“I guess we have to face the facts,” I said as we walked up the road toward Mount Mirrak. “We’re steadfast crusaders, now. It says so on the items.”
“I think that has more to do with their healing effect,” Cuby said.
“Their very strong healing effect,” I said. “10% of one of those wyvern’s Hit Points is most of your health bar.”
Cuby sighed. She had 750 Hit Points, plus 428 Absorb from my Supercharged Mana Shield. Speaking of….
“Look, I know I was all about the Magical Virtuoso passive, but the other one regenerates Mana Shield every 10 seconds, stops its regeneration from being interrupted, and recasts it at half strength after 10 seconds when it hits 0. It’s like a 43 Hit Point per second regeneration buff.”
“So take it!” said Cuby. “You said you’d be happy if the other passive was better, remember? It’s better!”
“I wanted to cast Slow,” I said. “But you’re right.”
“I’m just glad that the angels gave you some heals.”
I laughed. Every single one of the spells that my candle-flame was giving me felt like it was not only strong to have, but especially good for our situation. With Empyreal Aegis, we were both walking around with extra Divine resistance—which gave Cuby an extra flat reduction on account of her new class ability, Saint’s Purity.
And she was getting more out of all of the buffs. My Empyreal Aegis granted 24 Divine resistance—on her, that was 29. Same with Elemental Aegis, and Elemental Weaponry. We’d already tested it to see that it was working with Haste, and her Flurry of Steel, and my heal spell, and our Gift of Empyreal Might, and our Gift of Resistance….
Like I had said: these angels were power gamers.
“Realistically, I have one heal,” I said. “Though I guess my Moment of Solace and the new Mana Shield make that a little better. And I have one use of Gift of Mercy left—that’s a heal.”
“Mhmm. Say, if you want to cast Slow again, I think there’s a skill buy for it. You’re level 10 now.”
I blinked. “Right,” I said. “New skills.” I nodded, brought up my skill menu… and then closed it. “I’ll look in a minute,” I said. “This is all really nice. We’re going to be way more effective against those demons… but right now I think I don’t want to talk about the game for awhile.”
“What?”
“I don’t,” I said, shrugging. “It’s uphill most of the way to Mount Mirrak, which means we’re on foot. We won’t get another chance to just talk until we make camp in—” I checked my Adventuring clock, “—three and a half hours.”
“So I can ask you more questions about being human?” Cuby said, sounding hopeful.
“Sure,” I said. “Actually, can I try something?”
“Okay!”
I pictured taking a ride on a rollercoaster—being cranked up to the very top of the drop, the moment of anticipation as the cars slowly pitch forward and gain momentum, the weightless rush of being lifted out of my seat—and I sent all this through our newly-minted mind link.
“Are you getting it?” I asked.
“Huh,” said Cuby. “I don’t think so. I get that you’re trying to show me a rollercoaster, and I get that I’m supposed to be… excited, somehow. But I don’t really see it.”
“Damn,” I said. “I was hoping I could use the mind link to show you more of what my world is like—a world built by actual humans.”
“That would be nice,” Cuby said, her voice a little wistful. “But you can still just tell me about them.”
“Actually,” I said, “I wanted you to tell me some more about yourself and the Hierarchy. See, meeting you is sort of… mind blowing.”
“Huh?”
“Just another thing to add to the list of things that I’m not sure I’ve properly processed,” I said. “My people have never met another sapient species, Cuby. Unless I was catapulted into the future, or my brain-scan kept in storage, or something, I might actually be the first person to do that.”
“That sounds pretty important.”
“Except I’m not even sure I’m qualified to play the game,” I said. “Let alone be the first human to meet other species.”
“You’re playing well, though,” said Cuby. “You’re definitely qualified!”
I could have laughed. How did I explain to her that as much as it was nice that I’d played some games before, it would probably have been much more effective to take a member of the CIA or something—an intelligent person who could work in moral gray areas—and teach them to play video games? Instead they had me.
Stolen novel; please report.
“I bet you just never knew you had it in you,” Cuby said. “And your natural human abilities are revealing themselves.”
Now I did laugh. “Maybe,” I said dubiously. “But now we’re talking about me, again. Will you tell me about you, your species? What was the phrenodine homeworld called—Enzal? With the bad nutrient gel?”
“You remember,” said Cuby.
“Does the Hierarchy of El teach evolution?”
Now Cuby laughed. “Of course. It would be hard for them to teach something else—at least to us. But I don’t know, let’s see… you’re like a taxin el, yes? Of course you are, these are human bodies….”
She seemed to think for a few more moments before saying: “Phrenodine are very different to humans. I don’t really know how to teach you about it because I don’t really know how they teach the taxin el. The only other species allowed near taxin el young are telorians, and only in very special circumstances. Enzal, then,” she said, nodding to herself. “Life on Enzal is very physically symbiotic, I suppose. I mean, I know that all life in a biosphere is symbiotic, but on Enzal… the planet is mostly coated in the Kulth. Does that translate?”
“No.”
“Good,” she said. “There’s nothing really like the Kulth anywhere else in the galaxy, as far as we know, so it shouldn’t. Think of it like a big layer of very sophisticated meat, all made of many interlocking organisms, but the most significant class of organisms are all actually also called kulth. We named the whole thing altogether after its most important part—sorry, I know it’s confusing.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “My people do that sort of stuff all the time.”
“Great,” said Cuby. “So…” she sighed. “I’m sorry, it’s hard to figure out how to explain this. It’s a whole discipline to study how the Kulth protects itself—the taxin el and the karox are especially interested because to them, a whole planet covered in one continuous organism should be vulnerable to predatory organisms like certain bacteria, or fungi, or reptilian predators. But just trust me when I say that the Kulth is very resilient to parasitism—hostile parasites don’t get evolved out of the biosphere, they actually get attacked like how a taxin el’s immune system works.” She paused. Frowned. “Do humans have an immune system?”
“Yes,” I said, not wanting to interrupt her and tell her that I very much suspected that taxin el were just humans, or at least very closely related.
“Good,” said Cuby. “Enzal has something that works even better, and the scientists love it. Anyway, phrenodine are a class of organism that we call cultivators. Did that translate?”
“You’re cultivators,” I said. “Made sense to me.” I hesitated, then added: “but we might be thinking of different things right now. What does it mean that phrenodine are cultivators?”
“Okay,” she said. “Phrenodine grow in semi-damp locations. We’re like trees, actually,” she said. “Though we cultivate a siriadel for the strongest part of our structure—we don’t have trunks. Actually, you can think of us like vines, maybe—but vines that grow siriadels to use as trunks and end up looking a bit more like trees.”
“Okay,” I said, smiling with simple enjoyment. Cuby was an alien—a real alien: how could I be anything but excited?
“But the point is that we’re photosynthetic,” she said. “And large. Very selfish, the phrenodine—we take up a lot of solar surface area. Naturally, we evolved to become better cultivators as our size increased so as to avoid being deemed parasitic and eradicated.”
“How does that work—cultivating?” I said. “You’re just biologically very symbiotic?”
“I’ll try to say this in a way you’ll understand,” Cuby said, seemingly lost in thought. “It’s just, if you don’t know the phrenodine words, then they’re just chemicals with a lot of different organisms inside. But we dispense fluids that alter the environment around us, and our seeds have mostly evolved to be food for the ikkalmites so that they don’t need as many flowering phrue… that sort of thing. A big part of it is that a lot of the Kulth is a little like your musculature, and almost all cultivators can control it with electro-chemical signals. I want to say that unlike a taxin el, phrenodine don’t consider their bodies to be just that single biological unit which contains their genetic identifiers… and that’s sort of true! But the taxin el are also filled with other organisms, they just don’t like to think of it that way.”
“So you’re evolved to take care of your environment,” I said. “And coexist with other species.”
“I know, I know,” said Cuby. “That’s how everything else works, too—that’s how these trees work, say. But the cultivator species of Enzal needed to do it so much that it’s essentially how phrenodine developed intelligence—we started sending signals to so many things, reaching so deep and far into the Kulth, that our signals become sophisticated enough to talk to each other and our mutually beneficial networks became societies. And out of the compulsions in us that led us to hate both waste and parasitism, we developed morality, and codes of ethics.”
“That’s fascinating,” I said. “I bet there are people where I’m from who would give their whole life toward learning more about your people.”
Cuby laughed. “Taxin el typically find the Kulth very… gross and smelly. They like their meat to be organized, with only parts of it visible. Speaking of—I’m going to finish my leg.” She materialized her giant hunk of meat.
“Good idea,” I said, pulling out my own. “So what about you—where’d you grow up, what did you do before you got here?”
“Oh, right,” she said. “You don’t know anything.”
I laughed.
“About this, I mean.”
“I know.”
“It’s rather sad,” said Cuby. “You might be the only player in here who doesn’t know enough to be impressed by me.”
“You’ve sort of hinted as much—what’s a left hand in shadow?”
“Oh,” said Cuby, nodding. “That was my old job, see. It’s the highest calling a phrenodine can achieve. It’s someone who works for a prominent taxin el and handles any immoral deeds or crimes they need committed, among other things. And I was very good at it.”
I sighed. I suppose that once I’d learned the nature of Solarius, I’d been comfortable not thinking about how readily Cuby had wanted to kill three unknown people in the mines—it really had been a misunderstanding, of sorts.
But I knew her enough to know better than that. Solarius hadn’t had anything to do with it, or she would have told me right then because she’d have known it would change my mind. And a meal shared on a cliffside, or some new feelings of sympathy for the dead of Oromar’s Bastion, had likely not changed who she really was.
Or maybe I just didn’t understand her?
Or maybe I could change her myself.
I almost had to brace myself as I said: “All right, Cuby—tell me all about it.”