Drip-Fed Pt. 09

"Then don't," Apexus suddenly burst out, his deep voice made only that bit more menacing by the mask. That this map drawing person decided to use his food hole to do this much blabbering, talking as if they were friends, irked the chimeric creature more than a little bit.

"O-oh, sorry, sorry," the gnome waved in a panic. To him, the slime was an almost two-metre-tall (at that much difference, ten to fifteen centimetres was barely noticeable) giant of a relatively lean build but giant wings that more than made up for it. All that was visible of Apexus' body were those wings and his pale blue eyes, staring down with slit pupils.

An awkward silence ensued, during which Apexus kept staring down the gnome, the gnome sweating profusely and Aclysia trying to figure out how to solve any of this. Between her beloved reacting in a, somewhat understandably, aggressive fashion and them being out of luck when it came to buying things.

"Ehem," Aclysia cleared her throat again and the gnome was very happy to turn his attention to her. "Please ignore my darling, he isn't very familiar with this environment," she said. "If you could, I would be happy to buy some information instead? We are wondering where to go next."

"Ah, yes, that will be no problem!" the gnome obliged and climbed back on his stool to gesture at the map. "As you can see Azenia-Ra has a total of seven dungeons with a wide level spread. You should already know Myrlight," he just stated that as a fact and so Aclysia nodded. She wanted to ask, but feared that would cause the gnome to ask unnecessary questions. "If you go south from here, the wild animal will get a bit stronger. Generally, the animals become more bothersome the further south you go, but they don't reach something a level seven adventurer shouldn't be able to handle. We have settlements of humans and dwarves here and..."

While the gnome gave Aclysia and Apexus the rough rundown, Reysha was only concentrating on her breathing. Her eyes were focused on a single point. She wasn't really looking at anything. Really, she tried her best to not see anything without closing her eyes. If she could have done the same for her ears and nose, then she would have. Her keen senses constantly fed her all of the business-buzzing that went on around them. The singing sound of coins bouncing on wooden surfaces, the squeaking of badly oiled scales, the shouting matches between aggressive barterers and old trade rivals, the friendly chatter between people that only got to see each other on these days, the typical array of a market.

Somehow worse was the smell of dust. After all of the sweet smells of the forest, the dust that rose from the trampled road filled her nostrils with an odd familiarity. In her home, Ragressia, where hot days and desert winds had been normal, it often smelled similar to this. That smell of her birthplace, a home that she had always disliked for many reasons she carried in her own personality, now made her nostalgic at a time she really couldn't use it.

Violently, she was ripped out of her attempts to not think, when someone bumped into her. At one moment, her mind was forcefully calm, the next her hand closed around something hot.

Suddenly, she stood in that basement again. Her hand was burning, the flesh set aflame and reduced to ash within moments by the life-stealing fire. It burned hot, way too hot, melted her bones and crept up her arms. She was there, she was wide awake and she was screaming.

Apexus had already been walking when he noticed Reysha stumbling, but now he moved as quickly as his liquid body allowed him too. "What is...?" he tried to ask, but Reysha's eyes were empty and opened wide in terror, as she slumped to the ground and continued to empty her lungs in an intense, pained cry. Only her hand had any sort of tension in it, holding onto the metal handle of the well. It had been exposed to the sun all day and was very hot. Not enough to cause more than a bit of discomfort to a healthy adult person. Reysha did not fit that categorization at the moment.

Realizing that the problem had to do something with that, Apexus pried open her thumb and pulled her away from the well. The moment he did, Reysha's flashback came to a sudden end. The pain left with it, but terrifying confusion took its place. Crying and quivering, she let herself be embraced by Apexus, who stroked her hair and mumbled whatever calming came to mind. Aclysia, no matter how much she hated the situation, quickly hurried over.

Half the market was looking their direction for a little while. The genuine scream of a woman echoed far and wide over any environment, no matter how busy. A city guard stepped close, inspected the situation for a little while, then shook his head and took it on him to disperse the crowd. "Let's leave them alone, come on people, don't you have business to attend to?!" he shouted. Like most guards, he was a former adventurer and had a vast number of ideas what could wreck a person like that.

The gnome waddled over and placed his stool next to the well. "Sit her down," he said, in a very calm voice. "And get some water out of that well."

Apexus looked to Aclysia before he followed that advice. Working the handle, he soon brought a bucket of water to the surface. The gnome returned with a piece of cloth and a cup. "Here," he offered both to Reysha. "Take these."

"I don't deserve that," the tiger girl mumbled.

"It's not a gift, just drink a cup of water and clean your face," the gnome stated. "Take them."

With quivering fingers, Reysha did and kept it to the suggested order. She wasn't especially thirsty, but feeling something cold run through her greatly helped in other ways. Once she had wiped off her face, she let out small breath with relative relief.

"I don't want to inquire, but..." the gnome started and this time Apexus only lowered his head and let him talk. "...you seem like adventurers that have seen something you weren't ready for."

"Understatement of the millennia," Reysha mumbled.

The gnome didn't care for the irony in her voice, only gave her a friendly grandpa smile. Apexus hated that this expression stirred distrust inside his core. "I won't ask anything else. Just know that there is a summer island where the monsters are weak and the dungeon is only one step above the easiest Safe Leaf ones. We call it Summer Rest, for obvious reasons. It's a popular retirement place for adventurers. I am not suggesting anything," the gnome said and raised his hands defensively when he got three pairs of protesting eyes, "but if you want to be somewhere safe, then you should either head there or take the trip up the Leaf to Ctania."

The trio fell silent, unable to respond.

Mistaking their grief and bad conscious for hesitation, the gnome put on his nicest face and said, "Wait a second," and walked away into his house. After about a minute, during which they all heavily considered whether they should just run, the shopkeeper returned with a folded map in hand. "Here."

"We don't have the money," Apexus reminded the the gnome, who mockingly blew air out of his nose.

"What do you take me for?" He gestured at his table. "The map I showed you is one of my works, a piece of art that I replicate every other week. That costs you five silver and you don't have the money for it," he gestured at the folded map in his hands. "This is a failure my son drew when he was learning the craft. It has water damage and is folded all wrong. I don't sell failures around here." He shoved the map into Aclysia's hands. "So, you're doing me a favour, really. Just don't tell anyone I dared to hand something like that out, it would ruin the reputation of my shop!"

With that, he took the cloth and the cup and headed back into his home. For some reason, after all of that, the trio had a very easy time standing up and leaving. They only did three things before hurriedly getting out of the city. They took a look at the failure of a map they had been given. They put the stool of the shopkeeper back where it belonged.

And they put all the money they could quickly find in the adventurer's bags on the seat.

The old gnome hadn't been lying, the map was most certainly not good enough to sell at a shop that prided itself on high quality. The lines were inconsistently wide, suggesting that the person drawing it hadn't been used to the drawing tools yet, two of the landmarks and a fair chunk of forest were blurred thanks to water damage and one corner of the map was partially torn, as it stuck out whenever they folded the thing.

Regardless of all of that, it was true to scale and all of the important information was displayed on it. The common roads, the cities and larger villages, the dungeons, their names and their advised level range, what biomes were predominant where and all of that sort of thing. It was a bad copy of the map they couldn't afford but it was perfectly workable. Aclysia stored it in her adventurer's bag.

They kept running from the city environment for much longer than necessary. Apexus didn't want to be anywhere near that place of buzzing business and unfamiliar faces and the other two members of the group had their own, similar, reasons to follow that distancing. They only stopped once night time came around.

With it came a sudden and heavy rain. It depressed the temperatures considerably and hid everything behind an evermoving, grey curtain. They found shelter under a toppled over bolder, its brown-coloured size resting above a small trench that had clearly been dug later. Whether by hands of humans or animals wasn't clear.

The trench wasn't all that deep, barely enough for them to sit under, but it beat resting in the cold rain or the unreliable cover of young canopies by miles. Especially once the wind picked up and caused the rain drops to toss and assault from rapidly changing directions. Most of the time, the trench protected them from the winds. Only sometimes, a gale would have the exact right angle to blow right through.

Reysha shivered on one such occasion. They had found shelter before the proper storm, but she was still wet to the bone. "My life for a fucking fire," she cursed and stroked her drenched hair back.

"That'd be a bad trade," Apexus pointed out.

"You think?" Reysha asked with a sarcastic smile. "I might be feeling worthless these days, but that's a bit low even for me. And yes," the tiger girl changed focus to the angel who had just opened her mouth. "I know we can't make a fire here, even if we some-fucking-how managed to find dry wood."

"Then I shall keep my advice to myself," Aclysia said, while Apexus took off the wooden mask. The verdant wings stretched out to seal the shelter's openings to both sides. "Darling, that only protects us," she pointed out, as Apexus's back and said wings themselves were now fully subjected to the elements.

Apexus only shrugged. "Cold doesn't bother me much, only makes me slow," he stated, and waved for them to come closer. "Is easier to keep my wings closed around you if we cuddle." Not that the trio needed any excuse to find comfort in each other, they soon huddled together as closely as three people could.

Much like her beloved, Aclysia wasn't much affected by the weather. Her body was only reliant on magic to survive. It was, however, usual for her to be at the warmth of a usual human body and the cold sapped away at her mana reserves that way. Gently reaching out to Apexus, she drew new magic from him. He had quite a reservoir of it. Nothing truly outrageous, something on the higher end appropriate for his level. How much of that was reserved for his supernatural body function and how much he could theoretically utilize freely, if he ever came into acquisition of an organ that allowed him to channel that mana, Aclysia didn't know.

The slime let his magic seep into the metal angel. She didn't keep much of it to herself. Instead she formed a bowl with her hands and concentrated. A tiny light appeared between her hands and slowly grew. "Insufficient as it might be, this is the light I can offer," Aclysia's voice sounded like a melodic prayer. "Let it be what warms us in this stormy night."

The Illumni spell glowed and swelled to the size of an eyeball. No matter how much Aclysia would have tried, it wouldn't have expanded further. It was a supportive spell, a very basic one at that, meant to act as a magical alternative to a torch. Thanks to her nature as a summer angel, its light was paired with a pleasant warmth. It was like they had the tiniest and weakest of suns amidst them. Soothing in this night.

"It'll do plenty," Reysha assured and inched, what little she even could anymore, closer. So they sat for a little while. "Thank you for not giving up on me."

"We have been through this often enough, Reysha," Apexus shook his head. This topic no longer needed debating. "We will stick through this together, like clam and clamshell."

"That's a very stupid comparison," Reysha pointed out. "Those are one organism."

"We are more than one organism. We are one... family?" Apexus tilted his head. "Is that right? I don't want it to sound like we are related. Friends is too low and lovers not fitting."

"Family is a perfect way to put it, darling," Aclysia smiled and kissed his cheek. It slowly got warmer inside their little chamber. While the spell wasn't the greatest source of heat, the feathers around them did make for great insulation. Soon, Reysha stopped quivering and even smiled a little, while leaning over to Aclysia and kissing her for a change.

A loving kiss, right on the mouth. The spell flickered and shrunk to its normal size, barely bigger than a fingernail, as the angel's concentration broke for a moment. "Love you," Reysha whispered. "I thought you should know that. I don't know what I did to deserve either of you."

Aclysia blinked a few times, then chuckled. "Perhaps I should call you something as well? Perhaps 'honey' or 'sweetie'."

"I think neither of those fit my sexy butt," Reysha purred jokingly.

"Bubble?" Apexus suggested and got himself a questioning glance. "It is the shape of your butt, so calling you bubble would work, yes?"

"No," the tiger girl decided.

"Scratchy, perhaps?" Aclysia suggested in just as joking a fashion.

"Okay, we are not giving me a name!" Reysha decided, her tone having an undercurrent of laughter. "What would you call Aclysia if we based her nickname on her butt, huh?"

"Perfect," Apexus answered without hesitation. With the confusion of the behaviourally prude but factually lustful, the metal fairy blushed until her white hair line rose clearly from her usually white skin.

"Ouch," Reysha pouted and rubbed her own butt. "That hurts my pride as a sex-loving kitty."

"Your ass is really good," the slime was quick to point out, using his left hand to give it a bit of a squish. "Aclysia's is just a bit better. I like your top half more though."

"The divine give all of us gifts that carry us on in this world," Aclysia hummed.

"Some have way more than others though," the redhead said, concentrating on that hand on her butt, gently stroking what was under the wet cloth. It should have made her feel something but, still, nothing. Not even the slightest tingle. It was pleasant to be touched that way, reassuring to be in his arms, but that was all she felt. Even after a month on this Leaf, especially after a month, this bothered her. She had come to accept that annoyed feeling but she didn't want to accept the change itself. "The gods aren't exactly fair."

"The gods are many and follow different paths and philosophies of what the races they create should develop like," Aclysia's tone was something between defensive and admitting. "Some decide that all of their chosen race should be beautiful."

"Like mine," Reysha grinned. "Seriously, just try to find a Ragressian that's not at least a cutie." She was right in that, although every race affiliated with feline features was well known for having a lot of beauties among their ranks. Even among those, Reysha stood out, however.

"Others decide that it should be mixed," Aclysia continued. "Very few... decide to create humanoids that I can only call hideous."

"You mean like orcs?" the tiger girl remembered the green skinned brute she had seen once. His face had been unnaturally flat, except for the piggish nose. That this kind of humanoid all had a hunchback didn't help the matter.

"I mean like... perhaps an orc...?" Aclysia started and then trailed off, as she discovered the gap in her knowledge. "How odd, I recall these distinctions but no concrete examples. My blessed father certainly limited what I know at weird places."

Apexus suddenly felt a panic pull at his mind. "Can he remove memories whenever he wants?"

The metal fairy shook her head. "While he has sworn to me being outside the divine circles, in other words, while remaining in love with you, my darling, I am untouchable in this regard. It would go against the codex of the gods to meddle in such a direct fashion."

"But what if he decides to ignore that codex?" Apexus asked.

The very notion caused the light to suddenly extinguish and Aclysia to twitch away from the slime. "My apologies," she swiftly said and lighted the Ilumni again. "The codex of the gods is enforced by all of the gods and there are none that haven't agreed to it. Suggesting that a god could decide to break it is..." she shook her head and whispered, "...I would recommend you don't even mutter such heretical an idea in front of a person of the church. At best you may voice it in curiousity. It has not and will not ever happen. Should it ever, the Omniverse would be transformed into a safe and hopeless place."

Apexus wasn't sure how that opinion could be prevalent enough among all gods that nobody ever dared to venture outside of the boundaries, but he believed his Aclysia, if nothing else. The slime's right hand brushed over her side calmingly, until the spell had grown back to previous levels. A period of silence ensued.

After all that had happened that day, they felt tired, but unable to really fall asleep. There was much stirring about paranoia, caution and trauma inside them, about their fears and how the friendliness of strangers worked with those fears. About the question whether a thousand earnest smiles were worth risking the single one that turned out to be fake, hiding a maw of knives.

Finally, Apexus posed the question on everybody's mind. "Do we start our journey to Summer Rest tomorrow?"

"I say it is our best path forwards," Aclysia nodded. "It should be safe there, a place to breathe and recuperate. On the condition that the place we stay at is relatively isolated, we may be able to stay for a little while."

"I just... want my head to obey me again," Reysha sighed and scratched at the dirt floor. "Being somewhere nice will hopefully help with that. No more of these... repeated shattering of whatever I'm thinking."

"It could be a trap," Apexus suggested, unable to keep that thought from surfacing.

Aclysia shook her head. "Logically speaking, there is a null chance of Summer Rest being a trap. If they wanted to catch us, designing maps and the lore of the land to that end would be a ludicrous way to go about it. The planning involved is nigh impossible to design. More than that, it would be a scheme of unnecessary proportions. They could have caught us already, if that was the purpose of this Leaf, a Leaf that predates our arrival by likely thousands of years."

All of that was reasonable, but Apexus wasn't really able to reason away that fear. Regardless, he nodded. 'I know better, can't let myself be controlled by random emotions,' the chimeric creature berated himself.

Neither of the girls made fun of the slime for the idea, only gently spoke to him to ease his fears. They all had their burdens and they all had each other to shoulder them. Apexus held them in his arms, as tightly as he could, and sealed his wings over the three of them. All that mattered to the slime fit under his wings and that was a calming thing to know.