SARAH AVERY VASILIAS, GREAT HOUSE SCION, REBORN LVL 5

THE SECOND WORLD, WORLD OF DREAMS

Sarah tried to focus the way she did when creating her weaponforms with her Never Unarmed graft, but it was more difficult now. Far from being harder to manipulate, her anima was much more responsive in this place, which meant she couldn’t take the shortcuts she now realized she’d been taking. She closed her eyes, removing the distracting, ever-shifting world around her.

Gritting her teeth with concentration, she started again for the sixth time. She realized she’d been getting sloppy with her weaponforms as she smoothed over yet another jagged burr where her lack of imagination had left her weapon-formed anima a malformed mess. Finally, she had smoothed out every last imperfection in her weaponform, and it felt right. She opened her eyes after what felt like hours and blinked in surprise.

In her hand was an insubstantial but incredibly detailed Master Sword from The Legend of Zelda. She couldn’t help but smile when she saw it, though her nostalgia was tinged with bitterness: she’d never play Zelda again. Then she saw her fingers. Her bright red fingers, on a much larger hand, forearm… The floaty, cartoonish, tapioca pudding body she’d been in when she got here had disappeared. She realized she was in her Oni-Blooded form, even though she hadn’t activated the graft or used any tensa. She felt gingerly at her lips… yep. Tusks.

Cricket was staring at her in frank astonishment. She felt like blushing, but something in this form wouldn’t let her feel embarrassed. It was the strangest feeling in the world: she felt like she should be blushing at the old orc’s assessing stare, but as soon as the feeling started manifesting, it went through some weird alchemy where it turned from embarrassment into anger.

She felt the increase in her Attributes and, even though she wasn’t enraged right now, she could feel the low pulse of anger just a hair’s breadth away from being unleashed, being fed by pretty much everything around her. It felt good. Now’s not the time to get swept away in this Oni-Blooded form, there’s too much riding on this! Sarah told herself harshly. Trying to hold back the anger was like holding a door closed to a five-alarm house fire.

“Where are we, old man?” Sarah asked, deliberately keeping her tone respectful, even if she did growl it through clenched teeth. She strode through the reaching little newt-things, bowling them over when they didn’t move fast enough. She was trying to find a place where she could get a better vantage; somewhere that would start to make this place make sense. “Why did you bring me here?”

“I like ya better like this,” Cricket said approvingly. “Yer more real. I didn’t know you had a transformational graft of the Second World. That’ll make things a tetch easier.”

“Stop deflecting and answer me!” Sarah barked. The embarrassment once again burned into embers of anger. “You drugged me and kidnapped me and made me drink your hallucinogens. I’ve been really fucking reasonable up to now!” She found she’d infused her weaponform with tensa, and the Master Sword felt good resting solidly in her hand.

Cricket grinned. “Fine, fine… ain’t no need t’be testy. We’re in the Second World, what we call the World of Legend, and what Imps call the World of Dreams. Ya cain’t go here on yer own, not without some major juju an’ heap o’ knowhow, but with the right pharmacist with a lil’ spellwork, y’can visit fer a bit so’t’speak, look at the place an’ learn a lot about someone.”

“And what do you think you’ve learned about me in the minute or two that we’ve been here?” she demanded, thrusting her chin forward.

Cricket crossed his arms and looked her up and down slowly. She didn’t rise to the obvious bait, waiting for him to answer. After a beat, he said, “I think yer a mite-bit more honest here. You don’t like me and that’s fine. It’s just fine. Tell the truth, it don’t matter much what ya like. But what I don’t see is hate. And that’s new.” He circled her slowly. “Ya got every reason to distrust me: like ya said, my people drugged ya, they threatened ya, and they kidnapped ya. I’d be fucken livid. But I can work with that: it’s reasonable. I cain’t work with someone who hates me. Not here, not now.”

“And what makes you think that my dislike is something I’ll want to get over?” Sarah asked, gripping the hilt of the Master Sword hard in her hand. “I trust Kimi-Lim. And they told me that you were our best—our only—hope to live out here, but fuck, I’m not really sure that the elf really knows what I’m capable of. I might be just fine on my own. So why the fuck should I stay here? Why should I make this effort?”

“Ha! Hah hah hah!” He guffawed with a true belly laugh, completely unexpectedly. “And so you turn the interrogation around on me!?” He slapped his knee, laughing until he was out of breath. “Yer the strangest human I ever met!” He kept laughing.

“THAT’S IT, I’M DONE!” Sarah roared, her meager control snapping as he laughed. She was just so fucking tired of feeling like she was out of control. She punched him. Right in the jaw. Not with the sword. She’d been very careful about that; even as her rage demanded violence, it demanded a very measured violence. Cricket’s head rocked to the side, though he didn’t move other than that. His laughter cut off abruptly.

Slowly, he reached a hand up to his lip and wiped away a trickle of blood so dark red it looked black. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, that’s yer one. Now, let’s try again.” His whole demeanor had changed. “Ya already know my name. I’m the orc who makes sure the Aquma cell’s safe as can be.” He’d hardened, but the mockery was gone from his voice. “You are a Great House Scion from the most hated goat-fuckers to set foot in our mountains. But unlike those goat-fuckers, yer sittin’ here chattin’ instead of gutted and left as a warnin’ with yer fucked-up-lookin’, deformed-ass, pink head on Kaelle’s saddlebow as a trophy.” Of course. It was some kind of test. Like she hadn’t had to prove herself over and over and over in her life. It was tiring, but also somewhat of a relief to know that, even on an alien world with magic and monsters, there was something so familiar.

“Lucky me. I get to talk to you instead of getting the sweet relief of death,” Sarah said sarcastically. “What do you want from me?”

Cricket didn’t answer her immediately. Instead, he just walked past her, heading through the watercolor landscape. Sarah hesitated a moment before she followed him, looking around nervously. The stuff she’d drunk, the gongk, was unlike anything she’d ever had before, recreationally or not.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She couldn’t believe she was still sitting in the dilapidated RV that smelled like old cigar smoke and stale sweat. Even though they moved their legs like they were walking, and there was the sense of motion, they didn’t walk here. The land swirled and swept around them, the sky becoming suddenly indistinguishable from the ground as their colors bled into one another. Fantastical, multicolored plants with gorgeous flowers and strange dark leaves leaped out of the landscape in breathtaking detail, then melted and dissolved into patches of diffuse color, merging back with the landscape from one moment to the next.

Sarah couldn't follow their progress. There were no landmarks here. Nothing was permanent. The sky changed from chartreuse to magenta to black with no rhyme or reason. It should have been jarring or nauseating, but every time the unreality of the place would assert itself in Sarah’s mind, she’d get a strong taste of fermented grapefruit and the dissociative feelings would subside. It was like being in a dream. Cricket never spoke and never turned back to check on her. She had no idea how long they walked.

Finally, they stopped. Sarah had given up on looking where they were going since it had no real bearing on where they ended up (she’d thought they were walking toward a tree whose branches were arranged in fractal patterns, but long past the time they should have approached it, Sarah realized they’d already passed it). Cricket gestured grandly, and Sarah realized she’d been wrong: there was a landmark that didn’t change. They were standing on a ridge that was alternately wooded in flame-colored foliage and covered in pink flowers (the flowers melted into trees and the trees dripped and transitioned into flowers constantly), which had a fantastic vantage to see the mountain.

As soon as she saw it, Sarah knew it was what Cricket had been taking her to see. The mountain wasn’t particularly tall, but it looked like it was made entirely out of obsidian. It wasn’t shaped like a normal mountain whose slopes were formed by erosion and continental drift; this obsidian mountain looked like it had been pulled from the ground while the obsidian was still molten, then stretched and twisted like a piece of taffy but instead of melting back into the ground, it had hardened into a curved talon of rock. It reminded Sarah of the Skeksis’ castle from The Dark Crystal. “That looks more evil than anything I’ve ever seen before,” Sarah said, watching the mountain; unlike everything else around them, it did not warp and shift and change.

“That’s my home,” Cricket said, and Sarah snorted.

“Sorry,” she said perfunctorily: the mountain did look like the most evil thing she’d ever seen. The more she stared, the more she thought it resembled an enormous clawed finger from some blackened thing desperately trying to break free from its earthen tomb. “It does look like the most evil thing I’ve ever seen, though,” she said.

Cricket glanced over at her, a slight smile on his broad face. “Y’ain’t too far from the truth. I cain’t imagine what this’s like fer a pale lil’ grublet like you: from a world with no magic,” he shook his head and looked out over the vast and ever-changing vista with the one static eyesore marring the beautiful chaos with its weird organic curves. “You must think everything’s bugnuts.”

“You were getting to the point, eventually?” Sarah said, feeling irritated again.

“Point’s this, Imp: you humans and yer allies’ve been fightin’ over my people’s land for fucken millennia. Y’cain’t deny it, ‘s a fact,” he waited for any objections and seemed surprised when Sarah didn’t have any. He shrugged and continued, “A’right. That ‘evil-looking’ sumbitch over there,” he pointed at the twisted obsidian tower jutting up in the distance, “she’s the reason why they keep sendin’ their best n’ bravest t’die out here to orcwallah toh-yeh. Her name’s Aadhrika. Ain’t she a beaut’?”

“Why do they want… her?” Sarah asked, intrigued now despite the growing irritation at the way Cricket never seemed to answer her questions but just seemed to dance around them. “And what the fu—what does it have to do with me?” The irritation, it seemed, had not disappeared entirely.

“The ol’ girl’s more’n’ jus’ a looker. Kinda like you. She has a bounty which she allows us to partake of.” He left the end of the thought unspoken, though Sarah could feel the question in the air almost palpably.

“I’m gonna say this one more time,” Sarah said, her voice tensing as she spoke. “You have me here. Kimi-Lim and I are here willingly. What do you want from me?”

Cricket frowned at her and spat to the side, his gob of spit turning into a tiny bat-like creature that flapped into a sky that turned vermilion with lime-green clouds. “Yer an anomaly, Imp. Yer an Imp that ain’t an Imp. Yer a fucken Great House Scion—one o’ the goat-fucken, cloaca-nursin’ personifications of all the enemies o’ the orcwallah. Ya call yerself willin’. Ya say yer from another world.” He shook his head in disbelief, “And y’know what the damndest thing is? Yer story checks out. As far as me’n’ mine’re able to suss out, y’ain’t lyin’ to us and that puts us in a real fuckeroo.” He fell silent, and Sarah realized he was waiting for her to figure out what he was talking about.

She thought about it, feeling her impatience warring with her interest. In the end, her interest won out, and she paced around as she started thinking through the situation. “Well, let’s see. Kimi-Lim told me you orcwallah are like one of the Empire’s biggest bad guys, so I can see why you’re suspicious. I mean, I’m a Great House Scion—I still don’t know how that happened, but that’s a subject for another time, I think—so to you, I’m like Darth Vader, Lex Luthor, and Dracula combined.” She crossed her arms and tapped meditatively on the tip of her nose as she considered. “Because I’m actually telling the truth, you can’t do the thing that you—well, maybe not you personally—want to do? Which is probably like you said earlier, kill me and Kimi-Lim and forget we were ever here… Am I close?”

“It’s a purdy smart goat what can bleat out ‘oh fuck, gimme more,’ but the trick loses its shine when y’realize it’s jus’ repeatin’ what yer ma was screamin’ ev’ry night when I wuz givin’ it to her real good.” He grinned again and seemed to be waiting for her to react violently again.

She couldn’t help it, she laughed. His “your mom” joke was so… familiar. It almost made her want to give him a grateful hug to hear it. Almost. “This is gonna be a long conversation if you keep trying to test me or be cryptic every ten seconds. Can we please cut the bullshit and just talk? Assume, for the sake of argument, that I’m not trying to trick you or take advantage of you or anything.”

Cricket snorted and shrugged. “A’right, fine. Y’want it straight? I’ll give it to ya straight. Yer a Kandori Fire Ruby: most valuable fucken thang on Nolm—to the right people. Us orcwallah,” he shrugged again, “we ain’t fancy. We don’t really need jewels, but we can recognize when we got a treasure. So really, yer jus’ valuable to the highest bidder.”

“You’re… selling me?!” Sarah demanded. Cricket cocked an eyebrow but didn’t object. “To who? The Imperials?”

“Y’ain’t gonna be harmed, yer elf buddy made sure o’ that. You’ll be back with yer people in like a week, tops,” Cricket gestured to everything around him, “an’ all this’ll be an amusin’ story t’tell over luncheon—or maybe it’s bruncheon? Shit, I’m jus’ a simple orc, ain’t never had a bruncheon ‘fore—while we get a mountain o’ processed resources from Imps that we don’t have to fucken raid away from ‘em.” He rubbed his fingers together, “Everyone wins! We win, cuz we get a buncha fucken Imp resources and we get rid of you—no offense, but you’ve got a target painted on ya so fucken temptin’ that yer lucky it’s the orcwallah that got ya and not some band o’ mercs or an Imp toh-yeh: they’d have been a lot less gentle.”

Sarah rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hips, her irritation flaring. “Okay, which is it?” She demanded. “Am I going to be safe and sound with you guys, or am I going to be sold to the highest bidder? Because just a few minutes ago, you were saying how Kimi-Lim had already worked things out with you and that I was just fine. I just want to know exactly how I’m being fucked by you. It’s common courtesy.”