A deal worth making

Melo has decided to keep producing oxygen at elevated rates, even though the barrier isolates her from the leash of command. She does not want to move. The pain is too great. It does not matter that her avatar is fine. The affliction carries over from her true self. Revenge, even if it is by keeping alive whom her tormentor decided to suffocate, is better than merely waiting for the parasite to kill her. The other sacrifices probably don’t even understand the danger they are in. Demons and humans are stupid.

Though the demoness has finally stopped her frantic attempts to break out of her chains. Does she want to conserve oxygen or is she merely too tired from the curse to carry on? She might ask, were there any chance they have a language in common. Escape? There is no obvious way. It would take planning. Planning is hard for a healthy dryad, let alone one closer to death than life. Letting her final days be filled with keeping some people breathing is enough.

The song the demon has just begun is beautiful. She’d like to thank her, yet interrupting would be rude. She won’t destroy beauty.

Zewrepa understands that those who never join the choir do not get to shape the chorus. She never expected herself to be among those. Yes, the numbers say that more than three quarters do not make it through the first three quests. It wouldn’t be her or her sister, who grasped at the quarrel stuck in her throat in her last moments.

She has gotten too tired to go on. The drain has dwindled to a trickle, yet the curse prevents healing. It is time to lean back and start her last song.

She even thinks of her brothers, foolish creatures as they are, though technically sapient. Now drawn to songs like her mother might be singing right now, if news have been tardy. Songs she will never get to sing. Even if she escaped, she’d be without clan or nest.

Enough of that; her last song will be of pride and defiance, not self-pity.

I hear music. Just one voice, high and clear, interrupted from time to time by something like bird song and something that might be a very mutated bagpipe. Why do I know about musical instruments? Or birds, for that matter?

The music is filtered. I want to hear it unblemished. There is a barrier I want to go away. I smash it.

I feel myself on a floor. I have a sense of touch. Is that the same floor I felt slamming into for a moment? I truly do not know. A refreshing feeling. The air is dusty. Have I caused that by my impact? Again, delightfully, I don’t know. Novelty is refreshing.

I have a body. I can now close my eyes. But I don’t want to. The yellow light is gone. I don’t miss the joy of the irony. That is good. I can enjoy the music while looking at its source.

I am looking at a pokemon, for all I can tell. What is a pokemon? My state of mind has not changed. I keep knowing things I don’t know why I know them. She – and she is obviously a she, for she is nacked – has the classical four arms, the bony ridges on the head, though her color is off, a pure blue, and her face is very human and her torso is not so exaggerated.

A human has emerged. Does she want to kill him from stealth or challenge him to a duell to the death? And it is obviously a him, as he is naked and missing the vestigal fur humans have. A male without wings. He couldn’t fly. Ridiculous. How is he to spread his genes? Are they inbred? Though he is ridiculously tall for a male, the crown of his head reaching her shoulder, if they both had been in an upright position.

He is listening. A show of respect. Honor requires a challenge. First the song must be finished.

She keeps singing. I only stand mesmerized. Finally the song ends. Would she understand clapping? Probably not. I bow. In fact, why not try to build communication? I sit down.

He submits. Why does death have to be complicated? She should be honest to herself. He is not technically an enemy, just an abandoned unwilling servant of an enemy. The situation is inherently complicated.

Her legs are not chained to the ground, but fastened by hoops of metal directly bolted to the ground. He is touching one of them and incidentally her foot.

I look around myself. I am sitting in a room, lit by a few sources of light afixed to the walls. It feels like a cave. It is filled with a whole lot of gadgets, some obscure lines scorched into the ground and people, well women, for they are nacked, chained to stone steles rising from the ground and the ground itself. In fact one is a pregnant woman and next to another women a metal cage holding a baby only a few weeks old is bolted to the ground. What happened here?

I am not going to keep newborn babies in cages, if I can help it. But I will start here and examine the restraints.

The warmth of a healing spell is filling her. It does not do anything, slamming against the curse, but conceptually it changes everything. He has become an ally.

I feel more than I should feel. Though again I have no idea how I know that. There is damage and something oppressive lurking behind it. I want to smash the damage. This makes no sense, you cannot smash damage. Some strong force floods through my hand ready to smash damage only to run into a wall the oppressive force has errected. It wants to push back into me and subdue me. Unacceptable. I smash in another way. It does not yield. I smash harder with my full might. It shatters.

Suddenly I feel so tired. Have you ever dreamed of sleeping in the lap of a pokemon?

The curse is broken! She is still very, very wounded but the healing can now begin. She may actually live. The human is sleeping with his hairless head on her lap. This feels very very odd. His breath is tickling her. Minutes earlier she would have killed him. But one does not kill an exhausted ally, except under very, very limited circumstances. In fact, emulating him looks like her best option to maximize healing.

Melo feels the curse go away. Now the situation requires no planning, merely action.

She turns into a wooden sword and drops to the floor free of her restraints.