A deal worth making

Anjali tries to hide her discomfort. Merely turning 23 had gotten her sold off. She is getting a third chance in life. Few get that far out of an Atlantean trap. Granted, few get into one; the numbers guarantee that. She is not going to be bitchy now. That could ruin everything. Besides, nobody likes an ungrateful bitch.

In fact it is time to take one for the team. She munches on the pear. It is delicious. Perfectly ripe. Refreshing. It clears up her head. A clear head, however, notices inconsistencies. She has never heard of a nature mage who can make metal decay.

Hildegard is unhappy. Her training tells her to treat this situation as a siege. Her nose and her stomach tell her that the situation is not good. Sickness must be avoided during a siege. And obviously, you need to make your supplies last, which is difficult if you have no food.

The demon is standing in front of the doorway in a contemplative pose. The dryad is asleep. The wizard is asleep. The two peasant are huddled together is far away from the wizard as possible. She decides to check on the dryad first.

The dream is back. In fact it has gotten even fuller.

I hear a voice from the other end of my hospital bed. „Make a deal, my boy. I’ll help you get around it. They want to trick you, but you need the deal.“ I wish I could rember whose voice I am hearing. It seems infinitely important to learn that. „No, don’t turn around. They cannot see me. Don’t show them I am here.“. That makes sense. I don’t respond.

And indeed my earlier visitors continue „Somebody has violated an agreement and recruited somebody from this world. Your task is to be to either identify the violator or, failing that, to at least eliminate the recruitee. For that purpose we intend you to make a similar journey, which will grant you powers of the same magnitude.“. Their plan has an obvious weakness, which I need to mention if I want to stay credible. „How am I supposed to find a single person on a whole planet?“. „That is indeed a problem, which will require us to influence your choice of powers. You will also need to overcome our target. For that purpose we intend to let you pick a part of the powers.“

I wake up abruptly again and scare a young woman who happens to approach me right at that time. I embrace her and call for my grandfather. Now that is odd. I wish I remembered my grandfather, but I am willing to assume that she does not resemble him.

You should not surprise and scare somebody with combat training. I would have known that. Yet these dreams, if indeed they are dreams, shake me deeply for reasons I don’t understand. Anyway, she does an excellent headbut. My nose is a witness for the crown.

Hildegard deems her life finished. If he does to her what he did to the crystal she’ll be low-quality charcoal. A member of the Rabenstein clan does not panic or grovel. She stands straight up and looks into the distance. She never expected to go to Valhalla, but this might qualify.

Ouch. Yes, I am sorry, but she woke me up from a nightmare. Could somebody somebody help me? Well, I get it, as far as they know, if I need medical help, the case is hopeless. I can heal myself after all. Let’s do that then.

„With the head you have spoken clearly to the nose. I prefer that you ask the ear with words.“, I got a remark as witty as I could got. She looks at me a bit oddly and remains silent. I break the silence, „In a dream I was harmed. Can I help with something?“

Apparently we need more water. I am happy to provide it. In fact this time I attach both spells to the buckets. I need to look into doing this permanently.

Zewrepa follows the wizard to the doorway. Almost any idea for getting out of here is better than waiting for a return that may or may not happen, and if it happened would lead to a battle their enemy would have had as much time to prepare for as he likes. Indeed he breathes fire into the barrier. She attacks with her claws elsewhere trying to overburden the battery. They try he alternating between fire and disspells. He even tries a lightning bolt. Other than a boom that scares the other people they are tapped with half to death, the result is unchanged.

They try going through the wall. It produces a sizable amount of rubble he finally needs to make disappear. All their attacks work, but the energy reservoir behind the barrier is just too large to exhaust and the barrier too strong to overwhelm with power. Does he understand it? Going by the way his shoulders hang, yes he does. At least he is not stupid, even if he was defeated this morning by the female he tried to establish dominance over. It seemed even a little kinky at that time to see males and females fighting, but in an environment with no other males to show dominance over she could almost understand it.

Branislava’s relief at her cousin finally starting to speak is replaced with horror. „… He kept shaking for most of the day. He looked at me. He couldn’t speak. Blood was flowing out of his mouth. They had several of those spikes. They told us that they had to charge them all. We hoped that the victims would keep suffering because then we would live.“ she narrates very calmly as if talking about how to bake bread.

„I had no idea. They isolated all visibly pregnant women in one hut. We almost hoped that they’d just leaves us there because we are slow and not just set the hut on fire to get rid of witnesses.“

I am making pears. I understand that some people would go out of their way to make all sorts of different food stuffs. I, however, will feed this stuff to people, including myself, who have nobody but me to go for medical help. Aside from the obvious issue of disabling myself I have no idea what problems I can and cannot handle. We need to eat, so this risk is unavoidable and I understand risk versus reward, but a varied fruit selection for dinner is not a sufficient reward.

Still I make a few grapes and tomatos. I tried coconuts. They did not work.