SARAH AVERY VASILIAS, GREAT HOUSE SCION, REBORN LVL 5

SOMEWHERE IN THE CATACLYSM MOUNTAINS

Sarah groaned as she regained consciousness, her hand immediately going to her temples. A fierce headache pounded in her skull, and her mouth tasted like something had died in it. The taste triggered her gag reflex, and she coughed, retching a little and clenching her stomach, trying not to puke everywhere. Why am I hung over?! she thought wretchedly, her eyes watering and still closed as she breathed shallowly, trying to keep her stomach settled.

A warm, rough hand gripped her face, firmly but not harshly. She heard a deep, raspy voice murmur something she couldn’t quite make out, and a second later, it felt like a frozen wind blew through her with tempest strength. Her eyes flew open, and the headache was completely gone. The hand slid away from her face, and she could focus on her surroundings.

She was in a small, close space, lying on a cot or low couch. Everything was tan and dusty. She felt an odd sense of déjà vu as she looked around. She had been deposited in an old RV.

The interior was a study in faded beiges and yellows, and the place was a mess. Piles of clothes, ashtrays, plates, cups, books, and all kinds of miscellaneous junk were scattered everywhere. It smelled like smoke and body odor with a strong scent of vinegar or maybe it was fermentation. A man was sitting across from her, just two meters away, kicked back on a recliner.

He was a barrel-chested mountain of a man with grass-green skin. He was an older man with a hard, scarred face that looked like it was used to frowning. Notably, he had a pair of finger-length, yellowed tusks which jutted out from his bottom lip. He wore a dark blue mechanic’s jumpsuit, complete with grease stains and other obvious signs of wear. Despite his appearance, he exuded a palpable air of command.

He was chewing on a lit cigar, large hands resting on the arms of the recliner. When he saw her stir, he didn’t move, just maneuvered the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, blowing out a cloud of smoke as he did.

She coughed, feeling an acrid tickle at the back of her throat from the smoke. It wasn’t tobacco that he was burning in that thing; it smelled more like burning plastic. The big man didn’t react, just observed her. She looked around, feeling a bump and realizing that she’d unconsciously been hearing the low vibration of a running engine. The windows in the back of the RV were all covered with dirty yellow-brown curtains, staining the light that filtered through into nicotine shades.

“Where am I?” she asked.

The old man puffed on his cigar and shifted, ratcheting down the footrest on his recliner and leaning forward. He squinted at her with sharp, dark green eyes, scrutinizing her with predatory intensity. Sarah’s jaw firmed, and she gathered her anima into a weapon form in her hands. The old man’s eyes widened a little at that, and he snorted out more smoke from his nose.

“Ain’t never seen that before, Imp.” His voice was deep and rough, like a cement mixer full of boulders. “I’m real fucken’ curious to know what you were plannin’ on doin’ with it.”

“I’m not an imp,” Sarah said, not releasing her anima. “I’m human. No wings, no pointy little tail, no red skin.”

He snorted a little laugh and tapped ash out on the floor of the RV. “We’re gonna be here awhile,” he said. “So ya might as well get comfortable. My name’s Cricket, and I already know pretty much everything important to know about you.” He pulled a small notebook from his back pocket and flipped a couple of pages, running one thick finger down the thin paper as he scanned the cramped writing. “You come from a planet called… let’s see here… ah, there it is—Earth. You arrived here with your lover, another human, but y’all got separated. You’ve been in a Tutorial Realm for the last month and change, though to you, it felt like several years before you emerged.” He looked up from his notebook and cocked a hairy eyebrow. “Did I miss anything?”

Sarah hesitated, thrown off by his knowledge. He’d spoken with Kimi-Lim already. “No…” she said slowly. “You got pretty much everything. So… why am I here?”

“Yer worth more alive than you are dead,” Cricket replied. That made Sarah’s next words die in her throat. Cricket continued, “For now. I’m trying to figure out just how useful you can be; you might wanna help me out.”

“So what, I’m arguing for my life now?” Sarah demanded, feeling the old anger rise in the pit of her stomach. She felt herself go flush as her voice tightened. “I haven’t done anything to you! I’m not your enemy; I’m not even from this planet, so it’s not like I’ve got anything to do with your politics!”

Cricket coughed out a laugh, then hocked and spat off to the side into a pile of dirty clothes. He took another puff of his cigar and blew the smoke in a noxious cloud that made Sarah start a coughing fit.

He waited for her coughing to subside, then said, “Mayhap back on Earth you can be a member o’ the nobility, not t’ mention a personification of Imperial conquest and colonialism, without being involved in politics, but not here. There’s a couple reasons I ain’t let Kaelle drop you into the deepest ravine in these mountains,” he puffed his cigar again. “Now I ain’t used to explainin’ myself, so I suggest you listen up.”

Sarah nodded but didn’t say anything.

“First, yer a fucken Great House Scion. Now that don’t mean spit here, but it does to the Imps, and that gives us something we didn’t have before: leverage. So long as you live, the orcwallah has the leverage to gain some breathing room.”

“Leverage for what and against who? The Empire?” Sarah asked.

“We’ve been fighting a guerilla war for the past two hundred and fifty-some-odd years against the Empire while two of their Houses stake claims and set up camps out here in the Cataclysm Mountains, creeping and crawling everywhere they can, trying to find Dungeon entrances,” Cricket explained. “They’ve grown balls they ain’t had for near a century up to now what with them trespassin’ in orcwallah land, but with a little leverage, we can force at least one bunch of fucken Imps to leave: that’d be yer own House, the Vasilias bunch. With them out of the picture, we can do for the rest on our own.”

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“What makes you think they’ll leave?” Sarah asked. “If they’re here now, looking for Dungeon entrances, why would they stop because of me? They don’t know who I am. I didn’t even exist here a… fuck, did you say a month? I got here a month ago?” She leaned back, realizing as she did that she’d let her anima dissolve into an unformed cloud. “I guess I knew that already… Kimi-Lim did say something about it, but I… for me, it’s been eight years. Sorry, you were giving me the reasons you had not to kill me. I really didn’t mean to interrupt.” She smiled weakly.

Cricket’s dour expression didn’t change. He just grunted and blew another cloud of smoke. Eventually, he said, “The other reason is…” he sighed and looked away, green eyes narrowing in disgust. He grimaced and looked back over at her. “Your friend, Kimi-Lim. They suggested that you might be friendly to our cause. An ally, so to speak.” She got the sense he was suddenly paying even closer attention to what she was about to say.

“Kimi-Lim told me about what House Vasilias did to your people. To the mountains. Fuck, man, August Vasilias is responsible for…” She swallowed, unable to continue. She clenched her fists and closed her eyes, trying to breathe through it. She felt a warm hand on her shoulder and another cloud of acrid smoke nearly smothered her. She coughed, the choking feeling suddenly going from emotional to literal, but she appreciated the sentiment. “Let’s just say I understand why you’re fighting against those assholes.”

Cricket patted her shoulder and sat back down in his recliner. He’d stubbed his cigar out in an overfull ashtray built into the arm of the recliner, and as he popped the footrest back out and leaned back, he picked the cigar back up and stuck it in his mouth where it relit itself, greenish smoke curling up from the tip once more.

“I cain’t believe I’m sayin’ this, but I believe ya. Yer biometrics indicate no deception, yer story corroborates with yer elf friend, and ‘sides, we’ve already made a deal with Kimi-Lim, our new integration architect.” He smiled, leaning forward, holding his hand out. “You’ve got a place amongst us fer as long as ya want.”

Sarah looked at the hand for a while, considering what it meant to take it. I’m at their mercy, she thought. They’ve been fucked by August Vasilias and his family just as hard as I have, and they’re fighting them. If Griffin’s a prisoner of the Imperials, then these guys might be my best chance of getting him back.

She leaned forward and took his hand, gripping his forearm like she’d seen Arnold Schwarzenegger do in Conan the Barbarian. “Uh, thanks. Mr. Cricket. So… what now? Where even are we? Where are you taking me?”

Cricket returned the grip and leaned back in his recliner, still puffing away on the cigar. “Now? I get to know you, you get to know me. We’re gonna take a trip together with some ol’ fashioned gongk: we’ll even use my best batch. As fer where we’re goin’, well… you’re about to find out.”

He got up and walked around the recliner, heading over to a cabinet. Sarah watched him take a jar of noxious yellow-green liquid out of the cabinet with colorful bits of string tied in intricate knots all around it. He took another jar out with the same evil-looking liquid and then came back to his recliner and sat back down in it. He held one of the jars out to Sarah.

“What’s in it?” Sarah asked dubiously, opening the lid and sniffing. It smelled floral and citrusy with a sweet undertone, like over-sugared grapefruit juice.

“Gongk’s about the strongest thing this side of the Cataclysm Mountains. It’s made of pure-spun dreams and then it’s mixed and infused with a kaleidoscope of hallucinogens, just like Ma used to make. Dazh var Kildari!” He popped the lid off the jar and downed it in one gulp, smacking his lips as he did. “Tastes good, too. Now, drink up,” he said, his gaze locking on hers with the tenderness of a dentist’s drill.

Hesitating only a moment, Sarah lifted her jar in a toast and put it to her lips. The gongk tasted like nothing she’d ever had before. It had notes of grapefruit juice but with a funky fermented taste that overwhelmed everything else. The other flavors in the drink were subtle but pleasantly surprising. The tiny sip she intended turned into one enormous gulp as the taste seemed to coat her tongue and throat. Before she knew it, the entire jar had disappeared down her throat, and a delightful warm feeling was growing in her, spreading from her stomach.

Sarah waited for something to happen, looking around nervously. Cricket had kicked back in his recliner, his eyes half-lidded and unfocused, though he still seemed to be looking in her direction. He’d placed the cigar back in the ashtray but hadn’t put it out, so the smoke curled up from the softly glowing end in a steady stream. Sarah watched the smoke, her mind drifting as she waited. She blinked. The world was different.

There was no transition. No dizziness or queasiness. One moment, she was drifting, essentially staring off into space; the next, she was somewhere… else. The landscape was hard to define because it refused to resolve if she focused on it too much. It was very colorful, though.

She was standing on a grassy hill with grass whose leaves were an eye-searing shade of yellow and Day-Glo orange. The magenta sky had fluffy baby-blue cumulus clouds that moved in odd, seemingly intentional patterns through the sky like they were trying to spell something in a language you could almost understand. This more than anything else made her feel queasy, but the feeling soon passed. Every time she tried to focus on the scene, though, it shifted and churned, making her want to look away, but there was no safe place to rest her eyes.

Something fluttered against her leg, and she looked down, realizing two things at once: she was not alone, and she was… missing. Sort of. Where her body should be, she found that she was a gently curving kind of blob the color of tapioca pudding with a slight glow to her. Weird. Then there were the… things all around her.

They were maybe twenty-five centimeters tall and resembled anthropomorphic newts with bulbous eyes and stubby little tails. They were colorful little things; no two of them seemed to be the same color, and they were constantly moving and bumbling around. They seemed to be attracted to her, occasionally raising their little heads and opening and closing their mouths like they were gasping or eating.

“You’re cute little things, aren’t you?” Sarah said. Her voice seemed to have a physical effect on the little newt-things as they jumped and crowded closer to her when she spoke. “What are you?” She asked softly, tentatively reaching a bloblike extension of herself that felt like her hand to one of the newt-things, seeing if it would allow her to touch it.

Before she could, Cricket’s voice interrupted her, “Don’t. They’re cute, but if you feed ‘em, they’ll never leave ya alone.” She turned and saw Cricket standing there, exactly as he’d looked in the RV. He smirked at her vague shape and shook his head. “Your anima discipline’s fer shit, human.”

Sarah looked at her bloblike form and shrugged. “I could’ve told you that—not exactly a secret,” she stepped over the reaching little newt-things, getting out of their immediate vicinity. “Feed them? I don’t have any food. What do they want?”

“Yer juicy tensa pool. You smell like dinner to them, waftin’ it all around with yer anima all bulging out like that. Do the thing you were doing earlier.” He walked over to her, examining her critically. When he moved, he looked like a watercolor figure moving through a watercolor landscape until he stopped, and he became more solid, and more real once again. Sarah gulped and nodded.