Almost immediately, Bayce emptied an Inventory-bracelet of Spells, letting the paper-wrapped bundles simply fall on the grass. The telltale charcoal of Fire, the minty sprigs of Ice…I hadn’t memorized them all, but I gathered these were all elemental.
“Reload,” she said, still out of breath. “We need…to find her…no idea…”
I silently collected Fire, Ice, and Electricity Spells, plus a single Minor Heal. It took ejecting both the still-unused Low Gravity Spells and the eight gold pieces. The latter was a minor enough loss that I wasn’t going to bug Bayce to snatch it up. Not when she was still fighting to get words out.
Inventory: 10/10 Fire Spell x4
Debug Blade
Minor Heal x6
Book of Sister’s Shadow
Burlap Sack
High Gravity Spell x1
Ice Spell x4
Lightning Spell x2
Earth Spell x3
Attraction Spell x3
As I was collecting this, Bayce also thunked down a bundle of…flour that smelled mildly fruity. “You can eat this if…you need…”
I, uh, had no idea what that was, so I briefly made Inventory space, added the flour, and checked its identity.
Plimpberry Pancake Flour The raw, plimpberry-puckered material that goes into those darling flapjacks. Nourishing. Heals a small amount of SP.
Man, she was really looking out for me!
I tipped the bag over my wide-open mouth fully expecting it to be disgusting. What I didn’t expect was to nearly choke and for it to be that disgusting.
No sooner had I done that than a blob of water hurtled into my mouth, with such speed that I knew Bayce had launched a Water Spell. Eighty percent of it splashed right past. I braced myself, stayed standing and managed to chomp the vile mixture down, but only thanks to all the Levels I’d gotten. That would’ve knocked down veterans.
HP 100% (826/828) SP 47% (373/795)
“Small” was right. This was, what, 5, 7 percentage points? Plus, being blasted by water had taken out two HP. Not that I honestly cared about that—it wasn’t reflected in the 100 percent reading for a reason. I did care more about my stomach screaming and rebelling, but that could be dealt with later, I hoped.
Nonetheless, every point counted. Rather, every point might count, depending on whatever the heck Bayce was in the process of saying.
She gathered up the flour and all the things I’d dropped, then started power-walking westward into the trees. I followed.
“All Reed did was go outside, to see the weather,” she said, “and then when I left to look, she was gone. Like, into thin air. Then I got up to the door and I saw those same shimmers! That person who fought you is still messing with us. Reed could be quite literally anywhere.”
Ack, the wave of nausea was interacting with the wave of guilt. I had to push past it. “Meow?”
“Meow what?”
I wished the Spirit Board had a mobile attachment. “Meow meow?”
Bayce shook her head. “We have to stop for a bit.”
We did, and I stiffly traced two sides of a very skewed triangle.
She snapped her fingers. “Ah—Chora,” she said, with such correctness and conviction that I was impressed. We walked on as she added, “Yes, but no. She went to town. Might still be there. Might not be.” Bayce took a weary wheezing breath. “I really hope so.”
We could use the help, I was thinking.
Although mainly I was thinking about how we had no idea where to actually start.
Clearly Bayce was leading me toward the cabin. What good would that do? She just gave me emergency resources, what else was there for us?
Was she leading us towards the shimmers? What were they, a teleporter? Obviously not—they’d never worked that way when we touched them before.
No. Bayce had no idea where to go.
I stopped. Bayce went on for a few footsteps before she finally noticed, and turned with mouth hanging open.
The Burlap Sack hit the dirt, and I dug out the Spirit Board. “WHERE R WE GOING,” I said, dramatically leaving off the question mark.
“I don’t know,” she said flatly.
That was all I needed. “POND,” I said. It was a lead. It gave us some direction.
If time was of the essence, then Bayce could really benefit from my speed…
I Morphed, then almost backed into her and crouched.
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“W-wait, what’s your plan here? You’re—” I heard a muted sigh. “This is so weird. I do like where your head is at, though.”
Strangely enough, hefting a person several centimeters taller than you onto your back can make you quite clumsy! And I didn’t envy Bayce for having to hunch forward just to get her arms scarf-wrapped around my neck. But she had enough courage not to let that scarf devolve into a death strangle. Though I almost overbalanced when she first got her bearings, soon I secured her shins with my firm, hopefully reassuring grip.
Then I went running!
“So this is Bayce’s carriage throughout the Vencian Woo—oufpht!” Bayce said as a branch no doubt smacked her in the mouth.
“Myaow!” I said by way of “sorry.” I felt her turtling up as much as possible after that, her head sorta nestled in the crook of my neck.
The weight of Bayce did slow me down slightly, and I was probably coming out of this with an hourglass-shaped bruise on my back, but it was more than counterbalanced by my sky-high Stats, and I was more than happy to speed this all along—to Mirror Pond.
We reached the pond’s boundary. I set Bayce down right when I hit the water’s edge, darted up to the edge of the grass jetty where she had once gone fishing with me, and un-Morphed, conserving what I could. As she teetered aside, I kneeled by the water and simply closed my eyes.
I was hearing the wildlife of the pond. It was seemingly a day like any other.
But I bet there was more to it, more based on intuition and the fact that the Sapphire Queen had been here at all than on rational fact. It was better than nothing.
I turned to Bayce, Morphed into nekomata form, and dug out the Spirit Board. “RIP SWORD FROM ME IF I START SMILING!”
Bayce’s already-disoriented face went blank. “Um…yes. Yes, I’ll do that, I trust you.” She pushed past it, kneeled next to me, looked determined again.
Given how much laughing ecstasy I’d been in once I had the Debug Blade up and running in Cornutopia, I assumed it would be obvious to her once I’d reached that tipping point. All I wanted right now was a burst of Wisdom, something beyond what a few pumps of Meditate could give me.
The Debug Blade came out, and using both paws, I theoretically mashed that grabby A button.
WIS 505 (x5)
WIS -303 (x-3)
WIS 707 (x7)
There it is!
Despite the painful pulse in the back of my mind, having Wisdom pushed this high seemingly allowed me to find a place of singular, uttermost focus. And calm. Calm I would need to analyze this situation…
This was not ordinary water, and maybe it never was.
I opened my eyes to see. The twinkling sunlight across the water looked natural, and the water across your skin felt natural, and animals lived and swam in it every day believing it to be so. But it was really polluted.
Polluted not even with a substance, but with something…beyond substance. Like a supernatural substance?
Well, no. I wouldn’t have said there was anything remotely spiritual about this. Those very tiny particles bobbing with the waters, they kind of looked like ordinary grit, and were gone before you knew it. But get real close—or just real focused—and you’d realize that they refracted the light in a spectrum of silver. And stranger, no particle was round or rounded off. Like computer chips, they were square, they had corners.
They were square and flat—or maybe not flat, because when they tilted horizontally, they seemed to disappear. Beyond flat. Truly two-dimensional.
Whatever they were, I felt certain that the pond was thick with them. It must have been those, those…pixels that shimmered on a certain dark night, that shone so beautifully. I leaned closer to the water, realizing that if I stirred it enough, maybe the pixels would dance around for me like tortured fish. Hey, I liked fish! What was I doing at a pond not eating fish and tormenting ducks, for goodness’ sake? I could be—
I nearly plunged face-first into the water. The sword had been tugged away from me.
Bayce coughed. “Sorry, but you said.”
I transformed back, agreeing fully.
“Meow,” I said to thank her. All the stuff I’d thought about in the past two, maybe three seconds was about to fade from me like a dream. My mind scurried to tamp them all down, as if grabbing freed balloons.
I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. These discoveries had felt like a revelation at the time I’d had them, but…just comparing the Queen’s abilities to, like, computer pixels wasn’t helping me at all. In fact, I could hardly believe that was the best Past Me had!
Without clearly knowing what I meant, I jabbed a paw down toward the pond.
“Down there?” Bayce said. “Like what’s down there? There’s the Geographic Carp, of course, kind of like a guardian of fishes and the whole underwater place, and um, that should be it.”
Suddenly, a spark shone in her eyes. With a jingling rattle of her tons of bracelets, her frenzied hands searched around—and her own Inventory, or maybe one of several, revealed something like a classic bicycle horn.
Without another word, she honked it. Whatever feat of dexterity it took to make it not make that classic “honk” sound, though, she made it, and a slow but beltingly loud wheeze filled the area.
The nearest ducks scattered. I even saw the closest fish holding still, then flitting into the depths.
But nothing else happened. Several seconds passed.
Bayce sighed heavily. The horn disappeared. “Okay, I guess they’re not in there. That’s definitely not a big deal.”
Okay, then my mind was made up. Again I jabbed my paw toward the water—only I pointed to the both of us too.
She pinched her brow. “Lord! Lord of lords.” There was an almost playful lilt in her words, like she didn’t wanna feel all the awfulness of this whole mess and this was how to stave it off. “Okay, we’ll go in if you’re sure. But I’m warning you! Nobody’s perfected gills and I don’t have a single air-bubble-making Spell! We’re just gonna have to turn on High Gravity and sink like rocks.”
Fine with me. And as long as Bayce had the Low Gravity Spells on her too, we had our emergency out.
After my stiff nod, she handed back the Blade, and I gathered everything into my sack and Inventory.
I gestured toward me, then her—specifically her arms.
“Oh!” she said. “Hold you. Yeah, that’d be efficient. Let me cast the High Grav so we can get as heavy as possible with a single cast.”
…Honestly, I’d suggested she hold me because she might find it kinda comforting, but yeah, that worked too!
Bayce gathered me in her arms, took perhaps the deepest breath of her life…then released it and took another, and tried again. And then she took the deepest breath for real…right before letting it go again. Then she tried again—
Nope! No, this was getting ridiculous. But really, the ridiculous one was me. Who was I to put Bayce in this kind of danger? Hadn’t I just been determined to keep my friends safe and their lives as untroubled as possible, not surprise-drown them?!
I began squirming out of her arms, but Bayce squeezed me tighter.
“Taipha,” she said with the tone of a warning. “I’ve put my foot down. I’m going with you, and I’m going because I want to.”
Before I could protest, she took her realest-real deepest breath, cast the Spell, and swan-dived in. Together we knifed through the water.