“Are you sure about this?” Sean asked as they followed the olive-skinned woman deeper into an oasis that was proving a good deal more expansive than he had first guessed. “You went from being afraid of witches, to wanting to trade with them in what… three fruits?”

“Four!” Gel replied happily, still consuming the last of the sky-blue berries the woman had tossed him. “People who want to hurt you don’t feed you, Sean. Besides, this is our chance to find out where the other witches are! You said they were full of meat, right? I call dibs on the next one.”

“Not on this one?” Sean arched a skull-brow at that. The slime had never turned down first pass at a potential feast before, even if that ‘feast’ was a person. Especially then.

“I saw your orbs burning over her when she walked away. I can respect a silent dibs on a meal when I see one.” Gel said, and the gelaton couldn’t tell if his friend was teasing him or not. “All the good stuff is coming to me in the end anyway.”

“That’s not why I was staring.” Sean shook his head. “She’s not a meal.”

“That is entirely untrue, look at her!” Gel protested, his eyes tracking her every step. “She’s at least a whole snack.”

“My point,” Sean continued, overriding his friend’s antics. “Was that I wasn’t staring because I was hungry, I was wondering why I can understand her!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I couldn’t understand a single word of what Feathers or any of those other survivors were saying back there, I don’t speak a lick of Peasant, and yet the moment we walk into this oasis suddenly now I can!” Sean felt some of his frustration at the situation spilling out, which his inner nature quickly worked to squash. “First the manticore, then the witch… what the hell is going on? Is it because of the–”

Sean groped around for words to describe the being who had somehow put their minds back together after whatever-that-was had fractured them the other day. To do so without calling down the attention of an entity Gel had been afraid to even discuss ever since.

“--of what happened with our status?” Sean finished, knowing his friend would understand what he meant.

“I don’t– hmm…” The slime mulled that over for a minute as they walked.

Ahead of them their guide moved expertly through vibrant, dense brush that seemed to move out of her way on its own accord. Sean couldn’t help but feel their surroundings were wildly out of place with the environment they had been traveling through for most of the day. He had also noticed she still hadn’t given them her name yet. The manticore – Rastegar – had opted to stay behind to watch the water line, which was honestly a bit of a relief. Though it didn’t allay all of his concerns.

What kind of woman just invites an omnivorous, undead monster back to her home? Sean didn’t even have to mull that one over to get his answer. The kind who doesn’t believe we’re a threat.

He would have to make sure Gel didn’t actually try and eat her. Sean’s instincts were telling him that if the slime did, then it might be the last time he bit off more than he could dissolve. His instincts also seemed to think she wasn’t a threat, at least not an overt one. Where that feeling came from however, Sean didn’t know.

“She’s not speaking ‘Peasant’, you know.” Gel piped up as they passed another stand of thick palm trees.

“She’s not?”

“No, and Rastegar wasn’t either. They’re speaking Beast.” Gel said, as if that explained everything.

“Okay, now you’re just fucking with me.” Sean deadpanned. “How is Beast a language?”

“How is Peasant?” Gel countered with a bit of sass before explaining. “Beast is what nature-based creatures use to communicate with one another. It doesn’t usually use words or anything, that’s more of an enlightened thing, but it can. It’s more about intent. You can sort-of figure everything out from there. Usually.”

“Usually?”

“It depends a bit on how intelligent the ‘speaker’ is.” Gel continued, as the slime reached for a branch loaded with berries before seemingly thinking better of it and retracting his whip. “Scorpions don’t usually have a whole lot to say, for example. They mostly just yell at you to leave or die or something. Whereas Rastegar–”

“--sounded like he was starved for good conversation.” Sean finished, understanding a bit more why the manticore had been so eager to chat. “So that’s why he kept countering with questions. He was testing how intelligent we are?”

“Probably.” Gel admitted. “Probably also gets tired of hearing things hiss ‘thank you’ at him all day before wandering off.”

“And if the witch is the only one he can talk to normally… I could see that getting boring after a while. Having only one conversation partner.” Sean teased. Gel exclaimed in offense, but the gelaton just kept going. “So wait, you mentioned the scorpions. Has everything we’ve hunted down been talking to you this whole time?”

“Yup!” Gel acknowledged, as if that wasn’t a bombshell revelation. “Honestly, it hasn’t been anything worth sharing. Mostly just: ‘Begone!’, or ‘Stop eating me!’”

The slime laughed. “As if we would ever stop eating something. Can you imagine?”

Gel continued chuckling over the idea for a long moment while Sean digested this information. It sounded like whatever had been done to them by that ‘entity’ had given him some of Gel’s own knowledge. That exchange had probably gone both ways and definitely bore investigating, but now Sean was curious.

“Can you say something in Peasant?” He asked his friend, just as they approached a small pond ringed with more of those bright-blue bushes laden with fruits of all colors. A hundred or so meters beyond, the endless desert returned. “Doesn’t matter what.”

“Sure.” Gel agreed, before belching a long string of incoherent nonsense into Sean’s mind.

The gelaton sighed.

So much for getting a Rosetta Rock download. Guess I’ll just have to be happy with what I got.

Sean shared the disappointing update with Gel just as the woman in front of them tapped the ornately carved fruit at the tip of her staff into the water. An instant later, Sean’s jaw dropped open as magic dispelled the mirage before them.

A shimmering curtain fell over the landscape beyond the pond in a wave, revealing a cozy little wooden cottage with a leaf-wrapped chimney merrily puffing white smoke into the air. An extensively overcrowded garden filled the space all around the cottage, with neatly-trimmed grass paths winding out from it in a dozen directions. Floofy little balls like the white puff phase of dandelions rolled all over the ground, carrying seeds, soil, and even water wherever it was needed. There had to be a hundred of the tiny things, each with a pair of cheery green eyes smack dab in the center of their ‘body’.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Sean felt like his burning orbs were going to pop out of his skull as he stared, and hundreds of green eyes paused to stare back at him. With a frightened chorus of meeps the crowd of white puffs all dove into the garden, peeking out a second later to watch him with a collective, unblinking gaze that the gelaton could only describe as ridiculously cute.

“Oh look, snacks!” Gel said brightly. “Kind of her to have them all ready for us.”

Before Sean could respond, another voice bubbled up from the water in front of them just as the woman they had been following stepped ahead into her garden and went to her knees to whisper softly to the hoard of puff balls.

“Pardon me, good creaker. But would you happen to have–”

The voice was interrupted by the woman grabbing a long, curly green vegetable that looked a lot like a darker, striped cucumber off a stalk from her garden and flinging it into the water. Bubbles surged up, popping in ways that sounded distinctly pleased.

“Don’t mind Warabe.” Called the woman over her shoulder, rising from her kneeling position with a half-dozen of the white puffs now bouncing their way along her arms. “He’s harmless enough once he’s been fed. Come along and I’ll set us down with some nice tea. Oh and do mind his water on your way in.”

Sean nodded, still a little unsettled at being able to understand other people who weren’t Gel talking out loud as he had gotten used to just ignoring ‘conversation’ lately. He stepped around the pond towards the garden as the witch had. He snuck a glance down at the still-bubbling water as he passed.

A yellowish-blue scaled, humanoid turtle-like creature – far more turtle than Maxway had been – lay half-curled up underneath the water’s surface, chewing away at what had likely been a bite half the size of the arm-length vegetable. It nodded its head respectfully towards him, and Sean returned the gesture, making the creature reveal exquisitely sharp teeth with its answering smile.

The gelaton noted it had webbed feet and hands that ended in sharp claws, a turtle-shell on its back, and some kind of inverted dip atop its head. Like someone had pounded its skull inward to serve as a dish, only this dish was clearly made of bone. It had human-like hair, rippling muscles uncovered by any sort of cloth, and Sean couldn’t help but notice the human male anatomy it bore drifting freely about in the water.

“Any idea what that is?” Sean asked Gel, the oddly respectful creature’s appearance triggering something in his memory that he couldn’t quite put his finger on as he followed the witch into her oasis hut.

“Nope! Sure has a lot of meat on it though.” His omnivorous ‘stomach’ responded brightly. “I wonder if I can digest its scales. Ooh, and what it uses that hat for. Is it a hat? It looks sort of like it’s wearing a hat. A smooshed one, but still a bit stylish, don’t you think? Avant-garde.”

“How do you know what that means? Also, is ‘creaker’ the polite term for skeletons? I noticed you didn’t get offended at him using the term.” Sean pointed out, taking extra care not to step on any of the white puffs which now seemed to be taken with him, ‘meeping’ every time he moved.

“It is. Amongst us anyway.” Gel answered, completely ignoring Sean’s first question. “Not sure the enlightened have a ‘polite’ word for you. At least, none the villagers knew about. Most weren’t real heavy into books.”

“You keep using that word, ‘enlightened’. I’m guessing that’s the polite word for humans?”

Sean didn’t need to ask what ‘us’ referred to, that was obvious: monsters. He was curious as to the scope of what ‘enlightened’ entailed, though. So far he had seen nearly half a dozen ‘human-adjacent’ races. It made sense there would be a divide somewhere.

“Well, yes and no.” Gel hedged. “It’s technically the polite word for races that have classes instead of evolutions. Humans, owlkin, turtlekin, lizardkin, all of those count for it though it does sound a bit high-and-mighty now that I think about it. Haven’t really had a reason to use the term much. Hmm. I feel a bit insulted, now that I think about it. Do you feel insulted?”

“A bit.” Sean admitted, ducking under the open thatch framing to enter the witch’s cottage. “Tell me more about these class…es… woah.”

The interior of the cottage defied Sean’s expectations. He had been expecting, given the whole ‘little bo meep’ exterior she had going on, to find a humble oasis abode. Some desert-themed decorations, sparse furniture, a tiny bed off to the side… maybe even a kitchen along one wall.

Instead, what he found threatened to drop Sean’s jaw for the second time in as many minutes.

The cottage’s interior looked like the interior of a four-star ski lodge resort, if you could find one that had been handmade by someone who completely eschewed all technology. There was a sitting room with chairs made out of scorpion chitin and layered with nermite fur, a bedroom separated by flowing ivy used as drapes, and even a recessed staircase that led to a closed door. Though of course, what interested Sean most was the kitchen.

He could guess the function, though perhaps not the safety of what looked to be a hardwood stove, and there were about two dozen white puffs dancing around what he could have sworn was a palm leaf-wrapped bread oven. Cabinets on cabinets, stacked from the floor to the rafters, held stores of ingredients Sean could only guess at as the olive-skinned woman moved nimbly about her home adding this or that to a small, silver pot. Eventually she set it on the stove, and a white puff rolled over to it. It meeped at a fire mote underneath the grillwork, one which looked almost exactly like the motes powering the lanterns he had seen back at Dry Run.

As their host dusted her hands off with a hand towel, Sean glanced over the room once more. There wasn’t a single witch-like vibe in the whole place. It was all natural, with a distinctly wild aspect to both the furnishings and the decorations. The gelaton was so enraptured taking it all in that he almost missed the woman now shooing him towards a scorpion-legged chair.

“Sit, sit! We can talk business after we’ve settled in and had our tea. Have you had tea before?” The woman asked, settling down into a chair of her own across from him once they were settled. She leaned back, resting her staff across her lap the way one might a cat. White puffs jumped up to run along it, meeping at one another the whole way. “I never know what to offer guests when I get them, Rastegar says you all love my tea. Maybe he’s just being polite.”

“I like her!” Gel said both immediately and enthusiastically. “And I want everything in her kitchen. Literally all of it.”

“She does seem nice. Not very witch-like.” Sean responded mentally to his friend, before trying to respond out loud to the woman before them. He opened his jaw, but of course no sound escaped. He gestured a few times, trying to make his intent evident and hoping what he was trying to say would come across… but the look of confusion on her face told the gelaton he was getting nowhere.

Great.

“Can she not understand me?” Sean asked, just as Gel spoke up for them – which was good, as the silence in the cottage had just about started to stretch out to awkward levels. The woman seemed content to wait on them, but still he didn’t want to appear rude.

“We haven’t had tea.” Gel said helpfully. “But we would love some! And some of whatever else you normally serve to guests. Brain? Ears?”

The woman stared blankly at him, so the slime added. “Orrr more of those fruits? Fruits are good, too. Nice and juicy.”

An airy laugh escaped their host, and the slight tension Sean had felt after Gel’s opener faded away. She gestured with one hand, and a vine reached down from the ceiling. It lifted the pot, pouring out steaming liquid into two silver cups the white puffs had brought over to the stove at some point. Another gesture, and more vines brought their cups over to them.

Ahh, so not a witch. Sean realized, watching the display. A druid. An oasis… druid? Hah! Fluid druid.

As the woman took a sip, and Sean prepared to do the same, he shared his revelation with Gel.

“Looks like I don’t owe you a marmlat after all.”

“What?” The slime asked, clearly distracted by the prospect of a fancy new beverage.

“She’s not a sand witch. Look around, she’s a druid.”

Gel was silent for a moment as the steaming-hot liquid splashed down both of their metaphorical and physical throats. The slime sighed expansively in contentment before finally appearing to register what Sean had said.

“Wait, she’s a what?!”