“What is all this?” Jasper asked, as the woman led them deeper into the building. Every available space was packed with growth, with climbing green ferns and budding flowers; there was an electric charge of mana to the air that gathered on his skin.

“A conservatory.” She answered.

“I notice. In the middle of the desert too.” Jasper ducked his head to avoid the branches of a tree that grew up the walls and across the ceiling, bending its back low to reach across the windows and swallow up all available light. “What are you growing?”

“Plants.” She grunted.

Jasper glanced to Thorn, who was walking silently behind. “Do you think you can speak her language? You two seem… like-minded…”

Thorn rolled her eyes and snapped out a terse, “Hey!”

The woman stopped.

“He’s not going to shut up until you tell him.”

“Fine, fine. We’re here to cultivate new breeds of flora that can survive the desert. Most wild life has a small chance of spontaneous adaptation, given exposure to the natural mana-flows of a given hex. By offering a carefully spliced mixture of their natural mana-environs and the local varieties, we can prevent them from atrophying, and eventually, they’ll undergo rapid evolution.”

Jasper glanced to the side. A window-bed was full of bonsai trees, bent little sculptures of wood and leaves. A few had already begun to morph. They were growing long, desert-brown thorns, their bodies shifting to become squat and rounded just above the roots, storing water in their trunks…

“That’s amazing. Does it ever… happen to people?”

“People. No. Mer, yes.”

Great. Now I just need to figure out what Mer are…

But to his surprise, she added without further prodding. “That’s where the sand elves came from. We think this used to be a forest hex, but when it changed, the natives changed with. That’s why we don’t have hobgoblins or kobolds instead– and why there’s so little desert flora. The rapid shift wiped out everything that couldn’t change with the hex.”

Mer. Anyone that’s not human. Got it.

“And our friends the wart-horns got lucky?”

“Nope. Monsters are spontaneous; they form out of waste-manas. If we had a better ecosystem, most of that waste would be soaked up by less invasive species, instead of forming new ones.”

Jasper nodded along, trying to look like he understood. And he hoped he mostly did. It sounded like most of this world didn’t actually operate under the principles of evolution, but instead, things were just shaped by the magic in the air and earth.

And if necessary, they were invented out of whole cloth to hold those magics.

“Can you make monsters intentionally?”

For the first time, the woman tilted her head back to look at him, as if reappraising his intelligence up from the general level of a slime mold. “On a small scale, yes. On a large scale, also yes, but you’ll die. Man-made monsters tend to be a lot scarier than naturally occurring ones. I actually have an abomination– a small one– if you want to see.”

“I’d love that.”

“Do you have a wringer?” Thorn cut in.

“I do. You’re welcome to borrow it.”

And they stepped into the central hub of the conservatory, buried beneath the earth by a slant in the passageways. A single skylight reached the level of the surface above, letting in a diagonal slash of light that illuminated all. In the center of the room was a massive cage of glass panels that contained a miniature jungle. Green life pressed to the greenhouse’s edges, and small creatures moved in the underbrush. Around it were smaller beds that contained numerous samples and cuttings, being slowly adapted for the desert’s harsh soil.

“This is brilliant.” Jasper commented, walking around the glass enclosure.

“Mm.” She seemed to have warmed up, a little. Her grunts were less terse. “It’s an actual solution, although it’s slow progress. Those hex-vaults they grow their crops in? Ancient. And nobody can build any new ones.”

“So the desert will win in the end, unless you regrow it…”

She nodded. “The desert always wins.” Going to a workstation, she drew out and unfolded a strange device. It was a set of interlocking rings that formed a globe, with numerous runic letters inscribed in circles and connected by branching, geometric lines. It reminded Jasper of a circuit board, really. There were small clusters of gemstones laid out in neat rows.

Thorn glanced over to Jasper. “Condenser Matrix. Or, a wringer. It squeezes the mana back out of the monster.”

“Can’t you…” He furrowed his brow, trying to make sure this wasn’t a stupid question. “Can’t you use it to eat the mana before it forms a monster at all?”

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“No.” The scientist answered harshly. “Never try that. Killing the monsters– asserting your power over them– is what ‘tames’ the mana. Trying to wring out waste-manas before they’ve gone through the natural cycle is how you get artificial monsters. Like this one here…”

Passing the ‘wringer’ to Thorn, she returned to the workbench and retrieved something else…

A small glass cube.

Within, slapping its sticky, shapeless body against the walls, was a blob of psuedo-pod limbs and gray-brown flesh, a stringy mass of boneless muscle that flopped about. Every side of it, every crook between its many arms, was occupied by small, sucker-round mouths. They flexed and expanded, exposing the rings of teeth within.

“An abomination.”

“Always.” Thorn said, her voice a harsh whisper. “Always make sure the monster is dead. If it’s not, wringing it will make one of these. And not a small, harmless one.”

Jasper nodded. He appreciated that Thorn, knowing he was some strange thing from beyond the stars, had shifted gears to actually educating him. He wasn’t sure if she was a friend, exactly– but she clearly wanted him to be a competent ally.

The woman counted out silver wrens into Thorn’s palm, and nodded to Jasper. “If you’re really interested, you should visit in…” She paused for an inordinate amount of time, lips moving as she counted. Judging by the heavy bags under her eyes, Jasper would guess she didn’t get a lot of sleep, and didn’t have a great grasp of what day it was outside. “Three days. We’ll be transplanting specimens then.”

“I will, if we’re still in town.” Jasper held out a hand. “But I didn’t get your name?”

“Sable.”

— — —

Watching the wringer work was… disturbing.

Thorn made a point of slitting the wart-horn’s throats and letting the blood drain out before she began. She held the wringer aloft, and the inner rings began to rotate, spinning up faster and faster as a spark of blue light surrounded by drifting, flickering runes blossomed at the center. A wind blew from nowhere…

And the corpses began to unravel. Ribbons of golden mist reached out from the bodies and were sucked into the wringer. The bodies dissolved into the mist, collapsing layer by layer, first removing the skin so that everything was red and raw and then eating down through the fat, meat, and tissue, exposing the bone and eroding that too.

In short, Jasper saw the poor lizard-frogs get peeled like onions, and the smell was indescribably worse than the sight.

He lifted a hand to cover his eyes–

And saw a thin ribbon of golden mist unfolding from his own fingers, getting pulled into the wringer. With a sudden start, Jasper backed up, splashing through the salt-pan and pulling his hand protectively against his chest.

Thorn glanced back.

Jasper grinned unconvincingly.

But as the last of the golden threads poured into the whirling device…

And the rings rolled to a halt…

Something was left where each of the bodies had been. Faint halos of golden mist clung to the remnants. Two of the toads had left small, condensed gems of pure mana, no bigger than Jasper’s finger past the joint. One had become a green-clay jug wrapped in a netting of rough twine. The last left behind a bag made of rough, scaly leather.

“So they just…” Jasper squinted. “Turn into treasure?”

Every once in a while this world, which was real from the sand in his boots to the sun in his eyes, would do something just impossible and leave Jasper feeling like he was left out on the joke.

Thorn shrugged. “I heard mana likes to be useful.” She tossed him three silver as they went gathering the treasures. “Let’s get going.”

Jasper felt oddly okay with things as they rode back towards town.

The nervousness in the pit of his stomach was still there. Thorn knew his secrets, and what she would do with them, well, that would be her choice. Amun would have exploded and probably tried to kill him; Jasper didn’t even want to think about Teysa’s reaction.

But if anything, it had made him closer with Thorn…

— — —

They stopped at a merchant’s house. Unlike the armory, it wasn’t a proper store, but instead a lavish home furnished with expensive pieces to showcase the owner’s wealth. A maid welcomed them in, pouring a fragrant alcoholic disinfectant over their hands. Business was conducted over tiny dishes of shaved ice drizzled in rich, caramel-flavored oils that carried the caffeine kick Jasper desperately missed from back home.

As he wolfed down his ice, Thorn tersely laid out the gear they’d taken from the wart-horns.

The merchant was a man with a handsome, chiseled look, threads of gray shot through his stubbly beard. He took out a flat shard of crystal and ran it over the pieces. Beautiful little patterns of frost grew over the crystal pane. Setting that first tool aside, he set both the bottle and the bag atop a large metal disk that sat on three gilded legs. Light spread outwards across the plate, and numerous small icons carved into the side lit up.

“Mm. Nothing especially rare, I fear. The bag is an extradimensional pocket. Low-grade. Twenty wrens at most. The bottle, less. It’s a sustenance charm, also low-grade, and will probably fetch you six or seven wrens at the most. I can offer you no more than thirty, and that is generous.”

Thorn looked to Jasper. “Do you need to level your Negotiation?”

“I do.” He grinned.

“Ahhh, treating me like I’m a common monster to train against. Do you have no sympathy?” The merchant threw up his hands.

— — —

They left with thirty five wrens. Even then, they still had the two mana-gems, Jasper was quickly realizing that the actual commission for hunting monsters was a consolation prize, in case you didn’t have a wringer or you didn’t find anything worth selling.

Five of those wrens were Amun’s.

He was technically the only licensed adventurer among them, so he got a hefty part of any fee.

But that left fifteen for each of them. Jasper pocketed his prize with a shit-eating grin, briefly glancing at the notification that said he’d leveled Negotiation again.

“What are you spending your half on?” He asked.

She glanced at him sharply. “Don’t spend it all just because you have it. Keep some back. If you’re not careful, you’ll have nothing when a little counts for everything.”

And then she was gone.

Jasper paused to watch her down the street, for a moment, and wondered who the strange one was. Her or him? Which world was the strange one…

Earth or this beautiful, bizarre planet?