We’d searched the gnomish village and the lakeshore with mixed results. Brick had found elf and bear footprints by the headwaters, indicating Bruiser and Bastion had been here recently – we would recognize Bastion’s pointed boot prints anywhere - but the gnomish village had been vacated long ago, with everything covered in a thick layer of dust and no boats to be seen.

“We need to put our heads together,” I muttered, staring out at the slow-moving water. It was wide here but sped up downriver past the waterfall. It was a waterfall we did not want to cross, either.

“What if we took some doors off the houses? We could make rafts,” Nightfall suggested. “Although they might struggle to take Brick’s weight.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Brick said, scratching his jaw and staring out across the river with tired eyes. “If Bruiser could cross, maybe I can too.”

“I don’t know. Brick, Bruiser’s bear form is huge, and is kind of designed for river crossings.”

“Well, we need to do something,” Brick grumbled.

“Could you use your fire spell to evaporate the lake?” I asked Nightfall.

He gave me an amused half-smile in response. “I’m flattered by your faith in my abilities, but there is no way I could gain enough mana to create a fireball that large.”

“I just wish there was a bridge,” I muttered, then thought for a second. “What if we filled the river up? We could walk across.”

“With what?” Nightfall asked. “I can’t imagine a way that we could manage it in time unless you want to cause a landslide and cross on the north edge of the lake. But that might add another three days to our journey, which we don’t really have to spare.”

“What about fish?”

I knew exactly three spells. I could send anything to sleep. I could talk to animals – something which was so new I hadn’t had the opportunity to try it yet but had hoped would be handy in chatting to Bruiser in bear-form and Bonaparte. And I could produce a fish on demand. When I had chosen that spell, I’d been thinking partially of my stomach and that I would have an unlimited food source to compliment my cinnamon-roll heavy diet, and also of what I’d learned in my animal husbandry course at university - that almost every carnivorous animal could be bribed and/or tamed by giving them fish.

“You’d have to summon more fish than you have mana for to fill the lake,” Nightfall said dubiously.

“But cinnamon rolls replenish mana, and I’ve got several hundred of them in my bag. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?” In this world, food didn’t give you cavities or make you gain weight, but it did replenish your health and mana and occasionally give you a buff to your stats. Cinnamon rolls weren’t exactly powerful, but they did restore mana and they tasted good, so I always wanted a decent supply of them on hand.

“We’ve got no better ideas, so you’d best get started,” Brick said with a grunt.

I would have asked if Jackal had any input, being half mermaid, but from the ungainly splashing he was currently doing in the lake, it appeared he’d inherited his swimming capabilities off his minotaur father’s side.

“Okay, let’s give this a try.” I walked to the edge of the lake and rubbed my hands together before holding them out over the water. “Summon: Fish!”

A small silver fish appeared in my hands, wriggling and wet.

“Bleh!” I threw it into the lake, where it slipped under the surface and swam away. “Gross.”

“Your spell is only at Level One. Keep using it and you should be able to increase the size of the fish when you level up,” Nightfall advised me. “Try picturing something larger in your mind, like a salmon. When you’ve gotten them to a decent size, we can kill them before we drop them in.”

“This is going to take forever,” Brick fretted. “I’m going to check the village again, see if there’s anything else we could use to make a raft.”

I watched him walk away, but then turned back to the task at hand, Nightfall giving me encouraging tips as I practiced my spell.

“Summon: Fish! Yuk!”

“Hold your hands upside down, then they should just drop into the water.”

I turned my hands over. “Summon: Fish! Hey, you’re right! Thanks. Summon: Fish!”

By about the hundredth fish I was getting exhausted, but my fish were getting larger. I’d managed a salmon, and then a bream. I’d just produced my first trevally when Nightfall urged me to stop and have a break.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He passed me a cinnamon roll from my bag, and Jackal appeared by my side with a roast salmon on a stick looking extraordinarily proud of himself.

“Thanks Jackal,” I took it off him and took a bite before handing it back, just to be polite. I was getting rather sick of the smell of fish by now.

Brick had torn several doors off houses but was still testing their buoyancy.

I dusted the crumbs off my hands and got back to work, summoning fish after fish until they reached several feet in length.

The sun was climbing high in the sky when my latest fish slapped water into my face with its tail. I felt about ready to shriek with impatience. I must be almost a thousand fish in, and there was still no way I’d be able to fill up a bridge’s worth of mass. My best hope was going to be getting enough experience together to summon a goddamned whale and ride on its back.

I glared out at the other side of the lake, which was just close enough to taunt us but far enough away to be out of reach.

My eyebrow twitched, and I looked over at Brick, hoping he was having more luck. He’d managed to tie a couple doors together and get them stable enough to comfortably hold his weight, but even if we could all fit on it, there was no way we could steer it. We’d likely end up getting swept down towards the waterfall.

I blinked, looking at the raft again. He still had spare ropes. We just needed a way to steer it.

“Don’t give up, Emma. You’re improving at a fantastic rate.”

“I’m not giving up. I just… I had an idea.”

I’d been able to summon a number of different fish species and yet I was unsure what exactly constituted a fish. I’d listened to a podcast once that had been titled something like ‘There’s no such thing as a fish’ due to the sketchy definition of the word and the fact most underwater creatures identified as fish were not really genetically that close. There’s no knowing what this world would accept under the loose definition of the word.

I closed my eyes and focused on the image I wanted, holding my hands out above the water.

“Summon: Fish!”

I felt the creature drop, splashing me with water for the nth time and opened my eyes.

“Wait!” I called out before it could swim away.

The mermaid sat up and looked at me curiously. “Hello?”

She was gorgeous with a bright orange tail like a goldfish and brown, lustrous hair which trailed down her shoulders and covered her bare breasts. She smiled up at me coquettishly.

“Hi. Uh, would you be able to help us? We need to get our raft to the other side of the lake.”

“I suppose so,” the mermaid said, giving me a curious look. “Did you make me?”

“Uh, yes. Yes, I did.”

“Do I have a name?”

“Uh… Ariel,” I said, the Disney princess coming to mind first.

“Alright then,” the mermaid said, looking around. “Are there any of my kind here? I might need help to pull a raft that big.”

“I’ll make more,” I grinned in relief. “Nightfall, can you go over to Brick and ask him to bring the raft over here?”

He didn’t respond, so I turned to him to check he’d been listening, but he was staring at me with his mouth open.

“Uh, Nightfall?”

“You just… summoned a mermaid?” He stared at me in disbelief. “You made sentient life?”

“I guess so,” I shrugged, then looked back at the mermaid hesitantly. “This doesn’t make me like… your mother or something, does it?”

“It makes you a goddess, Emma,” Nightfall said, stunned. “To create life… real life without the use of necromancy… It’s beyond belief…”

“Right, well,” I gave an embarrassed laugh. “You best get over it because I’m going to do it a few more times and then we’ll need to catch up with the others, alright?”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted the pressure associated with being seen as a goddess in this world, but this was the closest we had come to a solution and we had to get to Bruiser and Bastion one way or another.

I raised my hands over the water and summoned several more mermaids, waiting just long enough for the previous one to swim out of the way before producing the next. They asked me for names, but as in the moment all I could think of was ‘Splashy’ or ‘Goldfish’, I tasked Ariel with the job and named her leader of this new tribe.

I may have just sprouted a new group of beings out of my hands, but I was in the business of trying to get across the lake, not come up with their whole lore. I was no Tolkien.

In my previous life, I’d been an accountant with an annoying boyfriend who couldn’t manage to clean up after himself. In this life, I was a succubus who collected boyfriends and leveled up by flirting with people. This world had plenty of plot holes, so what was the harm in one more?

If I could figure out how to navigate this world with vague success, I was sure the mermaids could figure it out as well.

Nightfall was still immobile with shock next to me, so I picked up my bag and tugged him along as we led the mermaids over to Brick and Jackal.

“I didn’t know mermaids lived in this lake!” Brick said, meeting me with a relieved grin. “Good find! We’ll be much obliged for your help.”

“They don’t live here. Or they didn’t,” Nightfall said weakly. “Emma made them.”

Brick raised his eyebrows at me, but then just laughed. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

We clamoured atop the raft and handed a couple of leading ropes out to the mermaids. Ariel took command, and the others got in line behind her. They pulled the raft along and we made slow but steady progress across the lake, touching ground within the hour.

I thanked the mermaids for their service, and they thanked me for their existence before slipping under the water and disappearing into the depths.

“I still can’t believe you did that,” Nightfall said numbly.

“You’d best keep that ability quiet until the necromancers have been dealt with,” Brick added grimly. “It could be dangerous for you if they learned how powerful you really are. Your ideas are dangerous. In the hands of a necromancer, that kind of creativity would be immeasurably deadly.”

“If you made the mermaids, did you make me?” Jackal asked, looking at me with puppy dog eyes. “I’m part mermaid, but I only got the top half and the scream.”

“Don’t talk about it, Jackal,” Nightfall said darkly. “No one is to know she did that.”

“Did what?”

“Let’s just get moving,” I interrupted them before it could turn into a fight. I figured Jackal would probably forget it before long anyway, if we just moved long. I didn’t know if it was his mermaid-minotaur heritage or just his low intelligence stats, but he had the memory of a goldfish. “We should cover some ground before it gets dark.”

Brick grunted his approval, and we took off again, this time on the most treacherous part of our journey.