A knock on the door panicked the two younger adventurers, but Rodney simply called out to the stranger. He expected it would just be Mary’s husband, Theon.
“What is it?”
“Are you okay in there? I thought I heard something go boom.”
“It’s fine, just some stubborn kindling didn’t want to light.”
“Okay, be careful. I’ll be the one who’ll be cleaning the soot off the walls if you scorch them.”
“Yeah, sorry. We’ll be down for dinner in just a second.”
After waiting for the steps to retreat downstairs, Larrik heaved an exasperated sigh and asked the question the party had been neglecting since they had arrived.
“What are we doing for dinner? Who’s gonna stay and watch the rock?”
“The more we stick around that thing, the more likely it could get curious about us. We’re going downstairs until the fire’s out, and then we’re going to leave it in the backpack overnight.”
“Is that really the best solution?”
“It depends on if it moves after we leave. If it’s gone poking around the room by the time we get back, we should use the fourth bed as well.”
“We’re going to tuck it in?”
“If you want to see it that way, sure. I just figured the sheets and pillows would dampen any noise and stop it from rolling around.”
~~~
After a short conversation, the three of them left me alone in the room, having left behind all of their stuff. Luckily for me this included the gloves. The fire around me was burning hotter than it had been when that mage had lit her seemingly special fire, but I also couldn’t detect those motes of ‘clean laundry’ smell anymore. When the fire around me had burned down, the mana I now had at my disposal, was making me feel electric. None of the ashes stuck directly to me, but some got caught in my cracks or in the small bits of rock that were half melted into me. I had to do something with this energy, and the only non-destructive idea I could come up with was trying to change my form.
The crystalline structures moved easier if I kept them as whole structures, but that severely limited my options. I needed to break them down, so I applied more force. It wasn’t painful, like the foreign materials were, just disorienting. I started actually getting somewhere when I tried to smooth my surface of its pits and cracks by visualizing a hand of mana molding me like clay. The ashes and rubble fell into the bottom of the fireplace, with the last of the fire’s embers. In order to get my surface to become plastic, I had needed to use the fire mana, and in order to get my new coat to stick, I had expended most of my glove mana. I had now become significantly closer to a real sphere, being just a bit too oval, like two snowballs smushed together. It was not difficult to get my form to roll, as I just used my fire mana to shift some weight off center, in the direction I wanted to go. When I stopped focusing, my balance returned, but now I had forward momentum. The gloves they had used to put me here were sitting close by, and I rolled until I hit them, stopping by molding the part of me in contact with the ground into a flat surface. The ground here still felt like stone, so I was comfortable enough for some riskier experimentation.
I didn’t want to try to draw in whatever mana the gloves were releasing, as if the fire was anything to go by, losing all their mana at once might break them. Up first, I might as well try and expel some of the cool mana I was now gathering, as if fire mana produced fire, logically this cool mana would either produce water, or ice. Because I had removed all my surface cracks, I made myself a simple nozzle, just a hole that tapered out. I started with a very slow trickle of the mana, and I didn’t initially notice any water or ice. The mana did however cast a light I could just barely see by. Enough to know that I was now on the edge of the stonework that surrounded the fireplace, and the wooden floor was a short drop away, before disappearing into the distance. I then did the same test with fire, shooting as little out as I did of the apparently not water mana, but unlike before, as when I had blasted the logs with the mana, there was no “flamethrower”. I could just barely feel the air it was passing through causing turbulence, unlike it did with the blueish mana. I tried countering this effect with a blast of cool mana, and the light they gave off together seemed to shine brighter, and the turbulence of the mana plume was gone. Just as I was about to start trying to expel both at once, I felt footsteps through the stones below me.
~~~
Upon arriving at their room's door, the three adventurers all shared a look. Waiting much longer would risk the Living Metal getting bored, and for all they knew it would start trying to catch the whole room on fire.
“Ladies first.”
“Really? Is this your idea of chivalry?”
“You are the mana expert here.”
“Fine.”
Leona opened the door gingerly, half expecting to see the ashes from the fireplace scattered all over. Instead, The room was just as they had left it, except for one thing.
“It has moved, but it's on top of the gloves?”
“It’s what?”
Entering the room, and closing the door softly behind them, they all saw the same thing. The previously rough looking lump was now much more spherical, with its previous pearly appearance now far closer to silver. It was also resting on top of the gloves Larrik had placed to the side after using them to move the Living Metal into the fireplace.
“So, if it did move, that means it’s curious. That doesn’t mean it’s more dangerous, right?”
Both the rogue and the divine mage seemed conflicted.
“Well, this is over my head, but if I had to guess, it’s not just capable of manipulating that chaotic mana. Those gloves are of Resist Fire, right? They should be passively emitting order.”
Rodney rounded on the mage.
“That was chaos mana, not fire mana, earlier?”
“You couldn’t tell?”
“No, I couldn’t. Are you sure?”
“Not sure, no. I have a spell that would let me be certain. Would you like me to find out?”
“It’s tempting, but I also don’t want you to cast any more spells in front of it, in case it tries to copy you again.”
“You think that’s what it was trying to do when it reignited the fireplace?”
“That is my best guess. Larrik, Can you get the gloves out from under it, without touching it?”
“It’s not that heavy, sure.”
As he headed for the giant pearl lookalike, it shifted slightly, and the orb fell from the stonework with a light thump. His instinct had been to dive and catch it, but Rodney had made it clear he shouldn’t be touching it without the gloves on, and he wasn’t even wearing his normal gauntlets. His two party members shared a glance behind him, first of shock and then relief when the orb didn’t seem to react to the impact.
“Well that wasn’t good for my heart.”
“Nor mine.”
“Larrik, please just get the gloves and grab it before it gets into something.”
“Oh, uh, sure.”
The orb had been rolling in the vague direction Larrik had been approaching from, but as he gingerly stepped around it, it angled slightly, turning for the party members' haphazardly discarded supplies. Leona rushed to grab both backpacks and lift them out of the way, but Larrik was more than fast enough to have made it in time as the living metal didn’t seem to be in a hurry, and didn’t resist when being picked up.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
~~~
After our quick game of tag, the trio seemed nervous. They moved me to the one bed they had left open. It was between the two men and the woman, and they wrapped me almost completely in its sheets. I could only tell they were sheets because they felt so soft compared to everything else I had touched. They blocked my vision, but I could barely see light peaking between some of the threads as my new friends must have been moving around, getting ready for bed.
Shortly after being swaddled, I stopped seeing the occasional flashes passing by. My experiments had been interrupted, but that didn’t really bother me. I could now only speculate as to what the warm mana really was, but it didn’t seem to be simple “fire”. Seeing as how external experiments were on hold, unless I wanted to risk them taking more drastic measures to keep me from rolling around, I figured I could do some internal experiments so I’d be ready for tomorrow. I started by trying to turn myself the rest of the way into a perfect sphere. It was slow going, as I was trying to smooth a dent out of sheet metal by hand, but when I changed my conceptualization to magic hydroforming, my mana expenditure dropped slightly and my precision went up drastically.
I was now a perfect sphere, with no bumps, no cracks, not a single blemish on my surface. My plan’s next step was to try and compress myself into a smaller sphere. This started off easily enough, with going from bigger than to just smaller than a basketball, taking almost no effort beyond imagining compacting snow. But after that, it started getting really difficult to make myself any smaller. I tried a few different approaches, starting with folding and working myself like you might forge iron.
My next breakthrough came when I got fed up and just imagined another dimension where I could stick my excess mass. While this idea didn’t grant me some sort of otherworldly pocket, It did feel like I was swallowing myself. This time when I shrunk, my weight seemed to be diminishing at the same rate as my volume. As I approached a baseball’s size, I tried for my end goal. I focused on the look and feel of a weapon. I was imagining a decorative one, rather than a real one. I could only assume daggers were commonplace in a world like this. My reasoning behind being decorative was that turning myself into a real weapon was a big risk, as unlike normal weapons, I had some responsibility in what I was used for.
I attempted to cast myself into my desired shape, using the pale blue mana as my mold. The form I managed was not very good. I had a point, I had a handle, and I had an edge, but I looked more like an oversized butterknife that had been dropped in a blender. I wasn’t going to give up until I ran out of mana, though.
~~~
When Larrik started his shift, he cracked the window and let moonlight in so he could check on if the living metal had moved at all. It was still dead center in the bed, but something did seem off about its size. Was it smaller? The sheets had probably just settled down after they had been all balled up. He spent the rest of his watch listening quietly for any one trying to sneak up on their room, but all he heard was his party members shifting in their beds. He checked again at the end of his watch, but all he really did was look to see if the sheets had moved.
Rodney had taken the last watch, and he didn’t notice that something was wrong. It wasn’t until dawn was properly breaking that he glanced over to the door, as some other denizen of the tavern got up and headed downstairs, likely in search of breakfast. Glancing past the unoccupied bed, he saw that Leona was still sleeping, and on his other side Larrik was likely awake, but still resting. It took him a second to before he made a double take at the unoccupied bed. Jumping to his feet, he grabbed the sheets, and swept most of them off the bed in one large movement.
“Larrik, where did it go?”
“Huh?”
“The living metal isn’t where we left it.”
“What the fuck? When I went to bed it was still there. I even double checked just before I woke you up for your shift.”
Rodney turned back to the bed, and cleared the rest of the sheets off the bed. It was only as he dragged the last of the sheets off the bed that he heard something metallic strike the floor.
“You’ve got to be shitting me.”
“What is it?”
“One second.”
Pulling on the sheets until whatever was caught inside of them fell out, Rodney facepalmed.
“That’s even more abnormal, right?”
“Yeah, everything before this was strange, but still believable. Now I just don’t know what to say.”
“It’s not supposed to be able to become things until it's been worked with by a manasmith, right?”
“Nothing man made. I heard a story that one turned into a bird on the way back, but it couldn’t fly, what with being made of metal.”
“And how long did the story say it took to figure out becoming a bird?”
“Somewhere between one month and two.”
“You think Tom’s ready to leave yet?”
“No, he will stay at least for breakfast here in the tavern.”
“What do we do with it then?”
“Pick it up with one glove, put it in the other, and then we’ll stuff it in your backpack again.”
“But won’t everyone get suspicious when I’m not carrying something so bulky in my backpack anymore?”
“Of course they will, but we can stuff our bedrolls in with it, and then it won’t be much more suspicious than the simple fact we came in with something so big.”
“I guess that might work.”
“What’s going on? Is breakfast ready?”
“No. Our friend here learned a new trick last night.”
“Our friend? Learned what?”
“Take a look.”
“Oh.”
~~~
They didn’t seem exactly happy that I was now less than a twentieth my former size, but it did wake them up pretty quickly. I had figured it would be easier to smuggle me out if I was smaller. Their reaction to someone coming in unannounced had made it clear to me they were trying to be discreet. I had wanted to keep experimenting with my form, but I had burned through about half my red mana getting this far, and was almost out of my pale blue. When he picked me up, only to place me inside one of the gloves, It let me start trying to refill myself with the glove’s mana. I hadn’t noticed initially, but the matter I had absorbed into myself seemed to constantly require that mana to stay put. If I didn’t actively use cool mana to hold my form, I would start growing. I had gained a whole inch in length and about half an inch in width before I realized what was causing it.
I was once again closed off from the world around me, but I could still feel the shifting of the pack, and the rise and fall of each step. After a short descent to the first floor, I was placed on the ground again, and I figured they must be eating breakfast. I was bored as I sat there in the pitch black void. The glove I had was stuck in was my only landmark, the other glove having fallen down to the bottom of the bag, out of my sight. Today they had stuffed me in with something soft, but I don’t think it made for good camouflage. I couldn’t see the actual appearance, but I expect the weight of a large rock weighs a pack down differently than a larger than normal dagger, and two pillows. After breakfast, we didn’t return upstairs and after a short walk, I felt myself set down again.