“All right, Whiskers,” I said to the sleepy-looking beast in my hand. “Show me what you got.”
The nodmouse blinked, yawned, and curled up to sleep.
“That’s about what I expected,” I said to Treepo, who peered over my hands and grunted at the tiny beast.
I had tamed a nodmouse in order to learn more about breaking through a beast’s level plateau. It was disturbingly easy to get a nodmouse maxed out, apparently. They’re too small to kill much of anything besides the small spider-like creatures I sometimes saw in the garden, but they could gain an enormous amount of experience from eating the meat of a sufficiently strong creature.
The experience that Treepo needed to level up had been one-tenth of mine. I needed 100 EXP per level, whereas treehoppers needed 10. I hadn’t known if that was true of all beasts or if it was different depending on breed or some other factor.
Whiskers the nodmouse only needed 1 EXP per level, apparently. I captured him and fed him some infused vipis meat, and by the time he was tamed he had already maxed out his level. Appraising him reported he was sitting at a full 10/10 EXP at level 10. Despite the growth, he barely had any HP and never exceeded 1 MP.
Growth conditions were not met, which is what I expected.
I was too nervous to try and bust Treepo’s plateau before I advanced my taming. Given what I was seeing from the nodmouse, it could be that oxalires were in a class of beast which required significantly more experience, and so while the oxalire may have escaped its tamer by evolving in Forn’s story, evolving Treepo might be fine. Nonetheless, I would rather learn on a much weaker creature. I needed a guinea pig. Or, in this case, a nodmouse.
I had learned a lot more about plants and potions from Belat. After much grumbling, she showed me her home garden, where I saw a number of herbs and flowers, including some I had found before growing wild in the jungle. She wouldn’t tell me exactly how they were all used yet, but it gave me an idea. Maybe the growth plateau required consuming a special plant. Maybe one of the plants used to make MP potions would give the beast enough MP bust through their plateau.
I pulled out a flower that I had collected from the jungle, and presented it to Whiskers.
“Eat this,” I told the nodmouse. “It might make you stronger.”
The mouse woke up, ate the flower, looked at me, and promptly died.
“Well, shit.”
* * *
“All right, Whiskers Seven,” I said to the sleepy-looking beast in my hand. “Eat this.”
The nodmouse ate the plant I had given it, made a face, threw up a bit, and passed out. His status now read “poisoned.” I tried to cure him before his HP could bottom out, but the poison worked too fast.
Treepo grunted. I grunted back.
I had tried a number of herbs, flowers, and leaves, and they either had no effect or, in several cases, quite detrimental effects. Nothing had triggered evolution.
I had several nodmice working away on different projects. Whiskers Four was told to eat a huge amount of meat, and it was stuffed full, taking only the tiniest nibbles of the pile before it to satisfy my command. Whiskers Five was swimming laps in a bowl of water and Whiskers Six was leaping back and forth over a small fire, seeing if environmental conditions or stress could be a factor.
I watched Whiskers Five start to drown, and waited to see if anything would happen. Treepo chittered with concern. I finally reached in and pulled the nodmouse out and put him on the ground. He trembled and panted.
“We’re not getting anywhere,” I said grumpily to the mouse. I cast a breeze at him to dry him off, then cast a cure and a heal. No longer drowning, he yawned and curled up. I glared at the clouds overhead. “What do you all need in order to evolve?” I tried not to whine, but I was getting annoyed. I looked around the yard.
I had pulled all sorts of items I had collected out of my inventory, trying to figure out what could possibly trigger evolution. I was deliberating another test when I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye. Whiskers Five had woken up and was sniffing the small magic crystal I had set down. Then the nodmouse shoved it in his mouth.
“You’re going to choke,” I said absently, before the beast started to glow. I smacked myself in the forehead. Oh, obviously.
The nodmouse grew in size, doubling and then tripling, legs growing slightly longer and thicker. Flesh formed between the front and back legs. The nubs on its head grew out into short, double point antlers. Its light-blue fur darkened to a richer blue and got a little shaggier, and the tail grew bushy. Treepo and I stared as it continued to grow.
The glow faded, and the nodmouse stopped changing. I looked at the new beast before me. It looked back at me and yawned.
Flying Nodmouse (Lv 1)
HP: 6/6
MP: 2/2
Status: none
EXP: 0/10
Treepo and I looked at each other, then back to the beast, who had already curled up and gone to sleep. “That works,” I said.
Then a thought occurred to me. “I wonder if he has a magic crystal inside of him now?”
* * *
I had plenty of magic crystals from last year, but suddenly decided some more wouldn’t hurt. It was rocky shieldback season anyway and Bosh had complained last time I saw him that I wasn’t bringing him much meat anymore, so I decided to clean up the beach, bring the meat to Bosh for sale, and collect some extra crystals.
I decided not to try to feed Treepo any crystals yet. The nodmouse had physically grown quite substantially when it had evolved, and if Treepo also grew that much it would be too difficult to hide him.
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It turns out the flying nodmouse had not contained a magic crystal. I felt pretty bad killing him to put him in my inventory to find out, but I needed to know. The rocky shieldbacks did contain crystals, and according to Bosh that meant they should be capable of using magic. Feeding one to a beast and causing it to evolve was insufficient to form a new one in the evolved beast. Would feeding more work? Did it require more time? The crystals seemed to be an excess of magic, concentrated, but it would need to develop an excess. Did humans have the potential to store excess magic, and would they have magic crystals inside of them if so? What would happen if I consumed a magic crystal, like the nodmouse? Was consuming the magic crystal the only way to evolve for a beast, or a shortcut?
I had released the rest of my mice after the experiment, feeling a bit of guilt at the loss of my evolved familiar. He had been really cute. Now his corpse sat in my inventory, making me feel bad about the whole thing every time I looked at the contents. I wasn’t in a great position to be taming and evolving a bunch of familiars right now. I didn’t even know how many familiars I could tame before I would start to lose control of them. This whole taming experiment probably needed to slow down until I could get some freedom from my parents. The only other option would be somehow getting my parents to accept that I could tame beasts, and in particular a treehopper, explainable in such a way that I could stop sneaking around.
I was ruminating on these thoughts and more while killing rocky shieldbacks for the meat and crystals. I dropped the last one into my inventory, distracted, when I turned and saw the little girl watching me.
Shit.
“Where did it go?” she asked.
The girl was tiny. At most, she was four, maybe even three. No one would believe this child. I sighed, admonishing myself for being sloppy. “Are you lost? Where are your parents?” I asked her.
She glared at me. “I’m five,” she said. “I’m allowed to be out by myself now.”
I blinked in surprise, and appraised her while getting my bearings.
Nodel Mirut (Lv 2)
HP: 16/16
MP: 24/24
Status: none
EXP: 52/200
Skills: Literacy
Mirut? That would make this the local lord’s daughter. That could be a huge problem. And yet, I was intrigued. How had she reached level 2 already? She was already literate, which was unheard of at this age among commoners, and most interestingly of all she had significantly more MP than HP at such a low level. If my theories about human growth were at all right, she could grow to be very powerful with magic. My own MP was finally starting to seriously get ahead of my HP, but they had stayed pretty even until late last year.
I glanced around. I didn’t see Treepo anywhere; he must have hidden when she approached, like he was supposed to if we saw other people. You could have warned me, I thought at the treehopper. I would have to tell him to warn me in the future instead of just hiding.
I studied Nodel for a moment. She was well-dressed, as one would expect from a lord’s daughter, and had wavy auburn hair, rich enough that it almost looked like copper in the day’s light. Intense, hazel eyes with gold flecks stared at me expectantly.
“You don’t look five,” I finally responded.
She sniffed, and looked away. “I was sick when I was a child. I’m all better now, but my mother says it will take a while for my body to catch up.”
Perhaps surviving her sickness had been stressful enough that it made her gain a lot of experience early, and that was why she was already level 2. Or maybe it was some kind of magic sickness that I knew nothing about. It could just be that noble life does that to a child. I was too ignorant. I might be able to learn some stuff from this kid, but I had to manage the immediate problem.
“If your body is weak, you shouldn’t be playing by the water. If you fall in you might get pulled out to sea and drown,” I told her.
She glanced at the water, took one step back, then looked back at me. “You don’t have to worry about me. Now, what happened to that beast? It was there one second and then gone the next.”
I looked behind me at where the rocky shieldback had been before I dropped it in my inventory. I started dropping some stones out of my inventory into the sand behind me, masking what I was doing with a minor light bending illusion. “You mean the sandbeast I made? I was just playing.” I stepped aside, and showed her the pile of rocks strewn about in the sand. “I tried to make one that looked like those beasts that appear here, but it looked wrong so I knocked it over.”
She stepped forward, and frowned. “No, that…” Her brow furrowed.
“I can make it again if you want,” I said, hoping to keep her off-balance and confuse her memory of what she saw.
She looked at the pile of rocks, then back up to me suspiciously. “No, that’s fine,” she said.
I shrugged, went to pick up my pack–feeling my familiar’s weight inside–and started walking away. “All right. Be careful by the water,” I said over my shoulder.
I got a few feet away before she shouted after me. “Wait!” I turned back and saw her eyes narrow as she looked me over one more time. “I’m Nodel,” she said after a few seconds. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Pilus,” I responded.
“Nice to meet you,” she said, giving me a well-practiced curtsey. Her eyes narrowed at me. “I’ll be seeing you, Pilus.”
I turned and walked away, picking up my pace. That could be a problem.
* * *
Nodel started seeking me out regularly, putting a serious damper on my activities. I barely managed to sneak out of town to check in on Missy, who I had been meeting with whenever possible to feed and check in on. Worried I wouldn’t be able to sneak out again before she had her babies, I built her a stone nest in the best location I could that seemed to be within her tribe’s territory and told her to give birth to her babies in there when she was ready to keep them safe. I left her a bunch of extra food and hoped for the best.
I managed to dodge Nodel again and sneak into the back alley behind Bosh’s butcher shop to drop off the shieldback meat and get paid. I laughed to myself when I realized her parents were probably the ones buying the meat from him. I made back the silvers I had spent bribing Belat and then some. I still had some stuff in my inventory I could sell to him to keep our relationship going, but without being able to hunt for more, I would only be able to keep that up for so long. Maybe if my potion-making lessons paid off and I could stock up on MP potions, I could hold back less and offer him more of my holdings.
In order to stay off her radar, I started visiting the Church again for lunch most days. Rog’s expression the first day I came back was almost worth the aggravation. I just didn’t want Nodel catching me eating high-quality meat every day without explanation. The Church’s soup seemed thinner than I recalled. My palate might have become a bit too used to the rich meat I ate most days of late.
I settled into a dull routine. I started going to Belat’s shop every morning, learning from her and doing simple chores for her. The woman was slow to warm but no longer hostile, and I was learning all the different uses of herbs and flowers. From Belat’s shop, I would go to the Church for lunch which I quietly ate before heading back out. I would go for a run in the afternoon, when the day was at its hottest; Nodel couldn’t keep up with her weak and untrained body and the summer heat, so I would lose her before heading home. It would be a problem if she figured out where I lived. Treepo stayed home more often than not now, but every now and then he would hop in my pack when I got home and we would try to get outside the wall to hunt a bit and see Missy and find out if the babies were born yet.
Sometimes I would accidentally run into Nodel again while trying to head to the wall, and I’d give up for the day and just chat with the girl, learning more about her family and this town and her life, and tell her a bit about the more innocent parts of my own. She would always head home before dinner, and I would wait until she left before returning home myself.
My progress slowed, and the summer days kept racing by.