Of all the beasts that roam the earth, there is one that is far more dreadful than any other. A horrid amalgamation of all that is wicked and unholy, a steed to pure evil itself. And to make a bad thing even worse, while normally they were herbivores, these mana-mutated malevolent monstrosities were bloodthirsty, carnivorous beasts. I did not stop for even a second to consider any alternative to fleeing, using magic to turn myself invisible and fly up and away to gain as much distance as I possibly could, without risking leaving a trail for them to follow. When I started running low on mana, I returned to the ground, straining my eyes to scout behind me, checking to just make absolutely certain that they had not followed me here.
“Hold on a second, let me make sure I got this right. You encounter a bear in the woods, you happily charge at it wielding naught but what is effectively a pointy stick. A group of humans following you, may as well walk right up and try to strike up a conversation. A semi-divine literal demon interacts with you daily as a voice in your head, and you have no issues with mocking her title. But where you draw the line…is giraffes?”
“Damn straight.” I gave Sophia a solemn nod. “Normal giraffes are vile and merciless entities already, I’m not about to find out just how much worse they get when souped up by magic.”
Silence fell between us as she took in and absorbed the pure knowledge and wisdom I had laid before her. Or at least I thought that was what was happening until a cacophony of laughter filled my mind. I walked downstream, listening as Sophia laughed at me for five minutes without a break. When she finally died down enough to speak, she said: “Okay, so giraffes are a no go, any other fears I should know about?”
I have a choice to make here. On one hand, I could take it the more serious route and talk about the more serious fears of actually achieving immortality and spending eternity in isolation, or I could keep listening to Sophia’s laugh and give her a few lighter ones. I thought about the past day and decided, I’ve had enough seriousness for now.
“Bugs, heights, and that thing white chicks do where they like, open their eyes too wide so you can see the whites all around the iris. That shit freaks me out. Hopefully, the only bugs I’ll have to deal with here are huge for some reason, that way I can at least know where they are, and when it comes to heights, I can freaking fly now so that fear is obsolete, but white chicks eyes….that’ll have to stay with me a while it seems”
Another round of laughter filled my mind as I saw a rabbitish beast off in the distance. I took out one of my enchanted flying knives and threw it, guiding the knife to pin the rabbit to the ground, then I sent out a second one through its head. With the knives, my level of control was excellent, but it did have the downside of draining my mana. I would have to take that into account when deciding whether to use them over shooting arrows in the future.
“Wait, so is fear like anger then, where it’s not technically an emotion so you can feel it?”
I shook my head and replied, “I think you’re misunderstanding something. As far as I can tell, I can feel all emotions just fine, I just have no way of knowing what the emotion I’m feeling is. Think of it like being colorblind, but for emotions. Actually, for the longest time, I thought I really liked both heights and bugs. I would feel my pulse quicken and my heart would feel like it’s in my throat whenever I was on a rollercoaster, picking up insects, or climbing trees. And because roller coasters are fun things, I thought that meant that the other two were fun as well. But then one day I fell asleep in my car with the window down and woke up to a cicada on my face screaming, and I felt that same thing. Once I realized it was fear that I was feeling, it was then that I realized I was actually afraid of bugs and heights.”
“Interesting. And ‘white chicks’ eyes’?”
I gave a laugh of my own as I started skinning and separating the rabbit. “Well, that’s less of a genuine fear and more of an aversion. Something like, ‘hey man, somethings not right with her, don’t trust that.’, you know? But what about you? I’m sure that you have an irrational fear or two, don’t let me hog all the fun.”
Sophia abruptly drew silent before trying to change the conversation into one about enchanting. I decided to allow her to, but not without making a mental note that there was something there. According to some of the notes in my plant diary, finding that rabbit meant that there were probably some edible herbs and whatnot nearby, so I left the riverbank, diving into the forest with pictures of what I was looking for. After a couple hours of searching, chatting with Sophia about random topics, and two failed attempts to kill other rabbits I had found, I returned to the riverbank with a few pounds worth of literal rabbit food, a starch-like plant and a few root vegetables. I decided that tonight I would try to jerry-rig up a somewhat edible rabbit stew, which I invited Sophia to try with me.
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“Wow, it’s been so long since I’ve eaten actual food.” She said with nostalgia, “When people used to summon me more frequently they would often have offerings ready.”
“Hold up, if you’re used to the people who summoned you giving you food and drinks and shit then why did you act like I was so weird for offering you the same?!”
“It’s not that you offered me a drink, it’s how you did it. You see, there’s a difference between a group of people conducting a sacred ritual, then when the giant pillar of flame appears, seek to appease it with offerings of fruit and wine, versus essentially messing around in your pajamas, then when a giant pillar of flame appears, treat it like a damn neighbor that popped by and offer it a beer.”
“Chocolate milk. I didn’t actually have any alcohol in that house since I don’t really drink regularly, but yeah, point taken.” I acknowledged as I continued my trip downstream. I walked for a few more hours, before deciding that I had gone far enough for one day.
“So, do I need to do anything to make it easier for you to bring me to the subspace? Or are you good to go?”
“Do you remember the Marker I gave you before you left the first time? Just take that and put it in the ground around you. Then when you return to this spot, remember to pick it back up.”
“Marker?” I asked, confused, before remembering the moment she had sent me back, “Oh you mean that spike?” I fished it out of my bag and stabbed it into the ground at my feet. “What does it do? I mean clearly, you still send me back to wherever I was originally even without it, so it’s not a guide.”
“The marker allows me to observe the area around it even when you’re not there, that way I don’t send you in completely blind. I had been worried before, as I had no way of knowing whether there were monsters already drawn in by the scent of blood from your massacre, so this will make it so that I can wait to send you back until the coast is clear, or at least give you an early warning.”
Well that makes sense. I nodded then announced, “Alright then, beam me up Scotty.”
Sophia’s POV
I pulled Leo into the subspace, and took in his curious expression. I asked, “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing much, I just noticed that I really do just kinda immediately pop into existence somewhere completely different when you do this. I was unconscious the first time, and somewhat distracted the second and third, so this is the first time I ever actually paid attention to the process. There was no sensation of disappearing and reappearing, no opening a hole in space connecting the locations and walking through it, nothing. Just immediate transference.”
“You’re not going to ask how it works? Normally that would be the first thing out of your mouth.”
He shook his head, a small smile and a light filling his eyes, “Nah, I already have a theory, and once I have a handle on space magic, I’ve got a few experiments in mind to verify it. I wanna get better at figuring out how to learn things on my own without relying on you to explain everything, since we have different ways of thinking about things and different types of basic background knowledge to build off of. If I base too much of my magic off of the way you do things, then I can only do as much as you teach me, but if I develop my own style, I can eventually figure out how to do whatever I want.”
I nodded at his reasoning, and agreed that it was a good idea. I did tell him one thing though: “Well, you can absolutely use this place to get that handle on space magic, if you mess up too badly you got me here to clean up your messes.” I then led him to the living area I had prepared for him while he was walking. I felt him freeze beside me, and looked over to catch some sort of emotion in his eye I couldn’t quite place.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him.
“You did all this?” He whispered, gazing at the living quarters I had made for him. It was a simple house I had constructed with magic, with a couple of bedrooms, a communal lounge area, and a kitchen for him to use. Outside there was an empty garden area I had made so that if he wanted to, he could collect some seeds or saplings and grow them here, so that he wouldn’t have to worry about running out of herbs and spices while traveling. Past the garden there was a sizable shed that he could use to practice his enchanting and store experiments and equipment that, while useful, were nothing more than extra weight on his back when he was traveling through the woods.
It was only a few hours worth of work, shit, when Veronica asked the other day I had spent twice as long helping her out, so if it didn’t suit his needs it wasn’t really a problem to scrap it, so I asked “You don’t like it? What did you need instead?” I wasn’t ready for the sheer intensity of his gaze as he somehow managed to yell and whisper at the same time, “Don’t like it?! Sophia this is incredible! Seriously, thank you.”
I was uncomfortable at the level of gratitude in his eyes. It was just a few hours of effort, so why was he looking at me like I had gone above and beyond what he had expected…and then I remembered. Remembered that the boy in front of me had never had the slightest amount of support in his life no matter what had been going on in his life. From his perspective, someone he had known only a couple months had just given him a house. It makes sense that he would feel like it was such a huge deal. In order to make him calm down a bit I walked him around, showing him all the different places and telling him how I had made them, trying to downplay in his mind how much effort this had taken.
It seemed to work to some extent, as he had stopped drowning me in intensity, but there was still a huge amount of gratitude in his eyes as I finished with our tour.
“If you ever get an idea for something else you want, feel free to either make it or let me know. Once you’re a demon and we start the process to move you to Hell, we can transfer all of this over at the same time, and this can be something like your starter house there. Most of us build several homes throughout our lives, since you need something to do in order to deal with immortality.” By this point, we had ended up in the kitchen, so that he could make the rabbit stew he had been planning on. With no hesitation, he brought out his meat bag and his plant bag, and got to work.