The slimes were deceptively cute, Jump-touch thought, looking at the little pink ball in front of her. It was a small round thing, coloured an eye-searing pink, and it was eating a silver-skinned apple. Very, very slowly.

She had left Shrike's side a few minutes before and was now crouched at the bottom of one of the silver trees. The slime didn't seem to mind her being there, but there was also no intelligence in its watery little eyes.

Jump-touch reached out and nudged it with the end of her finger.

It wobbled, looked around for a moment with a wet gaze, almost like it was about to burst into tears, and then went back to the apple. It felt like... She didn't know what it felt like. Gelatin maybe? Or eyeballs.

It was what poking a dry eyeball might be like.

Eww.

She poked it again. Boing.

The little pink orb tried to snap at her finger, but it was so slow that her hand was long gone by the time it'd even perceived her touch.

I want to keep it, a part of her brain said, put it in your heart, keep it as a pet.

That part of her brain was, she knew, insane, and she had long ago learnt to ignore it.

Mostly.

She poked the slime again, and it made a little "bop" noise, facing up to her like a puppy, faster this time.

Jump-touch rocked back on her heels, and with a satisfied noise, it went back to eating its apple. Interesting.

"How can you bear to kill these things?" she asked, returning to Shrike. He hadn't actually done anything so far that she'd seen, certainly no magic. Instead, he was leaning against a wall and intently watching the others.

"They're monsters," he said distractedly, keeping his gaze sharp, "they don't think, and the dungeon will regenerate them in a few hours, will make new ones."

"All of them?"

He shook his head, still watching, "no, it'll regenerate five or so, if I'm reading this place correctly. Five pink, one or two green, and the blue after a week or so. But they're slimes, they can split themselves into multi-"

He stopped, standing up straighter all of a sudden.

"Green, on the left!" He called out, and Jump-touch turned to see what he'd seen.

This slime was much bigger than the little pink ones, and the look in its eyes was different, more focused, less on-the-verge-of-having-a-breakdown.

"Yaris," he shouted, "it's going for you."

"I've got it"

"Hit it, Eim"

"You stun it, I'll burst it!"

A moment later Eim half-flattened it with his hammer, having to fall backwards to avoid the ricochet, and then Ollie had speared it all the way through to finish it off.

They all danced back as it burst like a damaged water-skin, Eim landing hard on his butt and scrabbling backwards to avoid the hissing liquid.

"Good job, four more to go, seven more pink." Yaris scanned the area, "split up again, but don't go too far. Shrike?"

"You're all good so far," he responded, "no more sighted."

She sighed in probable relief, and they carried on their hunt.

****

"Doesn't walking make your knee worse?" she asked Shrike quietly a few minutes later, perching on a piece of ruined wall beside him like a gargoyle. The group had killed one more green and most of the pinks in the area now, and they were beginning to range further in their search for the remaining slimes. Jump-touch had picked up her apple-eating one and sequestered it behind them both on the wall, to save it from the slaughter.

Shrike broke his gaze off of the search for a moment to look up at her.

"No. It's complicated and I don't want to talk about it, but while it's not going to get better, it's not going to get worse either."

He nodded to one of the distant group members. "Eim has a skill which takes the pain away for a time and fixes any damage I've done to it throughout the day, so that helps, but we can't use it too often or it'll stop working. We're hoping to find something deeper down which might fix it. A stronger skill, or-" he paused, looking over the orchard. "Just levels, really. If we get stronger, and get some money, then even if we can't do it ourselves, maybe we can afford to buy something to mitigate it long-term."

Jump-touch thought about that. Any kobold who was injured generally got better on their own. Even the one who'd been hurt by the giant wolf was all healed up only a month or two later. Scarred, but not permanently maimed. She didn't know anyone who had an injury they expected to never heal.

Or it could be they just never spoke to you about it.

She shrugged off that thought. Rat-tail must have had his reasons. What would the village have done, if healing an injury required trading, and more goods than they could provide? Would they have gone to war over it? She didn't think so.

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She resisted the urge to pet the slime, it didn't like it. She wasn't going to keep it. In a minute somebody would come over and finish it off, and the thing wouldn't care either way.

I should tell him he doesn't have to walk back, it was greed, the lure of keeping secrets and of shiny things. A secret was a fun thing to have when it hurt nobody, but she wasn't hurting nobody.

She turned to him, opening her mouth to speak, when a flash of blue caught her attention, as she turned she saw that it wasn't in the grove at all, but behind them and coming straight-

****

She hadn't panicked. The ear-splitting whistle she'd let out was a warning shout, even if it was one in the wrong language.

After that, everything had happened very quickly. Shrike slamming her off the wall and to the ground, as something white and so very shiny left his hands.

The shouts from the others in response to her whistle, the pounding of feet.

The shadow, as Yaris sailed over her prone form.

"Ollie!" Yaris shouted as she landed in a cloud of dust, barrelling into the monster.

"I'm on it," they shouted from somewhere beside her, but Jump-touch couldn't see with her face pressed into the grass. Impressions, noises, voices.

"Shrike!" Eim's voice.

"I'm fine, I'm fine, back them up."

There was another flash of bright silver light, and she curled up into a ball as Shrike's weight shifted off her.

"Lure it-" another flash of silver, a shout from somebody near the monster, and then all of a sudden, quiet.

As she tried to uncurl herself, she could hear everyone breathing heavily, too winded to speak.

Could she help…? She searched her Heart as she tried to blink the lights from her eyes. She had water, did people need water? Did she have first-aid supplies, was anyone hurt? There were no cries of pain, but-

In the gap of the ruined wall, Yaris was standing with her hands on her knees and her head down, panting heavily. Eim had one hand on the back of her neck, and Ollie was inspecting a hissing pile of blue goop that not long before had probably been a very aggressive ball of gelatin.

"Is it, dead?" she asked, then as Shrike rolled away from her, breathing heavily, "are you okay?"

He shook his head, "took a lot out of me, ten minutes, what the hell was that noise."

She winced. "It was a warning shout, my-" she lacked a word in Resper for what Rat-tail was, "-friend? My friend back home drilled it into us. Our village was attacked sometimes."

He eyed her from his spot on the floor, and then accepted a hand from Yaris, who pulled him to his feet. "I'd say warn me next time if you're going to do that next to my ear, but I guess that was the warning."

He winced as he put too much weight on his knee, nodding thanks to Ollie as they handed him his cane, "we get any drops?"

Eim tossed something blue and shiny into the air with a twirl. "Opal crystal. It's small, but that alone should pay our costs for this journey."

He span it in the air once more, before tossing it to Jump-touch, who caught it awkwardly, still unsteady on her feet.

It's pretty.

The 'opal crystal' was a round-ish chunk of what looked to her like quartz, flecked inside with rainbow sparkles. As she tilted it in the light, they seemed to shift and move inside, and she found herself staring at it, moving it from side to side.

"Store that for us, kid," Eim said, "and good job on the warning, that thing woulda ran you over otherwise."

I'm not a kid, she staggered as she sent it to her Heart, placing it in pride of place on the top of her new bookcase.

Oh.

When had she sat down?

And why was Eim crouching in front of her, his hand on her forehead?

She flinched him away, and he shrugged to the others. "Too much for today, maybe, plus the strain of converting the magical weight of the Crystal. She looks fine, best my Skill can tell."

"I fell over?"

Her mouth felt fuzzy, and the words weren't coming out right. Jump-touch tried to shake it off. "I'm okay, I sat down?"

Eim shook his head, standing up, and Ollie took his place.

"Yep. You sat down, zoned out for a minute too," Ollie raised a fist, "how many fingers am I holding up?"

She stared at them, then at their hand, "none?"

"The kid can count!" they grinned and rose gracefully back to their feet, all in one motion. "Come on, up on your pins. We'll harvest some of the apples, find a place to camp and settle down for the evening."

Her senses were slowly coming back to her as her stomach growled. That was what had happened, she'd sent the crystal to her Heart, and hadn't been prepared for the backlash.

"We're staying out all night?"

Yaris was already heading back into the orchard, closely followed by Ollie, who was for some reason staring at their own balled fists.

"Nothing dangerous should regenerate for a couple of days," Yaris shouted over her shoulder, "the blue one not for a week at least."

Eim took over as the two disappeared into the trees, "we'll set a guard for the night, but it should be safe enough here. Are you alright to bring things out of your [Pocket Zone]? As your healer, I don't think you should be sending things in again for a while. When did you last eat?"

She nodded. "Bringing stuff out seems fine. I don't know why? This morning I think?"

"No lunch?"

She shook her head, as Shrike tapped his cane against the bit of ruin he was sitting on. "It's because to send things, you have to use your own magic to convert them from matter into theory. To bring them back, the magic has already been spent, you may even get a portion of it back."

"She could try-" Eim reached for her forehead again, but she dodged backwards, almost falling over, and he shrugged, "she could try bringing the crystal back out, see if it gives her a sugar high?"

She queried her skill for 'sugar', Oh, interesting, 'the stuff that makes things taste sweet'. Humans really did have words for everything.

Well, not everything, but so many for things she'd never even thought about before. All the different types of settlements, and different ways of preparing food. Different parts of things, all the way down to sugar.

It made Lower Tongue suddenly make a lot more sense in her mind. She had always dismissed it somewhat as a more complicated version of Given Tongue, useful for incoming traders who refused to learn a proper language, but now it was starting to feel more like a necessity. How could you trade for something like sugar if your language didn't contain a word for it?

She followed Eim and Shrike into the trees, thinking.

Were there words in Given Tongue that she didn't know? There must be, right? But if there were, then who would teach them to her? Would her own understanding of it change as she learnt more Resper, until all she had left was Lower Tongue? Could she make new words in Given Tongue?

That last one sounded like sacrilege. It was Given Tongue because it had been given to the kobolds. It was the First Language, and the best. You couldn't just add to it or change it just because you didn't like that you sometimes had to compound sounds.

But, maybe there was a word for 'sugar', and she had simply never heard it spoken.

For a moment she lamented not taking [Polyglot], it would have been so interesting, to have every language in her head. It would have been amazing. It hadn't seemed fun at the time, to take away the joy of learning, but she could have made it fun.

But that didn't mean she couldn't do it anyway, it would just take longer.

This would make a good topic for her first book. Taking the kobold scratch and writing down all the words she knew of Given Tongue, then when she travelled to other villages and learned new words, she could write them down in her book too-

Oh.

Oh.

This was what the Stone had meant by 'human numbers', wasn't it.