B 3 C 1: GET LUNA?
Priscilla's, the Madam Warden of the surviving human forces, tolerance of me is tenuous at best. A quarter of the time, she wishes I would assume command of the entire human forces. Another quarter of the time, she wishes I would obey her every command. The other half of the time she wishes she'd never met me and would never have to see me again.
Sir Reginald, originally my proctor, military recruiter, staff sergeant examiner, has been appointed as her advisor of some sort. I’m not sure on the official title. The two are both working through a lot of grief, but their opposing opinions are probably necessary to find the right path. Sir Reginald fancied a lady and perhaps her sister as well who worked at the Salty Wench, but the whole city was destroyed. That’s also why Priscilla is the way she is. Not that she had a crush on Salty Wenches, but that the city was destroyed. Although, who knows? Maybe she does fancy Salty Wenches.
Our neighbor the eight-legger isn't doing so well. They're used to caves, and now they're on sunny open plains, with no support network, no place to build their home unless they leave us all behind to journey alone into the forests to the south. That might be the best for them in the long run, but I think they're attached to Agwai and the rest of our family.
Some of the soldiers have given me the nickname of Little Giant. I suppose in part because I'm quite short, and I had adopted a form towering over thirty feet tall during the Night of All Burn. It's what we've agreed to call the horrid event where lava was consuming everything across the land.
Just like using super speed beyond my means, I hope I never have to do anything like I did on the Night of All Burn, ever again. I don’t know if the fourth form will always absorb the damage sustained. If it hadn’t, I don’t know if I’d have ever recovered. I was looking a bit like molten dross, or slag by the end of the mana convergence. I also don’t even know how I got three mana pools to begin with for separate self tethers. The experience tells me an earlier theory was correct though, that I could probably add an additional heart tether to Lil or Teuila, or even Luni, even in their strongest evolutionary stages. Not just that it’s possible, but that it would likely create some new evolutionary form.
I haven’t heard from the voice that I believe to be future-me since the Night of All Burn. Yet Luni seems to still be under orders to keep me from guessing about certain events, both past and future. Apparently this isn’t all over yet. Now that I know just how enormous the stakes can be for these time travel shenanigans, I completely understand why I entrusted Luni with this, and no one else. She’s made of the sternest stuff to put herself through so much hurt having to hide things from us.
I would like us to bring Luna into our fold. I don’t want her dying out here if the lava decides to just spill all the way south down to the swamp. I’m not sure the best way to do it though. Can one of the Shellcracker Adventuring Party just ask her to follow the SAP? Can we invite her to the party? I don’t want her to get freaked out by, attacked by, or attack, all the soldiers and critterkin. It hurts to say ‘critterfolk’ because of the way the humans had been using it for so long, like it was derogatory, so a few of us are trying to change the terminology used.
I thought of myself as a child for so long, but I’m essentially a wartime general, an adventurer, a family leader, just too many things to ever have put on a child, not to mention all the trauma I carry. Still, even being saddled with so many responsibilities, it doesn’t hurt to be mothered once in a while when one needs motherly advice, does it?
Speaking of trauma, we lost Sal and Har because of me. They thought they had to save me, and kept trying. They didn’t realize I was basically in no risk. Sure, I was frozen in and out of an ongoing panic attack, and would have gotten hurt a bit by the pterodactyl, but the lava wasn’t as dangerous to me as it was to them. Maybe if it weren’t for their sacrifice, I might not have been able to survive to fully manifest the fourth form. I don’t know how many tries across how many timelines I went through for that night’s outcome to be as it was. Well, not me, the sneaky mysterious future me that I think keeps contacting me. If it’s not future me, then I have another personality riding around in my head that has some sort of precognition.
Luni telepathically sends, “Stop guessssssing. Silly goose.”
I send back, “Aye, yeah, sorry Lu, just went down a rabbit hole of thought. I think I need some advice from Lao, have you seen her?”
Lu replies, “Have you checked over by neighbor-san?”
I chuckle in response, “When did we agree to start calling him neighbor-san? How does anyone even know what the suffix means?”
Lu blows a raspberry towards me mentally, “I think it’s more polite than eight-legger, or just neighbor.”
I can’t help smiling, Luni is right. I definitely would prefer to be on good terms with neighbor-san. I think Lao and Agwai are trying to convince him to start a new home far to the south so that he doesn’t have to deal with the sun, and so many people. I know he doesn’t like me, I’ve known ever since he crashed our first party. I take my time ambling their way, hoping that Laomati breaks off so I can talk to her for a few moments alone.
Speaking of people or beings that don’t like me, thunder specialist Sofu thinks I’m a complete dick for the way I piledrove them into the ground. I’m glad they lived, but I was also trying to prevent Jazharn and Adom from dying, so I don’t really regret doing it. Jazharn is, ah, well, she definitely doesn’t like me, her acid is powerful though. Not as powerful as the serpent in its final rage mode, but she’s still a frightening force, she’s part of why I was so destroyed during the Night of All Burn. Adom, whew, I think he keeps trying to poison my food. I wonder if it’s almost a game to him at this point. I’ve been careful to only ingest enough to trigger the mildest defensive responses so that I can raise my toxin resistance. I can’t prove it’s him, but, come on, who else would it be? He’s really good at subtly casting his poison magics. Most of the human mages all announce their spells to be able to manifest them, not Adom though, instant effects by the time he has pointed somewhere, boom. I sort of wish I hadn’t made enemies of those three. Maybe we’re just rivals? Is that any better?
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Since humans don’t have menu interfaces, or inventory magic, they can’t progress rapidly like I can, nor recover from as deadly of injuries, and so on. Human magical prowess and its progress is more like exercising a muscle would be in my memories. No matter how much they do it, there’s limits. For humans that seems to be a thousand maximum mana, though the rest of their sub stats vary a bit. I guess the progress and healing is something that sets us critterkin apart. Yet I’m also different than every critterkin I’ve ever met. I bleed like humans. I can’t understand non-party speech, like humans.
Oh whew, Laomati is free. I call out, “Lao, can I snag you for a second?”
Lao beams a smile towards me as she almost sashays in my direction with arms open wide. Her approach ends in a warm, loving, motherly embrace that I sink into for a while before getting around to my question. I hug her back as lovingly as I can. I don’t know if she remembers being in the middle of derezzing from lava on the Night of All Burn, or that I was forced to save Lucky instead of her. She’s not the type of person to ever hold it against someone, but I still wish I could find some way to beg for her forgiveness that wasn’t all about me. She’s alive and in good spirits, that’s what’s most important to me.
Teuila’s first instincts were to save Lao, essentially our mother figure, our clan leader. If we had both acted to save Lao, Lucky would have perished, then we wouldn’t have been able to escape the lava. Only Lil and I would have survived. Lucky was able to dig us to safety when the lava was closing in on all sides. Our settlement had been completely surrounded by lava so quickly. I was fighting it back but it actually flowed backwards uphill in a circle around our settlement to close in from all sides. Without Spice’s tunnel, or Lucky’s digging, I’d have lost much of my family that night.
Sighing, I finally begin rambling, “So, Lao, um, sorry about the events, but thank you, and Lucky. I um, anyway, not about any of that, all behind us, right? Anyway, you’ve heard our tales of Luna now and again, you know how close she is to a place that has terrible memories for me. The humans and critterkin here need to move south as soon as possible before sweeping east to find a new home, so we’ll be passing the area. I’d like your opinion on what the best way to approach Luna is. Also your opinion on the beaver situation. I’m not sure if their dam structure is safer or more dangerous in the event of the lava flooding the river like it was doing during the Night of All Burn.”
Lao leans back on her tail for a moment, then sits down, using it as a cushion. She pulls me into her lap and I happily take the position, despite the jeers and sneers from various nearby human soldiers.
They say things to the effect of, “Looks like it’s Little Giant’s Naptime.” or, “Guess Little Giant really is little, needs his mommy.” Others will correct people that call me male and say that I’m a she, and they’ll get into arguments over it. They project their genders onto me, whichever they assume to be either stronger if they admire me, or weaker if they admonish me. Joke's on both camps, I'm neither.
I roll my eyes at the soldiers, and I jokingly, somewhat juvenilely pull out my thunder stick and set a low rolling rumble in their direction. Harmless, just sensory, but a bit funny to me. It’s like I can make the ground or sky growl for me. Some are startled, others call out that thunder is no biggy, they can do lightning, or they can do thunder too, then they get into arguments that devolve into heading away to spar to prove which magic is stronger.
I’m surprised these fools are able to function as a unit at all, but we did pull together to pause the Night of All Burn. Regardless, I turn my attention back to Lao who is stifling a chuckle, holding her bottom lip as she gazes between me and the soldiers who are now walking away to spar.
Lao finally responds, “Dearest, Beloved Reggie Shellcracker. At this point in our lives, I feel as if you’ve the loom of fate all to yourself, and that only you can plot the correct path for us. Look at what you’ve accomplished! You saved them, all of them! We could have continued to flee, we could have fled further south yet as we could outpace the lava by this point, as it slowed considerably. But no, one family was not enough, you saved thousands! I know how it hurt so that three dear to you that I know of were lost, but still you persisted.”
Lao pauses for a breath, then continues, “You had help, much help, but you made the choices that led to you being able to earn that help. Think on that. Every choice you made leading up to that point was necessary for you to be able to get so many powerful beings to rally behind you, to put their faith in you. It was no small amount of trust either, you requested they give up all the power that they might have used for their own survival.”
I chuckle a bit as a tear forms in my eye before I rebut, “I’m so grateful for your pride and faith in me, but I honestly believe that the right course is for me to garner your opinion on matters. You’re important to me, you’re mother to us all. Honestly, we might have a party of thousands of critterkin all under the Shellcracker family name soon. Whatever you believe about me or yourself, I think every last one of them will look to you for your warmth, guidance, affection, and all that you bring to our family.”
Lao wrings her hands slightly as she frets, “Surely not, would they truly all join the family? Well, I suppose it matters not, if they do, they do, and we shall persevere. If they don’t, they don’t, and we shall carry on.”
At this point, it sounds like Lao’s trying to convince herself of something rather than convince me of anything. Almost as if on cue, the parley between Lil, Bettie, and several critterkin families appears to have concluded. New panels open in my mind’s eye interface, a sub party. Disturbingly, it’s attached to me, not the family as a whole, or Lao. Lao chuckles as we notice this at the same time, there’s a slight wink that’s as close as she’ll ever get to saying ‘told you so.’
More disturbingly is the name. It’s ShellCracker Raiding Adventurers Party. SCRAP. That feels like a bad omen. At least I can speak with them without needing a translator, I guess. Ugh, I do not need this kind of responsibility. Can’t I go on pretending to be a human child a bit longer? No, no I suppose not, not with the threat looming over us. We couldn’t pull off another Night of All Burn finisher right now. Heck, I can barely combat anything at the moment with how much energy capacity I’ve lost and how much max mana is locked away on top of that.
Fine, if it’s up to me, we march south, but slowly, with my SAP far in the lead. We’ll talk to Luna. She’s wildly intelligent. I’m almost positive she understands speech, and even more odd, my speech. Few people or creatures understand my speech, or did. Now I have nearly a thousand critterkin in some kind of raiding party, and thousands of humans who can understand me. I really don’t like the name raiding party. It implies we’ll be raiding settlements. Hm, maybe I can distract myself from that connotation if I think of videogames instead? Raiding would be raiding bosses or dungeons. Is that fine?
I wonder if Luna can join that party dynamic. Would we be able to speak freely with her if so? I guess there’s nothing for it but to try. I hug Lao as I announce my intent. She nods approvingly as I stand and take my leave.
I’d like to check in with everyone individually, it seems like Agwai is saying goodbye to Neighbor-san, I guess we are parting after all. Luni is curiously hanging around Priscilla and Sir Reginald. I’m worried for her safety around Madam Warden, but I trust Lu to take care of herself for the most part. Lil is just returning with the heads of the various sub factions of critterkin that are now allied under me. I give Lil a dubious look, a very “why did you do this to me?” look.