An Age of Mysterious Memories

Laomati sets a hand on Ag’s shoulder and looks concerned, yet somehow also pleadingly at Agwai, as if a simple look requests that they calm themselves. Somehow this motherly figure’s authority and presence calms even her equal, giving me the opportunity to explain.

“I would never risk Te or any of you if I could avoid it, if I could find a safe solution, you have to know that, you have to believe me. I’d be willing to give up everything, for any of you. I just mean, the feathered bear was something we ran into before I even really discovered how powerful my inventory magic could be, and I went about the fight all wrong, I think a single one of these could have ended it.” I state as I summon a radiant spear duplicate to expel it from my inventory, flinging it straight downward, where it burrows deeply into the ground before dissipating.

I indicate the devastating tunnel excavated in a single instant, “I’m already back to the point of being able to do that, and Teuila is honestly more powerful than me in any sort of combat where I might be unable to do that for whatever reason. Even without this magic, Lil and I were able to drive off the bear thing, and well, like I said, Te is stronger than either of us, no offense Lil.” Lil harumphs in response, though I can tell from our shared wavelength, that Lil begrudgingly agrees, at least in Lil’s current form. Lilagnewt might be a different story, a flying, fire-breathing dragon is a force to be reckoned with.

I can tell Lao’s eyes look almost pleadingly at Agwai, while the twins and Mataalli seem to be talking privately in confusion. Te and Luni, for their part, come to stand next to Lil and me, Te’s hands resting on my shoulders. Agwai’s look softens, and their readiness to outburst in anger appears to drift away, vanishing as Lao strokes their cheek.

Agwai sighs, visibly heaving a long bated breath, frustration veritably dripping away as their shoulders sag, and they sink into an embrace with Lao. Lao turns, hugging Agwai’s face to her shoulder, before she takes over the conversation.

Lao quietly agrees, affirming, “It, as you say child, is dangerous to remain here. We are not entirely ignorant of the serpent of the swamps, nor its frog denizens that wish harm unto all. I trust your best intentions, and so too does Agwai. We’ve simply been thrust into change after change, danger after danger recently. We await a seemingly inevitable danger once again to remain here, though you’d created shelter for us. Where once we saw always the right path to take upon our beach, we now see only fearfully surviving each day, dreading what may come the next. If you believe your pond to be safer, to be a home that can be shared with us, your family, I see no reason not to pursue the path that leads there, though the path itself carries its own risks.” My heart swells as Lao calls me her family. During our entire conversation, I’d been trying to combine timber and needles into rough house shapes, as well as trying out various alchemical combinations still. I swear I heard a tiny cracking sound coming from within my mind’s eye, where I picture the virtual lock on my energy capacity.

“Yes, yes I really do believe it, there’s a pain with being away from your home that I can feel, a sickness in my gut that I don’t want you to have to bear, that I think would dull with time if we can build a community there. Things like this could be where we would take shelter and, um, train, and pursue arts and music.” I try to explain as I produce a radiant roughly hewn version of a miniature log cabin from my inventory, the creation of which was massively exerting. The shellcrackers seem to understand the word music, but its impact doesn’t carry the weight I’d been hoping for, as if the word and its definition exists, yet none of them had experienced any of it before.

“When?” Agwai asks plainly, with some irritation in their voice. I feel like I’m finally part of this world as normal, while there are text logs of conversation in my mind’s eye, I could swear that I truly hear Agwai speak with my own senses. “Well, When?” They ask again impatiently. I realize now, that I might not even have been noticing that my senses were acclimatizing, hearing things around me as others like Lil hear them. I remember the sound of Teuila’s voice, and, oh right, Agwai asked me a question.

“What? Oh, oh sorry, I was, I was distracted, I’m sorry. Honestly as soon as possible, maybe in the morning. Each day is going to be a challenge, but I’m terrified of losing any of you if we stay here and another wave happens further inland.” I don’t let on how excited I am to hear Agwai’s voice, even if their voice sounds irritated at me. I don’t mention how I hear the murmur of individual conversations, and I can just sink into my own closed-eyed world. I find myself sighing contentedly that I really belong.

Lao and Agwai look to one another, exchanging those knowing glances that speak volumes more than I could ever comprehend, maybe they’re on as close of a wavelength as Lil, Luni, and myself. “So be it, we journey in the morning.” Agwai states, before their voice softens, “thank you, child. What we yet have is each other, we strive to keep it that way.” I want to hug Agwai in a sort of comforting acceptance, but Agwai has never really struck me as the affectionate type. Even as I think that, Lao brings them into a hug, while Agwai seems to begrudgingly accept the comfort.

Everyone appears to be slightly uncomfortable at the moment, and looking for excuses to wander off to do their own contemplation or preparation for tomorrow’s journey. My senses are starting to become more reliable, and I’m struck with an idea. Thinking at Lil and Luni, I flick my head towards the river, Te’s observation also catches my meaning, so the four of us head towards the river for privacy.

Across our wavelength I telepathically send, “So, um, it looks like my wish is going to come true, for showing you all to our little home.”

“Yup, it was probably just a matter of time buddy, everyone was nervous staying here.” Lil plainly comments on everyone’s subtle anxiety. I was probably a bit preoccupied to realize that it was affecting everyone, but it makes sense that two massive, deadly, tidal waves striking, in such a short time, would leave a family feeling anxious. Between that, and being forced to move closer to a swamp that houses violent bullies and deadly serpents, everyone has probably been more on edge than I’ve been able to notice without my sight.

“My biggest worry on the way back is the serpent, Octorochi. Thinking back to the fight, I think I managed to halfway strike down one head with a radiant spear worth about half a thousand energy. That means it would take eight thousand to stop it all at once, no, over eight thousand, wait, the main body too, so it would take over nine thousand energy worth of radiant attacks at once to at least stop, if not put down permanently.”

“Over nine thousand!?” Lil exclaims, realizing that it’s far more energy than either of us currently, or have ever had. This vaguely sets my brain flickering into a tiny BSOD moment oddly.

I nod when I reorient myself and return to my senses, “I know, I know, that means we shouldn’t try to fight it. At least, not yet. Lilagnewt’s dragon form, and Te’s divebombs are our aces, or trump cards, or the tricks up our sleeves, and I don’t know how those compare numerically to my radiant strikes, but, well.”

“I’ve seen one of your energy attacks take down a tree in a single strike that I spent minutes on, your space magic is ridiculously powerful, it’s frightening.” Te basically completes my thought, as I didn’t want to disparage her and her power, as physically she seems to be dozens of times stronger than myself, she’s easily capable of doing things it would take me magic to complete.

I continue nodding as I try to puzzle out a solution while rambling, “I’m pretty certain our best bet is to try to flee, and maybe put up some kind of barricade if we can’t get away, if we make like, clay or logs that it can’t break through, then it should eventually get bored, especially if we leave only little holes that Lil and I can fire out of whenever it tries to attack. It doesn’t seem stupid enough to keep throwing itself at rocks that are going to set it on fire and blast spears into it repeatedly. There’s something about its eyes. Other predatory things have had these crazed, red, pupil-less eyes, but Octorochi knew what it was doing.”

Teuila oders, “Make me some spears, and teach me what skills and abilities I’m going to need.”

My right eye twitches as it squints while my left brow raises in confusion, “Do what now?”

Teuila responds matter-of-factly, “I didn’t stutter, I said make me some spears, and teach me what I’m going to need. To be able to throw at this Octorochi. I’m not letting you two take care of everything. I’m the protector of our family, I’m going to be the strongest. Show me what my numbers need to be at, and I’ll work harder than anyone, ever, to get them there.”

Befuddled, I mildly grump, “Te, I, I don’t know how high”

Teuila prods, “Can you make them?”

I do my best to respond, “Yes, of course I’ll make anything you want, anything to help you protect us and yourself.”

Teuila continues to needle, “Then just help me make a goal for my numbers, you know you need to get yours over nine thousand, what do mine need to be to keep up?”

“Okay, well, uh, currently the numbers for us three are the following.” I say as I pull up our stats, as the three warriors here. Luni doesn’t seem to mind being excluded, her thoughts are mostly focused on Lil’s wellbeing, and I think she might be composing music in her mind?

Lil thinks at me “Yup, Luni took it to heart when you were talking about creating music!”Teuila’s statistics are ridiculously impressive, I think over the last few weeks she has somehow gained an average of at least five in every offense and defense on any given day, the rest of the family can’t even compare to her numbers. I can’t even imagine what her training is like, probably swimming upstream against rapids and bashing into rocks, it would also explain why her stamina is so high. “Well Te, uh, at the rate you’re going, like, three, four, maybe five of your strongest strikes might take out a head? If the numbers work that way, but I couldn’t even penetrate its hide with my lesser strikes with normal weapons that were like half of your numbers. We’d have to craft something special for you.”

“Well?” Teuila asks impatiently, I can hear the soft tapping of her foot.

I boggle, “Well what?”

“Well, go on then, craft away. Gimme gimme.” She orders in what sounds like a partially joking manner. I half laugh at the absurdity, I hope she’s joking.

Stifling a laugh, I try to entertain the thought while providing clarification, “Teuila? I can’t tell if you’re being serious. I don’t have any materials, or ability, to craft better than what I used back then. We’d have to get metals, or well, ores or something, and learn how to melt and smelt the stuff down, then like, hammer out the impurities, or fire it with uh, I think they call it coke, which I think is just cooked coal, or something. Right now I can give you some pointy wooden sticks with some teeth glued to them. I think we need iron, and molybdenum or vanadium or some other eeyums, like titanium or something. The more impressive sounding the mineral element of the ore, the harder it is to work with, I think. At least based on my memories. Like ferrous metals can rust, so we’d have to combine them with other metals to make an alloy, so if we found iron, we’d need to make steel.”

Before I can continue further explaining what very very very little I know about metallurgy, Teuila puts a paw to my lips, shooshing me, in fact, her pawed hand basically paps my entire face, smooshing my cheeks, rubbing my forehead and rolling my lips around, smearing a bit of saliva, “Blah blah blah, all I’m hearing is we have to go on adventures and find some materials.” I laugh somewhat indignantly, now I can tell she’s teasing me, for sure, but from anyone else, that would have been so rude I’d probably facepalm, or stomp away in frustration. With Teuila however, I just get a big derpy grin on my face, and shake my head incredulously.

My smile stretches my face wide as I jokingly admonish her, “You’re unbelievable.”

“I know, right? Fast, strong, and smart enough to know when to shut you up?” Teuila proudly claims, I can tell she crosses her arms, striking a pose and leaning back, for a split second. I burst out laughing and wipe a tear from my eye from laughing so hard. I know she’s not that full of herself, so the last few seconds have played out like some sort of comedy skit in my mind, but I feel her padded fingers plop against my face again.

“Hah, hah, okay okay, can I have my face back now?” I jokingly ask as I try to shove Te’s hand off of my face, which earns me another paw to the face, and as I push that one away, the other returns, again and again for several seconds filled with laughter. “Hah, okay, okay, you win, you win already! Hahah, yes, sort of, you’re right, adventures in mining I guess, but to do that, we’d have to go all the way back to, what did Lil call it, Fire Biome? Volcano Biome? Lava Biome?”

“Fire Biome buddy!” Comes Lil’s excited reply.

Expressing my gratitude, I continue, “Thanks Lil, so yeah, we’d have to head all the way to the North, through the swamp, up the river past our home, and into the cliffs leading to Fire Biome anyway Te. No luck on getting the materials right now to make you decent equipment until after we leave Octorochi behind.”

Teuila's frown itself is almost audible, “Huh, well, poop. That sort of sucks, how am I supposed to protect you brats if I can’t fight? Did you maybe get any materials from that living box mouth thing? The mimicked box, you know, the one that, uh -”

“Ah yes, the one that ate me, thank you for reminding me.” I jokingly shudder, and Te baps me on the cheek playfully before hugging me comfortingly. She is right though, we did get some things from the box. Maybe they’ll be useful in finding our way home.