Momo
The water sloshes in the bucket as Momo slowly walks toward the big house. Or, her new home, as she likes to call it. Her instinct is telling her that Allard can be trusted, but there is nobody in the universe who can be right all the time. It would serve her right to be wrong after spending so much time taking care of him over the last few days, time that she should have been spending making her new home hospitable. If she is wrong, he will most likely attack now. She grips the handle of the water bucket loosely, ready to swing it at him the moment he does so. If he does.
Unsteady footsteps approach, and she turns when he calls out hesitantly.
“Momo?” He stumbles over the name, only two syllables but it is obvious they are strange to him. “Did I wake up a lot since you found me?”
“Hm,” she shifts the bucket to her other hand and points toward the big house before continuing to walk. “You were awake a few times, but not aware. You ran a high fever for a few days. I think that had more to do with being malnourished and out in the sun without water. Maybe a bit of it was just needing the rest, though.” She opens the door, waits until he passes into the shade, then closes it again. “Why do you ask?”
He follows her like a lonely duckling as she navigates around the big table that she pushes against the front door every night. He thinks for a moment, then sucks in a deep breath and blurts out, “How were you able to get me to the waste pot?”
Momo pauses, glancing over her shoulder at him with raised brows. There is little light with the shutters closed, but she can tell his face is as red as a tomato. “I’m sorry, Allard. I would love to tell you that you hopped up and took care of everything yourself, but even if you weren’t tied up you weren’t going anywhere in your state. The first time there was an accident I didn’t have any spare clothes to put on you since I hadn’t gone through all the houses yet.”
She shrugs and makes her way to the back door, giving him a moment to deal with his embarrassment before making it worse. “Still haven’t, actually. With you running a fever I didn’t want to try and strip you and use too much of my clean water, so I used my cleaning skill on you and it worked like a dream!”
The sun nearly blinds her as she steps out into her newly fortified backyard and sets the bucket down just outside the door. She rolls her shoulders, then rubs her aching right forearm while she studies the tall man who stands frozen in the doorway. “Don’t worry, I didn’t see anything you wouldn’t want me to see, and I turned you over so you wouldn’t get bedsores or anything. I may not be a nurse but I took care of my husband during his last few weeks at home and I remember that I have to keep you moving to prevent those.”
Allard doesn’t respond to her. He stares ahead, into the yard for nearly a minute. Then, to Momo’s consternation, a tear drops from his eye, tracing a glistening path down his gaunt face.
“I’m telling the truth,” she says, waving her hands back and forth in the air in front of her. “I really didn’t see any of your bits and bobs, and you shouldn’t worry if I did anyway! You needed help!”
“How,” he whispers, stepping fully out into the sun, watching his foot as it sinks into the grass. Another tear follows the path of the first once both feet are fully standing on the green carpet. “How did you do this? Is this real?”
“Oh,” Momo drops her hands, still waving away the accusations he was never intending to make. “You’re upset about the plants?”
She looks around the yard, trying to see it through his eyes. After trying to bring the shrubs at the front of the house back to life repeatedly, she realized something was stopping them from staying alive. It was obvious, as soon as that realization hit. Why else would everything she had seen so far be barren, with not a single stubborn weed or plant poking out from the ground?
With that thought, Momo decided to experiment. She left the last six houses in their dirty, bloody states, and used all of her mana on cleaning the sick man in House Three, purifying the well water they both needed to drink and doing a deep cleaning and purification of her backyard. When she woke up on the second day, she found a patch of weeds poking up through the ground in the space closest to where she slept in the back room.
A window popped up, identifying the weed and advising her how to deal with it. Momo sat in the early morning sun, her ears open for any approaching danger, and taught herself everything she could learn from the system about her Green Finger ability. It took some trial and error, but over the week she was able to make a lot of progress.
Momo smiles as she steps up to a tomato plant almost as tall as she is and moves the leaves aside to check on the heavy red orbs hanging from them. “I have some skill at growing things, and I like tomatoes.”
“But how?” Allard drops to his knees and reaches out a shaking hand to touch the vine. “Nothing can grow. It's in the ground!”
“Why don’t you take a seat here? Drink some more water. I think these cherry tomatoes over here against the fence are ready to eat, you can eat a few while I get to watering things. And you can tell me all about what’s happened here.” His eyes flit to her, confused, but immediately stray back to the growing plants around him. “I bet most people know, but you can think of me like a traveler who knows nothing.”
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She picks four bright red ovals from the vines she indicated before and drops them into his outstretched hands.
Allard looks at them, then back at her with an expression that is too worshipful for her liking. “Where do you want me to start?” She shrugs and he clears his throat. “Alright, back to the beginning.”
“It seems like it has been years, but it hasn’t even been one. It started last winter, or at least that’s when word reached us here. People stop by on their way to Yanniston, but there isn’t much here to pull in travelers when they can keep going a few more hours to get to town. So news can be slow to arrive.”
He shakes his head and smiles sheepishly down at the tomatoes still being held like precious jewels. “It started with an idiot warlock, of course. Like so many others he botched his summoning and ended up making a pact with a demon dumber than he was. The reason changes based on who tells the story, but whatever his reason was he tried to punish someone and worded his spell badly and the demon got involved and he heard the bad spell wrong and made it all worse.”
Momo rolls her eyes, no stranger to incompetency in people who shouldn’t have as much power as they do.
“So the person he was trying to punish died, horrifically of course, when the warlock was just trying to make him always hungry forever. Or so the story went. The warlock was captured, and thanks to an overeager barbarian he died before making it to jail.”
He pauses and reverently places one of the tomatoes in his mouth. His eyes flutter closed and he holds the tomato there, not chewing.
“Okay,” Momo prompts as she starts to pour water at the base of each of her tomato plants in the yard, as well as the little plot of zucchini that she was testing out in the back corner. “So he died, and then what happened.”
He says something, but it is garbled due to the food on his tongue. Momo waves for him to stop and swallow before starting again. “Nothing happened at first. It was just a story about idiot warlocks, until the midwinter potato harvest.”
“The goblin neighborhoods were hit first. They love their potatoes. Within a day of the first potatoes coming from the ground half of the population was sick. The healers figured out it wasn’t a normal sickness, but before they could figure out that it was connected to the idiot warlock and his revenge the sick started dying. And then, they came back. As biters.”
“So the dead rose and started eating people, and that’s about when the healers figured out it was all a part of some curse? And since I have killed a few of them myself out here all by my lonesome I am assuming that they couldn’t reverse it,” Momo states matter of factly.
The bucket is empty, so she places it on the ground by the door and sits down with a sigh in the small bit of shade created by her reinforced fence. After figuring out that she could grow things from nothing she added on to her fence using the wood from three of the other backyards around her to extend her fence up above her head. Empty cans strung around the top of it clink together as she leans against it, her early warning system if anyone or anything tries to break in. She adjusts her bottom on the dirt and waits for Allard to finish savoring the last tomato in his hand.
He does so, swallowing the last bit and looking down at his hand forlornly. “Yes,” he nods, his eyes wavering as he tries not to stare at the plants and their ready harvest. “Since he was dead they couldn’t find the demon he made his pact with, so they couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Yanniston managed to kill the dead within their walls without losing everyone and then set fire to the remaining crops just in case. That’s when we found out what was happening. The mayor sent armed parties to the neighboring villages to request food, and ours was one of them. But our crops were dying, every field wilting and crumbling before our eyes. We saved what we could and were in the process of preserving but-”
Allard stops, looking away and rubbing the back of his tomato juice-stained hands across his hands. “There were biters outside the walls, and the parties were followed here. I don’t know how they didn’t notice the things following them, but they didn’t and we were caught unawares.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Momo says, and he nods, shooting her a wry smile.
“I don’t know if I was lucky or not, but some of us managed to run while the warriors were fighting the biters. We made it to Yanniston, one of the last groups to be allowed in before the town was shut down. Things are…they are bad there.”
“So you came back here? All by yourself?”
“I did,” he nods, squaring his shoulders and raising his chin for just a second before collapsing in on himself once more. “I was hoping to pick up some of the things that were able to be preserved before the attack, but I got distracted and then that biter got me. And then I guess you found me.”
Momo closes her eyes and listens. Allard trails off, and there is nothing but the sound of the light breeze pushing through the slats of the fence. She thinks about what he has shared. Most of it is obviously second-hand information, but it is more than she had before. I need to come up with some better defenses, she thinks with a mental sigh. If this man could come back home so could any of the others that used to live here. And just about anyone else who might be hoping for some abandoned supplies. Oh, yeah, and the biters too. Take a bit to get used to calling them that.
The now familiar notification bell dings and she opens her eyes to find a new window in front of her. She looks around it to see if Allard can see it, but he is busy staring at the cherry tomato plants with hunger in his eyes. She calls to him to get a few more, then focuses on her screen. “I just want to relax,” she mouths noiselessly.
Active Quests
Go to Yanniston and meet with Head Guard Farrel.
Reward - 35 XP
Save the People of Yanniston
Reward - 5,000 XP