in Falcon’s Rest. The numerous triangular sheds would be ransacked for anything useful now that there were hands to put the tools within to work.
Antique crosscut saws especially would be needed, the only changes to the burg that mattered were a couple of old pines that had come down across the streets in a few places. A wet climate guaranteed that, inevitably, the roots of some old wind catcher would finally give up and send the tree toppling over. Fortunately, those kinds of saws weren’t so hard to find in lumber country. Not a few hung as decorations of one’s grandpappy’s grandpappy, or something similar. There were even new examples of lumberjacking heritage hanging in the hardware store, which Alexander hadn’t bothered scavenging back when, on account of they were a two-man job.
A willing heart and young back could only go so far.
Alexander guided the wagons through four way stop signs and turned down a side street before freezing in the middle of the narrow strip of asphalt.
Whistling unconsciously in amazement, he took in the sight of the neighborhood that housed the building that was his second home and laboratory, a renovated old farmhouse. It wasn’t the house that had his attention, however, it was the garden in front of it. A front yard turned by his hand into a large garden, an assemblage of raised beds in a grid, based on the different vegetables and fruits he’d been attempting to proliferate and raise for sustenance had exploded from their humble beginnings.
“Oh, holy shit, the super soil!” the young man exclaimed, recalling the experiment in which Entling blood had proven to be supernaturally potent fertilizer, exponentially increasing the rate of growth of virtually anything planted in soil enriched with it.
His tomatoes had climbed their trellises, then reached out tendrils to the porch support beams, and grew like a second roof over the house, dotting red, yellow, and green across the shingles. Wheat and corn stood with stalks proud and kernels golden, tufts of silk on the ears declaring themselves ready for plucking. Empty stalks told the tale of donations to the local wildlife. And not just in the beds from which he’d put them. The action of birds and other critters, probably the incorrigible crows and racoons, had scattered seeds packed with Entling vitality to neighboring yards, where they had sprouted into mixed fields, broken up by patches of green beans, pumpkin, squash, and cucumber, all similarly having escaped their bounds within his test beds.
All down the street, grass had been replaced by a panoply of crops, some that only vaguely bore resemblance to the plants that had spawned them, courtesy of the mana rivers that bled magic into the land above them, and from the potent effects of Entling blood enrichment.
Shaking his head, he couldn’t believe the difference a year had made. He’d have to cut a path to his doorway!
Granny Nguyen made a sound closed to climax and darted into the various patches of fruiting crops and bulging vegetables. Careful, swift hands cut and picked, and grazed from the bounty grown wild.
“Umm…Granny, you want to be careful, some of these are probably monsterized by--” He started.
“My precious!” Was the strange lady’s frenetic reply, yelled without looking up from the task that consumed her.
Ben and Mark traded looks and shrugged before guiding the wagons to parking places to the sides of the street. Brig commanded from on high, giving instructions to get folk sorted out, her splinted leg propped up to pain her less when a jostle or pitting of the road made the wagon rattle. Impervious was helping the teams of draft beasts to get unhitched and tied off so that they wouldn’t wander far and turn into monster food. They’d have to build corrals soon. Most of the houses in this neighborhood were intact, the settlers could start unpacking the wagons into whatever residence took their fancy. Rock, paper, scissors broke out in best two out of three, witnessed by a member of Getsome or Impervious to arbitrate disputes.
Alexander, deciding that his hired crew had things well in hand, found himself drawn to his home, its profile calling him with a siren song of remembered study full of his father’s books, wood chests full of the booty looted from monsters and hunted critters, and journals holding his recorded notes from the winter and spring spent alone trying to solo speed run civilization.
He did, in fact, have to cut dense foliage away from the door to open it. That musty smell of a house empty for too long greeted his nose.
The kitchen was just as he’d left it, the cleaned dishes of the last breakfast cooked sitting on the counter where he’d left them to dry.
Was it odd to feel like a stranger in his own home?
“You’re being wicked goofy, Little Falcon.” Alexander told himself, as he walked through the dining room and turned the corner to go upstairs, where his study awaited.
Through the door left cracked he strode and stood before his chalk board, the projects outstanding still there, many of them semi-irrelevant now. He laughed a little at the simplicity of things back then. His tannery project, in particular, was almost comical to observe, in the face of the superflax that his artisans would soon be turning into linen of unparalleled quality. Gods all that stink he’d suffered, just to end up walking away and forgetting about it for nigh on two years. The rains had probably diluted the pits before they destroyed the material, that was his only consolation. With a wry chuckle, he shook it off. It didn’t much matter.
How rapidly paradigms can shift. Alexander erased the board, obtaining for himself a spiritual clean slate, in addition to a real one, and he left his lab to get to work.
For the rest of the afternoon, sixty odd settlers strove to unload wagons and carts, moving their necessities indoors within the houses that they’d claimed. Alexander had made a request of the settlers before they’d left on the journey and none did less than he asked: the statues of the townsfolk frozen during the pulse were, gently, placed on the empty wagons and carts for transport.
One of the first projects for Scott had been the design of a bunker in which to safely store the first residents of Falcon’s Rest, so that they could be preserved in case he discovered a way to save them. If no way could be found, then they would have a mausoleum worthy of the men and women he’d grown up with. It was the least he could do for them.
Emptied of the previous occupants, the houses were aired out, that little doing assisted greatly by Riley Potter, the Vacuum Fencer. Occupational expertise now coupled to magic that permitted him to displace large volumes of air when he wanted to, the stale, sometimes vaguely moldy air within the structures was vacated rapidly, replaced by cool moist air of a probably going to rain soon October afternoon.
Alexander didn’t do much to aid in this process. He was glad to welcome these folk to their new lives in Falcon’s Rest, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to displace the nick-nacks and personal things of the families who had resided here alongside him his whole life. It was still too close to him, the sudden loss of everyone he’d ever known, especially now that he had returned. Instead, he busied himself unloading the wagons laden with building materials and the haul from the dungeons they’d slain on their departure from Safe Harbor. Altogether, under a tarp to shield everything from the frequent Main autumn rains, this formed a mighty pile.
Looking at the goods dispelled a bit of the nostalgia and gloom that had begun to invade him since crossing the threshold into the town. Thinking of all the good that could be done, all the comforts that could be created for the settlers made him a little happy. His workshop awaited him, Sterling, George, and the rest of the gang would soon be raising the racket of progress once again. His Warforger skills would get pushed to their limits, hopefully beyond them, with the help of the artisans such as Reynolds, Saki, and Summers. Professional machinists, builders, engineers of hearth and home, these men and women were going to be pivotal in turning this empty village into a thriving beacon of humanity.
Coupled with the expertise of Getsome and Impervious, to say nothing of the other Adventurer classed folk that had tagged along, Falcon’s Rest might one day soon even become something close to safe. Considering that he’d nearly bled out in a ditch thanks to Yetis roaming the town from down out of the hills, he considered that akin to rediscovering Eden on earth.
They’d even killed the giant panther that stalked the mountain! If they could take on dungeon born monstrosities, dragons, and Gaian spawned giga predators, then a settlement secure from danger might not be a mere pipe dream. Alexander was basking in the thought of his tiny town becoming a fortress for humanity when his distraction caused him to fail to detect evil creeping up behind him.
A hand cupped his rump and squeezed, drawing a high pitched, “Haaiyaaah!!” and a rapid egress toward the safety of a nearby tree. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d climbed one to escape danger.
Granny Nguyen stood laughing, tears gathering in the corners of her almond eyes, one fist held to her mouth to keep from choking on her mirth. The bags of her pack bulged with corn ears, beans, wheat stalks, and whatever else she could get her claws on.
“Gods blood, why?! Why does your black heart find joy in scaring the ever-living shit out of me?!” Alexander ranted, knowing while he did that nothing he said would penetrate the impassive mask she’d adopted a few moments after nearly suffocating from laughing.
“Because it pleases me.” Was her easy reply, and, without another word, Granny Nguyen departed to unload her haul, the massive load carried easily by the deceitful strength of the Dryad harvester.
He shook his head at his sometimes friend and frequent tormenter and resumed his work. Now that the goods were unloaded, stacked, and covered, he would go to the cess pits to see what a year of oversoaking in the tanning bath, a solution of the worst smelling filth imaginable had done to the pieces of hide.
Pits abandoned to the elements for a year and more had, as he’d hoped, diluted, and the chemical reactivity of the things had faded over time. What he found, in the formerly disgusting baths, was leaf covered pieces of tanned leather ready to oil. The haired hides had suffered a bit from their overlong bath, but, other than some loss of fur on the ones most exposed to the solution, they were fine.
Alexander was slightly amazed by the result, deep, darkly tanned leather, supple in his hands. He wasn’t certain if this was thanks to his process, or due to the properties of the largely supernatural beasts from which he’d claimed the skin. It didn’t matter. As a result of the project, he was in possession of about ten square yards of the finest leather since the Pulse had wrecked the cow industry. Sharp eyes surveyed the yield. Some was thicker, with dense fur, as from the Yeti, some thinner, as from the wolves and panthers he’d hunted. Still others from elk and bear that occupied a middle ground of workability and toughness.
One of the men who’d come along on this not quite fool’s errand was an old-fashioned saddler, who’d made a living selling custom saddles to everybody from the ultra-rich owners of show horses in the bluegrass, to poor as dirt rodeo riders forking up their life’s savings to make a splash on their debut, and all the way to cheaper looks only gear sold for use on Hollywood sets. Alexander wasn’t a guy who knew much about working with it, but he’d done enough research during the tanning process to suspect the man would be happy to make use of this material.
It was funny the things you needed frequently dealing with livestock. Saddles, bridles, traces for plow teams and stump pulling, and all kinds of things. Most of them were good old fashioned preserved animal skin, and Alexander bundled the still sopping hides off to find some vegetable oil in his stashes with which to get them oiled up before drying them. Once the material was dry he’d have to work it again, to make sure it stayed flexible and soft. Perfectly ready for Dave’s steady handed craftsmanship.
He'd just finished brushing the preserved pelts and staking them out for the somewhat anemic autumn sun to dry when he heard his name being called. It sounded like Melinda, and she wasn’t screaming, even if her low pitched voice sounded worried, so he made no attempt to race back to the neighborhood. Two blocks down toward where the others had been handling the wagons, however, a pervasive low register buzzing sound made him break out into a panicked sprint. Only one thing, or rather, the collective of many things acting as one thing, made that kind of sound.
Boots scuffing across pavement, Alexander broke through a side alley and skidded to a halt, wishing devoutly that he hadn’t inadvertently compromised the razor thin balance of the situation. What he found was a Mexican standoff, Adventurers and Matriculated settlers on one side, and about forty Dire bees on the other. Behind the dachshund sized workers, were German shepherd sized warrior bees, twelve of them, and they were surrounding a single, glorious eight-winged queen, who stood on two legs while her four sets of wings whirred to hold her upright, the other four limbs weaving in some sort of complex threat display.
Sweet fuck! The bees! How had he forgotten the bees?! He moaned within the confines of his head.
But…after the brief ice water rush of absolute terror faded, he was left to take in the scene. No one was dead. No bees were stinging. The helicopter drone of wings was present, but, other than to hover in place, clearly holding their ground, none of the bees was in motion. Alexander knew that these monsterized honeybees could kill, and would do so with incredible violence. Yet here they were. And what exactly the fuck was going on with the queen? Why was she even out here, away from the hive-house he’d built for her?
Alexander Gerifalte had many questions now, and answers slipped like water from between his fingers.
“Okay, I’m fucked if I know what’s going on here.” He declared aloud, drawing the attention of man and insect alike.
Getsome, Impervious, and another dozen combat classed unaffiliated with any structure, and a stationary swarm all turned toward him. Waving insectoid arms pointed at him, glittering complex eyes somehow still implying absolute attention on Alexander Gerifalte.
The young man pinched himself hard on the arm to verify that he wasn’t trapped in some kind of nightmare. The bruised flesh between his fingers hurt like hell, and he accepted that this was some fresh Gaian platter of bullshit.
Alexander raised his arms slowly, as if under arrest, and asked semi desperately, “Guys? Any idea how we can get out of this without it turning into a horror show? Also, why does this kind of stuff happen to me?”
Even the indomitable Benjamin was off kilter and the warrior traded looks with Mark before he said, “They’re your bees! Go talk to them or something, shit.”
Which was nonsense. He’d captured a wild hive queen and brought her to the town, from the mountainside, but that was May before last, and bees didn’t work that way. They didn’t have that kind of intelligence. Bees also didn’t grow to the size of dogs, break down doors, and hunt for interlopers that had insulted their queen. But these had. So…maybe?
“Ohh this is not going to end well.” He whispered, before taking gradual, slow steps toward the hovering swarm.
“Can you guys sort of lower your weapons? I don’t think there’s any point talking to them if you’re all, you know, menacing over there.” Alexander suggested, certain that he’d lost his goddamned mind sometime this afternoon.
Brig made her position clear, even as the assembled soldiers reluctantly adopted more relaxed postures, “Alexander, if your bees kill us, I will haunt you, curse you to chiggers on your balls for all time.”
Incredibly though, when the warrior people abandoned their defensive stances, so did the swarm. Stingers pointed aggressively toward the invading humans dropped, and many of the bees lowered themselves to land on the ground. The queen dire bee began again the wild gesturing, slower this time, and the droning of wings took on a varying pattern.
A lightbulb went off in his head, and he shook his head slightly at the ridiculous conclusion he’d reached: the bees were talking to him. Or, rather, the bee. Honeybees were a hive mind; the queen was talking to him. Petrified wasps and bee hives had been found, suggesting that they had been treated similarly to humans, alongside dogs, cats, and other suspected sapient creatures.
There were many eventualities Alexander Gerifalte had considered during lonely months wondering what madness had taken over the world. Later, when he’d ransacked every source of information he could find, talked to anyone who would tell him anything about the monsterized creatures and dungeons since the Pulse, he’d spent many a night trying to figure out how the rules of magically enhanced life worked. Somehow, this situation had never come up.
What if an intelligence bearing monster wants to talk to you? Absurd! The only monster that had ever spoken was an undead thing called a Reaper and it wanted to kill him because it thought it was doing him a solid or something by shuffling off his mortal coil. So, not great grounds for discussion there.
Feeling more than a little moronic, he told the swarm the first thing that popped into his addled brain “We come in peace?”
“We’re doomed.” Brig observed with resignation.
“Super doomed.” Melinda confirmed.
“Shut it you lot, you said go talk to them, so I’m talking to them!” Alexander hissed over his shoulder, before returning his attention to the…situation.
More waving. More tonal buzzing. He shook his head, how the fuck was he supposed to speak bee?
“I don’t, umm, I don’t understand bee. So, I’m, we’re, back. For good, sort of. These people are with me, we’re going to live here now and turn this place into a home for people.” He said haltingly, before adding hurriedly, “And bees, bees too, you guys can stay just like always!”
He heard whispers behind him, what sounded like Cervantes, observed “We gotta get this kid some public speaking lessons, or he’s going to get us into wars with the bug people.”
Alexander groaned softly, today was just the dumbest day, the very stupidest of days of all time.
But he wasn’t dead yet and the bees weren’t making any aggressive moves. More gesturing. He had a feeling by the lidless stare of insectoid eyes, that all the buzzing and waving was supposed to convey something, but he wasn’t even close to having a clue what.
Suddenly, a worker bee that hadn’t been with the original group flew in from the direction of the hive house, the A frame apiary he’d remodeled. The bee’s trajectory took it to the queen, where more buzzing and gesturing took place.
“She’s definitely talking to us.” Alexander, with far more serenity than he felt, stated the obvious.
He had to say something, if for no reason than to take comfort in one single thing that might have made sense. Besides, if he stayed calm, the giant potentially murderous bees would probably stay calm, right?
After several moments, things got even weirder. The worker bee that had been summoned turned and drifted slowly in Alexander’s direction. Halfway to the ever more nervous young man, the dire bee lifted its stinger to its tiny jaws and crunched through the barbed chitin, dropping the stinger to the cracked asphalt below, before it approached further.
“Okay, these things are definitely intelligent, I’m pretty sure that was the bees telling us they come in peace.” He called in a strained voice to the Adventurers behind him.
He didn’t see Nathan Smythe close his eyes and grimace at the statement, nor catch Van Richards sliding a finger across his own throat, for concentrating on the approaching stingless honeybee.
Bonny, with her wolf familiar, smiled shyly and gave him a thumbs up. Her class came with empathic connection and communication abilities with the critters and that meant she was probably a better candidate for this than he was. But they were his bees. Sort of.
Close up, Alexander observed that these monsterized insects bore only superficial resemblance to their natural counter parts. The wings of the creatures were more angular, the jaws slightly more predatory, and the tongue that occasionally flicked behind them had barbs on it. Legs were thicker and the body more akin to a hornet than the last time he’d seen them, indicated that these creatures had changed since he’d left. Temptation to call up his Greater Analyze and scan the monster rose, and he stuffed that impulse down, for now. Sentient creatures, people at least, could feel the ability and it made them nervous. He didn’t want to make the Dire bee swarm nervous.
Faceted eyes reflected the late evening light of the sun in a dazzle of color. Then, the bee stopped within a foot of the young man and vomited at his feet, spilling thick golden goop transported fresh from the hive. Dire bee honey.
That auric jelly, its smell sending his brain’s scent memory into overdrive, was the source of this mischief. Its siren song had convinced him to bring a dire bee queen into his home, to build her a mansion. All for the allure of a free source of never spoiling nutrition that could be harvested by the gallon.
There, in the dirt before him, was something close to tribute, or a gesture of good will, or something. But he had to eat it. Let’s not, ehem, sugar coat it, it was bee puke. Nossir, Alexander sighed, it was one thing to know honey was bee vomit, and it was another altogether to see the insectoid monster yak the stuff up in front of you.
“I saw this once at a frat party.” Came the unhelpful announcement from Georgea Stephens, and Alexander wished the time manipulating anchor tank could wind the clock back and save him from such commentary.
The stolid and uptight lady didn’t even look like the type to rush a frat. She must have gone as a plus one. Inane meandering was his passionate avoidance for what he knew in his heart had to be done.
“I hate this life.” Alexander declared solidly, before he slowly bent down to take a handful of the sticky goop and, like the liver earlier, got it down before his frontal lobes could launch too much in the way of rejection.
Tier two dire bee honey, as it happens, doesn’t hold a torch to tier three dire bee product and Alexander went away for a while, while the sunset melted into neon washes of color.
Thirty seconds to five minutes passed without his awareness. Whenever it was that the initial rush of Dire bee honey ingestion finished rewiring his synapses, Alexander felt fine. Great even. The vague anxieties regarding the future of humanity were gone, replaced by appreciation for what a fine afternoon it was. Even the imminent threat of rain was just a part of the natural order. It was Maine. It was October. It would rain. These were things that simply were. Kind of like how the beautiful people who had followed him into the north were wicked awesome!
They really were, to have walked away from the looming pseudo feudal society that was slowly creeping up on Safe Harbor’s citizens. Those Contract mages were about to have their hands full. Pretty soon attempts would be made to bribe, threaten, or otherwise subvert their independence to gain control of Matriculated through the binding oaths sworn via those individuals. Problems for other lads and ladies, Alexander mused. Oh! His friend, the queen was waving him over for a chat.
Alexander moseyed on over, glad to see what his six-legged pal needed. They had so much to catch up on, he hadn’t given the hive so much as a “See you later” when he’d left town to follow Getsome to civilization. The queen looked good. Healthy. Clearly a tier up had occurred at some point. Her minions, extensions of her will, similarly were in show condition, the fuzz on their bodies resplendent, if not quite so rich as the matriarch herself.
A slight bow of his head, as was proper when greeting the royalty, preceded the young man’s polite greeting, “Greetings, Oh mother of the Falcon’s Rest hive. I hope you’ve been enjoying all the lovely flowers I left for you.”
A cheerful buzzing returned his greetings, “Hive builder! The fields sowed by Our patron were much appreciated by Us. We have grown, strengthened, and guarded well the borders of the home bequeathed to Us. Why have you given your silver stinger away, does your not-drone wield it in your stead?” said the Queen.
He glanced toward Ben and gave the awesome dude a double thumbs up to show him he appreciated the warrior, who was way better off with the frost brand than he ever would be.
“Indeed, he does, Highness. You gaze with multitudes of eyes upon the men and women who I lead to prosperity. Ben, the man who bears the weapon with which I defended the hive, is a fighter of great pride and prowess. He, alongside the other warriors in my service, will assist in the defense and expansion of my territory. Your hive resides in Falcon’s Rest, Highness, my bastion for humanity’s precious remnants.” Alexander told the Queen.
With a sly wink at the insectoid monarch he didn’t mind telling his old friend his secret, “They’re going to help me purge Gaia of her infections, those pesky crystal hearts of foreign realms that suckle from the dragon pulse to feed themselves and expand their domains.”
“Together though, and with the alliance I would hope with her Highness, we can secure our borders and drive them back. One day, perhaps we can even restore the Enshrined to life. I hope I’m not being presumptuous, assuming your wonderful brood’s aid?” Alexander asked, confident that a ruler so wise as the Queen would know a good deal when presented one.
“Of course! We are indebted to the Hive Builder and slayer of the Hive Ruiner.” the Queen replied, her intent clearly friendly by the gesture of forelimbs and the high-low shifts in octave of her wings.
“The hive built by your hands for our use, the lovely fields of flowers so succulent, fed by the blood of a Barked Oakherd, and your defense of Our hive against the honey thief demands no less. Without the richness of the nectar you provided, the shelter so cleverly crafted for our young, and the cleansing of the honey thieves nearby, we would have been sorely tested. Better this place than Our cave. But now! We are strong, Our brood many, and We welcome our patron gladly. It is good that none of your drones showed Us insult or we would have been forced to feed on them.” The Queen explained, her noble bearing leaving no doubt as to how the hive had flourished.
That would have been awful. Workers fighting each other fruitlessly, for a simple misunderstanding. It was much harder for him to replace his too, so he wanted to avoid such waste, if at all possible. The Queen held a natural advantage in that her brood expanded in number at her will, commensurate with the amount of pollen rich flora available. A wise and most prudent matriarch was the Falcon’s Rest matriarch, she would not expand her hive’s numbers without the ability to feed them adequately, thus eliminating inefficiency.
“Well!” Alexander clapped his hands lightly, “I am so glad this meeting of old friends has gone so swimmingly. But, I am afraid that our travel has left us tired, and in need of food. My workers will, of course, not infringe upon any of her Highness’ hives. Please, make easy the recognition of any such, I cannot give those who follow me instruction through pheromone and vibration as you do so swiftly. We are slow, we humans, and sometimes things must be made obvious, even though it troubles your royal self.”
“Your limitations are known to us Patron of the Hive,” the Queen acknowledged gracefully, with only a hint of pity at the human condition, “We will mark our rooves with the bones of those who sought to intrude upon Our domain. Go with Our blessings, peace, and prosperity to your brood.”
Alexander was simply thrilled at how fortunate he had been to have been of service to the hive all those months ago. One good turn deserves another, and all that. He made his way slowly to the waiting folk soon to settle Falcon’s Rest. Slow because his feet weren’t quite landing where he wanted them too. He would blame his body, the pesky thing seemed to want to float away. Time was also seeming to slow and speed without warning, which was making it difficult to walk. More honey might fix this situation, but he had no more and wasn’t going to be so rude as to intrude upon the Queen any further.
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Still, determined effort brought him back to the wary members of the Adventurer teams.
“Great news!” He extolled, “Her Highness remembers me! We’ll get along smashingly, just nobody try to break into any houses that have bones waxed to their rooves, that’s the sign we agreed upon. Now. I believe I must be going. The moon has told me that we have things to discuss, and I shouldn’t keep the old girl waiting.”
Concerned looks went around the gathered people, for some reason. Alexander didn’t pay it much attention; he was curling up on the cozy ground a profound sleepiness calling him to speak with the moon in his dreams.
Julia Richards, Bonny to her friends, took a far smaller nibble of the mana laden material, which did greatly enhance her communication abilities with the dire bee queen, and managed to salvage the situation. Sapient monsterized bees went away content that their domain was safe, their hive protected, and these other variants of their first best drone would similarly serve the interests of the queen by taking up residence.
“What the fuck was that?” Brigitte O’Connor asked, voicing the question that was foremost on the minds of the witnessing peoples.
Their presumptive leader had, upon ingesting the almost iridescent smelling honey, begun gesticulating and garbling nonsense, and had walked right into the midst of the swarming monster bees absent care, grinning like a madman the entire time. Then, for an uncomfortably long span of time, he’d communed with the bees before stumbling his way back toward them and passing out.
“I think that honey has some kind of fucked up bee telepathy going on with it.” Granny Nguyen hazarded a guess.
Bonny waved a hand back and forth ambivalently, “Eh. Sort of.” The shy girl offered in explanation, now that the bees had retired, “But more like an empathic link than true telepathy and language. Normal people shouldn’t eat that though, it’s meant for servants of the hive, wicked potent. It’s almost like a mushroom high, real nice. I think Alexander probably took too much.”
“Oh, he took too much alright, the kid was somewhere on Mars.” Ben observed to the general agreement of the gathered warriors.
“Okay, first thing’s first,” Mark Ross announced, hoping to prevent disasters in the future, “Nobody ever eats the honey from those bees unattended by responsible supervision.”
“I would kill to have a mass spectrometer to figure out what compounds are that psycho active,” Wynona Saki remarked, “I’ve heard of salvia trips less intense. LSD doesn’t have shit on whatever that stuff is packing.”
She’d played with lysergic acid diethylamide and mushrooms in a wilder youth, but nothing so completely involved as thinking you could talk to monsterized bees. What was worse, the bees had looked like they were talking back! Annita Nguyen was perceptive, but who ever heard of telepathy? Then again…who had ever heard of racoon sized bees that had evidenced intelligence?
“How about we get the young man a better pillow than the pavement? He might have just saved us from certain death by swarm.” Nathan Smythe inquired on behalf of their elected leader.
“Shotgun!” Brig called.
“No!” the rest of Getsome opposed.
Dame Sanchez elaborated with an arch, “Our Count requires rest, not your bestial pawing.”
“Stuff it, sister, just because you have your flaps sewn together doesn’t mean we all have to.” Brig fired back.
“I’ll keep watch over him. My hawk is in the air, I’ll shout if anything threatens the settlers.” Volunteered Julia Richards, the shy beast master, and no one would say otherwise when the girl wanted to do something enough to speak up for it.
This was how, not very many hours later, Alexander Gerifalte woke with a dominated dire wolf next to him in his bed and nearly voided himself in terror. After many apologies and some quiet-voiced convincing to get him down from the dresser, the young man drank a glass of much needed water and returned to his bed to sleep a normal sleep, absent the dreams of bees and fields of glittering flowers.
Days blurred following the rather eventful reclaiming of Falcon’s Rest. Amongst the first objectives was the communal ingestion of most of their captured store of dragon blood, in order to lever the settlers into tier three, which process had the same level of success as for the “pilot study” carried out on the Adventurers under contract with him. A wide array of bloodlines was ushered to prominence. Only a half dozen of the forty-six remaining villagers, the number not involved with his eighteen, ended up joining Georgia Stephens with her particularly infrequent Morrigan bloodline. Only a single other Outsider emerged to join Alexander and Jules Reynolds in the rarest subtype of Homo Novus, the new humanity. Conversations were had regarding the mystery of how these magically enhanced new regimes would be passed on through lineages, but it was all conjecture at this point.
Speaking of, the news of reproductive potential was met with cheers and not a few tears. Many of these people had dreamed of starting families. It hadn’t been long enough for any of the tiered-up women to experience an ovulation cycle, so the colony was still rather in the dark as to timetables. For that matter, they didn’t even know if there were ovulation cycles as tier one humans knew them. That wasn’t important compared to the reassurance of simply knowing that humanity wasn’t doomed to slow extinction. That day proved to mark a significant boost to morale.
Julia, true to her word, sat cross legged for nearly an entire day, guiding the red shouldered hawk carrying a small messenger bag of copied leaflets revealing the truth of tier three to Safe Harbor and back. It was a grueling exercise, but the introverted girl smiled briefly and quietly assured Smythe that the messages had been delivered. Two hundred miles and more of flying exhausted her hawk familiar, however, and she retired with her “pets” to recuperate. Unlike many of the abilities exhibited by classed individuals, the magic of Julia Richards’ Lunar Warden was in her connection to her familiars, with very little in the way of personal strength.
She could share senses, bolster their physical abilities, initiate rapid healing, take over direct control of them, and, now, maintain an additional beast courtesy of her Dryad trait, One and the Same, which allowed her to choose one of the familiars to duplicate with magic. The mana golem version of the copied beast had all of its abilities and even a simulacrum of its mind. Alexander considered Julia to have one of the highest ceilings to her abilities. When she acquired a more potent set of familiars, her class would become truly powerful. The downside was that exerting greater levels of control exhausted her, and strained her mind, so she withdrew to privacy to keep from overloading her psyche. It was understandable.
Progress fortifying Falcon’s Rest proceeded rapidly, under the careful guidance of Scott’s balding gaze, seeing to it projects followed his architectural planning and Van’s sculpting of the granite of the foothills to create a walled town along the same lines as that of Safe Harbor. Alexander thought the results were rather Gothic, with flying buttresses, ribbed vaults, and pointed arches to achieve strength with a minimum of material, and a host of more modern architectural techniques designed to maximize the robustness of the wall.
Panther Rex had served as a dour reminder that the scale of some threats was rather more substantial than anything old humanity had ever seen. Then anything seen since the Cretaceous, for that matter.
Gaia had many tricks up her mana-soaked sleeves, so Scott, Van, and Jules had their heads together, alongside another man with a mason class, whose major utility was in the ability to seal gaps in different pieces of stone to make a single, unified piece.
Scott had nearly creamed himself when he found out about that back in Safe Harbor. It meant that the structures could be done piecemeal and then the whole thing consolidated into a single mass. According to the pudgy, balding man, the removal of any and all faults or seams between pieces exponentially improved load distribution, relieved thrust, and a litany of other advantages that he’d gushed over to anyone who would listen. The mason classed man had not been a man of formal training, he’d made hobby patios, mosaics, tiling, and the like. Scott was teaching him the fundamentals of statics and force distribution, but it would be a couple of years, at least, before he could be allowed design input. Until then, everything went through Scott to sign off on, which made the Cryomancer a busy, busy man.
It was just as well he was passionate about his role in rebuilding Falcon’s Rest. Scott Kaczynski, for all his talent in architecture, would never see combat again. His will to fight had been completely shattered by the close call in the dungeon, he froze, ironically enough, when adrenaline hit his system. Alexander did not blame the man. Nor did anyone else. Most of the folk here weren’t soldiers, even where their classes implied that they could have been.
Riley Potter and Wynona Saki were outliers in their willingness to get in there and fuck up monsters. Potter compared fighting to football, which he’d played at collegiate level, telling Alexander once, “You shake like a leaf and want to puke, right up until the first sonofabitch hits you, and, after that, you got your dance shoes on.”
Saki didn’t have that kind of background; however, she was a born arsonist. The now red skinned woman had a more than speculative gift for detonation. When Alexander showed her his lab, the one he hadn’t destroyed with a failed RDX synthesis, but which had gotten torn up some by Silverstone, the silver ore golem that had chased him all over town, she had lit up like a Christmas tree. The little shaped charges he’d left behind in storage had been taken by her for her own purposes, and Alexander wished her the best. Those lines of research had been born out of necessity, not desire, a result of an army of goblins and ogres prancing around nearly immune to his guns in those early days. Explosives still scared the shit out of him, and rightfully so.
Aside from those two, the majority of the settlers were not willingly going to be combatants, though they could be counted on to pitch in if things went tits up. Granny Nguyen wasn’t a fighter either. She had an assassin’s heart though, and a sense of timing for when and where to lay a killing blow to finish something off. The Dryad harvester also cared not a lick to get up to the elbows in gore to make certain anything of value from a kill was collected. As such, she was regularly queued up when anyone went on a hunting trip or when the scouts were doing clears of monsters. For monsters there were.
The Dragon Pulse, the networks of magic that ran deep underground, Alexander had read books that referred to such myths as leylines, ran strongly near Falcon’s Rest. Apparently, the mountain that loomed over the town, whose ridges and foothills surrounded it in a semi-circle and whose watershed spawned the myriad creeks and ponds in this area, was a mana spring. Magic erupted from the earth at the apex of the mountain and ran down hill, filling the valleys around like a fog of potential. This aetheric geography was why so many mutated variants of regular plants and animals existed near his hometown. It was also why semi mythological creatures like Yetis spawned sometimes, born of Gaia for reasons no one knew.
Alexander’s tinfoil hat theory about humanity being the god-planet equivalent of activated leukocytes refused to leave him when the topic arose. His even more tinfoil hat, bordering paranoid personality disorder hypothesis was that Gaia created monsters to train her white blood cells, giving them something to chew on to hone themselves for the real test against the monsters of the contested zones.
A former advanced placement biology teacher who acted as a psychologist for the citizens of the town had gone thoughtful when he’d outlined his reasoning in Safe Harbor, so he knew he wasn’t completely off base. In fact, she’d taken it to heart enough to join this band of misfits as an educator and therapist, her Djinn bloodline and class combining now to allow her to efficiently clarify memories, weed out self-delusions, and coach people out of their neurosis. For a few months, she’d helped him greatly to process what had happened to him in that half year combination of isolated desperate survival. It had been a formative time for the young man, had shaped him into who he was today. That it had also been an incredibly cruel way to come of age had also been driven home to him, under the patient therapy of Dr. Sandra Patel.
The steel enjoys not the quench, but those extremes strengthened it. Or destroyed it. Sometimes both. That he had survived the experience tended to mean to him that he’d come through those days true. Most people would have said there was a slight warp in the steel, and he could live with that.
One of the distinct downsides to his awakened Outsider blood line was the nasty trait, Fractal Mind, which would have caused Dr. Patel extreme duress if she were to attempt to use her powers on him to aid their therapy sessions now. From here on, Alexander’s mind was a black box, and any shrink work would have to be done the old-fashioned way: long, awkward discussions on a couch.
He wasn’t the only one in need of counseling though, and the good doctor’s time was filled helping normal folk in abnormal times cope with the situation. A situation that steadily improved as the expedition’s members threw themselves into the founding effort.
When he considered the rapid progress fortifying and restoring the town, the almost Amish work ethic of the settlers and their drive to face a long Maine winter head on, he was proud of his fellow man. A two man, one woman team of classed individuals who had synergy in carpentry, wood manipulation, and the ability to saturate or desaturate water from substances were doing miracles on the old houses of Falcon’s Rest. Alexander only remembered the one was named Dan Price, the other two’s names escaped him.
Unknown their names might have been, but their handiwork was everywhere. Together with Potter, they furnished many of the existing structures with double walled exteriors using, not just dead air spaces, but completely evacuated spaces between the layers of the walls. The resulting homes had incredibly low thermal transfer between rooms or with the outside.
Jules Reynolds then played the trick he’d kept in his hip pocket and the entire expedition was ready to worship him: the Quintessence Shaper Outsider figured out how to create solar heating panels with Muspelheim obsidian.
Like all strokes of genius, it was so mind bogglingly simple when explained, nobody could figure out how it hadn’t already been thought of. The trick was to sandwich a very thin layer of liquid obsidian, which absorbed heat, between an external pane of clear glass, and an internal pane of solid obsidian, each layer of the pure elemental corpse-based glass about a millimeter thick. Light entered the clear glass, was absorbed by the liquid obsidian, because it had the property of being almost a perfect photon absorber, and then transmitted that energy to the thin layer of solid obsidian which when directly in contact with its liquid state, for reasons that defied material science, acted like a perfect blackbody, radiating the trapped energy as heat. Only when it interfaced along a solid to liquid boundary, however. How Jules had figured it out would remain a mystery, he said it came to him in a dream.
The set up produced tinted “windows” that absorbed the sun’s light and released heat into the building, which, thanks to the efforts of the carpenters and Potter, barely lost any of that heat. By flipping these windows, achieved by installing them with a swivel, the reverse could be done, pulling heat out of the structure efficiently. Jules had figured out how to climate control and passively heat any building, using about two pounds of the otherworldly volcanic glass. They had over eighty pounds of the stuff, courtesy of Granny’s determined will to leave nothing of the lava elementals’ corpses behind when they’d cleared the dungeon.
Speaking of Granny Nguyen, she, alongside the scouts, combed the mountainside and surrounding terrain to bring samples of every weed, sapling, berry, and green or growing thing back to the town for cataloguing and cultivating, where they were even suspected of proving useful. As such, recording notes, testing, sampling, and researching uses for the hauls the Dryad woman brought in routinely, kept Alexander nearly imprisoned within his study. Over and over his chalkboard filled with notes, and investigative queries before being wiped clean and then refilled.
After two and a half weeks confinement after their arrival, Alexander escaped the almost claustrophobic feeling study to find that Falcon’s Rest was entirely enclosed by a one hundred eighty-foot-high wall, fifteen feet wide at the top, widening to nearly forty at the base. It looked like Notre Dame had had a bastard child with the Colosseum, especially because it was still incomplete, with scaffolding and evidence of work yet to be done. Despite the inchoate status of this defensive monument, its lofty buttresses of stone held up a seamless mass of material, mostly made up of the granite that lay beneath the thin soil of Maine’s interior. Pointed arch recesses carved into the stone at ground level provided storage spaces. Around the perimeter, roughly every thirty feet of height, there would be a covered shelf, a wall walk, more like, whose crenellation would permit defenders at multiple levels to attack down onto anything that tried to move against the town. Scott had truly outdone himself.
Gawping shamelessly, he had trouble marrying his memories of the small footnote on a map that had been his home with the majesty of that wall, even in its incomplete form, and the incredible overhaul of most of the homes along this neighborhood. Most obviously, curved stone tile, courtesy of Van Richards, had replaced nearly every occupied house’s roof. Like a light grey Italian motif, married to quaint Maine sensibilities. Van must have been pulling twenty-hour days to move that much stone, in addition to that of the wall. There must have been some other stone mages in the settlers, Alexander couldn’t imagine the man was potent enough to do all of that himself.
His gardens, overgrown, long free of the bonds of their starting beds, had been cleaned up. Almost all the food stuffs had been harvested. Most for winter stocks of food, but a not inconsequential amount for seed. Over a dozen agriculturally based classes, each with their own specialties or general synergistic abilities had created a plan to grow food enough in the valley in the shadow of Mt. Katahdin to support a thousand humans, and five times that many animals of various kinds.
And there were animals of various kinds.
Julia Richards, at the behest of Granny Nguyen’s sage advice, was domesticating wolves. By placing the beast under her control, she could dominate the animal. Control it. Share her senses with it. Alexander’s bees had revealed that the mana infused variants of earth creatures still obeyed certain principles of animal behavior. They had the same needs, drives, and instincts, in many cases, although you had to work harder to convince them that you were higher on the food chain than they were and be aware that these creatures often were possessed of higher intelligence than their predecessors.
Her method was relatively straight forward: The Lunar Warden girl would go out, find a pack of Dire Wolves, and dominate their leaders. Through her abilities, she was able to use her insights into the minds of her wolf familiars to communicate with the wild ones. In her case, it was especially efficient since she didn’t have to get high as a kite on dire bee honey.
To the astonishment of nearly everyone, except for Impervious’ members, it worked. In a fortnight of steady effort, there were about sixteen dire wolves, shaggy monsters big as black bears, that had been convinced that humans were a better source of food alive than in their bellies. They acted like puppies when Julia was around, groveling on bellies, whining for attention, and rolling around in the grass playfully. For anyone else there was a curt growl and a warning show of teeth. Julia took a house near the edge of the planned wall and western gate, to create a sort of beast clinic and kennel.
Alexander stayed well away from the shaggy beasts. He still had nightmares of one of them throwing itself through a car window to chew on his leg, back when the Pulse had first happened. Dire wolves were all a product of Gaia’s mind, whomped up from mana. That they now bred and behaved more or less like normal wolves had nothing to do with it in his mind, he couldn’t bring himself to trust them. Julia’s taming had packs of four in roaming well outside of town, where they would hunt or alert for anything that might try to slip into their tamer’s territory. Their shared territory.
Other than a kind of stunningly big racoon with two tails, nothing had.
The young Outsider shook off the sight of a quartet of wolves patrolling around the south side of town, scarcely believing the changes, and continued to bask in the combined labor of the settlers, his aimless walk taking him downside streets toward the main avenue.
Each house occupied by a settler could be distinguished by new siding, stone tile roofs, and the big black-violet panels on said roofs, the Jules Heaters, as folk referred to them, very much tongue in cheek. Smoke wisps trailed from several chimneys, many of which had been recently installed, retrofitting the homes from central air to forced air from fireplaces. A small fireplace, combined with the Jules heater and the bombproofing that the carpenters and Potter did on the houses guaranteed that even minimal use of burned wood could keep things cozy, no matter how hard the winter got.
He felt like a tourist in his own home, the longer he walked. The wildly fantastic silhouette of a giant wall aside, Falcon’s Rest was transforming before his eyes, settlers working like ants to break down and rebuild. Or, rather, like bees.
Following a royal jelly communion with the hive mind, the bees effectively ignored the folk of the town as they went about their business. The queen in her generous carapace, permitted some of the dryad bloodline folk to gather wax from empty larva cells, the cleaning being much the same work the bees themselves would have had to do. In many ways, it almost felt like the colonists in Falcon’s Rest had been adopted by the hive, not the other way around.
They also permitted Alexander to harvest honey from the hive, once a month. With the boom in flowering plants, most of them Entling blood enhanced, and therefore with arcane properties desirable to the bees, the honey swelled in hexagonal pods, near to bursting. He didn’t know why the queen desired it, but her will was made known to him. A worker bee showed up at his front door, did a bee dance meant to give the poor wingless drone instructions, before leading him to the section of the hive that had been designated for the patron of the Falcon’s Rest bee colony. Twenty gallons of rich, slightly mind-altering honey a month solved many carbohydrate related problems.
When the maple syrup processing station got completed, the village would have one of the first true luxuries of the old world: sweets. The town’s two brewers wasted no time cabbaging onto ten gallons for a foray into mead. That was still fermenting, so it had a few months to sit before it was ready for consumption. Alexander was positive that the first human to drink that product would be taking a trip to neverland and wanted no part of it.
Most of the dilapidated or damaged structures, including the house nearly collapsed that Alexander had run through while fighting an ogre, had been demolished. Those still standing had their necks upon the chopping blocks. Poor wasn’t so uncommon in tiny towns like this, and some of the less reputable members of his pre-Pulse community hadn’t taken care of their houses. The vacant gaps didn’t hit him so hard, as the combined changes elsewhere built a layer of separation between his fond memories and the new reality of Falcon’s Rest.
A small smile played over his face when he saw that the ugly as sin chain link fences around the school had been taken down. Alexander had hated that fencing, making the school look like a minimum-security jail.
Soon, he would hit the square where he’d once slaughtered a goblin war party using Tannerite and shrapnel bombs. The bank’s roof had made for a nice vantage point. The sight of the square stopped him again, as he had the answer to a question rattling around in his noggin not long after the Pulse: what to do with all the dead cars?
Answer: stack them in the bank’s massive parking lot and build a blast furnace in the bank itself, with which to melt them down to make ingots of pure metals, with whatever flammable burning off.
Kim Summers and three others were, even as he walked by, using chain lifts scavenged from an auto shop to pull the engines out of one of the big diesel trucks, given that those could be repurposed when a sustainable ignition and fuel source could be provided to them. The kind of precision machining in those motors was not to be had again for a long, long while yet. If Alexander had to put his finger on it, he judged the average technological level of Safe Harbor and the other settlements to be around 1800’s era, preindustrial revolution. Premedical revolution too, but that was less a concern with the magic of the sun healing folk to perfection every three days.
On down from the square, the general store and hardware store were cleaned out. Rotting food had been buried in a set of large pits, a compost project by one of the farmers. Plastic trash, waste, anything that couldn’t be used had been burned or tossed into the metal recycling plant at the old bank.
The Quintessence Shaper had put their plan into action: Muspelheim obsidian smelters using the power of the volcano trapped within that magical black glass to power them. Steelworks were dangerous places. A leak, a sudden degassing, a broken chain on a multi-ton crucible, anything that caused the molten material to splash, spill, or suddenly run free from the smelter would kill whoever was caught in its path. Still, Kim was putting his assistants to work, one of whom had welded on shipyards and knew at least a little about working with dangerous conditions.
Alexander was in awe of how criminally underutilized, no, how wasted Jules Reynolds had been in Safe Harbor. The one-time brick layer was a promethean accelerator of civilization.
Eventually, his astounded wandering caught the attention of Georgia, who had been coordinating some effort or another, and she strolled over to, very nonchalantly, bird dog him.
Dirty blonde hair cut short into a pixie, to keep free of her eyes in combat, and because she was officially through dicking with fashion in the post apocalypse, tanned east European skin, and a blue-eyed school principal’s stare pulled him up short. The broad bladed arming sword at her belt, a great helm hanging next to it, appeared right on her, as did the scale armor. The big ass great shield on her right arm didn’t, so far as she evidenced it, bother her in the slightest. Impervious’ second anchor tank was a solid lady, all the way around.
“What has our wizard out from his tower? Hmm?” Ms. Stephens opened, her casually dry humor greeting him.
He chuckled a little at that, he really had been locked up in there for a while.
“The chalkboard was starting to drive me a little nuts, I needed to get some fresh air.” He admitted freely.
Spinning a three hundred sixty-degree wave of hands, indicating the all aroundness, he gushed, “But this! Georgia, look at all of this! It’s fucking amazing!”
The Morrigan blooded time knight gained a look of pride on her stern features.
“It is, isn’t it?” She agreed, sharing a little of his enthusiasm.
“Amazing what getting jumped by a cougar the size of a bus does for folks’ motivation.” Georgia observed.
He couldn’t argue with that. Most of the people in the expedition hadn’t faced a monster since being run through a minor field dungeon to matriculate. None of them had seen anything like Panther Rex. Being shown firsthand just what might be stalking around out Upta put the fire in their bellies, that was for certain.
“They know the stakes now, out here in the Green.” Alexander confirmed.
The Entropic Venator had spent six months alone in these hills, had battled monsters virtually from day one of the pulse. A lot of that time had been spent using guns, knives, just whatever he had to hand, absent any of the fantastic nonsense that matriculation provided. It wasn’t until he’d killed the Tirnanog dungeon heart that he’d discovered the entirely new supernatural layer to life upon Gaia. Even after coming to Safe Harbor, he’d gone on raids with the Guilds, he’d scouted and hunted the surroundings around old Searsport, clearing out the monsters that trickled from the small hyper dungeon of Belfast. Alexander Gerifalte was intimate with life in the Green.
“I still have a hard time believing you were living all the way out here alone. Good job hanging in there, tiger.” Georgia applauded, imagining for herself waking up with not a single person around, being forced to struggle against the new world alone.
“Jesus christ, it had to have been brutal. I was shook up enough when my fiancé went to stone while I was showering with him. At least I had neighbors to scream hysterically at, and, later, shoulders to cry on.” She recounted.
Alexander struck a hero pose, “I’m just that damned good, Ms. Stephens. All talent.” He rejoined, permitting the cockiness of youth to shine through and to deflect through comedy the tragedy of standing next to your planned life partner when they “died”.
“Ayuh. Sure thing. Well, All Talent, I’m going to just hang out here with you and make sure you don’t trip over a rock and break that pretty face. It would be a shame if our mascot were all mashed up.” Georgia scoffed, although she smiled a little at his shenanigans.
He wouldn’t say no to some company, so off they went. After a few minutes of marveling at how quickly folk remembered how to get things done by hand, using simple machines and tricks learned from the old ways, Alexander asked after the Adventurer parties.
“How are you guys in Impervious and Getsome doing? Gotta be at least a little boring strolling around inside a walled town again, with not much in the way of dungeons shitting out monsters nearby.” He inquired.
The Chronous Bulwark refuted that easily, “Boring is good. Boring means nobody died or got mangled by some creeper. If you didn’t have a few screws loose, going out there looking for monsters to kill, you’d still be in Safe Harbor, making steam engines and living like a superstar of the Guild. Me? I’ll take bored.”
Fair enough. But he knew a few others that shared his particular brand of insanity.
“That’s fine and fair too. But I bet Ben isn’t sitting around polishing his spear.” Alexander led.
Pixie cut hair waved as she shook her head, her expression slightly wondering, “Ben and his merry band of superheroes are made of something different. I don’t know how Mark does it, keeping them all pointed in one direction. Even Melinda, sweet, wholesome thing that she is, gets this wild look in her eyes when she hasn’t been outside the walls in a couple of days.”
He grinned at that description of Getsome. They really were like something out of a comic book. But he was grateful for them every day.
“They’re the heroes we need, Georgia. The heroes we deserve are sitting back in Safe Harbor, cultivating disaster. Mark my words, Belfast is going to go *pop* soon and I don’t know if they’ll survive it.” Alexander said, hoping, wishing that the Guilds saw reason before it was too late.
A dejected breath and sad look from his companion, because he would not call her a babysitter no matter what, told him her thoughts on the matter. Impervious hadn’t had much love for the Guilds, but nobody wished harm on Safe Harbor. Humans were too few for that kind of infighting. The rifle bearing marksmen posted by the Guildies to protect their claims from poaching said that feeling was not mutual.
Alexander was under no illusions in that regard. Had he fucked up, been spotted, or been less than perfect in his ambushes of the sentries, he knew they would have opened fire on their brother man. He knew better than most just how well the Guilds paid, the influence they traded.
“Yeah, well, speaking of heroes, you’re about to need one, I thought I saw Annita prowling around a few houses back, angling to get behind us.” Georgia revealed, a slight twist of her lips letting slip her good humor.
He couldn’t help a reflexive glance over his shoulder. Nothing. Sneaky little ninja.
“It keeps her entertained, I guess.” Alexander hypothesized aloud, but a little surprised she was inside the walls.
It wasn’t quite midday, from what he understood, Granny spent most of each day until midafternoon outside the walls, scouring the mountainside. After that, it was the green houses until dark, the industrious harvester class tending lovingly the assortment of cultivars her green thumb abilities allowed to flourish.
“I’m still surprised you got her to stop sleeping in your greenhouse.” Georgia admitted.
He couldn’t help reminiscing over that minor circus. Not because he was trying to lose a potential tail or anything, he took them through the empty grocery building and out, headed for his workshop. The smithy was a place of relative safety, since Granny hated the sounds of George, the power hammer, and his crew of machine tools. Metal work was loud work, and nothing to be done about it.
“Only because she realized that she could manage all of the greenhouses in the town, and couldn’t sleep in them simultaneously. She’ll be fine.” He explained.
“You know, she really had us all fooled with that medicine woman routine.” Georgia informed him.
“Ayuh.” Alexander nodded sagely.
It hadn’t taken long for the mask to come off. Small things being misplaced, subtle hints, a shack going up outside the walls in a damp little grotto between hills in which various nightshades, sinister toadstools, volcanic flowers, flames burning eerily blue, creepy mosses, Alexander’s mandrakes, and herbs with warning labels “Go and ahead and touch it, just don’t complain to me later trespasser.” all told the tale of Granny Nguyen being less a wise woman, and more a witch at heart. You could go to her for answers, and she would give them. For the low, low price of your first born. Or, rather, mostly just any leads you might have to a place that looked like it grew mushrooms.
“It couldn’t last.” He waxed philosophical, “Evil so great couldn’t be contained in that tiny body.”
Georgia’s smirked at his comment, wondering at how easily they’d been deceived.
They walked into the smithy, currently empty because Kim was still dismantling cars for raw materials. Familiar faces of Sterling the steam engine, George the power hammer, Ricky the lathe, Jerry the bandsaw, and Tabitha the drill press all greeted him, eager for the projects they would complete together.
“You know, it’s weird that you talk about them like they’re people.” The Morrigan woman told him, the feathered markings on her face and neck lending her a mysterious air.
Alexander shushed her before she could make his friends feel awkward.
“Hush now! They’ll hear you! She didn’t mean it guys; her kind just don’t understand you is all.” He consoled the machines.
Next to the stack of silver golem sourced ingots of metals whose properties reflected their infusion with magic were the dragon’s scales. Quite a sight they made together, the glittering red next to the slightly aquamarine shimmer of golem argentum, and the near titanium white sheen of golem high steel. It was from these that he would soon be rearming Getsome and Impervious, making for them protectives and arms of value matched with their role protecting this offshoot of humanity. In short, priceless.
One of the journals he’d brought back from Safe Harbor held sketches and schematics of some of the Guild’s best armorers. One-time cosplayers, prop makers between jobs, and a historian on vacation, they had got their heads together and, instead of working in brass, aluminum, and thin stainless, had begun developing gear to protect men from monsters. Those men and women had sold him designs for a pretty penny, paid for because he enjoyed tinkering with such things between his projects making steam engines or retrofitting industrial machines to interface with a nonelectrical power source. No one had sold him anything after his blacklisting, no matter the offer he made, so it was just as well his eyes were as good as they were. He’d done some of the schematics by free hand sketching Adventurers and Guildies as they walked through town. Schematic, one of the blessings of Warforger, let him more precisely manufacture anything he had produced a detailed set of plans for. It was cheating and he was proud of it.
The designs would be his, whether or not they wanted to sell them, he cackled to himself, remembering the injustice of it all.
“Oookay, I think I can leave you to it then.” Geogia said, confident that the reluctant leader of Falcon’s Rest wouldn’t be able to find too much trouble in his own workshop.
“By the way,” Ms. Stephens said as an afterthought, standing outlined by daylight in the shop’s doorway, “If you would just take her, wine and dine her a little first, maybe, Annita wouldn’t need to stalk you like that.”
Absently, not looking up from his hand tools and the system he’d have to redesign to implement imp and salamander core technology to utilize them as heat sources, rather than wood or coal fuel, he replied, “It’s just a game the little witch plays for points, she’s not interested.”
She wasn’t. They’d bar hopped, hung out, scouted, and done all sorts of things together over the last year. Not once had any spark of tension or attraction, other than Granny shopping around for tactical gooses to hear him squawk, arisen. Half a dozen times he’d helped her corral her targets amongst the other young men, approaching under guise of a friendly chat with fellow Adventurers and roamers of the Green. Never a once had he seen sign that the lady wanted anything more than a partner in crime.
Alexander had not exactly played hard to get, when he realized that basically all the humans left were relatively young and at least kind of fit, and that he was, as his mother had once informed him, going to grow into his legs and start dropping panties, her words verbatim. Just about everyone played loose these days, except for the dedicated couples, there was no reason not to. With the destruction of human society and the absence of any way to procreate, sexuality was about mutual attraction and experimentation, not socioeconomic cost benefit analysis or vague religiosity. As far as the die-hard religious folk were concerned, Rapture had occurred and anybody not petrified had been left behind, a world of sinners already doomed to Judgment.
These days, he would swing at about any pitch in his strike zone. Except for Brig, that fastball was a little aggressive. He had to admit she'd grown on him though. For a moment he wondered if the copper haired battle maniac was free, you must lift the heavy weights to gain muscle…no! Wait! You need the use of your legs!
Now that Georgia had him thinking about it, the days of promiscuity, for lads and ladies alike, when std’s were a thing of the past and nobody could have children at all, might be over. Or, well, not over, just redirected into a productive angle. Nobody knew when it would happen, the womenfolk still hadn't cycled. Kids would be pretty neat, but half the town delivering on top of each other would be sort of wild. Shiv would lose his mind, he wasn't an OBGYN, but he'd try. As long as nobody died outright, they'd all survive childbirth the old fashioned way, the women and the babes.
"Did you just die standing up?" Georgia called from the portal into the shop
Abruptly he realized the solid blonde warrior was still there in the doorway, waiting for a response, and that he had committed, once again, the social sin of forgetting people were there while his degenerate brain went round and round in its hamster wheel.
"Sorry," He apologized, as he always did, "Got caught up wondering how things will change when half the town's got a bun in the oven. It'll be nice to have kids running around again, but so many out of action for a trimester plus is going to pinch."
She shook her short cropped head at him like a disapproving school teacher and remarked "Typical. You're worried over nothing Alexander, we of the fairer sex have been carrying civilization on our backs, and in our bellies, at the same time, while you hairy apes breath farts in your hunting blinds for millennia. So? Granny? Dinner when?"
After a bit of contemplation, Alexander came back to his original conclusion that what Annita Nguyen was, was a good friend who complimented his brand of eccentricity with her own. Besides, she could be seen from time to time with Benjamin, their heads together in deep discussion. Given that they occupied wildly different circles of function in this post-apocalyptic society, they weren’t talking business, in all likelihood. Honestly? He thought they made a strangely fitting couple. One liked raising and cultivating various things, and the other liked uncultivating various things with prejudice. Yin and Yang.
“I think she has a thing for Ben. I wish her the best with that too, the guy needs to unwind a little every now and then. Coming from me? That’s saying something.” Alexander said, already turned to the project in front of him, distracted by the modifications he was going to have to make to control heat and engine output.
A low laugh and a muttered, “Sure, sure. Whatever you say.” Accompanied the Anchor tank’s departure.