She’s bent over, heaving. She lays her travel pack on the ground. Her legs shake like jelly.
“I know, right? It’s like a whole planet of nothing but rats,” Randall complains. He drops his bag too.
“What do they even eat?” Todd adds. He unbuckles his gatherers sack. “I mean, how does this ecosystem even work?”
“They probably eat those bugs,” Joe guesses. He spits. “Fuck. What the fuck. I need to sit down.”
“Oh yea, the bugs.” Randall pipes up. “That’s probably what’s poisoned us.”
“You don’t think it’s the rats?”
“I mean, think about it. Yellow powder?”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“In a game, poison is always obvious.”
Candra scoffs. “We don’t know that. I re-fucking-iterate, why are we assuming this all works like a game?”
Joe scratches his chin. “If this yellow stuff is poison, you’ve got it all over yourself, Toast. We all do.”
“Except Sue Ann.”
“I got a little.”
“She’s got a little. It went everywhere,” Joe accepts.
“We could wash our clothes.”
“How? We don’t have enough water. Only two of us actually brought full canteens.”
“Todd could –”
“I don’t know, man. I’ll just put holes in our clothing. [Water spear] really isn’t meant for cleaning anything.”
“Well did anybody bring a change of clothes?”
Candra throws up her hands in exasperation. “Oh, it doesn’t matter! What do we do now, what’s the plan?”
Todd speaks up. “Well, I want to search the place. That was the whole point of coming here.”
“The point of coming here was to set up somewhere that’s easy to defend,” Joe disagrees. “4H, guard the door. Take Candra’s smasher and hand me your sword. Candra, Todd. Come with me and let’s clear this place out. You can search after, I want to set up camp.”
Todd agrees and the three of them leave Randall behind to sweep the first floor. Quickly, Todd assigns his new stat free points.
Overarched by a high ceiling, the space is broken up like a honeycomb, with fused brick pillars bracing the six corners of each cell. Fossilized remnants of plaster and carbonized wood along the floor show that there used to be inner walls, breaking the floorplan into individual rooms. Todd adjusts to the low light and his leading foot crunches through ash. His ixwa waves in each direction as he turns.
A dry, fecal stink emerges from the far corner as they approach. Loose droppings and shed fur mark the location of an empty nest. Joe looks around. There’s no movement.
“Seems like we got them all,” Joe supposes.
“Look over here,” Candra bids. She holds a sleeve over her mouth and nose.
There’s a hole in the ground where a large stone grate has been chewed through. It opens into a vertical pipe that plunges into blackness.
“Sewers?” Todd asks.
“Don’t fall down,” Joe deadpans.
“Maybe we can block it off,” Candra suggests.
“With what?” Todd points out.
Sue Ann shrieks. Joe calls out encouragement and they listen for a moment.
“I should go help her,” Todd offers.
“She’s got it,” Joe says, holding up a hand. “Give me your [mercury rod].”
Todd hands it over and Joe reshapes the tool into a long bar. He lowers it down and melds it into place into the grate opening.
“Hand me yours too, Candra.”
Having sealed off the sewer pipe, they move towards a shaft of light. There is a large rectangular hole in the ceiling, open to the floor above them and the sky beyond that. After a quick discussion, Candra laces her fingers together and braces to vault Joe up through the ceiling. There are a tense few moments of silence before he calls back down. Except for old birds’ nests, it’s empty.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Joe leaps down easily, and the three of them return to get their bags and set up camp in the middle of the floor. Meanwhile, Sue Ann guards the door with a crazed expression and a dead rat at her feet.
“Alright, I’m going to see if I can’t find something,” Todd announces once they’ve finished.
He leaves them behind to cultivate and makes a wide circle around the inner circumference of the building. Running his hand along the wall, he steps carefully so as not to kick up powder. The wall is as burned and dead as all of the others. He nudges his toe through a larger lump of ash and hears the wispy crunch of rust. At first, the only thing he finds is a fragrant purple mold that sprouts out of a hump in the debris. His body is wracked by a craving for the mold, and cosmic energy wafts out of it as it aspirates. He forces himself to leave it behind.
Further in the back of the building, a crumbly layer of ash peels away from the walls under his dragging fingers. Underneath it, Todd finds the hints of colors, so he sweeps away a wide section. There, he finds an irreparably damaged fresco. Barely discernible, a garden of jungle plants curl around a central fruit tree. The tree itself exhibits a magnetic aura, even now. Todd stands staring it for a long moment before shaking his head and moving onward.
“Guys,” Sue Ann’s voice echoes. “Do you see this?”
Joe’s response is inaudible.
“Something’s eating the dead rats,” Sue Ann moans. “They’re really big.”
Todd freezes. But then he sees Joe get up and head to the door. So he keeps going and steps around the melted ruin of a stone table. It’s dark. The light coming through from the door and above are shining from an ever receding angle.
In the corner of the property, Todd discovers a closed off cell. Stone walls surround it, making it hard to spot from elsewhere on the floor. An opening gapes on the far side, and two green corroded bars cling to barely hanging hinges, the remains of metal bands across a long gone wooden door. Stepping gently around them, Todd enters a pitch black room. A glint captures his attention. He roots around in the dust and rescues a tarnished metal box. Its hinges have popped and the inner lining has been incinerated, but inside he finds five mostly intact crystals.
He finds nothing else.
The others sit in a circle, cross legged and meditating. Todd crosses over and joins them. He holds the crystals up to the light where he can and inspects them.
He can’t be sure, but four of the crystals look like standard [F-nexus crystal]s. Cosmic energy hums inside of their rough cut facets. The fifth crystal is different. It’s violet, trapezoidal, thinner than his pinky, and as long as one finger joint.
“Did you find anything?” Randall asks.
“I’m not sure. What does this look like to you?”
“A crystal. Is it magic?”
“I dunno.”
“Maybe it’s a crafting component. Or oh! Check if it’s an information crystal first.”
“Right. You figure it’s safe to try?”
Todd holds the stone to his forehead and focuses on it. Data blooms in his mind as he accesses the trove. Foreign symbols flow through his thoughts, and general impressions resolve into images and diagrams.
Todd sighs dejectedly. “Damn. It’s a cultivation manual.”
“Oh, cool!”
“It doesn’t help us though. I was hoping for something useful.”
“I’ll take it if you don’t want it.”
Todd weighs the crystal in his hand and tosses it over. Randall scrambles to catch it and his leg flares with pain.
“Sorry.”
Standing up, Todd joins Sue Ann at the doorway and looks out into the street at the splayed bodies of rats. Shadows have grown long. The sun hangs low in the sky as it droops toward the mountainous horizon. Sue Ann shuffles to make room for him and points forward.
“They’re out there. I saw two of them,” she claims.
“What are?”
“I don’t know. They’re weird looking.”
He watches with her, waiting for three minutes. As nothing appears, he excuses himself and heads back indoors. Taking his place in the circle, he pulls up his bag and plunges his hand deep inside to find [beast harvesting fundamentals]. The pyramidal jade is marbled green and white, and he places it against his crown.
His mind is pulled elsewhere. Cutting, carving, gutting, and skinning techniques fill the stone. The primer is comprised of the most basic advice for butchering animals, for meat and for preserving special organs. The guide provides examples, diagrams of beasts cut into cross sections and flayed. But the creatures are unfamiliar to Todd; alien. One looks like a ram, but has a long proboscis for a nose. Another is a six legged lizard.
Todd scans through, looking for a section which might help him decide whether a given beast is worth butchering in the first place. In particular, he skims for advice which might tell him whether the rats are worth harvesting. His stomach recoils at the idea of eating them, but their tough skin repels cutting edges and might make for strong leather. There are also alchemical components which come from beasts, like gall bladders and bezoars. Items like that had been prominent in the requests from the crafters, and Todd had bought one or two for the pill makers.
Coming out of his fugue, Todd picks up his ixwa and drags himself over to the bodies of the indoor rats. He grabs one by the front legs and pulls it until it’s in the diminishing light, then the point of his blade hovers shakily over the belly of the corpse.
“Okay. Gross. Gross,” Todd says to himself.
He saws into the vulnerable pink flesh, pushing against resistance. Almost immediately, he cuts too deep, puncturing an intestine and letting out black, stinking offal.
Picking the body up, Todd hefts it, shoulders past Sue Ann, and throws it out of doors.
“What are you doing?” Sue Ann demands.
“I’m trying to skin it,” Todd admits.
Sue Ann pauses. She looks him over. “Really? Well bring one over and let me show you how.”