“Don’t go outside.” Taika’s voice startled Sophia. He sounded both sad and scared. “That’s him. The one who wants to eat everything.”
It took Sophia a moment to realize what Taika meant. This was one of the two beings Taika had warned them about, the two who had broken Cliff’s dungeon and thrown them across the Origin to the Broken Lands along with Taika. Unlike Taika, who was warped into an possibly illusionary chinchilla that was driven to comfort and help, they were warped into beings that wanted to consume what they found.
She felt a little sorry for them, but her anger was much stronger than her pity. They might not have known what their actions would mean, but they knew they were wrong. The fact that they didn’t know how to handle the Origin didn’t excuse them, not when they were the cause in the first place. She could pardon Taika since what little remained of the original person seemed to want to fix his mistakes, but she couldn’t forgive the other bandits.
No matter how she felt about them, however, Taika was right about one thing: if the “Hungering Spark” was after her specifically the way Taika said he was, she needed to stay inside and let others fight. She was far weaker than many of the people here, after all; all she’d accomplish by going outside was to endanger herself.
She hated it. The last thing she wanted was to have others fight her battles for her. It wouldn’t bother her if she could fight alongside them, but the idea of not being able to contribute rubbed her nerves raw. It was worse that she was probably the reason they had to fight. Well, okay, Cliff was really the reason, but that was basically the same thing.
Sophia needed to do something even if she couldn’t fight now. The best thing she could do was to spend her Wisps. She had enough to buy something, as long as it wasn’t too expensive; maybe she could find something that would replace telepathy. That would be something.
Sophia pulled up her Status to confirm how many she had and froze. When did she get over a thousand Wisps? How? That was more than five times as many as she’d had available the last time she checked. “Amy, Dav, how many Wisps do you have? Did you just get a lot?”
Amy’s choked gasp told Sophia she wasn’t just imagining things.
Dav, on the other hand, managed to limit his reaction to a simple “Huh. I bet that’s from resolving the corpsevine situation by turning over the bird pin. I wonder if it includes the bonus from closing the Leveled Challenge.”
“You’re probably right, but what I care about right now is that we have enough to do something,” Sophia stated firmly, “And I want to go for it. Amy, do you know where the records of spells and whatnot are?”
“Aimiva can get them for us,” Amy said, then shook her head. “Or whoever’s at the reception desk if Aimiva is still upstairs.”
The sound of thunder punctuated Amy’s words. She looked towards the entrance and shook her head. “I need sleep, but there’s no way I can sleep with that going on. Come on, follow me; we can bring the books back here.”
As it turned out, there were some books but most of it was on loose pages bound together with something that glowed softly to Sophia’s MageSight. If she had to guess, they were the magical equivalent of the standard three ring binder from Earth, allowing pages to be easily added and removed.
The collection was huge and hard to navigate, even with Aimiva’s help once she returned. It was clear that this was a large portion of the reason for a mentor; Rensyn ought to be able to direct them to what they needed from experience while they had to guess and hope they found the right collection of pages.
Most of the notebooks were relatively small, no more than a few dozen pages, but a few were huge. When Sophia investigated one of them, she found out that they were collections of popular setups and lists of Abilities that worked well together or that didn’t work the way they were intended, often with short descriptions of what they were supposed to do and where they worked or failed.
Unsurprisingly, while there were hundreds of different Species and warped variations listed, neither Dav nor Sophia found anything that matched what they had available. For Sophia, they did manage to locate a few records of individuals with warps related to Force, Corruption, or True Death, but none of them seemed draconic and none were related to the higher-level element. As Rensyn predicted, there were a number of incomplete records of spells of the sub-elements; fortunately, they were also able to find one record of an arcane spellcaster and several different descriptions of the sub-elements, so at least there was something.
Dav had even less luck. There was nothing in the entire library labeled eldritch, as far as they could tell, and while his Species listing also called out chaos, the only records they could find of chaos-related warps were far worse than Dav’s. The abilities those people received were also far less reliable than Dav’s, which was both reassuring and completely unhelpful. He was going to have to search through the Guide’s thoroughly unhelpful interface on his own.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
When it came to Spheres, both Sophia and Dav had more luck. Their Spheres weren’t identical to any that they could find, but they were both able to find Spheres that seemed close to the Abilities they’d already selected. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a starting point.
Amy had the best luck, unsurprisingly. She was able to find her Species, her current Sphere, and a number of options for her future choices. She was even able to find three different writeups of historical nightowls to give her an idea of what they’d selected and how well it did or didn’t work.
Aimiva shooed them away to have dinner before the kitchen shut down for the night. After eating, they made their way to their rooms and passed out, exhausted after a very long day.
The next morning, Sophia woke to the sound of raindrops on her window, the bright glare of lightning, and the sound of thunder. The storm wasn’t gone; if anything, it was stronger than when they went to sleep.
When Sophia and Dav arrived downstairs for breakfast, the dining room was completely full; people were sitting around talking instead of heading out to whatever their plans for the day were. Sophia called over one of the waitstaff to make their order and asked why everyone was inside.
The answer was a complete surprise. Everyone below the first upgrade was being told to stay inside until the storm was gone, while those over the first upgrade who could fly hunted for the source of the Domain. It seemed oddly festive for a group that was essentially trapped inside and under siege; no one seemed to feel like they were actually in any danger. Instead, it was a holiday.
Part of the reason for that became obvious when they were told they didn’t have to pay; until the doors were open again, the Registry was covering a crown’s worth of food and drink per person each day. The waiter called it “enough to eat and have a couple drinks with your meals or enough to get drunk but not stay drunk,” so Sophia guessed that most people probably chose one or the other. Sophia was just happy that the waiter counted Taika as a person in his own right, so his food was covered as well.
When their food came, the waiter shooed some people who were clearly just using the chairs away so that Dav and Sophia could sit and eat.
Amy bounced in a few minutes later and joined them. She seemed just as cheerful as the people around them. The fact that there was an open chair at Dav and Sophia’s table seemed to make her even happier. She waved at a waiter, then looked at the others. “What’s the matter, you two? Don’t like death days?”
“Did someone die?” Dav sounded puzzled. “I thought this was because of the storm.”
Amy shook her head. “No, it’s just what we call them back home. If you go outside the guarded area, you die, so you have to stay inside. It’s a death day. I think they call them Registry parties here, which is true enough I guess but I don’t like it as much. They’re not very common here, probably only a couple days a year. What do they call them where you’re from?”
Sophia shook her head. “We don’t have them.” When Amy looked puzzled, Sophia clarified. “It’s because of whatever is creating the domain, right? We have kaiju sometimes, but this has been going on for hours. For anything that big, we’d evacuate the area. Well, except maybe for hurricanes; they’re so big it’s hard to get people out. It isn’t a party, though.”
Sophia bit her lip. She didn’t think she’d given a good answer, but at the same time it wasn’t all that different, was it?
“Kaiju?”
“Huge monsters,” Dav answered. He was staring at Sophia as he spoke, rather than Amy. “Monsters bigger than this building. You really have those?”
Sophia shrugged. “In the New York City metro? Once or twice a year. There’s a nexus a little ways offshore that likes to produce monsters. Dad hasn’t been able to figure out why it spits them out instead of turning into a proper dungeon. Only the kaiju ever get to land, and they’re killed pretty soon after that. Other than that, it’s one or two a decade, I think.”
Dav shook his head. “And I thought Dust storms were bad.”
Sophia frowned at Dav when he didn’t continue. “What’s a Dust storm?”
Dav shrugged. “Sometimes Dust gets blown away from the area it controls. When there’s a Dust warning, everyone heads inside until it’s safe to go out. A storm like this one would be safe; Dust doesn’t do well when it’s too wet or around lightning. High winds with no rain, that’s Dust weather.”
Dust sounded pretty terrifying to Sophia; anything bad enough that you had to worry about it that you couldn’t see with your own eyes sounded bad. It was clear Dav was far more concerned by the idea of kaiju. “It’s all in what you’re used to, I guess.”
Dav smiled and shook his head. “You’re right about that. It’s been years since I had to worry about Dust storms. They were common in my hometown, but it’s near the border. There was one while I was in New Miami a couple years ago and it was like everyone panicked; most people didn’t really know what to do. It was funny afterwards, when we knew it was over.” Dav glanced around the room, then grinned. “This would be a pretty good place to wait out a Dust storm, actually. The exterior’s stone and glass. I’m not sure about the roof, but any building like this at home would have everything handled. It’d probably be a designated Dust shelter.”
Sophia shook her head. She could imagine it; the scene when people were warned about a Dust storm when they weren’t used to them was probably a lot like the first time someone who’d trained but never actually fought monsters went into a dungeon. People made the strangest mistakes.