Sunlight woke me up in the usual fashion, shafts of piercing light knocking on my eyelids as if they just didn’t give a fuck. Birds chirping joined the choreography of pain as my ears also decided not to let me sleep. I did love mornings, but only after I had gone through the disgusting problem of waking up over the course of an hour, or that’s how I used to handle mornings. Now I just used the elemental powers of the universe to perk me up and take care of the cleaning stuff too.
With my morning ablutions completed, the entire day stretched ahead of me like a fat ice cream cake, one of the many foods I constantly daydream about, smooth and full of delicious promise while still holding the promise of quickly melting faster than hoped for.
“He’s shorter than I thought he’d be . . . “
“Does he always wear armor? Can’t even see if he has muscles . . .”
“Does it matter? Meliad clearly said he’s off limits.”
“But he smells soooo gooood! It has to be his magic, right? No satyr smells this good!”
The lilting voices were sweet, softer than any human tones but I clearly understood their dulcet language that sounded like a blend of Spanish and Old English. Turning my head, I saw several women reminiscent of Meliad straddling the horizontal branch of the oak tree at the edge of the clearing. My gardeners had arrived. All the bad jokes about picking them up at a Wal-Mart bounced off my teeth as I knew they wouldn’t get it. They had the lovely Latina curves from what I could tell but if their conversation was anything to go by then they’d probably be just as much trouble.
“You’re right, it doesn’t matter.” My voice scared one of them so badly she almost fell out of the tree. “You’re here to work, and that’s it. I already know that you’re getting a serious leg up on your rival groves.”
I’m definitely spitballin, but there’s a solid chance I’m right. When in doubt, act with confidence. Sheep will fall in line and the wolves will be kept at bay by the simple fact of having more power than them. The leafiest of the dryads smacked her sister so that she almost fell out of the tree.
“He’s a Nature Sorcerer, you tangled briar! Uhg, you should have been grafted to a vine for all the good you are!”
I heard the sound of a light slap.
“Hey! Not everyone gets to pick where they’re planted! Some of us had to work for our trees!”
Another slap.
Great. Plant-based arguments, just what I wanted to hear. After listening for a minute, I waited to see if the forest ladies had any semblance of human perception in regards to social situations. Their bickering told me either no, or they were like human females just enough so that they just didn’t care that there was an oblivious human male in their midst. Sending a bit of power into the tree that they were sitting on, I caused the branch to buck wildly sending them roughly to the forest floor.
“Anyone else want to pointlessly argue in front of their boss or should I have Meliad find me more useful, less talkative creatures?” My wry tone was lost on them as they started tearing up. Quivering lips and shaking limbs as they picked themselves did not sway me, mostly. Throwing themselves at my feet, their pleading was almost more irritating than their attempts at using their feminine wiles. It was like a group of kids all trying to tell you the same story of how one of them horribly skinned their knee but you can’t make out a freaking word.
My forced glare eventually shut them and blessed silence reigned once again in the clearing. My patience was definitely thinner than it was twenty minutes ago, but now I at least had their attention.
“Look, uh, ladies? I guess? I’m a simple guy with a simple vision. I want all of you to make a jungle where every plant is edible AND delicious. I’ll show you the area that I’m intending for this venture but I basically want to be able to walk through and pick fruit off the trees at all times of the year and enjoy it. New and exotic fruits are perfectly fine to put in here, and if you need anything let me know. But I need to have a place that is all mine where I can relax and there’s nothing but peace. Does that sound like something y'all can do?”
Their puzzled looks were so cute but not very effective, praise be for fuckin Flesh Sorcery. The old me would NOT have been able to even think in a situation like this.
“A yes or no will suffice, a nod of the head, some kind of affirmation would be nice . . .”
Their effusive agreement was again in the vein of multiple children all talking at once.
“Good good, all right, sheesh, QUIET!” Taking a breath just to give myself a second, I pivoted to take them on a tour of the proposed site of my future smoothie jungle.
******
Three days later . . .
Beautiful. Simply magnificent. It was everything I wanted and more. Quite literally ‘more’, as in more than what I laid out, more than what I expected, more than what my sometimes flighty mind can cook up on a spur of the moment idea rampage.
“It’s beautiful! Simply Magnificent! Isn’t it everything you wanted, Master?”
Fucking dryads, or is it hamadryads? I may never truly know. I hate it that we sometimes think along the same lines to where our thoughts literally match. It’s probably due to the fact that my Nature Sorcery and overflowing amount of personal mana is turning the once innocent and carefree creatures into innocent and carefree creatures that won’t leave me alone!
Damn I’m a grump today.
After showing the leafy ladies the estimated size of the jungle I wanted and spending hours describing the kinds of fruits, veggies, and berries that I wanted in it, the damn curvy things took off like a bat outta hell. I didn’t hear from them in days so I decided to rest and relax and work on my internal enchantments as well as the temp tattoo ones as well.
AND IT WAS GLORIOUS!
I relaxed, had a couple ration cubes while not wearing armor on the riverbank, played fetch with Spot and climbed trees to bug Tuki when I got bored. Other than the fact that I was completely away from all ‘human’ contact, it was awesome. I put in some serious work to make my living spaces in the Hole and the Lab as comfortable as possible. I made a bunch of chairs out of living wood that I enchanted to conform to the body of whoever sits in it, enchanted the main stone table so that it could act like one of those strategic sand tables on command, and I even got a super nice big bathroom going with water conjuration and banishment enchantments for a hot tub/shower duo.
Fancy looking marble and polished wood made the living space almost look like the inside of one of the old school Virginia mansions where people with way too much money on their hands used to live.
I even had a blast messing around with trees in the forest surrounding my home. I didn’t really dare to mess with the Yggdrasil offshoot that was my home, but all other trees were fair game. Several of the big oaks became stashes for caches of weapons and armor while others had conveniently placed knobs for me to quickly climb up and out of sight. I even took the time to grow treehouse blinds to hide in if ever I needed them. A few clusters of rowan trees also littered the small clearings in between the larger trees and I remembered that rowan trees tend to be symbolically or magically significant in books that I’d read.
Naturally, I had to mess with that too. I placed several small super-charged crystals of quartz or ruby or sapphire in their roots and carved a small rune for health on their trunks. Maybe over time they would gain unique properties or become excellent materials for all kinds of experiments.
One section of forest I personally shaped to be my own personal version of an outdoor gym, something that is much more common in the United Kingdom than America. Of course I didn’t need it thanks to Flesh Sorcery, but it was a lot of fun pushing my Nature Sorcery to make a natural setting for unnatural things. There were stone blocks with handles for weights with defined carvings for the approximate weights, pull-up bars and body-weight exercises. I even magically groomed in super nice seven foot by four foot mats of luscious grass that would have made any golfer drool. ‘Natural’ yoga mats, wink wink.
What took the longest was putting in the most epic swimming pool complete with a waterfall with auto-filling/draining enchantments to regulate the water and maintain its freshness. Off to the side was an imitation of a bar complete with bar games such as pool and darts, each bit lovingly conjured and shaped to be as accurate as possible. The pool balls were slick marble and the pool sticks were polished oak while the dart boards were hardened clay with self-refilling enchantments so the board would always look brand new.
I pretty much crafted a bachelor’s outdoor dream setting now that I think about it. The trees were more than happy to bend to my wishes as I put in a ‘cover-the-area’ setting in their trunks with an enchanted crystal. Everytime it rains, the trees bend their branches to largely cover up the play area and divert the water away from the fun.
On the outskirts of the second closest edge of the forest, about two miles away from home, I set up an explosives testing area next to one of the Rappahanock river’s more open banks. I had an idea on how to fix the explosive crystal shells in Gungnir as they wouldn’t actually go boom yet, but testing them close to home was definitely not in the cards. The river bank was a mix of sand and clay, which I extended up a bit and then spent time hardening the soil and dirt near the trees ringing the river bank. Even though I love explosives, I didn’t want to ruin the setting of the forest with my magic bombs.
After conjuring and shaping an 8x8x8 foot stone table in the middle of the cleared river bank, I set one small crystal round that had about a ten percent charge in it. My theory for why it didn’t explode when shot was due to the crystalline structure actually being too perfect. Perfection, when in reference to structure in a crystal, directly affects how durable it is. Diamonds tend to be the hardest crystal as they have the most ordered and perfect structure, and because I conjure my own crystals, I force them into the most orderly structure possible.
Due to that built-in habit, they just don’t have the necessary weaknesses for them to shatter when necessary to distribute their explosive payload. A normal bullet consists of pieces that when properly used distribute the explosive propellant against the tip which fires at the target at high speeds causing the kinetic damage. In my case, the crystal shard is flung by my weapon Gungnir at high speeds from within the spatial storage area. The payload was not only the sharp carbon crystal, but also the raw mana tucked away inside.
Taking my time, I picked up the crystal round and began banishing tiny bits of it to form a weakness that would hopefully split it after impact. Ten agonizing minutes of detail rendered what I hoped would be the perfect bullet. Popping it into Gungnir, I focused out on the water and mentally ordered, “Fire!”
WHOOMPF!
“Fuck!” I cursed. The round was propelled at high speeds, enough to act like a basic bullet but I wanted more! “Goddamnit, why is there NO boom?”
Feeling out the area with my magical senses, my Water Sorcery showed me the fine particles that the round shattered into, but I didn’t see or feel any kind of explosion that I was hoping for. Attempts two through eighteen revealed roughly the same results. The round was more than happy to shatter on impact, but not actually explode. I dipped them in my magically charged blood for the next score of attempts, and that didn’t do shit. The next twenty involved putting even more mana into the damn rounds, but the energy still dissipated when the round shattered.
And when I didn’t intentionally put in the strategically placed weakness into the round, charged it and shot it, it didn’t break at all. It functioned like a freaking piercer round. Staring at the latest conjured crystal round in my hand, I saw the temporary tattoos on my arms, the kinetic conversion rounds.
“Hahaha, well I might be a certified idiot,” I chuckled to myself, “But at least I’m one when nobody’s lookin’.”
Reworking the kinetic conversion enchantment in my head from absorbing excess kinetic energy to expressing it, my Mana Sorcery tweaked the mana I’d stored in the bullet to convert into expressing kinetic energy from the round being shot from Gungnir, and partially into heat energy on impact. As the enchantment equation settled in my head, my magic provided a visual of the rune for me to use, a cartoonish looking bomb that Wily Coyote would have used. Snorting with laughter and putting that bomb rune on the round, I charged it up to about half full, shoved it in Gungnir, and fired at the river again.
KABOOM!
For a moment, the river’s current diverted around the sudden empty crater in the water flow before resuming its course.
“FUCK YEAH BITCH!” I screamed as I ran out and danced on top of the water. Pulling a Jesus is pretty damn cool, but I’m sure He wouldn’t appreciate it, so I ran back out onto the shore and conjured a whole mess of bomb rounds. Charging them up to full power and properly enchanting them with the new rune, I stuck them into Gungnir and began blowing up, I mean testing, the river.
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Then it hit me, why stop with explosive rounds? I mean, I already have piercing rounds, and with a bit of work, the rounds with the intentional flaws in them can function as a sort of shotgun spray after hitting the initial target. Conjuring another normal round, I put a hammer rune on the flattened tip and charged it up as much as I could. Slipping that runed bullet into Gungnir, I conjured a ten foot cube of solid granite on the riverbank and ran about a hundred yards away behind a thick tree. Aiming carefully, I fired the hammer round at the cube.
PUMFFF! CRACKKK!
Squinting as I stared my target because I couldn’t make out much, I muttered. “The hell?”
Running back to the granite cube, I noticed that there was a fist-sized crater in it, but no other kinds of damage that I could see. As soon as I ran my hand over it, the entire cube just fell apart, as if I smacked a sand castle at the beach. Running both of my hands through the mess, I scooped up a handful and examined it with Earth Sorcery. Yup, it was still granite but now it was granite sand.
“Holy fucking shitballs on stick!” I whooped. “I am a goddamn genius!”
My new experiments greatly expanded upon my current arsenal. The American love of guns wins again. I have rounds that go boom, some that are completely normal, and some that shatter, but now I have the wallbreakers, the tomb-busters, the tower smashers; I have crystal rounds that can literally carve through solid rock. Damn I love magic.
Whistling all the way back to my lab, I cracked my knuckles and got work. “Can’t let a few successes let me get lazy.” I said with a smile on my face as I conjured, runed, and set up another pair of solar panels that converted UV radiation into mana and put it outside in the clearing in front of the Hole. In the center of it, I put a large empty crystal battery and then made another and buried it underneath. After making a power bank, I set it up for continuous charge and then began the boring work, carefully conjuring crystal rounds of each kind and storing them in Gungnir for the eventual undead crusade.
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t wanna touch him, you touch him!”
“He might think we’re flirting with him, Mother forbid!”
“Don’t invoke Her! She favors him! We’re just the outermost leaves, just get his attention somehow.”
“Don’t you see how much power he’s playing with right now? That’s more than we can make in a century of sunbathing.”
“He made a mini-sun, or sunlight gatherer? I can’t tell, scoot over!”
I was steadfastly ignoring them and concentrating on my work until that last phrase, sunlight gatherer. Every damn book, movie, joke, and reference that I can think of holds sunlight as what kills the undead, well, that and holy water and silver bullets. But I am a sorcerer with nature in my repertoire, so doesn’t that mean that maybe this is something I can get a hold on? Pausing in my bullet conjuration, I closed my eyes and sort of felt around my magic for a bit, various applications of each part coming to the fore, but nothing related to sunlight itself. My Nature Sorcery let me know that sunlight is related to what I work with, but it’s not within my purview. Having sunlight around certainly makes it far easier to work nature magic but it isn’t something I can directly control.
“Then I’ll do it indirectly,” I muttered, turning back to my work. The manufacturing of the crystal rounds was now governed by several automated processes thanks to Consciousness Sorcery, which left me free in the rest of my brain to think of other ideas. I remember an old collection of novels where the humans had these ‘sunstones’ that kept away dinosaurs that wanted to eat them but didn’t affect the herbivores. Fuck if I understand how that science/magic worked, but my problem is undead-centric. Sunstones, or my version of them, is something I could use if I could actually make them. Shit, why the hell am I trying to figure this out when I have more than three sources of information behind me.
“Ladies? Do you think you can answer a couple questions for me?” I asked, making sure to stay still as my body and magic was working on conjuring and storing crystal rounds. A chorus of ‘yeses’ and ‘of course master’ was actually nice to hear for once.
“First, I’m gonna need your names,” I said as a vision of lovely dryad flesh paraded in front of me. Their eagerness to please was way too attractive. “All of you look similar enough to be identical siblings and how do you know Meliad?”
I watched as they bounced their way closer to me. The group dynamic was hard for me to figure out because their very nature was odd in and of itself. All of them possessed an innocence about them but with the energy and drive of a squirrel gathering nuts for winter. While three dryads were more than willing to talk to me, I could see more watching me intently from the shadows. Some were clothed in wreathes of leaf covered vines while fewer, the more mature looking ones, had small clothes of leather. The clothed ones were in the minority.
“We don’t have names.”
“We are seedlings, the youngest kind of dryad.”
“Meliad is our Root.”
“The Root is to us what the Mother is to Meliad.”
Not helpful, really. And yet they just kept looking at me as if that was plain English, as if I were the dumb adult who couldn’t understand that the floor was lava and walking on it would result in death. Fuck it.
“Okaaaay,” I mused, deciding just to go ahead and skip the obvious lack of connection in the hopes of getting somewhere. “Do you know what a sunstone is or where I can find one? And what do you know about the Hungry Ones?”
The instant I finished my sentence, the dryads screamed and shot up the nearest tree.
“They’re not here!” I yelled, making sure to stay still. “I just need to know what you know about them because I’m going to have to go on a hunt soon. I got bullets that I think will work but I need some kind of backup magic and all I can think of right now is fucking sunlight!”
Two green heads popped out from the oak tree’s canopy. “Th-th-they’re not here?”
“No.”
“They’re always h-h-hungry. Life, flesh, it’s never enough, they just eat and eat and rend and tear!”
“Cold, they like the cold, they bring the cold, everything is dark and hurt when they come, but they always come.”
“Yeah, no, I got that, but does sunlight do anything against them?” My exasperation clearly wasn’t noticed. “Or is it fire that they fear? Come on now, I need a weapon that’ll blow them away, something epic that they won’t see coming.”
Another dryad popped out from the tree. “A sunstone might work. There’s a bunch on the other side of the mountain! They glow and it’s so nice to sit near them if I’m not sleepy when the sun goes down!”
The last dryad slunk down the tree, cautiously looking around as if the Hungry Ones were going to pop out of the shadows. “Nothing is ever enough, not even life, or energy, or mana. They just grow stronger and hungrier. You would be their favorite if you came near them, they can smell you. You reek of raw life, upturned soil and fresh spring. But they run from the sun. Dawn is their enemy, it burns them, weakens them, reveals them for what they are. For the Hungry Ones are more than the dead, they are the living dead. Some fly and drink from the throat of those with blood, some scrape flesh from the living and add it to their own like the Slaker Vine. The most fearsome simply look and their gaze makes the living wither away.”
I gulped. That about covers it. I need a portable sun. Where the fuck is Doctor Octopus when you need him? Shaking my Spider-Man nerdom out of my head, I contemplated possible solutions, something along the lines of the solar panel. I could capture sunlight in sunstones, possibly, or is it more energy efficient to use runes to convert mana into sunlight or UV radiation?
“You, and, uhm, you, go get me a couple samples of the sunstone, the brightest, most powerful ones you can find. Other you and other you over there, go find me sage and any other plants that undead things hate. We can grow and weaponize those down the road if need be.”
As they scampered off, I saw that my hands and Earth Sorcery were done conjuring up stacks of bullets. Carefully checking the piles of rounds stored in Gungnir’s storage space, I sent my thoughts into the crystal speartip and concentrated on sunlight, focusing all of my energy on what the sun means to me.
It does appear that the more I invest emotionally in my work, the more power or oomph it seems to hold. The sun, I mean, it used to just be the big ass yellow ball in the sky that made summers too hot or burned my almost too-white skin, but it was also the source of life on our planet. It grew our plants and heated our oceans and turned the entire system of weather that nourished life on our little blue marble in space. I can’t control the sun or the magic related to it, but everything I have, all of the magic that I am, is intensely tied to the sun, and that is what I’m working with.
As I meditated on my magic and its relationship to the sun, I focused on the runic aspect of my Mana Sorcery. I needed something special, as I had the feeling that the basic circle with squiggly lines wasn’t going to cut it for the kind of power that I wanted. Symbology is oddly important to making magic work; it creates a tie between the ‘belief’ aspect of magic to the ‘will’ and then sticks a bit of ‘emotion’ to glue it all together. The whole concept sort of falls apart if you don’t believe that it’ll work. The Hungry Ones were probably not the nice sort of people that will give me many opportunities to test out my weapons on them, so going in balls to the wall is probably the best way.
Holding a disk of plain stone in my hands, my Earth Sorcery kept sketching and erasing and re-sketching different images that meant ‘sun/life/power/purity/nature’ as I meditated and let my power work without conscious direction. At one point the image was the stupid sun from the Teletubbies show with the weird looking baby, uhgg. I did way too much baby-sitting when I was younger. The next was a nice visual representation of a sunflower. I had used sunflowers before, in fact, that’s not a bad idea, gotta remember to find and grow some more around the forest.
With luck, I’ll be able to use Nature Sorcery to turn those little dudes into the Hungry Ones’ nightmares, or is it daymares for things of the night? Eh, who cares about the grammar.
As my thoughts wandered, my magic did as well. The image on the stone shifted again to a cross ringed by the sun and then the cross morphed into a three-tiered sunflower still ringed by the sun. After a minute, small curvy lines indicating a flowing river cut across the stone, I liked it. The symbology seemed to fit in my mind, the sun as the outer foundation, that which all of my power depends on in a tangential sense, and then the sunflower to capture and hold the sunlight as well as represent my own power and relationship with nature. And then the water flowing around as the source of life itself, again keeping in line with my water magic but also to bring to life the meaning of older tales such as the undead being afraid or unable to cross flowing water. This symbol was odd in the way that it was everything that’s important to me, but specifically in the direction of fighting the Hungry Ones, the undead.
Part of me relaxed as the first part of my effort clearly communicated success to my magic. But the other part of me, all it really wanted to do was hermit down and relax for a couple thousand years while playing with my magic, but life has it in for me.
Fixing my mind on that symbol, I created a mental picture of it in my head complete with all of the emotions tied to it and stored it away as a spell matrix in my brain as well inside of Gungnir as a stored thoughtform. It almost escaped my notice but the symbolistic rune working seemed to hold a deeper meaning than what I currently attached to it. Standing up and stretching, my back cracking let Spot know that apparently I could be bothered.
“ACK! FFTPHT! Keep your damn tongue to yourself!” I sputtered, my hands useless against the slimy slug that was Spot’s tongue. Three licks later I was drenched in dog slobber. Conjuring a bunch of water, I rinsed off and then banished the rest of the mess.
“Something on your mind pup?” I asked, giving double scratches behind the ear. “Who’s a good boy? Who’s been neglected for too long? Do you need some lovin, some good ole fashioned SCRATCHES!?” Putting my back into it, I made sure to get behind both ears and then push him to let him know that it was belly rub time. My giant dog flipped over, more than happy to oblige.
“Does he really like that Master?”
“Wanna try?” I asked the brave dryad who was tiptoeing as if she were interrupting a special time. This one was different from the rest. She had a more lithe figure and golden hair. She seemed a bit more mature as well. “Spot doesn’t really care who you are as long as you give good belly scratches. Here, try.”
She timidly walked up and extended her hand out and proceeded to rub gently on his big belly.
“Aww come, get in there,” I teased, trying to wrap my head around the bevy of gorgeous naked women who just waltzed around my grove as if it were their backyard and not mine. Tapping on my Flesh Sorcery to rein in my sex drive yet again, I reminded myself that modern American sensibilities don’t necessarily apply to alien magical creatures. “Use both hands and give him some love. And while doing it, you always say, ‘Who’s a good boy’, or ‘You’re such a good boy’.”
“But doesn’t he already know that he’s a good boy? He can’t answer you anyways . . .”
“That’s not the point woman,” I said, trying to explain the simplistic relationship between a man and his dog. “You rub the belly. You scratch behind the ears. And then the whole time you coo like a child and tell the dog that he’s a good boy. That’s step one on how to treat a dog right.”
As she imitated what I was doing, I kept going. “And dogs are easy. You just love them and feed them and they treat you like one of their pack, kinda like I guess y’all have groves, maybe, not exactly sure how y’all work.”
“We are extensions of each other. Individuality is more foreign to us than it is to you or Spot.” She paused in her scratching. “The eldest commands the Roots, and the Roots command the Branches. Leaves are the youngest or most ephemeral of the groves, whereas the Oaks and Redwoods tend to be the Mothers. Silly fruit trees don’t live as long, so they tend not to be the Mothers, see?”
“Longevity equals authority, got it.” Several more questions popped into my head as I kept scratching Spot who was just loving the double amount of attention. “So what about Meliad, she’s a what?”
“A treant, neither a Mother or a Root, but a Thorn. Thorns guard the forest and all that are in it. If you elevate some more dryads, you can have your own Bramble!”
Still not really answering my questions straight out, gotta love their childlike mindset. I tried again. “And what’s a treant exactly?”
She turned her beautiful green eyes on me, and I watched with fascination as they sparkled into shades of dark green and soft brown and then back again. “Treants are not just the guardians of the grove, but they are the forest. Because you made one so close to the World Mother, I cannot bear to imagine how powerful Meliad will be. All animals will come to her aid if need be and even the plants and trees of the land shall awaken.”
“Uh huh,” I said, motioning with my hands as if she were to keep going, “And what else? What do they look like, what can they do, can they travel, are they sentient?”
“Oh yes, Meliad will be even more beautiful than ever before! She’ll have several trees to call her own and even trolls and ogres won’t be a match for her! She’ll be big enough to pet Spot with one hand and walk a mountain range in a day! But she won’t be able to go far from her source of power.”
“Fuck.” I cursed quietly, coming to terms with yet another idea not being viable for making an epic army capable of taking on the Hungry Ones. Images of treants and earth elementals rampaging through hordes of undead as I overlooked the battle left my head. Beast hordes won’t work as the undead as they can just kill’em and add them back to the horde. Treants can’t travel all the way out there. Damn, where’s a freaking swarm of fire breathing dragons when ya need one? The upper reaches of Canada and all of the Arctic favor the Hungry Ones, it’s their form of having the high ground. Only my Earth and Water Sorcery will be helpful up there, but there’s not really enough heat or sunlight for me to be up there long term unless there’s some epic leyline I can work with.
Cursing myself for the millionth time for not picking a fire or portal related magic when I had the chance, my scratching was actually hard enough to annoy Spot who did one of those dog kicks when you hit the wrong area. The dryad caught me before I flew too far. With a huff, Spot looked at me askance and got to his feet, shaking the dirt off as he bounded away.
An almost inaudible ringing in my ears made me pay attention, my Consciousness Sorcery was pinging me. A background mental process I had set up a while ago was complete and had answers for the conscious side of my brain. Momentarily silencing the alert, I asked the dryad to find some seeds for sunflowers and thorny vines and have them ready when I got back. Rushing off to the Lab, I sat next to the mana generator and focused on the pinging which brought me to my mindscape.