By Akemi’s estimates, it was nearing eight o’clock when she finally heard back from the goat.

She had requested that her System wake her up the moment she got a notification, and it delivered in spades, emitting a sound that sounded like a mix between a fire alarm and a banshee’s wail. She expected to hear N’og complain, but luckily it seemed that the sound, like the System screen, was only experienced by her. How terribly convenient.

She rubbed her eyes and begrudgingly hauled herself into a sitting position. Forgetting that Mutt had been sleeping in her hood, the pika fell onto the ground and hissed, its flame tail bursting alight. Its ears flipped back, rigid, in a way that was surely intended to look menacing. It failed.

“Yeah, yeah,” Akemi said, nudging the creature with her foot lovingly—well, for as loving as Akemi could be—and opened her accomplice panel. “Don’t give me all that. I’m treating you to a proper buffet tonight.”

Kobe: Just because I accepted your accomplice request does not mean I consented to becoming your personal encyclopedia, human.

She laughed. Human. He made himself sound like a pretentious space alien.

She supposed, then, that he kind of was, for all intents and purposes. Kodra was certainly no Earth, despite the superficial similarities. Grass was still green, sure. Roosters still cawed into the early hours of the morning. But there was a subtle, discomforting difference between it all.

She rose from bed, and walked over to the wall, balancing her elbows on the small window that overlooked the dusky garden outside. Even the moonlight here was different. Faintly blue. And the moon—which she tracked with her eyes, following it up into the starless sky—was not a white, distant orb. It was terribly large, a fistful of craggy white rock that could be seen in vivid detail. The kind of thing to jump out of the page of a children’s book.

She had never had the urge to travel to the moon back on Earth—she left science to the people with an interest in textbooks—but staring up at this one now, so enormous and god-like in size, she had an odd craving to go there. It felt oddly… possible. That was the difference between this place and Earth. She no longer felt restricted by flesh and brain. Here, there was a stairwell of power that went all the way up into the glittering stars. All it would take to walk to the moon was enough cunning, enough drive.

Someday she would do more than just travel there. She would pluck it from the sky, and hold it between her fingers. Pinch it, and watch it explode. A speck of dust to a god.

Sighing wistfully, she parted from the window, heading for the door. She scooped Mutt into her arms as she sent out a message to Kobe.

Akemi: I don’t have any more information on the Avatar yet, but if you help me out, I do have a significant amount of … funds … to disperse. So think about that while I’m taking Mutt on a little midnight stroll. You have until I’m back.

Closing the inn door behind her, she strutted out into the warm summer night.

—

I can’t believe this guy’s name is Frank, Akemi thought as she gazed at the house high on the hill. Like, of all the names that could exist in both universes — that one?

Farmer Frank’s house sat on a modest hill overlooking his vast estate. It was a grand manor, as far as anything in Bocobo could be considered grand: two stories, an arrangement of wide windows, and a pack of horses strung up in the yard. Akemi waited for all of his many lanterns to darken before she started her approach towards the farm lurking below.

The farm itself was large, separated into many fenced-in coops. She imagined separating them like this prevented a major loss if a predator did break in, as even getting into one coop was an ordeal for something lacking opposable thumbs (or an orb of metal-crunching hornets.)

The hornets easily chewed the lock off the fence door, and it swung open without difficulty. She let Mutt out onto the ground, and before he could bound off into the coop, she forced him to look at her. She still wasn’t completely sure to what degree the pika was able to understand her—it certainly seemed like more than the average earthly mouse-dog—but she spoke anyway, providing instructions.

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“I’m going to strip the locks off all these coops, so you can just go one-by-one. But do try and eat quietly,” she urged. Almost as if on cue, a rooster’s high-pitched howl rang out in the distance. That caw followed another, then another, triggering like clucking dominoes. “You know what, nevermind. Frank probably sleeps with earplugs in. Just get it done fast, and try to run the chickens out of the coop before you start grilling them. Too many flames will attract attention.”

Mutt flicked his ears up and down, in a show of obedience.

“Good not-dog,” she said, and fluffed the fur on his back. “Enjoy your meal.”

As soon as Akemi let go, the pika eagerly skidded into the coop. In reality, Akemi didn’t care too much if the place went up in flames—this was just an amusing pastime while she waited for Kobe’s answer. Either she ended up torching the farm and getting some sort of anti-agricultural villainous achievement for it, or Mutt fed her some free experience. No harm, no fowl.

“Squawwk!”

A giant mother hen came flapping out of the coop door, the pika bounding in the air after her. With one swash of his tail, the bird caught aflame. Several other chickens rushed out moments later, running crazed in the open yard. Mutt swallowed some of the smaller ones whole—an all and all disturbing sight, to say the least—and finished the hen in two smoking bites.

*You have defeated a level 5 chicken - 7xp gained*

*You have defeated a level 4 chicken - 6xp gained*

*You have defeated a level 4 chicken - 6xp gained*

…

Akemi hummed, dissatisfied. The experience gain was even more meager than she remembered it being. She needed to up the ante somehow.

She proceeded to unlock all the other gates, and Mutt’s war against chickenkind became the backing soundtrack to her prowl around the farm. Every so often she’d hear a notification bleep, and watch as her combat log noted another meal. She didn’t understand how so much food fit in one tiny creature’s body, but she decided not to question it.

Eventually, she made it to the enclosure the farthest from the city square. It was different from the rest: larger, with towering bars of gold serving as a fence, as if it was protecting a minor god. The coop inside the enclosure only furthered that impression. It was designed like a six-tiered pagoda, with ornaments hanging from each sharp edge. They glowed softly, emitting light.

Akemi frowned as her orb failed to chew into the lock on the golden gate. The hornets were repelled from it, almost magnetically. She dispelled the orb and shook the lock with her hands, but her fingers were repelled just the same, as if there was a forcefield of resistance around it.

Frustrating.

Just as she was about to give up, she heard a low creaking echo; the animal locked inside the pen had pushed open the door to its coop, and emerged into the moonlight.

Imperiously tall, with three, red-waddled heads, the rooster—or, roosters?—eyed with her quick-blinking curiosity. Its stick-thin legs propped up an enormous feathered body, and when it called out into the night, Akemi understood, for the first time, why it was so damn loud.

Gabriel | Three-Headed Hydra Rooster | Level 21

“Level twenty-one,” she murmured, eyes expanding. “Well, aren’t you a specimen.”

“Do not refer to me in such pitiful terms.”

Akemi’s lips parted. Great. It talked. Of course it did.

Gabriel approached the limit of his cage, and pressed his three beaks to the cold bars. His eyes had a startling deepness to them, a self-awareness that felt disjointed with his body.

“Your minion thoughtlessly kills and consumes the other birds," he stated, and Akemi could only admire his fine analysis of the situation. "Do you intend to do the same to me?”

She remained silent for a moment. The two at the inn had warned her that the farmer had a magical rooster, but she wasn’t expecting a three-headed fowl with a voice that could rival Death himself. Maybe a chicken that floated upside down, or glowed in the dark, or something. But not this.

The rooster bowed his head, disappointed. “You are just like the manling, then. I understand you, but you do not understand me. Such is my fate.”

Gabriel turned toward its shelter again. Akemi reached out, touching his tail feathers.

“Wait,” she spoke, and heard the accent of her voice go down an octave. Had she switched languages again? What the hell was she speaking then—bird? “You need some help getting out of here or something, big guy? You seem a little too, er, sentient, for captivity.”

The bird urgently turned around, rising on his legs and flourishing his chest feathers.

“You understand me? I thought my language dead. I thought all of my kind dead,” he said, in a voice both tragic and euphoric. He surged one head straight through the bars, so that his enormous beak nearly engulfed Akemi’s nose. “Yes, free me. Free me at once, brethren. So we may seek revenge on the manling Frank who imprisoned me here.”

Akemi laughed. This little pastime had just gone from amusing to greatly amusing. Not only could she burn down the farm, she could free the farmer’s eldritch chicken, and reap the experience of him butchering poor Frank to death. Win, win, win.

“Roger that, Gabriel,” she said, giving him a stupid salute. “Now, do any of your three heads have an idea about this lock?”