Louie returned to his room unequipped his clothes and in only a pair of light pants that he had bought, laid down on the bed to sleep.
He tried to sleep but there were too many things running around in his head. Since he had found the spider eggs he had visions of trading caravans travelling from camp to camp like gypsies.
Caravans pulled by giant spiders. He smiled at the picture.
He couldn't sleep so he got up, wrapping the blanket around his shoulders to have the fresh smell.
Bed set (Peaceful sleep) Regeneration enhancement if used for longer than 6 hours.
+100% health regeneration.
+100% mana regeneration.
+100% boost to all stats last for two hours.
+10% The subtle smell of flowers.
He took out the tent he bought at the first vendor and two chest of holding which had 200sq and cost him 15G each and three Dimensional charms which cost 20G each.
Dimensional charm A sophisticated charm that magically expands the internal dimension of a container while the container retains its external appearance. The size of the expansion depends on the amount of mana used in creating this expanded dimension the first time.
Louie opened the two chests and saw that they appeared to be full of silver fog, but the moment he stuck his hand in the fog of one he got a 200sq inventory screen.
He took the charm and glued it to a mana crystal and then glued it to the inside of the chest lids then he closed the lids and his eyes, holding his breath, he placed a hand on each chest and cast
Shit, I hope this isn't like the lightning sabre. He slowly opened his eyes and saw two very plain looking small chests. Shit looked like it removed the dimensional effect.
Chest of WTF! Dimensional space of 1cubic kilometre. (bonded)
There is no inventory grid. Only bonded can open the lid.
You must visualize what you are looking for.
Command word can be set to empty the chest. (??????)
What are you trying to do? Steal a world? Twice?
Aaah maybe a mana crystal were too much, and you cant see what's inside, if you don't know it is there then you won't find it.
He shrugged and took the pole from the tent and glued the other-dimensional charm to a mana stone and then the stone to the tentpole and placed it back in the tent. He folded it up and placed it back in its bag before casting
After the light faded he used
Glamping tent This tent is bigger on the inside than outside. This has a dimensional space with a height of 5 meters and a floor space of 1000 square meters. How you furnish it is up to you.
Is a tent not good enough for you?
Harry Potter envy?
Huh? Whats Harry Potter got to do with this? I still got tickets to go see the premiere of the Philosophers stone in Paarl, well 20 years ago. Damn, now I won't ever see it. Shit.
He took the tent out to erect it when there was a loud bang from the workshop and the whole room shook.
Sher agreed with Joe and sighed as she went to the door for the greenhouse.
Time to see if I got what it takes to be a Druid and not just in name only, the book on Druidism that I got from Vendor said that I must make a vow to nature.
She looked at the plant-filled greenhouse and saw a half-empty plot, she walked over and cleared a piece of space and drew a circle.
She placed the plants and seeds that she bought on the line of the circle, spacing them, one plant then a seed and plant and seed again all around the circle.
Sher pressed the seeds into the earth and dug small holes for the plants, she had no clue what kind of seeds or plants most were. She had just bought the first batch of seeds and plants she saw.
Moving to the centre of the circle of plants she sat down and sat down on her knees.
Well, you will be part of my life so I might as well go all the way.
She removed the egg of her Companion and place it on her lap. She fed it with mana again and felt a warm glow of love radiate from it.
She sighed again. Now or never.
Reaching for her mana she let it flow from her to the circle of plants and seeds around her. Then she chaneled it to flow from one to the next all around her till the flow of mana raced around her in the plant circle.
She placed her hand on both sides of the egg and send her vow.
"With a healers heart
With a Druid's might
I swear an oath to your plight
To use your power in your fight
To protect and heal our mother earth
To honour her magic with all my worth
To promote Gaea's law
From this day forth
Gaea's warrior I will be
Till the last breath in me
So mote it be."
Suddenly green mana flowed from everywhere towards the circle of plants and seeds that had sprouted.
It was absorbed into the mana that was flowing from plant to plant faster and faster as more green mana flowed into what was starting to look like a circling river of mana, till it felt as if she was sitting in the eye of a hurricane.
She closed her eyes and thought that this was it. Somehow she had screwed up just like Louie, and now she had unleashed something vastly beyond her.
The vortex of mana closed up above her head as she opened her eyes. The mana suddenly shot down into the crown of her head, through her body and the egg on her lap and out through her legs into the ground till it reached the edge of the greenhouse and rebounded right back into the air to join the vortex above her head. Like a vicious feedback loop, the mana kept on flowing through her, the egg and the plants.
All of a sudden she was sitting in a meadow in the heart of a giant Forrest.
In front of her stood a pregnant warrior woman whose whole body was covered in what looked like a tattoo of a geographical map. She looked proud and stood straight.
It reminded Sher of a picture she once saw of Henry Cele as King Shaka Zulu.
She bowed her head as she felt she was in the presence of great power.
"Child, you have caught my attention, and your choice of plants are unexpected but interesting. all the other Druids have only vowed to follow me to gain the use of my power. A simple oath. But not you. You have pledged your life and that of your unborn companion to be my Healer, my Protector, Warrior, Paladin, Judge and Executioner for the rest of your existence. . .WHY?"
Sher sat with her head bowed as she clutched the egg to her chest.
"I want to be worth something again, I want to fight for something of worth, you are all that we have, if you die, then we all die. I have no one else in my life, so I give you all that is me."
"Child, you are mistaken, but I will accept your vow and give you my blessing."
She reached out and laid her hand on Sher's head and a river of green mana flowed into them till they were glowing like a lightbulb. She heard a whisper before everything went black.
"Tell your friend to stop messing with dimensional magic, he is not ready yet."
Louie rushed back into the workshop, the blanket still wrapped around his shoulders.
"What the hell!" He saw Sher laying on the ground with a cocoon of green energy around her. He rushed over to her. "What happened to her?"
Joe shook his head as he tried to reach her but was blocked by the green energy. Slowly the egg that was laying on her chest rocked from side to side and cracked. Seams ran around the egg as it suddenly unfolded into a silver spider the size of a rugby ball.
The spider flickered and turned into what looked like a metallic baby doll then flickered back to the spider shape than the baby again shifting faster and faster till it settled on her chest in spider form.
Louie looked at Joe to see if he also saw what had happened, but Joe was watching the whole scene with wide eyes.
"Did I just see what I think I saw?"
Joe just shook his head, "I didn't see anything. This is for her to figure out."
He went to get a chair from the bedroom and sat down next to her while Louie just plopped himself down on the floor with BOB beside him softly wining as he laid with his nose touching the energy field.
An hour later the green energy field flickered and died as Sher stirred awake. She wanted to lift her head but she heard Joe say.
"Don't move, open your status and check your afflictions, how is your HP?"
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She checked everything. "Everything is fine, why am I laying on the floor?"
Louie Placed his hand on her shoulder. "There was an explosion and we found you laying here, covered in a green energy cocoon."
She moved her hand to get up but felt something move on her chest. She froze and her eyes moved down only to meet 8 looking back at her. Suddenly a feeling of love and happiness flowed through her. 'mother?'
Slowly she reached out and stroked the silver spider.
"Ansi." She was flooded with happiness as she laid back, closed her eyes and let the tears ran down her cheeks.
Louie and Joe shared a concerned look. Helping her to her feet they walked her to her bedroom while she clutched the silver spider to her chest. She stopped them as they went through the lounge.
"Here I want to sit here."
She softly stroked the silver spider and then she started her story.
"I grew up on a farm not far from here, a bit closer to Worcester. Got two brothers, well had two brothers. One is in prison for armed robbery, the other one was killed in a gang shooting when I was ten years old. I saw myself going down that road like all the girls in my class. If I didn't find a way to change things around I would have been in a gang and pregnant at 14, I was on my way there." She took a breath and shuddered.
"One day I was reading a magazine and I smelled this heavenly fragrance, it was one of those patches they placed in magazines some-times. There was an article about a woman that sold essential oils and stuff. 'The benefits and healing powers of essential oils.' And I was hooked."
She was deep in her memories.
"I studied hard and read everything I could on the subject. My cousin was also in my class and she had the same name as me, it was my great grandmother's name, so the kids called me Sher while she went by Lee. It was tough in a poor small-town school, everybody was more interested in the gangs, cars and guns. . . I met a guy while I was in matric and we fell in love. He was different from the other boys. Jamal."
She had a sad faraway look on her face as she remembered her past."He listened, believed and encouraged me in my idea to start an aromatherapy shop. So after school, I would try to find and read, study anything I could find on aromatics and how to work with it. Then after we finished school we got a small place and we worked hard and saved all that we could. Times was hard, living is expensive, there wasn't much to eat, food costs money, money was scarce. One day I saw a kid with a slingshot shoot a pigeon of a streetlight and I thought 'why not'."
She got a drink out of her inventory and poured them each a glass.
"I remember the slingshots we had as kids while living on the farm. I made my first one out of an oak branch and some haasrek that I got from Jamal. It took me about a week of practise before I bagged my first pigeon. It wasn't much but it was a start, after that we had enough meat to get by."
"After a while, I got very good at sneaking. Do you know how hard it is to sneak up on a klipspringer? They are very skittish and to get back home with meat, it was a gauntlet that I had to run every time I went hunting, and it was hunting. Shooting the klipspringer, butchering it and preparing the hides. It brought us a small bit of money in selling the hides, getting it home was hell, I had to sneak out at night to get the hide that I had hidden away and treat it at home."
She smiled as she remembered the good times.
"Jamal got work at a panelshop and I helped out at the old-age home till we had enough money to rent a place for a small shop and buy our first batch of stock, cash, not credit, we were so proud." She smiled at the spider.
Louie looked on in wonder at the way Sher changed, he could have sworn that he heard the spider purr like a cat.
"That first weekend was bliss, we had just found out that I was pregnant, we wanted it to be a girl, was going to name her Ansi, after Jamal's grandmother, she was from the San people."
They felt her aura turn dark as Sher continued her story.
"He was visiting me at the shop during lunch and some of my cousin's drunk friends came in to 'borrow' some money, there was an argument, a big guy, my cousin's then-current boyfriend pulled a gun and Jamal was shot, twice."
"I remember screaming. He was talking to me but all I remember was the gunshot and the blood, he died in my arms. The police arrested them but it was deemed an accidental discharge and they only got a fine each. It helps that the Judge was a family member of one of the accused. I was crushed, a wreck, the shop was closed. I couldn't get out of bed. The loss of him tore my heart apart, two days later I lost the baby. It was a week after that that I had the dream. I believe now that if I didn't have the dream then, I would have died there in my bed in that room."
The tears were flowing freely by now.
"It started as all the dreams lately, I was back in the shop with Jamal in my arms and we were covered in blood and I was screaming my head off while Jamal was trying to say something. Then he slapped me, not hard just to shock me, he had never raised his hand against me. He looked up at me and whispered. 'Live, live your life to the full, believe and work hard to reach your goal, never give up, I love you.' The last was so soft I could barely hear him then I woke up."
Louie felt her pain, it was so close to what happened with his family that he couldn't stop the stinging in his eyes. He remembered the red walls, the torn-up bodies and suddenly he had to fight the red trying to invade his sight.
"The shop failed after that, it was just too much to be in the shop where he died. I moved back home and started again from my parent's garage, after a while I expanded and started making scented candles and making my oils. I made a deal with my parents and bought the material and expanded the garage and build my shop. It wasn't much but it was mine and it was growing, not fast, but it was mine and I didn't own the bank anything."
"Then last week as I was closing up the shop the pulse happens. I was standing in front of the door reading the Gaea notice when just after that there was a ripple and the tree in the yard started growing. It got bloody huge, I remember looking up at the tree and thinking that somebody will cut it down for firewood. All of a sudden a drain cover flipped open in the street and giant rats started pouring out attacking everything. They were big, some struggled to get out of the drains."
"Suddenly my dad was next to me. He would open the front door every evening when I closed the shop and watch me to make sure nobody was hanging around. In his youth, he was a terror with a knobkierie and nobody in town could beat him in stickfighting he saved us that evening by standing in the gate and fighting the rats, while the earth shook and moved below us, till we could all get in the house. He was bitten real bad, that's when I awakened my life affinity and healing."
"When the rats got bad he would throw open the door and start laying into them with his knobkieries, I would be right behind him holding his belt and casting
"I curled up in an old culvert pipe, didn't want to move ever again, the fact that I could be killed and eaten didn't bother me at all. That day the Soldiers moved in at the Shell Garage, and the next day Joe's patrol found me, he carried me back to the Garage and the rest is history." The whole time she was softly stroking Ansi. She shook her head while giving a soft sigh.
"Shit Sher, I'm sorry to hear about your loss."
She shrugged. "Thanks, Louie but I'm sure everybody has a story like that now. The last two weeks has been hell."
"Last week."
"Huh?" Sher looked confused.
"Its been only eight days since the Pulse."
Slowly her confusion cleared from her face. "Damn, I forgot about the time difference. How long have we been in here?"
Louie opened his journal on his status page. "Nearly four days. So another 24hours and roughly one day would have passed outside since we fell into the dungeon."
Joe stood up squeezed Sher's shoulder as he walked past her to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. "We got to get a move on. I don't want to be here forever."
Louie looked at the silver spider. "And who is this young lady?"
The spider lifted its front legs in the air, he knew people say that they do that to warn of potential enemies, but to Louie, it looked as if it was waving at him.
Sher stroked her hand down the shiny metal abdomen.
"This? This is Ansi, my Companion."
Joe looked at Louie as he could have sworn she meant Daughter, they did not miss the fact that the spider now had the same name as the deceased daughter.
Louie held his finger out to the big spider. "Hello, Ansi, welkom to our family."
He didn't see the shock on the others face as he called them his family. The spider reached out its front legs and grabbed his finger before stepping back.
Sher reached out and picked Ansi up. "She is hungry, what do I feed a mechanical spider?"
Louie took a golem leg out of his storage and placed it on the table. BOB immediately perked up and came closer placing his head on the table near the leg.
Ansi jumped from Sher to the leg and waved her legs in the air as if trying to shoo him away. She settled down as she saw that BOB wasn't going to steal her food and the others were laughing at her antics. She touched her abdomen to the leg and slowly started to wrap it in webbing.
Everybody was watching as she stuck her fangs in the foodsac and inject something into the sac, it started pulsing and she stuck her fangs through the top and started feeding she literally started growing as they watch. After a while, she pushed the sac away and went to Sher was she curled onto a ball and went to sleep.
Louie reached over to dispose of the sac. As he touched it he received a BB.
Do you want to loot the Spider sac? Y/N
Intrigued he clicked yes and watched in shock at the loot notification.
They saw his expression and asked. "What?"
He shared the notification with them.
Spider foodsac loot received 1 silk purse
1kg steel ingot
1kg iron ingot
500g silver ingot
500g gold ingot
"That leg weighed about 6-7kg. I bet she injected some kind of magical nanite that broke the leg down and she fed off the metals she needed and the rest were condensed into that as loot."
"Wow."
Louie agreed with Joe. "They are mobile recycling plants."
"LOUIE!" Sher shouted indignantly. "She is not a mobile work thing."
Louie winched. "Sorry Sher, of course, Ansi isn't. It's just my inner greed piggy that startled awake."
He again marvelled at the turn around in Sher, yesterday she hated spiders, now she had practically adopted one. He turned around to go to his room. "I need to get some sleep if we are going out again to kill golems."
He stopped in his tracks.
"You never did say what happened? Why were you on the floor shrouded in a green energy cocoon?"
She told them about her meeting with Gaea.
Joe was stunned. "So what happened to the greenhouse?"
When Sher had looked at her status for any afflictions she had seen a flashing light next to her inventory. Upon opening it she found a new tab next to her Lunchbox marked greenhouse. Opening the tab she saw that she had 20 rows of 10sq that she can place seeds in and they would grow as well as plants.
It was a mobile greenhouse made by Gaea for her Druid.
"It looks and works like a skill. The more I use it the bigger it will get with more squares. Currently, they are all full of some strange plants. I think this is all the plants I got from the vendor. Gaea did say that my choices were interesting, but I just grabbed what was first."
Louie shook his head. "Tell me you didn't just grab a bunch of plants without inquiring of the vendor or us if they were ok? You do know that there are a lot of seeds and plants that grow into monsters?"
Joe stared at her in horror. "No way, you didn't?" When she didn't say anything, he groaned. "Ow god. Vine terrors, corps flowers, pumpkin kings, treants, Audrey ll."
At the last name, everybody burst out laughing.
"Feed me Seamore, feed me!" Louie was still laughing as he sat down at the table again.
"Sigh, we will have to sit down when we get out of here and go through the plants and see what you got, don't want an Audrey to get out." They all agreed.
Louie got up again and Sher placed her hand on his arm.
"Gaea said that you should stop messing around with dimensional magic, you are not ready for it yet."
"Damn, I was just getting started."
Joe was worried as he looked at Louie. "What have you been doing?"
Louie smiled as he removed one of the storage chests from his inventory. "I made you a vault for your starter town. Every good town needs a vault. Use
Chest of WTF! Dimensional space of 1cubic kilometre. (bonded)
There is no inventory grid. Only bonded can open the lid.
You must visualize what you are looking for.
Command word can be set to empty the chest. (??????)
Joe was shocked. "Louie, what the fuck. How did you make this?" He whispered. Joe shared the report with Sher, who was stunned speechless. "No wonder Gaea warned you of, you are crazy Louie."
He just shrugged as he grabbed the blanket and walked to his room.
When he opened the door he saw his bed neatly made up and the room spotlessly clean. He turned around and went to the workshop and upon opening the door he smiled and went back to his room and fell asleep on his bed with a smile.
Joe and Sher watched his antics. "What was that all about?"
Joe shook his head and also went to his room. "A couple of hours then we must go hit golems."
Sher agreed and carefully hugged Ansi to her chest as she also left for her room.