Sophia glared at her Status, then half-defiantly dedicated the wisps for an Unaffiliated slot. There was no reason not to, she knew what she wanted next. She leaned over and poked Dav. “Remember to save Wisps for the Telepathic Link Ability.”
“Which one are you looking at?” Amy crouched next to Sophia. “If you’re taking a communication Ability, I should make sure I take it too. At least as long as you’re still thinking about working with me?”
Amy sounded a little hesitant on the last sentence, but Sophia didn’t think she really thought Sophia was going to turn her down.
“Individual Telepathic Link,” Dav answered before Sophia could. “I looked through everything and I didn’t see any better options.”
“You were level one when you looked, weren’t you?” Amy didn’t pause long enough for either of them to answer. “Modir warned me about that, she said that there are some Abilities that are locked behind higher levels. Taking the lesser versions can give something more specialized or make the higher ones cheaper so it’s not really a problem if you take the lesser ones first, but she said to always check after you Level in case there’s a better choice. I’ve heard of that one, but it’s supposed to be something that only people who are really committed to working together take.”
Amy paused, bit her lip, and blushed slightly. That was fascinating; it was the first time Sophia thought she’d ever seen Amy embarrassed. She’d seen her frustrated before but not embarrassed. “The higher levels of the Ability let you communicate more than words. A lot more.”
Sophia grinned at the insinuation. That made “really committed to working together” take on a whole new meaning, didn’t it?
“Heh,” Dav gave a polite laugh. “I see what you mean, but I can also see where being able to, say, show someone else what you’re looking at could be very useful. Is there an … advanced version of it that allows for more people, or do we need to get it more than once?”
“Take it more than once?” Amy sounded puzzled. “I … don’t think you can? You can only take an Ability once, you have to take an Ability that’s based on it to get a better version.”
Dav shook his head. “That seems limited, if all you want is the same thing again with someone else.”
“You remove the Ability from its slot then re-slot it to change your choices,” Amy explained. “I’m not sure if either of you can do it or if both of you have to, but that’s how you change your choices on any Ability with choices.”
In some ways that made sense; it meant you couldn’t quickly move a link from one person to another and bypass the limitation on it. At the same time, it seemed like a seriously limited workaround, especially if you couldn’t have more than one link at a time. She still wanted the link with Dav, but she might have to put it off for a group link of some sort. At home, she’d use a technological solution or maybe an item that imitated one of the vast variety of similar spells, but that wasn’t an option here. There wasn’t anything like that in the store, even at the insane prices they charged for magical items.
Wait, that was an idea. She was certain there wouldn’t be a telepathy spell on her list since it was Mind magic rather than Arcane, but she still wasn’t certain exactly what would be on Dav’s list. It seemed possible for something called “eldritch,” even if she wasn’t certain she wanted to allow an eldritch entity into her head.
Well, an eldritch entity other than Dav, at least. She’d let Dav into her head whenever he wanted. “Dav, did you check your spells for telepathy?”
Dav nodded. “I’ll check again, I want to look for new spell options anyway.” He turned to Amy before he continued, “I want to talk about the future before we make any decisions. It sounds like you want to make a group of just the three of us and leave Casterville?”
“Four,” Taika added.
Dav smiled and patted the now bright pink-and-orange chinchilla on the head. “Four. We need to figure out why you’re so different. Maybe there’s something we’re missing.”
Sophia tilted her head to the side. Was that a roundabout way of asking about the bonding the Wanderer mentioned or was it just Dav being Dav and trying to look at all of the options? Sophia couldn’t tell. She wasn’t even certain if the Wanderer had sent him a message; he hadn’t gotten one after they killed the Hawk of the Black Blood, but he also didn’t get a Feat notification. If they were tied to Feat notifications, he could well have gotten one here. She wasn’t about to ask in front of Amy; she still felt cautious about the Wanderer’s instructions not to mention him.
She definitely needed to find out more about Patrons at some point. Maybe there was an obvious reason the Wanderer was disliked that she didn’t know?
While she was musing, Dav and Amy started looking around the room. Sophia got up to join them. There had to be something here. If nothing else, there ought to be treasure of some sort; several monsters started in the large greenhouse room, even if they didn’t fight them all there.
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“Any idea what we’re looking for?” Sophia called out to Amy after half an hour of fruitless searching. She’d checked the area near the Juvenile Corpsevine Crown and found nothing with any magic; she was currently carefully searching the various plants all around the room. Maybe one of them was the reward?
“Nope,” Amy answered. She sounded a little depressed. “Could be anything. There’s a reason Challenges often stick around for years, they’re supposed to be really hard to solve.”
“This shouldn’t be that hard,” Dav countered.
Sophia looked over towards her boyfriend. He was at the corpse of the Juvenile Corpsevine crown. Was he digging? It kind of looked like it.
“The problem is that the corpsevines came back after they were eradicated, right?” Dav removed soil packed around the corpsevine’s central vines. “So that’s probably the reason for the Challenge. We need to figure out how it came back and stop it from happening again. This is a plant, not a mushroom, so there are only so many ways it can spread and those are generally visible, though they can be underground. Right now, I’m making sure there aren’t any roots we need to be worried about. Once we’ve dug this up, we should burn all of it to ash and charcoal. Then we can start looking for the other options, a seedling or a seed somewhere. The corpsevine controlled other plants, but it couldn’t spread through them, so it’s here somewhere. It might not be in this room, but it’s somewhere in the part of the building we can reach. That’s the point of that puzzle; we’re in the right place. We just need to find the problem and fix it.”
That was more words than Sophia thought she’d heard Dav say in quite a while. It was also a solution that put the pieces they knew together in a way that Sophia felt like she should have already seen. It was obvious, at least now that he walked her through it.
“And when were you going to ask for help digging?” Amy sounded positively pugnacious as she stalked over to him. “Where did you get that shovel anyway?”
Dav waved at one of the walls. “Found it. Didn’t see another shovel, but there are other gardening tools.”
Sophia hoped they wouldn’t have to completely sterilize the greenhouse to solve the problem. She could see that as a possibility; some plants could survive with ridiculously small amounts of themselves present. On the other hand, weed killer did work, as long as you used enough of the right stuff. Sophia didn’t really know what “enough” or “the right stuff” was for most plants, much less corpsevine, but weed killer of some sort seemed like something that might be in a greenhouse. She supposed they might do everything manually, but that seemed like a lot of unnecessary effort.
“I’m going to finish checking for magic in the plants, then see if there’s a storeroom we missed on the way in,” Sophia told Amy and Dav. It looked like they were going to be busy digging for a while.
Dav acknowledged Sophia’s words by raising his hand, then turning it palm-up. It wasn’t the thumbs up gesture Sophia was used to, but it was clearly still positive. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Dav use the motion before, but it certainly looked like one he was used to.
In the end, Sophia found two plants in pots that seemed to concentrate magic. One of them, a tiny bonsai tree, held it in the central trunk; Sophia wasn’t sure if that meant it would release it to flowers or seeds or if it had to be extracted from the trunk somehow. She was no alchemist.
The second one was a fernlike plant. When she found it, Taika had already noticed it and was nibbling on the fronds. “Taika? What are you doing?”
Taika and Fern [https://i.imgur.com/iUSC1Pr.png]
“Eating the yummy plant?” Taika sounded like he wasn’t sure if he should be defiant or abashed, so it came out somewhat confused. “It tingles and sparkles and tastes better than anything since breakfast.”
Sophia sighed. “That’s because everything we’ve eaten since breakfast was designed to keep. Or the energy drink.” Sophia made a face at that. It definitely worked and she definitely didn’t want to face the energy drink again. She had one left and suspected she was going to need it before they made it back to the registry, which was kind of a horrible thought. It didn’t taste that bad at first, but after two of them it seemed positively revolting.
Taika made a retching noise. Sophia giggled at the thought that the chinchilla felt the same way about the energy drink that Sophia did. Of course, Taika had an advantage; he could ride in Dav’s backpack. He wasn’t going to have to drink more of the horribly sweet, salty, and simply overdone concoction.
Taika took another bite of the fern. He crouched down a little and had his left eye very clearly directed at Sophia, as if he expected her to swat him or something and was ready to jump away.
Sophia laughed instead. He reminded her of a cat who knew he wasn’t supposed to be where he was, but wasn’t about to move unless you made him. Taika was smarter than a cat, but that didn’t mean much apparently. “Taika, you shouldn’t eat the fern. It’s magical and who knows if it’s dangerous or not?”
Taika ostentatiously chewed the fern and swallowed it. “It isn’t. Not for me. Dav can eat it, too. You and Amy shouldn’t eat much, but it’s a lot worse for Amy than it would be for you.”
Sophia’s eyebrows rose. That seemed like an oddly specific ability. “You can tell if plants are poisonous or not by eating them?”
“It’s not poisonous,” Taika asserted. “It’s the opposite, it makes things excited and move fast. The lightning’s probably not good either, but that doesn’t feel like it would hurt anyone. It tastes kind of like the energy drink did, only not awful.”
Sophia couldn’t help but wonder if that meant the fern or something a lot like it were used to make the energy drink. It would make sense if valuable plants were grown in a Conservatory, after all. She just wouldn’t have expected it to be a fern. “Well, please stop eating it. I’d like to see if we can sell it to the apothecary. You already know what you could learn by eating it.”
“Learn by eating?” Taika tilted his head up and almost seemed to frown at Sophia. It was an odd expression on a neon rodent. “I’m eating it because it tastes good, not to learn about it. I got that much from getting close to it.”
The chinchilla gave a last look at the fern, then turned away instead of taking another bite. Sophia decided that now would be a good time to tuck it in her spatial backpack; if she didn’t, she was sure Taika would end up checking it later to see if it still tasted good.