Daffodil looks unpleased momentarily at the disrespect towards her hospitality that Mat showed by taking off ungraciously. She shrugs it off quickly though, stating, “Tell me about yourselves, you little braddah, you two wahine, your great scaly mastiff, this young dragon.”
It strikes me that we’ve been ignoring an elephant in the room, or two. If my dreams are any indicator, there are definitely no humanoid otters walking around Rayileklia. Also, I doubt many people have interacted with dragons, in almost any world, and we walk around with Lil like it’s just a matter of fact that they’re meant to be at our side. I mean, it is, Lil is a person with their own goals, ambitions, desires, emotions, personality. Just because they’re also a powerful mythical beast doesn’t take that away from them. Regardless, Daffodil has taken the makeup of our group in remarkable stride.
Before I can answer, Teuila brazenly takes the lead, “This wahine is called Teuila, that one is Luni. Reggie hasn’t corrected you, but I will, they’re not braddah or wahine or kane. Lil’s our big beautiful dragbutt, and Lucky is our friendly puppy.”
Lil and I both start to object as we blush, but Teuila continues, “But that being said, we’re very grateful for your hospitality Daffodil, and pleased to meet you. I did good, right guys?”
I struggle very hard not to facepalm, and barely succeed. She actually turned to face us and asked for reassurance audibly about her interaction as an introduction for us. Within earshot of Daffodil, since she was just conversing with her not a split second prior. Luni giggles and drapes her arms over Te’s shoulders from behind, snuggling her “Big Sis”’s skull near her right mandibular joint.
Daffodil apologizes towards me, “Ah, e kala mai i a’u ku’uipo. If you have another word, I shall use it. Or simply your name, Reggie you say?”
She gazes hopefully towards Teuila, who nods in response. She then smiles wide til her eyes close, and folds her hands in front of her, at peace with having made ammends.
I try to reassure Teuila while also responding to Daffodil, “Yes Te, thank you, My Wings. I wouldn’t have brought it up. I’m um, I’m sorry Daffodil. She’s right. I’m neither, my name’s fine, or Rej or R or anything like that. We’re sort of all neither, though Lu and Te have always been fine with female pronouns. Lil, have you ever decided on anything?”
Lil hems and haws, “Hm, no, I suppose not buddy. I’m still mad at you ya know. Mega mad, mega mega mega mad.”
Lil’s statement strikes my heart like a dagger driven through it as tears well in my eyes. I gaze upwards to avoid eye contact, making the same mistake I made earlier, resulting in acidic drizzle landing on my eyeballs, each droplet like a wasp’s sting. At least I have an excuse as to why my eyes are streaming tears now, trying to flush out the physical pain, rather than the emotional one.
The three of my inner circle chat with Daffodil on the way to her hut, but I’m a tad stunned and can’t really interact on the way there. I march half slumped against Lucky’s flank as we plod along the muddy path. Hearing my best and oldest friend say that they’re so angry with me, over what they’re angry with me about, hurts so deeply. I don’t know what to do about it. There’s really nothing I can do right now I suppose until Lil is willing to talk it through, if that will ever come to pass. Lil knows I beat myself up over things like this nonstop throughout our adventures. The fact that they’ve turned it on me now cuts like razor wire. I need to focus though. We’re in a whole new world, there’s so many differences and odd things we’ll have to learn.
One odd thing on the way to Daffodil’s home is that plants with large green stalks ranging anywhere from shoulder height, to probably over thirty feet tall, have flower bulbs that emit light. Not just a small glow, but as strong as a street lamp, maybe stronger. The light feels as comfortingly warm as the sun breaking through on a cool autumn day. At least that’s what it feels like comparative to walking in the constant shadow of the acid rain clouds. The head of the buds all face downward, emitting the light to the ground, opposite the activity of plants that I’d usually expect. Daffodil did say that it rained ceaselessly. Did she mean that it absolutely never stops with the acid rain and dark cloud cover? These plants, and the ongoing lightning, might be the only light that ever reaches the ground in that case. I see now that there are a dozen or so lamp plants scattered about Daffodil’s small cornfield.
Another thing about the cloud cover is that lightning continues to streak across the sky, but never seems to seek to touch down. What sort of ionic trail has to be happening to continue to conduct all of the electricity horizontally, never seeking ground? Regardless, it would be all the more dangerous to try to fly above treetop level, or scale any mountains in these lands.
Daffodil’s domicile is small, but impressive in its own right. Lil and Lucky can fit partially through the open face of its southern side, but no further. It seems she constructed the entire thing herself. She has very few tools; an iron hand thresher, or scythe, a stone bowl, or mortar, a pestle, the oven that she built from adobe bricks that she crafted herself, and an onyx knife. Her work is impressive. She has one large sealed barrel, and two medium sized jars, which appear to be her grain stores, or larder, or pantry. Whatever you’d call sealed off buckets of dried beans and cornmeal. The wicker basket she dropped earlier had nothing in it, apparently she was intending to head ma uka to scrape a few pounds of salt, or baking soda, or both from the mountainside. At least until she spotted strangers leaving Noirdivinhoz.
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Outside her home appears to be something of a water pump constructed of wooden reed, or perhaps bamboo. It looks like a rope holds a heavy cylinder that’s almost exactly the shape of the inside of the hollowed plant pipe. I believe that the weight can be pulled upwards past the tap opening by pulling down on the rope outside. If you do it fast enough, a short vacuum burst should pull the water from the ground. It’s ingenious.
Daffodil addresses the group, “You all seem lost when I use certain words. Do you only know the common Englishness?”
English? But that would be a language originating in the land of England, a place on Earth. Why would we even know English? I suppose it’s what we’ve been thinking and speaking in ever since Can’Z’aas, but still. I do think I had thoughts long, long ago, about our text and speech being in English, but those thoughts had come and gone. Like many others. I’m easily distracted after all. Still, why do I suddenly know more and more about Earth? Or, why do I piece together things that I had remembered in the past in Can’Z’aas about it at least? I’m certain my face is screwed up as I’m lost in thought.
Te begins to take charge again for us, but Luni interrupts her, “Yes, that’s right.”
Luni eyes me suspiciously though. I know she can’t fully ride my thoughts, since our telepathy is mostly broken here on Rayileklia. Does she suspect that I seem to know Hawaiian or Tahitian? The reason that some of the phrases don’t match up with the Hawaiian that I know for some reason, could be because it’s from a lexically similar language such as Tahitian. Or it could be because Earth is fakeworld and I just have buggy memories and think I know things. I could just be understanding definitions from context.
Why isn’t Lu looking at Teuila suspiciously though? Te knew the words about genders, even one that Daffodil never used. Ah there it is, her suspecting glare turned towards Teuila. Coincidental timing, that. Or maybe our telepathy isn’t as broken as I thought it was. If she has been concentrating on keeping it active since we got here, she might be able to stay riding around in my head. That must take an awful lot of effort if she’s doing that though, and even then, I couldn’t actively reply, or probably even hear her thoughts, just think thoughts that I’d hope she could hear.
Daffodil states simply, “I’ll fix us corn flatbread and beans. It’s a simple, modest life, but it’s what I have to offer. If you are truly, as you say, not from around here, Rayileklia at all, I would be happy to share what I know with you over a meal. Afterwards, I must go bury that poor soul’s body that resides within Noirdivinhoz.”
At the mention of Aces’ body, I suffer a pang of guilt. Did Daffodil know them? I suppose I can ask all about it over dinner. Daffodil reaches under a shelf to pull out another jar that I hadn’t spotted, the shelf might actually be her bed, come to think of it. In the jar seems to be salt, or maybe sodium bicarbonate. Either way, useful in making dough with cornmeal or corn flour.
I let the four of them converse for a bit as I maneuver past Lil to stand outside with Lucky, who also doesn’t fit in the hale, the house, while in his hound form. Lucky’s hound form seems to vary in size, anywhere from that of a horse, to twice the size of our original house near Shellcracker Pond. I wonder how or when he decides to shift sizes. I regret interacting with him so little during our time in Can’Z’aas. Luni and I created him in a convoluted series of events. Lucky is essentially our son. We had him imprint on Laomati though, in order to be her guardian. He must have been fated to exist though, he was one of the tome owners. I can’t even wrap my head around it. The five souls of origin, and the one original soul. Lil is the original soul, somehow. But Mat, Lu, Te, Lucky and I each happen to be one of the souls of origin somehow as well. What about our family? Where in the cosmic order do their souls fall? We somehow created Lucky to protect Lao, but Lucky was never destined to stay with her.
I sigh as I think about Laomati, one of our two clan leaders, essentially mother to all of us Shellcrackers. Lao had her heart broken when so many lives of her family members were lost before I had ever met them, and had it broken again when yet more were taken from her during the Night of High Water. At the time, I still believed myself to be a human child, so I acted with a child’s level of immaturity and insensitivity, not putting enough thought into her feelings or Agwai’s feelings. Agwai is our other leader. Back then Ag seemed so stern, so angry, so distant and cold. It turns out that all of that was due to grief and the stress of being overburdened with responsibility that they weren’t prepared for. The two have gone on to find such happiness with each other over time.
As much as I want to reminisce about my family, I have to keep moving forward if I want to ever see them again. For now, I’ll do what little I can. I’m pretty sure I can do this, so I focus on summoning items from my inventory that I know are there, without being able to browse my mental inventory menu. Standing in one spot, focusing for eight minutes, I begin to pant with the strain of the pull it seems to put on my entire being. Still, I manage to succeed. The small market stall that I claimed to my inventory so long ago appears with a resounding clatter, along with a sizable amount of currency in coins and gemstones, and several sets of Valkyrie armor and weaponry, and most of the magic items I’d acquired over the years. I pant as I lean against the stall, and Lucky bounds back and forth around it. I begin to wipe sweat from my brow, hoping that it doesn’t carry oil and acid rain down my brow into my eyes. Lucky however settles in front of the stall with me and laps at my face with his enormous tongue. I don’t have the strength to push his head away at the moment.
Long ago I was convinced Lucky hated me. It seemed like the side of him that was part cragbeast knew that I slew its queen, or something. On the other hand, he was mostly only hostile if I moved away from anywhere that Lao directed me to be or asked me to be. I had that first egg, approximately half of what makes up Lucky, for a year or more though! It’s nuts, I didn’t think to figure out anything about it in all that time, and then we had to do magic shenanigans and a whole quest, and merge that egg with another one, along with excess energy we needed to purge from all of our forms. In what timeline did one of us learn how to do all that? Or is it a causal loop, where because we did it in the future, and I sent back future personalities to Lu and to myself, we knew how to do it? Regardless, Lucky’s a lovable, enormous, joyful, noisy boy.
Daffodil shoves Lil aside to be able to exit her house to see the source of the sound. Her jaw drops when she realizes that a building, small though it may be, materialized out of nowhere. I smile weakly and wave in her direction. Luni and Teuila join us a moment later, and Lu claps giddily upon seeing the stall. She immediately takes her place behind its counter as the tending shopkeep.