A persistent banging on his front door was enough to draw Zack out of his focus. He was busy working on reinstalling the meadow after clearing it away from its original position, so the knocking came as something as a shock to him. Curiosity beating out his desire to work, Zack conjured a wisp near his entrance to check who it was.
To his surprise, he found Greg outside, a meaty fist hammering against his glass door. Mentally frowning, Zack bid the doors unseal, and ushered the orc in.
“Hey, man, what’s up?” Zack asked, as Greg shoved his way in. “Oh, you brought me presents?”
Greg had his duffel bag slung over his shoulder again, and grunted in affirmation at the question. He tossed the sack onto the floor and unzipped it. To Zack’s surprise, rather than pull out the requested items, he pulled out a pair of fingerless boxing gloves. As he started tugging them on, Zack took the opportunity to peer into the bag. It was stuffed full of strange items, many of which he was excited to study. He couldn’t help but wonder at the gloves though.
“Hey, uh, what’s up with those?” Zack asked, motioning toward Greg’s hands with his wisp.
“I need to beat something up,” Greg grunted. “Is the meadow ready?”
“Um, no. And it won’t be ready for a while, either. I just finished carving out a place to rebuild it. I haven’t even started reconstituting anything yet.”
Greg snorted his frustration and cracked his knuckles. “What about that other room? The spider warren?”
Zack mentally checked the room. “It’s still populated, but I’m not sure you want to go in there. It’s a little bit above your level…”
“You can control the monsters, can’t you?” Greg asked.
“More or less, yeah.”
“Good. Tell them to stay back. I want to fight them one at a time.” Greg made a fist and punched his palm before giving his neck a twist to crack it.
“Do you, uh, want weapons?”
“No. Just keep a Medibold standing by for me.”
Zack bobbed in place. There was already a Medibold waiting in the spider warren. At a mental nudge, Jean-Claude appeared from down the hall to lead Greg to his requested room. The spider warren was already up and running, with spawners to take care of the monsters. Zack didn’t need to pay it any mind. He commanded the monsters within to only attack Greg if he attacked them first—and to only fight him one at a time.
As the orc disappeared through the door, Zack allowed himself a moment to go through the duffle bag. There were the plushies he requested, along with numerous new material samples. There was even raw meat—though whether that was for him or for Greg after his work out, Zack didn’t know.
Technically, he didn’t need to absorb anything to learn their patterns—that was only necessary to fully acquire their materials for use in other patterns. He could easily absorb and recreate the items within. Subtly, he decided to experiment.
Starting with the stuffed animal on top, Zack scanned it and acquired its pattern. He mentally frowned as a detailed information window appeared to him.
[Deady Bear]
[Level 7 Construct, Undead]
[A stuffed animal brought to life through necromancy. It will obey the whims of its necromancer or its commanding undead.]
“Well that’s terrifying,” Zack laughed. “What the hell is Greg doing with an undead teddy bear?”
Curiously, Zack scanned the other two plushies, and was further shocked by what he discovered. Unsurprisingly, both were undead constructs, just like the bear.
[Stuffed Aevis]
[Level 7 Construct, Undead]
[Tyrannosaurus Hex]
[Level 9 Construct, Undead, Commander]
“Okay, that’s weird, even by my standards,” Zack laughed. He wasn’t sure why scanning the stuffed animals gave him monster patterns, but he had an idea of who he could ask. Besides, it wasn’t like Greg was going anywhere any time soon.
Despawning the wisp, Zack shot his awareness into the spider warren, curious to see what his friend was doing. To his surprise, he found Greg wailing on a spider’s abdomen like it was a punching bag. The monster’s carcass hung from the ceiling by multiple Holmgang tethers, and it swung back and forth heavily as the orc pounded away against it.
“Um, Greg?” Zack called, spawning a fresh wisp for his friend to look at.
The wisp emitted a soft green light, illuminating the otherwise dark and foreboding warren. Greg didn’t even bother looking up, he just swung a haymaker for the spider’s midsection. The oversized arachnid didn’t even twitch as the gloved fist cracked right through its hairy chitin. The poor creature was already dead, and Greg was treating it like a punching bag.
“Hey, um, if you’re not too busy, I wanted to ask about those stuffed animals in your duffel bag?”
Greg paused mid-punch long enough to look at the wisp over his shoulder. “They’re for you. There are other fabrics in there, too. Old t-shirts and shit. You can eat them.”
“Oh, okay, cool,” Zack said quickly. It took very little effort to consume the items in question without adjusting his awareness. Something about the way Greg was behaving felt off to Zack, and it felt wrong to just leave his friend alone in a room full of potentially dangerous monsters. “Are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” Greg grunted, accenting the last two words with a rapid series of jabs. One punch hit off-centre, snapping a leg off the spider
“You just seem a little… On edge?”
“What would you know about edge?”
“You don’t have to answer all my questions with more questions, dude,” Zack grumbled. “I just want to help.”
The muscles in Greg’s shoulders tightened, and he unleashed a series of heavy punches against his target. These proved more than the spider could bear, and at last it fell apart under the force of the blows. As the abdomen snapped off and rolled away, Zack absorbed it more out of habit than malice. The look Greg gave the wisp implied he didn't see it that way.
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“If I wanted to talk, I wouldn’t have come here.” Greg adjusted the fit of his gloves, making sure the knuckle pads were properly positioned on his meaty fists. “I’m here to beat the shit out of monsters.”
“If you want to train, you should have brought Alex and Chandra, they could help you.”
“Did I say train? No, I didn’t. I said beat the shit out of monsters,” Greg repeated, enunciating every word. “If that’s a problem, just fuckin say it. Stop dancing around me like a fairy and just tell me what you want.”
“Dude, I’m just trying to help,” Zack said, defensively.
“I don’t want your help. I want to beat stuff up!”
“Fine!”
Zack called in another spider and left Greg alone to have his way with it. He despawned his wisp and returned his awareness to his lobby. Without thinking about it, he absorbed Greg’s duffel bag and everything inside it.
As his mind flooded with patterns and materials, Zack realized what he had done. He swore mentally and quickly started reconstituting everything, before he noticed something strange in the bag he missed before.
The pattern didn’t make it clear what it was, but respawning it did. It was a photograph, printed out on a sheet of glossy paper. The picture depicted a young boy in his early twenties holding up a trophy. He was dressed in a bright blue shorts and a white t-shirt, with Northville College written across the chest. There was a girl in the photo kissing him on the cheek, and bright blue boxing gloves slung over his neck.
Curiosity getting the better of him, Zack stared at the picture for a long moment. The boy seemed familiar, but he couldn’t quite figure out why. That was when he realized something.
The strong chin, the shape of the nose. The boy looked like Greg. A younger, skinnier, less green Greg, but it couldn’t be anyone else. The girl certainly wasn’t someone Zack knew, although he had to assume she was somebody important to the orc. Or at least, important to him before he became an orc.
The Aetheric Boom was only five years earlier. That meant Greg had been an orc for, at most, five years. Zack cringed as he realized Greg might have been missing the life he lost during the Boom.
Worry for his friend mounting again, Zack shifted his awareness back into the warren. Greg had strung up another spider, and was busy tenderizing it like a side of beef. He looked up as he noticed Zack’s wisp, but didn’t say anything to him.
Zack hovered patiently for a few minutes, just watching the orc exercise. At some point during the workout, Greg had removed his shirt. The black tee lay discarded on the floor. Zack took the liberty to scan the pattern and absorb the sweat staining the material. He was surprised that doing so granted him a recipe for sweat, as well as both salt and water as usable materials. He ignored that for now, and simply waited for Greg to finish.
When the spider finally shattered, Greg turned to Zack and pointed at him threateningly. “You just gonna hover there and spy on me?”
“I’m not spying on you,” Zack said defensively. “If I wanted to spy on you, it’s not like you could stop me. I make these wisps for your benefit, I don’t even need them to be somewhere inside my dungeon.”
Greg’s face paled a shade, and he lowered his finger. “Oh.”
“Look, I think you and I, we got off on the wrong foot tonight. Something is clearly bugging you, and you came here to relieve some stress. I’m clearly not helping by asking questions. I’m sorry.”
Greg blinked in surprise at the apology, and looked away sheepishly. “S’fine. I was acting like a bit of an ass. I deserved it.” With a grunt, he bent down to scoop his shirt off the ground and tug it back on. He seemed mildly shocked to discover it was clean and dry, but he said nothing about it.
“I, uh, saw the photo in your bag,” Zack started.
A flash of anger rolled through Greg’s face, but it faded as quickly as it appeared. “Yeah?”
“It’s you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s the girl?”
Greg breathed deep through his nostrils, his wide nose flaring with the breath. “Jamie, my ex.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Greg mumbled. “It’s my own fault.”
Zack hovered patiently, waiting to see if Greg would let him on the secret or not. To his surprise, the orc let out a long sigh before speaking again.
“I told you before that being angry can turn someone into an orc, right? That’s not the whole truth. It’s not just anger, it’s emotions that inspire it too. Jealousy, hatred, fear. The kind of stuff that makes a man do stupid things…”
“Did you do a stupid thing?”
Greg nodded. “Shortly after the Boom, I learned that Jamie was cheating on me with another member of my college boxing team. I… I was going to ask her to marry me, Zack. Had a ring and everything. The Boom brought a lot of things into perspective, the big one being how little time we all really had. The world was changing fast, and we had to adapt to it or die. I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, but Jamie…”
Greg ground his teeth as he unfastened his boxing gloves and tugged them off. Gripping them tight, he leaned against the sticky, web-coated wall and slid down until he was sitting against it. Gingerly, Zack absorbed the webs off the orc, silently letting him continue his story.
“I almost killed him when I found out, Zack,” Greg admitted. “I beat the bastard within an inch of his life. I didn’t think I was an angry person back then, but to see the life I wanted, the life I dreamed about suddenly torn away from me by someone I thought I could trust? It inspired the kind of rage that you just don’t see in a normal man.” He turned his palms over and stared down at them. They were thick, but a lighter shade of green than the rest of him. “It’s the kind of rage that changes you, Zack. The kind that takes a man and makes him a monster.”
“You’re not a monster, Greg,” Zack said, softly.
“Aren’t I? Look at me. Really look at me.”
“I see a person. A big green person, but a person.”
“Then you’re one of the few. When it became common knowledge that rage was what triggered the change from human to orc, people started looking down on us. They see us as nothing more than monsters, ticking time bombs waiting to go off. It doesn’t matter if ogres are bigger and stronger. It doesn’t matter that empowered humans can literally bring toys to life by accident. Orcs are the ones people are scared of.”
“I’m… Greg, I’m sorry. I really had no idea about any of this.”
Greg snorted and shook his head. “How could you? It’s not like you’ve been around the last five years. You just woke up. You didn’t know me back then, and you barely know me now. This is the reality I’ve been living with ever since the Boom. I’ve long since made my peace with it.”
“You shouldn’t have to make peace with it. Treating it that way is wrong. I can’t believe magic came back into the world and racism of all things is still around,” Zack said, twitching his wisp from side to side in an attempt to mimic shaking his head. “That’s so shitty.”
Greg snorted. “Yeah, well, the more things change the more they ultimately stay the same. As long as people are around, they’re going to find a way to hate each other.”
“That’s a really dismal outlook to have.”
Greg shrugged and shifted his weight, rising off the wall. He stretched his back, earning a few sharp pops down his spine. “You kind of get that way when you see the fear lurking behind every friendly smile.”
Zack silently watched as Greg tugged his gloves back on and turned to scan the warren for any other spiders. He gave one a mental prod, and the dog-sized arachnid scurried over to the orc. It stood patiently, waiting for its beating, but the attack never came.
“Thanks for talking to me,” Greg said, looking over his shoulder at Zack. “I know you and I aren’t really close friends or anything. I’m barely close with Alex, and I’ve known him for years thanks to our group therapy sessions. It, uh, feels good to get all that off my chest.”
“No worries.”
Greg kicked the spider, lifting it halfway off the ground before grabbing it by the upper legs. With magical tethers, he hoisted it up and connected it to the ceiling, leaving it swinging in place. He held his fists up in a boxing guard, but didn’t take a swing at it. He hopped in place, as though imagining an invisible opponent. Perhaps he saw the person who betrayed him. Maybe he saw someone else. Zack didn’t know, and didn’t consider it his business to find out.
Then, to his surprise, Greg lowered his fists. “I think I’m good now,” he said. With a wave of his fingers, the tethers vanished, dropping the spider back to the ground. “I’ve had my fill of exercise for the night.”
“Just like that?”
“What do you mean just like that? I’ve been stewing for hours.”
“Oh, that’s fair. I guess I lost track of time. I’ve been working non-stop since you guys left earlier.” Zack laughed, though the sound felt forced as it came through his wisp. That was one of the noises he still hadn’t quite figured out how to make yet. Vibrating mana threads was proving a more challenging prospect when it came to communication, and he hoped to find a better solution for that sooner or later.
“I noticed that I didn’t need to wander through the meadow to get here, plus your hub looks a little more barren than before.”
“Yeah, I had to remove some stuff to clear up mana. I think I’ll need to remove the tundra all together for now while I work on getting the meadow in place. Those toys you brought me did give me some great ideas for the manor, though.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah! Haunted dolls!”
Greg’s eyebrows shot up. “Haunted dolls?”
“I mean, what else am I going to use undead plushies for?” Zack asked.
The orc’s eyes widened in horror, and he wheeled in place to stare at the wisp. “What do you mean undead plushies!?”