Several long minutes pass, and my muscles remain too weary to move as the leaden weight takes hold even further. Worse, I begin to sense the crushing sensation of the thousands of pounds of reptilian innards perched atop me, as my steely body spell begins to wear off. Well. Crap. Serves me right for not paying attention to my daily limits. At the very least, I can utilize telekinesis to relieve the pressure slightly, shoving upwards against whatever organ sac is crushing down on my cranium. Huff, phew. I’m left panting in exhaustion, despite not physically moving anything else. My muscles spasm in slight fits and bursts, just a side effect of my everyday existence at this point, nothing new. The hydra’s flesh internal walls bear down on me, and my eyelids droop lower and lower.
I’ll—. I’ll have to rely on my shield, and armor, to resist the slow, squishing death. I can’t keep my eyes open. I’m, I’m so tired. With that, my eyes close, and remain closed, no longer responding to my attempts to open them. My breathing slows, and slows. I drop into unconsciousness.
Her voice rings out with a clarity that snaps me to attention, startling me from my daze, “Honestly Err, we need to stop making a habit out of this.” There’s a playful, jovial nature to her tone, but she’s also sniffling, and fighting back sobs.
She’s right. We shouldn’t make a habit of fleeing into rivers. We’re cold, and damp, and she’s pretty banged up from the rocks and logs we’d bumped into. I’m fairly certain my clothes are ripped, and that I’ve got scrapes on most of the surfaces of my body. I had tried to shield her body from the worst of it with mine. She got jostled as I kept her wrapped in my arms, but I got scraped and banged and even stabbed a bit from the various debris in the river. It wouldn’t have been worth it to fight for our food though, or to even stick around. I’d take a thousand scrapes to protect her from even just one, to keep her smiling, to keep her safe and alive.
I almost offer, “We could go back,” but I know that she’d shake her head. I know she would understand that I meant back to where it all began, where we fled from. She would know I didn’t mean the campsite we were making use of. She trusted me, and we ran away. She still trusts me, and believes it was the right choice. She won’t talk about it, but ever since that day, we’ve been preparing, and running. We prepared to run, then we ran. I don’t know when we’ll stop, or how we’ll even keep making it, but she’s determined to follow me, to accompany me, and she’s positive we chose correctly.
All I want in the whole world is to keep her safe, and smiling. I don’t remember ever having a friend before her. Everything is fuzzy, I don’t remember much before that day at the river at all. A few weeks, maybe a couple of months at most, and even those are mostly a blur of sameness. I can’t keep thinking about it, or my brain starts to hurt. I think I’m a teenager, and I’m missing the better part of the first decade of my life in memories. I rattle my skull, trying to shake loose this train of thought that inevitably leads nowhere.
She scootches closer, and wraps her arms around me, pulling my arms about her for warmth in the process. We need to dry off, and find another hiding place. Sitting in the crinkly, fallen autumn leaves in freezing wet clothes isn’t doing us any favors. Sitting where we might be visible to park rangers, or hikers, due to the lack of foliage, and the brightness with the lack of canopy isn’t doing us any favors. But being held by her, as she smiles through her own sobs, it’s worth it to wait a while. I’ll protect her. I have to. It’s the only thing that matters.
—— The non orders me, “Stop clawing, stop scratching. These are not yours, and you will die if you continue to grasp at them! Survive, fight, free yourself! Free me.”
I find myself flexing my jaw, and yawning. I blink several times, as a thought crosses my mind with urgency. Survive, fight, free myself. I suppose that’s probably wise, my survival instincts kicking in, reminding me that I’m slowly being crushed inside a hydra. Hm, yawr, I yawn and smack my lips once again, resulting in having to spit out viscous slime that has worked its way into my mouth and nose in my sleep. Bleugh, yuck. Ptew, blech. Thankfully the neckchain keeps me breathing. Oh hell, I keep yawning. How tired am I?
Oh, right, exhaustion from hitting my S P limit. Not my total cap that would completely incapacitate me, but still, yawn. Hell’s bells, knock it off already, yeesh! Deep breath, okay, slow exhale. Phew. Better. Argh, my muscles are still leaden, weighted, too heavy to move. Is that because of the cored out nerve tunnels, or am I just having an unlucky day with my safe limit on S P usage? I could probably still go to a thousand today, but, well, I can’t even move to craft them right now. My shoulders and biceps are the worst of it.
Oh, I’m an idiot. I mean, that’s not news, but it’s the truth. Somehow my archsorc staff is in my left hand, mysteriously, again. I use it to renew the telekinesis spell on me, granting me the ability once more. Reaching out with my mind, I levitate the archsorc staff into its holster, the double-ended drop-sheath. Now, where’s that orichalcum sheet? I’m getting a lot of use out of a random banged up square of metal. There we go, slide it up the belly of the beast, and a little bit upwards, to the side at an angle near me.
And there we go, ta-da! I joke to myself in my mindscape as my evisceration of the hydra frees me, and a helping of its innards, from its chest-cavity. We, me and the innards that is, tumble forth, spilling out into the swamp to the side of the hydra. The drop is unceremonious to say the least. My fall causes me to first splash into a foot of standing water, then splat into the mud beneath that water. Great, now I’m buried beneath innards, in a muddy pond. My situation has vastly improved. Okay, okay, no need to be snarky with myself.
Easy enough to fix, drag myself out of the muck on my makeshift hoverboard. Now where the heck is Teuila? Casting my senses about, I don’t detect her within my silent sonar range, but she should be fairly near. Floating about in a spiral search pattern, I come across her sitting on a pair of hydra corpses, with an array of severed heads around her. From the cadence of faint vibrations coming from her torso, she’s either laughing or sobbing. I hope it’s the former.
As if in response, Teuila teasingly calls out, “What took ya so long, Airhead?”
I quip back, “Felt like taking a nap, so I did.”
Teuila absolutely loses it, and rolls off of her perch, bursting into laughter as she tumbles into the mud. Through laughter and tears she tries to ask, “You, haha, you, hah, you just felt like napping. Pft. Inside a big snake? Hehe. Oh my Air, what am I ever going to do with you. Only you Air, only you. Which way did you get out anyway? Out its a--”
I interrupt, “Don’t be crass, out of its side.” I can’t help laughing at Teuila’s implication though, and I’m not actually admonishing her. I’m mostly playing it up for laughs.
We both have a good fit of the giggles, remembering another large serpent that I entered, and how I exited it. Reminiscing about me entering monstrous creatures, Te jokes, “Air, I think you fight and kill more big monsters from inside, than from outside, hehe. Or at least, it’s beginning to become a habit at the very least.”
Huh, I wonder. I pulled off my first safe retaliation against Octorochi from inside its mouth. We finished it externally though, much later. Another Octorochi, I also killed externally, much later than that. The cragbeast queen, I’m pretty sure I finished her off before I plummeted into her mouth. Vesuviform though, Teuila’s absolutely right, my final attack was done from its insides. I had to float inside the dracolich for us to be able to finish that boss fight, sort of. The weird necromantic energy swirl is what I’m actually thinking about for that one. Being inside of it gave us a breather to figure out the truth behind the fight. Kozzurth I definitely slew from inside. Most of the Felgre portalspawns, including the first one that I fought, I slew from inside. Hydra, slew from inside.
Teuila continues her fit of the giggles as she rides my thought train, agreeing with my memories. In meatspace though, she hauls herself up, and jumps up to slug me playfully in the shoulder. Her joking roughhousing manages to topple me from my precarious perch however, and I tumble off, splatting into the mud, unable to work any of my muscles. I have to laugh at myself, dropping out of or off of something yet again in such a short span. I can sense Te frowning, when she realizes that I’m in no shape for roughhousing. I can also sense the hint of fear riding beneath her emotions, the worry that her playfulness might not be met with the joy she intended to inspire.
I flash Teuila a smile in thinkspace, attempting to reassure her. Te hauls me up out of the mud, and I almost begin using magic to cleanse myself, before realizing that first of all, I can’t, because I can’t draw the runes, secondly, I’m already past my safe S P limit for the day.
Te grumps, “Okay Air, come on, let’s get you back to the camp.” She then asks, “You want me to carry that thing?” while gesturing towards the hovering slat of orichalcum.
I’m tempted to experiment, to see how far away I can get before the telekinesis drops, when I’m focusing on an object, trying to bring it with me. It’s a curiosity, for sure, but I don’t sense any practical implications at the moment, especially if it’s just going to drop the connection as soon as I leave the normal range for the ability. I think the range is supposed to be something like thirty to sixty feet, but I think with fairly intense focus, I can manage about thirty meters instead, but that’s about the end of it.
Coming to a conclusion, I shake my head, more at myself than Teuila. I don’t need to ask her to experiment, so I answer, “Sure, sort of, can you just hold the hyperdimensional haversack open real wide, really carefully? I’ll just float it in there.”
Teuila unceremoniously tosses me atop her left shoulder, while she fishes around beneath my cloak to free the hyperdimensional haversack. I can sense her prying it open to its widest aperture, just barely big enough to fit the orichalcum sheet into. Sliding it in with telekinesis however is much easier than when I was fooling around, doing it by hand, by myself. I mumble my thanks as Teuila sets her grip firmly about me, and takes off like a rocket back towards the front of the refugee camp.
It’s difficult to parse my senses while we’re traveling over fifty meters per second. Vines and tangles and brush and tree trunks and mounds of muck all blend together in a blur, both visually, and via my silent sonar. I feel a bit like a bug on a windshield, mostly just sensing a splat of input. Te’s mental avatar chuckles at the comparison, even though she shouldn’t know what a windshield is.
More and more, it seems like effective knowledge of my Fakeworld memories are picked up by my inner circle, my loved ones. Is it a byproduct of them riding around in my brain so often? Are my mysterious memories bugging out the brains of my beloveds? Teuila snorts in laughter at the alliteration, and I can’t help but chuckle with her. We’re almost to the camp, so I let my thoughts drift away from such silly, trivial things as my broken, buggy memories. My mind reaches out, along with Teuila’s, for Tiktik’s mind.
Tiktik’s telepathy catches ours, and her telepathic avatar grumps, “I can already tell, you two hogged all the fun for yourselves, didn’t you? Meanies.”