Lexus checked his map every few hours. Every hour, really. He didn’t simply do one thing with his map either, he switched between different goals like he would die of he didn’t make a few new ones every day.
Unfortunately, the map wasn’t as omniscient as Lexus wanted nor thought.
But the current top goals he switched between were ‘nearest good potential party member’, after which he would check every class he knew about in the same format to figure out who the party member was. It gave him a travel path from his location towards them.
And-
“Aurora,” Lexus said, calling Aurora from whatever she had been doing at the back of the cart. Probably sleeping in, unlike Lexus who was up from before the sun rose.
Crawling on the floor from the back of the carriage was Aurora, who was using one arm to drag herself. “Yes, Lexus?”
“Do you know what this means?” The Hero said, shoving the paper in the groggy Aurora’s eyes. Focusing her eyes on the paper, she saw a ‘half-dot’. Meaning 50% of it was there, the other half was not.
“Probably something like… 50% of what you’re looking for is there. What are you looking at, anyway?” She replied, clawing onto the wall of the carriage to drag herself to her feet.
Lexus’ second highest priority to check on the map was for ‘Alive Bastion of Auiver Monks’. This meaning he could save himself the extra minute or so he had to use to iron out the goal in his mind.
Aurora found it atrocious that Lexus could manipulate his goals like that so easily, for others it would take hours, even if they had strong convictions. For those using the map for fun, sometimes you couldn’t even do it at all.
Repeating what he had set as his goal to Aurora, she screeched back at him, “Half alive Monks?! They…”
Lexus knew what the singular option was. He just didn’t want to believe it.
“Zegar… has been turned into an undead.”
———
Upon returning to the library after seeing Turlough off, who was sweating.. ‘buckets’ when he left the building, Jane tutored me on the English language with the special dictionary I had selected on her hands.
“I really underestimated how hard the word ‘the’ was to explain,” Jane said scratching her head. “But basically it refers to.. just about anything, the only exception that comes to my mind being names, so no ‘The Jane’, and is used to single out the word you are trying to refer to.”
“You just explained it pretty simply, though?” I asked back in confusion. “Well, it took me a second to think about it. And thats not all there is to ‘the’,” Jane replied leaning closer to me, to look at the next word in the dictionary: A.
I didn’t quite understand why a letter would be a word at the same time, but Common was the universally excepted easiest language. So I couldn’t complain much.
“‘A’ is another word like ‘the’, except it refers to something… non individual or mot special enough to receive that treatment. Like ‘a cat’ compared to ‘the cat’. The first meaning the cat is just… a cat. Nothing special. ‘The’ means something of higher importance,” she explained, taking her sweet time doing so.
“Your language is so confusing, Jane. I could probably teach you Common in a week,” I stated simply, reading the definition of ‘A’ to myself while Jane thought of how to better explain it so I wouldn’t become a ‘Grammar Police’, as she had put it.
Jane looked up from the dictionary, “Really? I’d love that!” To which I simply nodded. It wouldn’t take long to teach her, and it was good to propagate the simply superior language that was Common.
Looking back down to the dictionary with a smile, Jane began to speak, “Alright so ‘that’ refers to…”
~~~~~
After my Translation had worn off, I departed from the library and promised I would come back tomorrow with or without a renewed Translation.
Oddly enough Jane had refused me making a simple cheat sheet with my newfound kindergarten level English to Common. But, from what the older Monks had told me, women were weird.
Or perhaps it was just the people of this plane that were weird. Tapping on my still-broken arm, I estimated the time for its recovery being another few hours yet. Most of the brokenness I felt was patched up to a greater extent than it was not, but in the area where the Juggernaut had directly impacted my arm, it was the opposite by far.
So, upon returning to my extra-provided apartment, I activated ‘Meditation’.
It was a simple skill, really. Just put in 1-5 mana, depending on how fast of a result you wanted, and sit relatively still for a maximum of 20 minutes, resulted from putting only 1 point in. And during these minutes, both mana and your body would recover back to their peak form.
For 5 mana, it was just 8 minutes.
And now that I had such entertainment as a.. Television, that 8 minute waiting time became even more easy.
I really was quite fond of this ‘sponge bob’.
———
A week had passed now, since the Auiver incident. 5 days since the Zegar incident. Lexus had been doing his best not to flip his map’s goal to Zegar every other second, but failed when Aurora started to talk about it.
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So, here he was, moments from entering the city where his Paladin lied. Flipping his map off of the Zegar situation and to his Paladin’s location he found-
Nothing. As if they were no longer of this plane, or no longer of this plane.
Lexus was straight to the fact, stopping the carriage, even. Which caused Aurora to emerge from her cave in the back of said carriage, as it was still far too bright and early out for her.
“What are you doing?” She asked, watching the sitting Lexus with keen eyes. Lexus, who had managed to shift his goal, in record time, to ‘corpse of Paladin I have been tracking’.
There were no results.
“Our Paladin.. has gone missing. Either off to another plane or their corpse has been thoroughly annihilated,” he responded in fashion to his mood, sourly.
Hurriedly striding over to where Lexus was sitting, bending over to stare at the map in Lexus’ hands. “Thats.. we should ask around. Use your map for it,” Aurora said, steadily returning to her full height as she said so. “Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that, just maybe, this Paladin was taken by another portal.”
Lexus looked up to her, his head at her chest level, “I’m not sure about the portal theory… they could have just gone on a trip to another plane, for all we know.”
Aurora scoffed, a dreamy look in her eyes at Lexus’ optimism and innocence. “You checked the map yesterday night, didn’t you?” She asked, planning to argue her point from it.
“I checked it 2 hours ago.”
She chortled.
“2 hours ago.. and you really believe that something suspicious isn’t going on?” She asked, mumbling something afterwards about how hard it would be to live with someone like the current him.
“No. I just like to hope,” Lexus replied, not bothering to think about what his enhanced hearing had heard Aurora say. Friends could live together, too.
Aurora sighed, plopping down at Lexus’ side and dozing off as she did so. Falling asleep on Lexus’ arm.
His only thought in relation to this was,
It’ll be hard to protect her while she was in this position.
———
“So what can you two do?” Mezli asked, them being a woman with medium toned skin, looking at me, then turning towards Turlough, who had just been in a fight at his job, inciting him going to join the Power Brigade, which I thought was simply a brilliant idea. Leading me to here with him. Although he was happy enough with it, gaining his 12th level from the encounter.
Stepping up before Turlough could, I began to list all my abilities and such, “As I’ve learned, I am something equivalent to a ‘Bruiser’, but additionally I have some ranged attacks and can heal myself, both natural regeneration and active, also I can heal others, although less than myself.”
Mezli looked interested at the mention of me being able to heal others, “How effective is your healing?”
“It can heal broken bones in a minute or so, fractures and such don’t make a difference, as it applies to the whole area my palm covers, roughly,” I replied, repeating what the older Monks had taught me. Also from experience, me having healed Turlough’s broken leg from his fight at his warehouse job.
“Also, I’ve been trained in close combat since I was young, 10 years of experience,” I said, hopefully adding more credibility to my resume.
Metzli nodded and then turned to Turlough, who began to list his incoherent powers. From Firebolt to Grease to Haste to Mage’s Hand, he demonstrated all of them, except Shocking Grasp, because.. he needed to shock someone with it. And I, nor anyone else, didn’t particularly want to be a test for it.
Firebolt was different because he could shoot it at the fire resistance things in Metzli’s office, as she didn’t care for some reason.
“You two both seem useful, you’re hired, welcome to your life as a mercenary,” Metzli said, walking back to her desk from where she was standing.
“You don’t need to do.. background checks or something?” Asked Turlough in response to Metzli’s nonchalance. “Are you two murderous psychopaths?” She responded in kind, sitting down at her desk now. “I will have to do the paperwork, however. So come back in a day and we’ll sort the both of you out.”
Huh… that was.. easy? Too easy, in fact. Why weren’t there a dozen more people here then?
It was free money! Mr. Krabs had taught me the importance of money well, I wouldn’t forget his lessons soon, either. And experience, presumably I would be protecting people in this job.
Overall, this job seemed like pure positives.
What could go wrong?
———
The Litch walked through his dilapidated castle, housed inside a similarly dilapidated city, the former capital of some long forgotten kingdom.
He walked, and he walked. Until, after an hour of walking in a straight line, he ended up outside a room exuding clear signs of magic. Dark, neutral, and divine combining to form an aura that would scare away any creature without the proper resistances.
The Litch, however, had these resistances in spades.
Entering into the room through a double door twice his height and colored with faded dark red colors and rusting gold covering it, The Litch walked to the only object in the room, a wooden table that, in contrast to everything else, appeared new.
The rest of the room beside the table was covered in an all consuming darkness, a singular spotlight illuminating the table and fending off the devouring darkness, hands reaching out of the darkness every now and then to try and even get a piece of the table or The Litch.
Now standing before the table in ornate purple robes, a skeletal hand reached out to the table and laid itself on a map that covered the entirety of the table as large as a small room itself.
On the map was a moving a moving dot, two combined into one due to their close proximity. Lexus and Aurora.
Pushing his intent into the map, the original version of Lexus’ goal finding map, or rather the first one of it to be given to the mortal world, the dots representing Lexus and Aurora disappeared. Instead replaced by hundreds of others.
All the potential party members of Lexus.
Opening his skull’s jaw wide ope, a plume of dust coming out of it as he did so, The Litch spoke, “The Triumvirate may have forbidden me from attacking the Hero and his party till 2 years from now… the incident of Auiver being an exception because of Thegar’s first strike on me…“
The Litch cackled, his own bones creating a chorus of sound as they rattled in response to The Litch’s erratic behavior. The entire castle shook as well, the jingling of bones grew louder and louder until-
The entire castle rose from the ground. The castle warping—no, bones warping—as the ‘castle’, simply known as The Fate of Uguvin, grew legs and arms. The room where The Litch and the Hero Map were in being the skull of Uguvin.
The souls of the damned controlling its movement just like a regular brain would.
“But, they can’t fault me for being the big bad villain and attacking a few cities, can they?” The Litch said, his voice overlapped by an overwhelmingly loud beat.
A heart beat.
The chest of Uguvin was illuminated by a bright red, its origin being from inside Uguvin. It thumped again, and then for a third time.
Until, eventually, its thumping was so loud and fast the thunderous sound produced by a gigantic skeleton the size of an entire castle, not just any either, but one from the greatest time period and thus greatest sized castles, walking through a ancient city.
Back inside the skull of Uguvin, The Litch set his sights on the city with a party member nearest to the Hero. He would simply stop by and say hi, then erase everyone..’s memory. He would set up communication blockers, too.
His class allowed him to do lots of things.
Too dangerous for him to become the enemy of an entire kingdom.
It wouldn’t be good for him to fight the gods that came down to punish him for his destruction of their patron kingdom.