A deal worth making

I have been woken up again. I considered just resetting, as I call it now, her improvised diapers, but I am not sure about the effect of constantly wearing these rags on a baby’s skin or leaving residual dirt on her. So I take them off whenever she, well, uses the bathroom and clean her conventionally. Now, for some reason I love children, but I wish feeding bottles existed on this world. If I have understood her mother’s cousin correctly, the common answer to a dead mother is a wet nurse, extended families usually having pacts to arrange for them in those cases, or in a last ditch effort a goat. Nobody objected to me taking the baby though not universally with facial expressions easy to interpret.

My powers come with an eerily accurate clock. I can tell to the tenth part of a second when the rim of the sun will crest the horizon. For this purpose 47 minutes is accurate enough. Not enough time to sensibly go to sleep again. Cradling a baby on my knees – the new iteration of my shelter is high enough to sit - is oddly soothing. It induces contemplation. I might ponder why I like babies. I am pretty sure that that is not a universal trait for men of my age. Of course I might just have exceptional preferences. Or something significant happened in my past. I want to know. But I do not believe that simply sitting here and chewing the cud, metaphorically speaking, will do any good.

What am I doing here? In general I mean. I could just leave. I plainly don’t want to. If this is Ragnarök, as I must assume it is, I will have to fight for my life whereever I go. I am definitely not prepared for that. There are important things I need to learn. My powers obviously and putting stuff into things. I need to learn how Marental’s sword was made. I get hints from my ability, but they do not form coherent pictures.

Anjali was right. I do spend more time on my biological ability than on any other capability. I need stuff that is good for combat.

I can already use lightning bolts against an enemy. For single combat that should be enough. I will not try arcane stuff like conjuring antimatter. If it worked, I’d be in deep trouble. Being turned into hot plasma for instance. Better flight? Yes, but that is not a fundamental issue. Have I done something truly outrageous or incogruent? There was the episode with me disappearing and reappearing at the dryad’s tree. Hildegard mentioned that even wards cannot prevent me from following that specific connection. Now in hindsight this is less clear than I figured. Do I have the specific ability to follow such connections or … ?

I am imaging the cheese station. How it looked, how it felt, even how it sounded as the wind blew around corners. And once again I have to heal myself, as I have hit the back of my head hard on a wall when the support I was resting my posterior on was left behind. This has really become disturbingly common. Worse, I have been helpless for about half a minute. Hastily I go to full magesight. Nobody. And nothing. I am not very happy to take a baby into a combat zone. Though we all share the risk. If I left her behind and died, she’d be doomed, too. I am heading for the cabin I left the sick man in.

His corpse has already gone cold. My magesight indeed does show such things. For a few minutes I just stand there. I had already been wearing my armor and the backpack out of habitual caution. I like to be ready to fight or flee when it costs me little and I am outside. Once being almost shot is enough. Time to pack the cheesy loot. Something is irritating me. Am I in danger? I make a spear just in case. No, something does not fit logically.

Of course! I am an idiot. What did they want to do with the cheese? Well, eat it, obviously. But where? There is no good road only something that barely qualifies as a mountain path leading here. Driving a herd of cows here and back is one thing, pulling a wagon over that is another. I looking around with full magesight. Indeed it is no backpack, but an oddly tall and deep lidded wooden chest with chains from all four corners leading to a pole you could carry it between two men. It looks like my empty backpack to my magesight and the box is just long and wide enough to allow the insertion of a wheel of cheese. I have found a specialized cheese carrier of holding. I am not going to use it. For once it is probably designed to be carried between two men because it is worse than my backpack at nullifying weight. I am not even going to try to fly with that. And I will fly back to base. I have no idea what would happen if I teleported with a filled bag of holding. But I am also not going to leave a boon like that behind. I will consider the implications while I pack the cheese.

I am flying away from a conflagration. I’ve decided to solve the hay issue and the cheese station problem simultaneously. I have filled a few buildings with hay, blown some hay into the wind and set fire to the rest. With any luck whoever finds hay will consider it residue from somebody putting the cheese station to the torch.