Home for Horny Monsters Ch. 105

"Leased," Leilani corrected. "We leased it to them."

"So doesn't that mean they're paying you?"

She nodded. "They are. It goes into an account that we can use to purchase additional property or supplies as needed from your kind. How do you think we got that land in the first place? Do you think your government was feeling kind and just gave it to us?"

"Yeah, they aren't in the habit of handing out beach-front property. So how did your people buy it?"

"Your ships sink where we swim. It wasn't hard to go out and gather some lost treasure and sell it back. The merfolk in your Gulf of Mexico are filthy rich from some galleons that sank out there some time back. The Order helps them manage their purchases because that's a lot of money to casually move around."

"The Order has really helped your people, haven't they?"

"They have." Leilani paused, sticking her trident in the ground and leaning on it for support. "Without their help, I don't know where we'd be. Did you know they help set shipping lanes? If just one of your oil tankers spilled near a colony, it would kill us. It's absolutely a full time job for them just to make sure our worlds don't cross. If we wanted, we could rise up, attack your people, and cause some mayhem. But there aren't enough of us. It would be like if the people of Hawaii declared war on the rest of the United States. Sure, we could make the coastline a hostile place, but water magic won't stop your missiles, or your other weapons of mass destruction. My grandfather witnessed what your people did at Bikini Atoll."

He scrunched up his face. "What did we do?"

"Nuclear tests," she replied. "Merfolk around the world were discussing your war, and if we should strike out against you, chase you out of the water. We underestimated just how many humans there were across the world, and some of our most powerful warriors trekked across your continents just to get a better sense of the world in general. Captain Francois had given us plenty of warnings, but your advances sounded so impossible."

"Humans feel the same way about magic. Nobody would believe us if we told them mermaids and magic were real. Well, not enough people, anyway. It's all seen as make believe." Mike leaned against a tree and sensed a cane spider crawling down from above to investigate. He looked up at the arachnid and shook his head. "Don't do it."

The spider waved its legs in reply, obviously upset at Mike.

"I'm not claiming your territory," he told it. "Just resting for a moment."

"You command the land crabs, too?" Leilani's eyes were focused on the spider.

"We call them spiders. And only sort of." He narrowed his energy at the cane spider, who chittered at him and disappeared back into the leaves. "Some are more eager to please than others."

Cold water dripped on him from above and he turned his attention to the sky. A thin layer of clouds had moved in above them, blotting out the sun.

"It's raining again." He crossed his arms and sighed. The others didn't have any problem with the rain, but after at least three small downpours, his clothes were itchy. Leilani could easily push the water off of him with little more than a thought, but that only worked between storms.

"One of the wettest places on land," Leilani told him, pointing up the mountain. "The locals call it the Big Bog. My people call it Halealii Aina, or the land palace. It is a popular stop for those who do their pilgrimage."

"Why do you call it the land palace?"

"Very wet, lots of water. A merperson could absolutely live there if they chose to, and some have. Think of it like spiritual isolation, if you will. A place to step outside the ocean and ponder bigger things."

"Will we run into any of your people?" he asked.

She shook her head. "If we do, it's somebody we long thought dead. My kind doesn't often choose to exile somebody, but when we do, we chase them into the deepest waters." Sighing, she stood up straight and fiddled with the tip of her trident. "My father stayed there for a year when he was younger. Meditated on what it meant to be a warrior, to hunt for the colony, and to protect us from harm."

"That sounds pretty badass," Mike replied.

Leilani giggled. "When I was young, he confessed to me that he actually did it to get away from a bad situation involving some of your surfer women. He liked to pretend he was a surf instructor and bed them while they were here on vacation, but got caught by the queen."

"Oh my."

She laughed again, staring morosely at the bent trident. Opal, noticing this, moved near Leilani and held out her arms. The mermaid looked at her, then at Mike. "What does she want?"

Mike waited for the inevitable sign language from Opal. "She wants to see it," he answered. "She promises she'll give it right back."

Hesitantly, Leilani handed over the trident. Opal studied it for several seconds, her hands and arms sliding over the metallic surface until the trident's shaft was almost completely in her body. Scrunching up her face, her body distorted and the trident slowly straightened out.

"By the tides!" Leilani gazed in awe as Opal extracted the straightened trident from her form and handed it back over. "To think you were strong enough to do such a thing!"

Opal signed to Mike and he spoke for her. "She said not to underestimate the power of fluid dynamics." He didn't mention that Opal hadn't done so earlier because she was worried Leilani might stab him in the back with it, or the fact that she had done so now because she was tired of it coming up in conversation.

Her spirits buoyed, Leilani led the group, her attunement to water taking them in the correct direction. The miniature streams that formed on the mountain's skin flowed around them as the mermaid manipulated the water. Between Mike and Leilani, they were able to transform an extremely difficult ascent into little more than a strenuous hike. Leilani was huffing and puffing by the time they crested a rocky ridge and she paused to lean against jagged stones that had long ago burst free of the earth.

In awe, Mike stared down into the next valley. The sky above was blotted out by a mass of clouds that drifted between massive peaks covered in thick foliage. From where he stood, he saw more streams and waterfalls in one place than anywhere else he'd been before. The air was so thick with moisture that he could feel the humidity spinning in his lungs.

"Halealii Aina," said Leilani, kneeling and bowing her head. "I never thought I would get the chance to see it."

"It's breathtaking." Mike gazed down into the rainforest below in awe. The trees below practically sang in exultation, their needs constantly met. Closing his eyes, he felt something shift within him. The general sense of where his property was had solidified to a more precise location, which he pointed at. "Looks like we're going in," he said.

"Will we have to climb out the other side?" asked Leilani. "I thought the map said we needed to go around this place?"

"Trust me when I say that maps can be misleading." He sensed without a doubt that the entrance was somewhere down below. "But now I'm wondering about the thing that killed your people."

"What about it?" asked Leilani.

"We followed its tracks up this way until we lost them, right? Well, I know that where we're headed is correct, but..." he gestured around them. "There's nothing here. Either that thing tiptoed out of here, or it came down a different way."

"Hmm," was Leilani's only reply. The rain suddenly fell in thick sheets, and the other side of the bog disappeared from sight.

"Glad I wore comfy shoes," Mike muttered as he started down the hill. This time, the terrain was steep enough that he had to rely on the trees' assistance, using assorted branches and roots as handholds. The mood of the forest had shifted, and it no longer felt as friendly as it had before. He was an intruder in their midst, and the forest was wary of him.

Daisy had crawled inside his shirt, her body pressed flat against his sternum. He put a hand protectively over the bump in the fabric, wishing for perhaps the hundredth time that he had an umbrella. It was nearly half an hour before they made it down to the valley floor, where the foliage was so thick that he could no longer get the trees to simply part and let him pass.

"I guess this is the hard part," he muttered as they ventured forth into the bog.

Ingrid stood and watched in awe as Ratu's serpentine body tunneled through the hard rock ahead, the cavern lit only by a pair of fiery orbs that hovered just beneath the ceiling. When the naga had first transformed, Ingrid had been forced to hide back a scream at the sheer size of the snake. She had never worked directly with the naga, who had become notoriously reclusive in the last twenty years, and being subjected to the intensity of Ratu's gaze had triggered some primal instinct.

It was also unnerving to hear the naga speak. Her words had slid through Ingrid with the same ease that the snake passed through stone. She had wondered more than once why the naga were considered demi-gods and finally had her answer.

The yawning tunnel ahead of them trembled, sending loose stones clattering to the ground. Ratu returned to them in her human form, her gaze directed up toward the ceiling.

"It's stable for now," she said with a frown. "But I don't suspect it will last. We should hurry."

"Like, how fast are we talking?" Ingrid gazed up at the ceiling in trepidation.

"That depends on how much it's raining up above." Ratu looked up just as water dripped from the ceiling. "I may be able to command the earth, but water always finds a way."

"It's raining pretty hard." Quetzalli gestured at her nose and moved forward down the tunnel. "I can smell it."

Ratu gave Quetzalli a dubious look that she couldn't see, but said nothing. "Let's press forward."

Ingrid obeyed, not that she had much of a choice. If she wanted to turn around now, there were miles of compressed rock tunnel behind them. She would be forced to navigate it all in the dark in the hope that she didn't take a wrong turn. The transition between lava vents was always smooth, but the vents themselves were usually a mess. There had been a large hole in the middle of one vent that even Ratu's light orbs had been unable to find the bottom of. Even Ratu had sidestepped that one, stating that the fall itself wouldn't kill her but the sudden narrow portion halfway down certainly would. Occasionally, they were forced to surface, and Ratu would send Olivia out to check on Mike.

It was usually raining on the surface, but Ingrid had kept dry by sticking close to the trees. Inevitably, Ratu would take them back underground, where the air had a musty dampness to it that clung to Ingrid's skin and carried a nasty chill. Ratu's floating flames kept Ingrid warm, so she made sure to walk close to them whenever she could.

"It's about a hundred feet this way and then we're in the next vent," Ratu explained. "The slope is a little severe up ahead. I had to avoid another chamber."

"What was wrong with it?" asked Quetzalli.

"Massive." Ratu smirked. "We would need a rope to get to the bottom, and it's significantly warmer, if you catch my meaning. If I had gone any closer, I ran the risk of breaking the seal and flooding this tunnel with gas that would kill us all."

Ingrid frowned. "Do you mean like sulfur dioxide?"

Ratu nodded. "Potentially. But honestly, even flooding this place with carbon dioxide would do it. A benefit of using flames for illumination is that we would see them sputter out should something like that occur. My people have long traveled beneath the world. We know the pitfalls."

"Huh." Ingrid tried to contemplate what subterranean life looked like, but couldn't. "What does naga society look like?"

"What do you mean?" The naga's eyes were steady on the darkness ahead as the tunnel became sloped.

"I mean how your kind lives. The merfolk have hidden cities built of stone and coral surrounded by fields of seaweed. I've actually been there a few times. It's quite breathtaking."

"Ah, I see what you mean." Ratu held out her hands, one curled above the other as if holding a ball, and cast light all along the walls of the tunnel. The shifting shadows within her palms threw images of a massive underground dwelling onto the rock and soil. "There are places beneath the earth that are leftover from its formation, massive domes that are miles long in each direction. In some places, you cannot even see the ceiling. It is here that my kind choose to build their cities."

"Fascinating." Ingrid moved to the nearest wall and studied the structures projected onto it. "Do you build homes of clay, stone, or brick?"

"Whatever we choose, honestly. When a naga creates their nest, they may choose to mold it from whatever material they see fit. I actually had an aunt whose entire dwelling was composed of sapphire, collected over the decades and melded together using magic. It's a slightly more delicate process than what I have been doing to make our tunnels, but it's easy enough. Incorporating rare materials into your nest can be seen as a sense of status, or even doing intricate decoration. I had a friend growing up whose home was made of iron ore, but he had filigreed the image of every member of his family going back six generations into the exterior surface."

"Do you have livestock? What about agriculture?"

Ratu nodded, a thin smile on her lips. "My people did. We simply brought terrestrial animals down and made artificial light for our crops to grow. My people were once far more unified with surface dwellers in a state of coexistence."

"Do you mean when your people were worshiped?"

"I do."

"Hmm." Ingrid pondered that for a minute. She wasn't a huge fan regarding stories of mythical creatures being worshiped. To her, it was no different than dealing with a celebrity or a shitty politician. She and Wallace had been forced more than once to hunt down a creature who was pissed that nobody was feeding it anymore, or because it had gone rogue after a lack of tributes.

"You're scowling."

"What?" Ingrid snapped out of her thoughts and saw Ratu watching her. "Shit, it's nothing."

"She lies." This came from Quetzalli, who was busy munching on a granola bar. Her nipples were so erect beneath her blouse that Ingrid wondered if she was wearing a bra.

"I don't--" Ingrid sighed, then rubbed at her temples in frustration. Getting called out for lying was bad enough, but the woman was right. Doubling down would only cause more problems for her.

Ratu made a dismissive noise in her throat, then turned away and continued along the path. The trail became slightly treacherous as stones had come loose and slid away when stepped on. Thin rivulets of water had formed in places to create slippery streams.

Feeling like she should say something, Ingrid looked up and cleared her throat. "Look, I don't know that it matters, but in my experience, a lot of creatures I've met weren't really worthy of being worshiped, is all. I'm jaded, I'll admit it. But that's a result of the work I do."

"And what is this work that you do, hmm?" Ratu looked back over her shoulder. "The Order claims that they are here to maintain the balance, but to what end? Where would the world be right now if magic and science had been allowed to coexist all along?"

Ingrid felt her cheeks become hot. "Who can say? Some people think that humanity would be enslaved."

"By who?" Ratu arched an eyebrow.

Ingrid shrugged. "Doesn't matter. Dracula. Pack of werewolves. Maybe even a dragon." She noticed Quetzalli looked back at her for that last one. "That's right, dragons still exist. They're just hidden away is all."

"Ah. I see." Ratu snapped her fingers, causing the light show on the walls to come to an end. "And you think that's not true now? That a vampire isn't secretly running Wall Street, or that werewolves don't have a stranglehold on the world's saffron supply?"

"That's an oddly specific comment."

"Maybe." Ratu sniffed. "But you haven't answered my question."

Ingrid opened her mouth, but recognized that she had just walked into a trap. Choosing her words carefully, she continued. "If that were true, then they're only doing what any human could, without using magic. Sure, a vampire can skip generational wealth and have it all to themselves, and would likely have a better grasp of economics. And good for those werewolves, using their natural talents to do whatever the fuck you do to conquer the saffron supply."

"What do dragons do?" Quetzalli looked genuinely curious. "If they're still around, they're doing something, right?"

Ingrid bit her lip, unsure what she was even allowed to say. "Honestly, they mostly hold us at ransom. All that gold in Fort Knox? Gone. We moved it to a secure location and give a bit of it each year to a massive earth dragon that sleeps under the continental United States."

"Why?" asked Quetzalli. "Shouldn't the Order simply kill it?"

"Ha! They would if they could. This thing is perhaps the largest creature on record. There's a whole team who spends every day increasing the dragon's hoard just to keep it from waking up."

"Sounds kind of like worship." Quetzalli actually stopped to look back. "We give you gold, you don't blow us all up."

"I..." Ingrid blinked her eyes, suddenly stunned. "Never thought of it like that."

"I wouldn't find yourself at fault." Ratu let out a huge sigh. "Worship can take many forms, child. When I was young, your people worshiped mine and we repaid them in kind. Gave them blessings, brought rain during drought. It was meant to be a beneficial relationship, though there were many who became parasites. But that's true of any intelligent creature."

"But it all changed," added Quetzalli. "With better technology, people needed us less, or thought they did. The church grew in power and many creatures found themselves having nothing to offer the locals that mass religion couldn't promise. The balance of power shifted."

Ratu bobbed her head enthusiastically. "Not only that, but humanity had its magic locked away. That was the beginning of the end for the relationship between man and myth."

"I disagree," said Ingrid. "Plenty of people used magic to sow chaos and gain power."

"And yet, your kind hoards treasure much like a dragon does to the same effect." Quetzalli snorted. "Power abhors a vacuum."

Ingrid narrowed her eyes at Quetzalli, more suspicious than ever. For the longest time, she had figured Quetzalli was just a sexy side piece for Mike, a harmless cryptid with access to lightning magic. Now Ingrid wondered if she was something more, maybe even something from the fae realm. The presence of the fairies heavily supported this theory.

The tunnel eventually leveled out and the surface transformed, revealing dark basalt. The air had a foul odor, causing Ingrid to wrinkle her nose.

"Let me know if you get light-headed," said Ratu, pulling back one of her fireballs. She tugged at its sides and split it into three separate pieces that she sent ahead. "We have plenty of air, but it's mixed up with some other stuff."

"Okay, thanks." Stewing over how badly the previous conversation went, Ingrid fell back on the fundamentals she had been taught during her childhood. Magic had been sealed away, that much she knew. It was why she had to rely on magical implements for more powerful spells. Sure, she could summon up magical barriers, but needed a conduit for anything more nuanced than that.

Every member of the Order had the ability to tap into their own personal mana well, but not everybody had one. Most people had mana to some degree, but it was like a vestigial organ, useless and not entirely understood. It was the same reason why children were more likely to see spirits, or gain brief moments of precognition. Without any sort of training, that tiny amount faded away to nothing as an adult.