Mateo was still dead and I had nothing to do with the permanence of such death. Mariana was alive and I had nothing to do with her continued survival. The half elves, Florencia, Sabrina and Cornelio, were still breathing, to my extreme displeasure. And hopping between teleportation points and camping on the wild was getting old fast.
Meanwhile everyone else slept, I stared at the moon, using my hand to cover its life bar, imagining it was the one back on Earth. A week had passed since the night of the burial, and we had made no progress whatsoever. The girls wanted to visit their mother’s side of the family, yet Cornelio had his reservations, as since the last time they attempted to marry him off, so he seemed to despise the elf side of the family.
“Diana, Diana, Diana… why aren’t you easier to bring down and murder?”
The moon didn’t answer, she was all high and mighty there, looming on the sky, drowning children whose careless parents forgot buried in the beach’s sand.
I had never visited the beaches of Planet. I wondered. I wondered if the sand would be sprinkled with diaphanous health bars from the mollusks that inhabited beneath the surface. Did seals have a fat stat? did I have a fat stat? I checked.
Sadly, that day I learned death, taxes and the BMI are inescapable. I also had an erythrocyte sedimentation rate stat. And blood sugar levels. Several other stats regarded the immune system, another the levels of different hormones in blood, and, overall, all the things that could kill you if God misplaced a comma. My build? Cholesterol min-maxer.
This begged the question: was all that was quantifiable hidden in some stat window? Could I see, for example, the amount, however small, of inverted sugar in my organism?
After a bit of fiddling around I found the added length of all my telomers, and seeing the number fluctuate each second filled me with such a feeling of dread that I decided to think about anything else.
“Food,” I whispered, in an almost inaudible voice.
A most fluffy entity marifested out of thin air. One second it wasn’t there, and the next, it was. She wagged her tail and her eyes drilled on my very soul as I sat and she placed her head over my lap.
“Food!” she slurred, half her brain still asleep, as if she were a treat-seeking dolphin.
“Sorry Mariana, I was thinking out loud. I said ‘feud’, not food.”
“You said ‘Food’, I would not be awake otherways,” she sent the typo straight into my grey matter.
“Wise, Mariana, wise.”
She began salivating uncontrollably, her eyes glazed over, her head trembling, shaking from side to side. One would think she was about to explode. But, suddenly, she went limp and started snoring as if her life depended on it.
“What a cute shut down process, Mar.” I snarked, thinking about how to remove her head from my thigh to not lose said extremity due to lack of blood flow.
I wondered if there were stats we never saw, due to them only rising above zero when we slept. Maybe eye bouts per second during REM.
I swatted Mariana’s head off my person and started pacing around the clearing we had set up camp in. What was our next step? The Escapists had shown no signs of pursuit. We were on the move, but they had enough personnel to camp every known teleportation point. Fernando, they had Fernando. It was not far-fetched to think about the things they could do with his Forget-Me-Nots. A flower is easy to hide nearly anywhere, after all.
The eye could be upon us, but their resources were not being spent on hunting us down. Yet we could not relax and lower our guard, because that would be the perfect chance for them to strike.
After a few minutes of thinking, I took a decision.
“Sabrina, Florencia, wake up. Now!”
I have had zombies that raised faster than those two, so I prepared for melee. I searched for a low-leveled bough on the floor (I am not making that mistake twice), and ordered it to do my bidding. I sincerely don’t remember what species of three provided the branch that ended up beating Florencia awake, but it worked, so I cannot complain. I’ll complain anyway but don’t do it at home. I like ficuses. The trees weren’t ficuses. Is the plural ficuses, even?
It is.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Anyway, as the branch beat Florencia barely awake, I went up to Sabrina and considered how to better wake her up. I decided she, being more useful, deserved the use more traditional means. So I dropped Mariana on her and observed. It was a massacre, with Mariana jolting awake, and immediately going “lick nearest face” mode.
Sabrina screeched like the local healer when you burn her on a pyre because everyone in your town shares the same two grandparents.
“Mariana, stop, I am not a lollipop!”
“Show me three peer reviewed papers supporting your claim,” demanded Mariana.
“There isn’t peer review in here…” she whined, giving up and letting the thicc licc take her.
I turned just in time to notice a rabid Florencia had subdued the branch, and was about to use it to bat my head off my shoulders.
“Time out!” I called, and she stopped mid swing. “Good, now you are not intending to break that on my head, I need you to prepare to be our offtank in the upcoming dungeon, I will be the primary tank, and Sabrina…” I lowered my voice until it was a whisper. “Does Sabrina have any battle capabilities?”
“She’s an engineer. As long as she has contraptions in her inventory… well, things both living and undead will be in trouble,” She explained, pointing at her helpless, overlicked sister with the branch.
“And does she have any battle-ready contraptions in her inventory?”
She gave a sad shake of her feathery head. “I am afraid she may have the frying pan alone.”
“I’ll take that as her being armed and ready to go.”
Sabrina finally freed herself from the suffocating grasp of Mariana. My faithful and so obedient companion had gone on a dangerous quest to retrieve a stick Sabrina had thrown in a random direction.
“You are the richest person alive, Walter. Buy me the materials and I’ll make us an army of battling automatons and high potency weapons.”
“No, I am poor. Mariana is the Eldritchnomics engine.”
She turned her head in our direction, getting distracted from her task of stalking the stick “I am what?”
“The Venezolator 5000,” I clarified.
I was thinking that we could go and collapse some economy, permanently ruining a small city-state for some harmless fun. A sort of theme park for us. I wondered if starving children gave good XP. Then I wondered if I were becoming a monster. I licked my wrist. I didn’t feel any more energized, so I discarded my theory.
“Sabrina, what do you need? Wire? Plates? Electronic components?”
“Technology here doesn’t work particularly like in Earth. I will need some magic things unless you want to get the acids and rare metals needed to fashion good batteries.”
Mariana summoned a pile of batteries the size of my pile of dirty laundry in front of us.
“You have a spell for that,” I stated. It wasn’t a question. It was my daily episode of giving up on the coherence and seriousness of this reality.
“Summon Battery Pile. I expected the percussion instrument but this works,” telepathed Mariana.
“Mariana, that’s an environmental hazard!” Sabrina bleated.
I approached Sabrina and placed a hand in her shoulder. “I am sorry for your neuronal loss.” I made a pause as her face scrunched due to the fact I was making such a joke so soon after the death of her father, or so I think. “Mariana is an omnihazard. Her desert arson destroyed a whole alien planet.”
“Are they charged?” Sabrina asked, inspecting one.
“Let me read the spell description…” Mariana hummed elevator music for a few seconds. “No, nor are they rechargeable.”
“So what’s the point of the spell?” Sabrina kept on complaining.
“Upsetting the delicate chemical equilibrium of the local phreatic zone,” she hastily explained.
“Mar,” I said.
“What?”
“I fucking love you, you brainfull/less blonde.”
“And I like when you feed me!” she reciprocated the feeling and began circling around me, giving little happy leaps.
“Shouldn’t you reserve those words for your future wife?” Florencia asked with a slight amount of poison in her voice.
“Florencia, do you believe in the tooth fairy?”
“Of course not! A fairy made of teeth! Preposterous!” she said between chuckles.
“Good, because I don’t believe in my future wife.”
Her face bretrayed how disheartened she was at that. “But I want you to be happy, you are good to us!” She whined.
“I am happy like this. I am happy being alone.”
“No, you are not, I heard you cry at night!”
“Those are tears of happiness because the only insufferable bitch in my life is Mariana,” I confessed in all honesty. It was a good thing my only responsibility was caring for a Golden Retriever.
“Walter, the batteries are too spicy for me!” Mariana interrupted us. She brought a battery she was chewing on to my feet. The situation seemed very distressing for her.
“Mariana,” I spoke to her like I would to a special needs child.
“Yes?”
“Why?” then I shook her like I would a special needs child before going to prison.
“Human female companionship would go a long way in making you truly happy, Walter,” Florencia said.
“No, it would make me miserable. I don’t want the responsabilities of a girlfriend, much less a wife. Occasional sex cannot be worth the hassle, “then I pointed at the heavenly vault. “And you, Evolution, will not trick me into thinking otherwise.”
“But you will age and die alone if you don’t form a family!”
“Like my great uncle, who had seven sons and daughters and ended up in being cared for by nurses that hated him anyways?” I snatched another battery from mariana’s mouth before she broke the exterior of it by chewing. “I’ll die alone, I’ll die godless, and that’s mighty fine in my book.”
“Why do you insist in being sad,” she crossed her arms and glared at me, still holding the stick.
“I don’t see happiness as a value to be pursued or attained, Flor. Our worldviews are diametrically opposed in many aspects. Now, let us get that those components for Sabrina’s work in the morning. Tell Mariana where to teleport us when we are reaedy, Sab, i have a date with Morpheus. I will beat him up for being a little bitch. Wake up Cornelio, tell him to be on guard.”
Flor didn’t answer, but looked sad.
“What will my brother do in the dungeon, though?” asked Sabrina, pointing at the snoring bulge that was Cornelio. “He is not… battle-tested.”
“I’ll figure something out. Worst case scenario, we will have Mariana accidentally defeat the dungeon boss. Eventually. Given infinite time, everything succumbs to her.”