Aclysia’s glowing hand glided through the air shortly above the unconscious man. Her brows quivered; the eyes closed. The healing magic was directed ever so carefully, trickling through clogged circuits and atrophied and malnourished tissues, and attempting to revitalize a heartbeat that had long since lost its lustre.

Apexus kept his thumbs on two pressure points, preventing the man from awakening. “What is his state?” the humanoid chimera asked.

“Dire,” Aclysia responded. “My Scanning abilities are limited, but even I can identify numerous issues.”

“So? Can’t you just… fix them?” Reysha made a half-hearted mystical gesture. She asked more out of curiosity than concern for the slave they had ‘stolen’. For all the odd stares they had gotten, no one had stopped them in the process. Now they were thirty minutes out from the walls, on the main island, treating the old man.

“You should know better than that,” Aclysia chided the redhead. “How often have I patched you back together after one of your numerous scuffles?”

“Somewhere between 1 and a 1000 times,” Reysha answered. “Care to tell me the answer, so I can forget it again?”

Aclysia sighed and pulled her hand back. The glow ebbed away, her eyes opened, and she turned to the tiger girl. “A simplified explanation would be that healing magic, putting aside certain Arts and Spells of the uppermost echelon, cannot enhance vitality. Imagine yourself as a container filled with liquid vitality.”

“I don’t need to do that, I am that – at least after the big guy has had his fun,” Reysha threw in.

“What are you… Reysha!” Aclysia turned red with second-hand embarrassment when she had worked out what the tiger girl had said.

“What? It’s not a big deal, we literally all enjoy it,” Reysha grinned ear to ear.

“That is no reason to-“

“Cumdump.”

“Reysha!” Aclysia turned redder by the moment, until she took a deep breath to steady herself. “To finish the explanation you requested,” she forced herself to continue, “healing magic’s primary uses are to refill the container or mend cracks in it. To enhance the container or change a misshapen aspect of it, I lack the capability.” Her eyes returned to the man. “His life force is stored in a barrel with an open faucet. Slowly, steadily, it seeps from him. My magic cannot do much here.”

“How much longer does he have?” Apexus asked.

Aclysia hesitated. “My Scanning abilities are limited,” she reiterated. “He could live another ten years… or ten minutes. I could not tell you with any degree of certainty.”

“I see.” With those two words, the humanoid chimera released the meridians. For a few seconds, there was nothing, then the man slowly cracked open his eyes. Remaining inebriation kept the panic from settling in, as he sat up.

“Wheresh…” he mumbled, words pressed through teeth diminished by years of eating gruel. He looked around, slowly blinking, then yawned and lay back down with the certainty only a child or a drunk could have.

“Riveting,” Reysha stated drily.

“Uhm, Apexus, I still don’t get… what the plan here is?” Korith asked.

“There is no plan,” the humanoid chimera stated, while picking the man up again. “I couldn’t leave him to be robbed or killed. That is all there is to this.”

“Perhaps we should make a plan, darling?” Aclysia suggested.

Apexus shook his head. “Plans for the broad strokes. For this, I will see where conscience guides me. I believe that will be wisest.” Facing east, he began walking. “I may be wrong. Considering how little I know, it will almost certainly be wrong. Still, it is my decision to make.”

________________________________________________________________________

It took an entire day of travel before the man, for the first time, came about in a cognizant manner. For hours, he had drifted in and out, first of drunkenness, then hungover sleep. Laying by the campfire the party had made, unwilling to let the old man into the Change Mansion, he shot up and looked around.

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The look in his eyes confused Apexus. It had very little of an alert human. A rodent, that was what the humanoid chimera was reminded of. Standing on its hindlegs, snout in the air and sniffing for any potential threat – a mouse. A rat, if he was being generous. “W-where am I?” the old man stammered, pulling his thin arms and legs into a bundle.

Apexus tilted his head a little further, sitting across from where the old slave was cowering. “You’re not a turtle.”

“N-no, sir, I’m not a turtle?” the man responded, even more confused than the Monk.

“It wasn’t a question,” Reysha threw in. Slowly, carefully, at first, then suddenly, the gaze of the old man wandered from Apexus to the redhead. Fear mixed with clear desire. The salivating was so obvious that Aclysia, who had been getting ready to offer the man food, just placed the bowl in the grass and took two steps back. The desperate desire wafted off the man as a borderline physical stench, mixing with the already unflattering aroma of the unwashed.

Silence settled around the campfire. The trio was waiting for the man to ask something. The man just existed. The sheepish emptiness behind his eyes was complete. The fear had died down as soon as the immediate danger had passed. For minutes on end, they just sat there.

The man’s stomach growled.

“Eat,” Apexus said and pointed at the bowl.

The man looked at it. Several blinks passed, before he reached out and grabbed the bowl. Against expectations, he did not wolf it down. He ate slowly, his hand moving at a lazy pace. Apexus wanted to start a conversation, but it seemed the unowned slave before them was not capable of handling eating and speaking in tandem.

And so, they just waited until the last bit of stew had been devoured.

“Do you not wonder where you are?” Apexus asked, when the empty bowl was back in the grass.

The man looked around, eyes lingering mostly on the three women around Apexus. “I’m wherever you took me, sir.”

“I’m not your sir,” Apexus responded. “I did not buy you. I do not own you.”

“Oh,” the old man let out that single sound, then was back to staring at Korith’s tits.

“How did you end up in that slum?” Apexus asked, a little bit of annoyance sneaking into his voice.

“Was put there,” the man responded.

“Why?”

“Master didn’t want me.”

“Why?”

“Am too slow.”

Apexus did not have to drill further than that. The man was obviously a moron. It could be said in any number of ways more flattering, but the fact of the matter was that this slave was one too mentally incapable to fulfil even the most rudimentary task on his own.

There were people, however painful that realization was, who were too dull to participate in society in any meaningful way. As family members of well-situated families, they subsisted on charity. In any wealthy, caring society, these people were given some basic jobs where they at least couldn’t do any damage. While the Walled Ports may be wealthy, they were not caring. That the old man had lived to grow this old was a miracle.

“How did you survive?” Apexus asked.

“Took smuggling jobs. Killed a few people.”

The ease of the confession only made all of this even more confusing. ‘Is murder that accepted or is he just too dull to keep his mouth shut?’ Apexus wondered.

While he was thinking, something snapped inside the man. The little voice of reason inside his head, weak from the start and worn down by time, held no influence over him. He stood up and stumbled towards the breasts he had spent the last five minutes staring at. Apexus’ massive hand held him in place.

A reasonable man would have stopped there. For a man who busied himself with small crime and support in big crime, reason had long since left the faculties. He attempted to push forwards and was consequently pushed back. A small shove, that was all it took. The old man stumbled, fell, slammed into the ground, and did not get up.

It only took Apexus a second to register what he had done. Reaching out, he felt for a pulse, and dropped the limp hand when there was none. “Dead,” he announced to the other three.

“Man, talk about fragile,” Reysha said casually.

Aclysia and Korith said nothing, torn between a life lost and the relief of not having a creep in front of them anymore. Apexus, likewise, did not know what to do.

He had not made plans for this man. Still, his mind had wandered to fantasies of tearing the shackle off his neck and giving him a new chance at life. The desire to help at least one person back on their feet was powerful, but even if the man had not turned into a corpse, how would Apexus have gone about it? That entire slum was filled with people who were of no real use to anyone or criminal elements, from what Apexus had seen and now heard.

The first attempt to help had ended with a disappointed sigh and a nameless body, still wearing its shackles.

“Are you fine, darling?” Aclysia asked.

A difficult question. Apexus rose from his seat in the grass and tossed the body into the fire. Cremation was as good a funeral as they could afford to give him. “I don’t know,” he responded truthfully. “This is the second time I killed a person,” he looked at his hand. “I do not regret this one. It wasn’t on purpose. He wasn’t innocent. No one innocent tries to rob people at knifepoint.” He stared at the corpse, as the flesh and fat slowly began to burn. “It feels inconsequential. That might be the most terrible part of it. Who will even notice?”

No one in the party had a good answer for it. They tossed a few more chunks of wood into the fire, then walked away, the smell of burning flesh too much for them. They spent ten more minutes moving before turning in for the night.

“What after the dungeon, darling?” Aclysia asked, the next morning.

“The plan remains, we travel to Hebero. We clear the Aqua Maze. Then, it gets complicated,” Apexus told her.