"I'm sorry, can you repeat that?" Liara was washing her hands in the cafeteria's sink for the third time after collecting the mana cores from her fallen foes. Pulling out the Matriarch's core had been easy enough since the thing had been reduced to a pile of burned goo, but the Cadavers were a different story.
When she saw the singed uniforms of her classmates, she balked, but it was looking at the first Cadaver’s dainty hands that really set her off. The dead girl’s fingernails still had cute pictures of golems painted on, and it reminded Liara of the former humanity of her trap’s victims.
Pellas did not tell any jokes while Liara had slowly and painstakingly dragged every human body into a better semblance of order nor did he jest as she carefully ripped the mana cores out of each dead Gardener. The stiffness of the bodies unsettled her enough while she moved them, so she kept from looking directly at their heads. If she saw a glimpse of the victims’ faces while she cut into the Gardeners, well, she knew she would not be able to control what her stomach would do next.
"I asked if you have a headache." Now that he mentioned it, Liara did feel a slight throbbing around her temples. None of the Gardeners had lain a hand on her and the electricity-induced numbness had worn off, so she should have considered herself lucky if a headache was the worst thing she was walking away from this battle with.
Liara felt Pellas' arms wrap none too gently around her shoulders. He forcibly turned her face away from the sink and toward him. He held up a single arm in front of her eye, the end of which emitted light like a pen light. He checked both her eyes and then asked, "Do you know where you are?"
That was a silly question and she was going to tell him so, right after she answered his stupid question, but her tongue stopped mid-answer. She felt it there, what he wanted to know, but it was behind a fog that she couldn’t see through. Panic started to seize her and she started to try and slip out of Pellas’ arms, but the golem started shushing her and gently, but firmly, made her sit on the ground.
“We do not have the points to spare to buy you an antipsychotic cocktail, otherwise that would help with your agitation. The best we can do right now is let you sleep for thirty minutes.”
“But I don’t think I can fall asleep. They’ll get me while I sleep. We should keep going.”
Pellas’ arms prevented Liara from rising and she sagged back down.
“I will watch you and wake you if anything comes near.” Liara tried to get up one more time, but her heart was not in it and she finally laid down on the ground, crying.
“Why am I here? Why? Why? Why?” Liara kept asking the same question. She did not know the answer and neither did Pellas, but the golem embraced her and stroked her hair, all the while kept his eye swiveling like a hawk for danger. Eventually, Liara’s mumbling faded and her breathing pattern bespoke that sleep had overcome her trembling brain. Now Pellas could only hope that a few minutes of sleep could help her mind process the psychic ravaging that her brain was still recovering from.
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“Ben, are you going to get up and help us?” Liara’s brother was, as usual, acting like a no-good lay-about and spending more time on his back than his feet.
“Yeah, yeah. Just give me a minute. I’m tired.”
“You’re always tired,” Liara’s sister Luanne replied. She had grabbed her scrap basket right away when Liara asked her and unlike their brother, actually contributed to keeping the house running.
“You know, why don’t you just go ahead without me? I’ll catch up in a few." Liara sighed at her brother's usual response but knew she could not get anything better from him. Occasionally he did do what he said he would, but those days were getting fewer and fewer.
The trip from the house to the streets was a blur, but Liara took it all in stride, each step took her nowhere, but the buildings streamed by. Luanne was still with her, but everyone else was a stranger. Her family used to know everyone on the block, close enough neighbors that they would all celebrate the holidays together and help one another in emergencies, but between the constant relocations and layoffs that was no longer the case. The Colony Central Authority had split once close communities into a million different atomizations. Now no one knew anybody.
Liara bumped into a stranger and apologized, but he did not reply, just kept streaming by like a faceless shadow. “Isn’t that weird?” Liara asked her sister, but when she looked back, Luanne was gone too. Everyone was gone and she was alone in the dusty streets of Crestline.
“Luanne?!” The ground started swallowing Liara’s feet, but she tried moving anyway. Each step just drove her further and further into the ground. “Luanne?!” The world blurred again and Liara stumbled among a crowd of dirty men and women.
They were whispering to one another, about her, about the sacrifice. Liara did not care, she just wanted them to tell her where her sister was, but they did not answer. When she was about to start swinging at the closest person, the chanting started.
“Grant us prosperity, grant us protection from the dark! Give us sight, give us sight, give us sight!”
The crowd of people parted and Liara swam to the edge of a great pit. It was blackened from weeks of use. Bone, metal, and ash swirled in the current conflagration, a flame of passion that had swept through her city and captured the populace with vain hopes and the empty promises of the Eyeless God.
In the center of the flame pit, a great beast was being burned alive. Its single eye was glaring at Liara and with one great arm, it clawed from the bottom of the pit to reach her. Liara was transfixed, by both her feet and paralysis of mind, but despite this, the monster did not reach her. The flames consumed it first, from the inside out, and it was burned away with little more than a skeleton, posed forever stuck in its last attempt to flee the fire.
“Grant us your blessing! Grant us your blessing! Aiyat, Shi Zoa Looga, aiyat!”
A robed figure from the other side of the pit was leading the chant, his arms raised in exultation. Next to him, another smaller form stood by, waiting.
“Burnt offerings and sacrifice! Freely given! Despise us not and cast back the curse that plagues us! Aiyat!”
Liara screamed at the two figures. For at last, she recognized them as strangers not, but they either did not hear or did not care. She knew what was about to happen next and dove into the flames first, into the skeletal arm that still reached for her. "Take me instead!" The chanting swelled and the flames licked her skin, devouring flesh and cloth in an inferno.
“Liara!” Luanne’s voice sprang in her ears. She would have replied, but everything was fading, even in such bright light.
“Liara!” It was dark. She was alone. “Liara!”
If Pellas had not been holding onto her so tightly, he would have been thrown off when Liara bolted up with a gasp.
“Liara, thank goodness. You were having a nightmare.” Liara stared at Pellas, her mind taking the half second it needed to remind her where she was. The reality of their current situation crashed down all at once and she slumped back on the ground, eyes closed.
“I’m fine now Pellas. I just need a minute, thank you.” She could have used a million, but all the time in the world could not undo what was already done. They could only be present for the now and keep heading for the future.
Pellas was still worried about his charge, but he could do nothing except wait and be there when she was ready. He squeezed her right hand again. “Take all the time you need, Liara.”
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When Liara was back on her feet, she had to answer a battery of questions from Pellas before he stopped hovering near her, they were the simplest of questions that even children knew, but she supposed he had his reasons.
“Where are you?”
“Apophyllion Academy.”
“What is the central capital?”
“City or planet?”
“Both.”
“Windsora, Solidad.”
“Who am I?”
“An annoying golem that I rotate between wanting to hug and strike with a flame palm.”
“Well, at least you still have your bad sense of humor.”
“What is the point of all these questions?” Liara was putting her flak vest back on. Apparently, Pellas had put it under her head so that she could use it as a makeshift pillow.
"Honestly, I was afraid that the Matriarch had scrambled your brains. It is not unheard of for the ill-prepared to go insane when facing psychic Yabanchi combatants."
“Hmm, maybe if my Golem partner had given me a better heads up, then I wouldn’t have tried to have a mental wrestling match with a psychic juggernaut.”
“Please, leave the dramatization to me Liara, you are not as good at it. Anyway, I would hardly call a Matriarch a juggernaut. They’re only worth fifty points.”
Liara cringed at her own snappiness and bit down on her comeback. She looked back at the cafeteria hall and counted. Seventeen dead Cadavers and one Matriarch. It felt ghoulish to do the math, considering the stench of their electric burned flesh still hung in the air, but all those dead Yabanchi must have been worth quite a few points. She checked her stats screen and gasped, she had jumped to a little over one thousand.
When she noted this to Pellas he bobbed and replied, “Yes, well, despite how bad of an idea shocking yourself with all the electricity was, I have to admit it paid off.”
“Where did all these points come from?”
“Let me see,” Pellas’ eye darkened and he started reciting numbers. “You started with those fourteen thousand three hundred and fifty points.”
“Which we still don’t know where they came from?” Liara replied with a half statement, half question.
"Right, please do not interrupt me while I calculate this." Pellas put a thin arm to Liara's lips. "Then you received one hundred for your introduction quest, a single kill bonus netted fifty, and those three Yabanchi you killed earlier were worth thirty."
“But the real points started rolling in with this last battle. Those seventeen Cadavers were worth twenty each. Couple that with fifty from the Matriarch and the two hundred from your daily bonus, then subtract the costs of everything so far,” Pellas tapped the end of Liara’s nose and smugly said, "and you have one thousand and ten points.”
The golem spread all his arms out like he was bowing for a performance, but if he expected applause, he had another thing coming.
“You said that we did not have any points to spare for medication. Why would you say that while we’re sitting on over a thousand points?”
Pellas' arms slowly dropped back to their spider-like positions and he replied, "Getting all those points at the start of your career must have ruined your perception of Magical Girl economics. The fact is that we need every point possible if you are to survive the coming hours, let alone purchase the necessary upgrades I have been planning."
The mention of upgrades made Liara perk up and she asked, “What kind can we afford with the points we have?”
“If you had ten thousand, then I would purchase the ‘fire beam’ mana art for you immediately, but if you recall, I had to buy you a new eye and hand instead.”
“Point taken, Pellas. There has to be something though. What about attribute ampules? An increase in my strength or vitality stats would be nice."
"Well," Pellas paused and looked uncomfortable before replying, "that thought crossed my mind, but your strength and vitality stats are confusing, to say the least."
“No, I saw them when I was scrolling through them earlier. Both my strength and vitality shot up by two points after I became a magical girl.”
“And their increase has certainly shown their fruit with the way you decapitated that poor Mylock earlier. Yet when I checked the price to increase your stats earlier, the cost is more prohibitive than it should be.”
“I’m not following.” All this talk of points and costs was giving Liara a headache again. Talia was the one who was better with Magical Girl theories and rules, she would understand what Pellas was saying, but Liara needed it spelled out for her.
"An increase to a person's stats is proportional to the level that the stat is being increased. This is true for both Paladins and Magical Girls. In theory, when we look at your still relatively low nines in both strength and vitality, their cost should only be one hundred points each to upgrade them to ten." Pellas paused, still unsure of the significance of the stats himself. "In your case, the cost to raise them from nine to ten, however, would be five hundred each."
"What?! How is that fair?" Liara was in a fight-or-die situation and now the system itself was conspiring against her. If it was not one thing it was another and she was getting tired of rolling with the punches.
“Please Liara, please! I do not know how to explain this error. The cost is universal for every Magical Girl’s base stats. It is not like the system is trying to gouge you in your hour of need.”
When the fire rages in you, you have to let it flow, rather than keep it pent up or released all at once. That was the advice the battle instructors had taught Liara when she was learning flame strike and that was what she practiced now with her anger. She was usually not one to burst out in anger anyway, but the last few hours of fighting eldritch abominations were fraying at the ends of her nerves. She steadied herself and asked, “What can we do? I know that stats are not our only option.”
"Indeed! We do have cheaper alternatives, thanks largely in part to the Cadavers and Matriarch you slew. Their cores are not only useful for upgrading me but they can be used in a special mana core skill selection shop with reduced costs compared to other skill options."
“So I can afford something like ‘fire beam’?”
“Oh good heavens no, maybe if you had a hundred drone cores!” Pellas giggled at a joke only he understood, but stopped when he saw Liara’s face. “Sorry. As I was saying, you could with different cores utilized, but our only abundance right now is Gardener and Mylock cores. The mana skills associated with those types are not destructive so much as deceptive in nature.”
What Liara really wanted at the moment was enough firepower to level a building with. Sneaking around had been her modus operandi for most of her life and now it would appear that sneaking would continue to define her. Though it was not her preference, she still wanted to have every tool available, so she bade Pellas to continue.
“With ten Gardener cores and our remaining Mylock core, I can purchase the skill ‘lesser hallucination’ for five hundred points.”
“Five hundred still seems like a lot,” Liara replied.
"Unfortunately, the next cheapest skill option is two thousand, but between your above-average authority stat and my lesser suggestion ability, I think that it is an excellent choice!"
“I need weapons though. The spear that Dr. Holzer lent me is toast and I can’t just drain my mana every time I need to use a fireball.” The thought of Dr. Holzer brought mixed feelings for Liara. She had barely known him, aside from being intimidated by him in all the years she had spent at the academy, but now that he was gone, she felt a mixture of melancholy and dread. Melancholy because the retired paladin was likely dead and dread because the Destroyer that killed him was still out there. If she was going to face that thing again, a flame strike would not cut it.
“Well, I do have an idea for that as well. There are mana storage spheres that you can purchase for fifty points each. If you fill them with your fireball then you can carry them around and use them as needed without paying the cost an additional time.”
More points to spend, for disposable tools too, but the idea of carrying around a fireball like a hand grenade appealed to Liara. The possibilities flowed through her head and she nodded. “So that means I’ll have to wait here and fill them up as my mana recharges. That would take way too long though.”
“Unfortunately, yes. Normally if we bought three then it would take you hours to fill them and restore your own natural reserves, but we can purchase a mana restoration elixir for an additional two hundred points. It can boost your mana recharge rate significantly for an hour, so you would only have to wait approximately twenty minutes to fill the spheres."
"That's nearly half of my points spent on consumables though!"
"Yes, but I think it is worth it when you consider how much time has been spent so far.”
Ultimately, Liara thought so too and she approved the point expenditure for the lesser hallucination skill, elixer, and three mana storage spheres. The point costs were the last thing on her mind, now that she realized how precious her time was in comparison. She still had to find more survivors and investigate the main administration building, but most of all, her friends were waiting for her back at the shelter. She had the time to spare, but a single thought ate at her: did they?
Liara’s Stats
Strength 9 Constitution 9 Reaction 10 Authority 11 Mana 0/330 (60 rpm) Mana Art Specialization Flame Strike (15), Fireball (300), Lesser Hallucination (50) Augmentations Reinforced mana hand, Mana eye Golem Upgrades
Basic Medical Suite, Mimicry,
Lesser Suggestion
Items Mana Storage Spheres (3)