Several miles inside the deep wood a crude crow’s nest perched atop a tall pine. It was made of dead branches interlaced with scraps of twisted grass rope. It looked like it could fall apart at any moment. Despite this Gloe was lying atop it, stretched out and relaxing.
“Gotta talk this out, me. Let’s review.”
“Okay. First of all, I think we understated it when we called the deep wyld dangerous.”
“No kidding. Even the mauler ocelots are deadly, and they mostly hunt vermin and the like."
“Agreed. I get the chills every time they test the nest.”
“Nice rhyme.”
“It was inadvertent, but thanks. Moving on. The nest is not going to last very long, and we’re taking our life in our hands every time we head out to try to scrape together some supplies.”
“But if we don’t keep reinforcing the nest the mauler ocelots will get in. Plus we’ve never tested how long we can go without food.”
“And we have no reserves. Very dangerous.”
“Right. So we’re in a tight spot. What have we got to work with?”
“We lost most of our tools and supplies escaping from Clary and Copyright Infringement. We still have our magic boots, our magic hat and the steel knife we bought before heading out this way, plus basic fire-starting gear and a few odds and ends.”
“The boots give us lizard-squirrel agility, and the hat gives us lizard-squirrel senses, but I don’t think that’s going to help that much here.”
“I haven’t seen any lizard-squirrels in here, and that’s a fact. I think they just can’t cut it in this harsh environment. The knife is in okay shape, but it’s going to wear out fast if we keep using it to cut through thick wood. That makes constructing shelter or tools difficult.”
“Agreed. As for innate abilities, we’re not necessarily in a great spot either. Our original ability was not really intended for this kind of thing. It gives us a continuous source of energy, but only if we’re around people, and we essentially have to use the energy immediately since we have no storage capacity to speak of.”
“Plus we can only use that energy to fuel regeneration and our natural skillset. So it’s not like we could suddenly pull fireballs out of our ass, even if there were people around here. Fortunately we did make a number of improvements initially in order to revive this body and survive childhood, so I don’t think we have to worry too much about disease given our improved immune and digestive systems.”
“Most of that regeneration depends on energy input though. Without people around we would need to eat a lot of food in order to trigger any kind of accelerated healing.”
“But at least given time and some sustenance most injuries will heal themselves. Most people can’t say that.”
“Granted. But I think our other ability is our primary asset here.”
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“You mean the one we acquired after we…died the second time?”
“Look, we’re working on what exactly happened, but we agreed to shelve it for now. Right?”
“Right, sorry. Okay. So since we didn’t exactly design the second ability we’re not precisely certain what it does. Best we can tell though we can sort of…breathe in magic and auras and such in order to start to comprehend them. If we do start to get how they work we can breathe out the magic into an item in order to duplicate the effect. The breaths move small amounts of magic at a time though, so it takes a while to make even something simple.”
“Definitely not a combat ability. If it follows this world’s rules it should become more and more useful if we continue to level up, but that doesn’t seem likely at the moment.”
“Yeah, we’re barely surviving. Little chance of us killing enough to level.”
“We should make a note though. We’ve confirmed that magic breathed in can’t be used to fuel our primary ability. If we survive and return to a place where there are people we should check and see if energy gathered from our first ability can be breathed out into objects. That would increase our output immensely.”
“We still would be limited to magic we sort of understood, but I agree it’s worth investigating. At the moment though it’s a moot point. There’s no people here, and we only really get lizard-squirrel abilities.”
“True, but our experimentation has helped us learn. Given what we tried with grass and sticks, we’ve learned that some materials can hold more magic than others, and that items’ magic has greater potency if there’s a connection between the use and the form. So boots of agility work better than a stick of agility.”
“Not to mention that lizard-squirrel hide works really well compared to sticks or whatever for the agility magic. That suggests either that animal parts can hold more magic or that the connection between lizard-squirrel magic and lizard-squirrel parts somehow improves the outcome.”
“We really don’t have enough data. We need more variables for proper experimentation.”
“Well that would be nice, but that’s kind of putting the cart before the horse, isn’t it? For the moment we need to improve our chances of survival.”
“Don’t be a dick, I’m with you. Okay, it seems to me our primary problem is that we don’t have enough options. We need to find a way to create new capabilities using our existing resources. To me, that means trying to make a new magical tool or item with our breathing ability.”
“But how? We learned how the lizard-squirrels worked by killing them and breathing in their aura as they died. In order to learn a new magic to imbue into a tool we’d have to kill something, and our whole problem is that this area is far too rough for us. Predators can kill us, and prey animals can either also kill us or have the ability to evade our limited hunting ability. We could offset that with traps, but we don’t have the tools to make anything elaborate, and every minute outside the nest risks our life.”
“True. Hmm. Do we have any other assets that we’ve missed?”
“I mean, I’m sure we’ve missed a ton of things, but are any of them relevant? Parah taught us how to trap, but we would need tools and time. We remember a whole bunch of stuff from before, but most of it isn’t survival-related.”
“Right.”
“Although…we did escape from Red, even though he was more powerful than us. I mean, a lot more powerful.”
“That was because we refused to face him head-on though, instead…oh, I see what you mean. Actually…come to think of it, these animals and monsters and such…most of them don’t seem to be all that intelligent, or even clever.”
“Yeah. They’re wicked scary, and extremely good at what they do, but not very adaptive. I mean, those mauler ocelots can rip a smaller animal in two with one swipe of their claws, but because we made two discreet layers for the nest’s base they keep trying to climb around the first rather than just try to claw through it.”
“Probably because they see it as part of the tree rather than the last obstacle between them and their prey.”
“So if we could find a way to outsmart a creature, rather than overpower it…”
“What we really need is to find a monster that lets us skip several steps. We don’t want something that is just a little more powerful than us. That would just give us an incremental boost. We need a leap. Something with a weakness that can only be exploited by intelligence.”
“Something so strong it can afford to be dumb.”
Gloe smiled to himself.