by Deck Davis
Level up to level 5!
- HP inc to 219
- Stamina inc to 230
- Acid resistance inc by 3.2%
-5 attribute points to spend
For his last few levels ups he’d primarily focused his attribute points on intelligence, charisma and luck, since those were part of an alchemist’s core. The events over the last few days had taught him that he’d be doing more fighting than he thought in Sarametis, so it was time to even it out.
This time, he spent three points on endurance to increase his hitpoints, stamina and damage resistance. He used the last two points on agility to quicken his reactions. From now on he’d focus on intelligence, charisma and luck again, but it felt good to toughen up a little.
With the pain-filled death cries of Eric and the imps – Eric and the Imps, that would make a great name for a band – gone, the hillside seemed quiet. A flock of brown eagle-sizes birds flapped their wings overhead, before flying out of view. The wind had dropped, though there was an angry-looking cloud on the horizon.
After waiting to make sure all the imps were dead, he walked down the hill and checked Eric’s clothes. It didn’t feel right at first. As he rifled through his pockets he told himself that he wasn’t looting, but looking for clues. That didn’t really ring true when he took a few gonil coins and a necklace of increased endurance from him.
He put the necklace on, and his hitpoints and stamina improved straight away. It wasn’t just a case of checking his character screen and seeing that his numbers had increased. He felt studier, like he could take one or two more blows than normal.
Eric’s dagger was much better than his own, giving him a +3 increase in melee damage, as well as having a sweet flame pattern etched into the grip. Not only that, but had leather bracers, greaves and boots that would give Jake a bonus in armor. It wasn’t a straight forward as taking them off Eric’s corpse and then wearing them, though.
That was the thing that RPG games rarely explained properly. In games, you looted enemies and took the armor that they had been wearing if it was better than your own. It wasn’t so simple in real life; Eric’s leathers were covered in blood, foam and the stink of sweat. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he was going to wear them in their present state. Still, he took them with the plan of boiling them clean later.
The last thing he found was the most surprising, though by now, Jake should have expected it. He’d checked the pockets of Eric’s coat, but found nothing. Then, when he was about to call it quits, he found a secret pocket sewn into the inside of it. He opened it up and pulled out what was inside.
It was a wallet. It was chestnut-brown leather, well-made and had the sigil of an eagle carved into the corner. It was most definitely from back home.
A flutter of nerves hit him, and he couldn’t wait to see who it belonged to. Everything from home, no matter how small, was a lead. It gave him the hope that there was a way to get back.
He opened it up. There were a few twenties, a ten, and some change in a zip compartment. On the left side of the wallet was a row of thin slots which were meant to hold bank bards. This wallet held something else.
One item was a photograph of a man with his hair shaved even shorter that Jake’s, and a woman with the biggest, brownest eyes he’d ever seen. It was taken in a photo booth. They looked young and happy. Sickening happy, actually, the kind of happy you only saw in TV adverts. Judging by the quality of the photo, it had been taken fairly recently. The man had his arm around the woman, and the woman held her left hand toward the camera to show off a shiny ring. Her large eyes shone.
Above the photograph, in the last slot of the wallet, was a plastic card. The front of it had a large red cross on it, and next to it were the words ‘donatore di organi.’
What did it mean? Organi – was that organs? Organ donor? It’d make sense, with the big red cross on the front. He turned the card over. The man’s name was Renato Orsi.
He didn’t move for a while. He just stood there with the imp corpses around him, holding onto the organ donor card. Somehow, Renato Orsi had ended up in Sarametis just like Jake, and just like Robert Lasbecker.
Robert and Renato were dead now. Jake was the only one still standing, but were there more? Even more important, what was their link? Why had they, have all people, been chosen to come here?
Then again, Jake hadn’t been chosen. It wasn’t as if events had all been manipulated so that he’d stumble on the portal and that he’d walk through it.
Then a thought hit him. The griefer in the warehouse. The way it had stared at him, the way it had scampered down the stairs to where the portal was, almost as it if was leading him to it.
He needed to speak to Cason, and he wished the old coot would hurry back. He gave Eric one last glance, then walked up the hill. Back in the shack, he searched through the rest of the traveler’s things. The only thing of importance that he found was a piece of parchment stuffed all the way at the bottom.
He unfolded the parchment. The yellow paper was covered in spiraled black handwriting, and was tough to read. Whoever had written it obviously thought a lot of themselves, since their letters were all done with sweeping movements.
‘Another portal has opened. My sources tell me it is near Alder’s Pike. Find it.
IS.’
He heard the name Alder’s Pike before; that was where Eric said he was from. He must have been lying about that, then. Whoever IS was, they’d written to Eric and told him to find the Earth portal. Presumably, his orders were to kill whoever had come out of it.
That meant one of two things for Jake; either it was a complete coincidence that Eric had murdered someone from earth, only to stumble upon Jake, or he had known exactly where Jake was from, and had come here to kill him.
He put the note on the alchemy counter and glanced at the door. The hinge was so busted that the door was almost hanging off. Shame that Jake knew squat about woodwork.
Come on Cason, he thought. Where are you?
He needed to take his mind off things while he waited for Cason and Faei to get back. He decided that rather than wallow and ponder everything that had happened, he’d improve his skills.
With that in mind, he walked down the field and back up again four times, each time heaving the body of a cock imp with him. Then, he went around the side of the shack to Cason’s butchery area, and he started to dissect the imps the way he’d seen Cason do it on a deer. The anatomy of a deer and an imp were completely different, of course, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t doing it to get meat.
It was on the third corpse that he got what he wanted. He’d just removed the imps’ heart. His hands and arms were covered in blood, and he’d already retched twice on the smell. Then, when he was tiring, a message flashed in front of him.
Butchery skill added to ‘Preparation!’
Butchery involves preparation of a creature’s flesh, skin, body fluid and innards for use in potions. Waste not want not.
He dropped the knife. Finally, it was time to call it a night. The sun had set somewhere in the middle of his second corpse dissection, and now, it was completely black. A cloud covered a large patch overhead, but the stars twinkled over in the east.
Jake went inside and washed the imp blood off his hands and arms. He changed into a shirt and a pair of trousers that Cason had donated to him, and then he grabbed a bottle of moonshine from the counter. He unscrewed the cork and took a sniff, then jerked his head away. Man, this was a potent batch. It smelled like it would knock an elephant on its ass.
Still, he needed it. He couldn’t help looking at the door, which he’d wedged in place as best he could, and wonder where Cason was.
He took a hit of the moonshine. It didn’t just burn his throat, it practically melted it. He almost worried that he’d drunk dissolve potion by mistake. When he breathed out, he imagine he was breathing out the braincells he’d just killed.
He looked at the doorway. Through the gap where the door didn’t quit
e fit the frame anymore, he saw darkness. He saw grass. He imagined Eric Cratter dead, and then he pictured Renato Orsi Richard Lasbecker…and then him.
Another drink. More of his brain cells died.
This time, when he looked at the door, he thoughts didn’t swim. They stayed placid, like a stinking swamp undisturbed for years.
Another drink.
This time, the room began to get hazy. It was time for sleep. Things would be clearer in the morning, Cason would be back, and hopefully they’d figure out some answers. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and let slumber take hold.
A wash of daylight and a stiff breeze woke him the next morning. His body ached when he forced himself out of the chair, and his back especially was angry with him after sleeping all night in the worst position possible. Outside the shack, the birds chirped in their cages and demanded food.
“Alright, alright, buddies, I’m coming.”
When he took a step forward, leaned on the counter, and then looked around, he realized three things.
One, his head was pounding like the bass drum of an army marching band.
Two, Cason and Faei weren’t back yet.
Three, and most worrying, was that when he realized that yesterday, Eric Cratter had made it through Cason’s runes, despite having hostile intentions.
He hadn’t realized what that actually meant until now.
Chapter Nineteen
No more waiting around. It was bad enough that Cason and Faei had been gone almost two days for what was supposed to be a quick trip, but the failure of the old man’s runes meant something else.
Maybe something had happened to him and Faei. The runes worked from Cason’s mana, which was an advanced power that expert alchemists earned. If his mana supply was suddenly cut off, then the runes would fail. Cason was a drunk, but he was careful with his alchemy; he wouldn’t go anywhere without making sure his mana bar was high and that he had potions with him. Not only that, but he’d once shown off his necklace and rings of mana regeneration. This wasn’t a case of carelessness at all. Something must have happened to him.
He was going to have to take a trip. He packed some things in his leather bag. He took vials of healing potion and stamina regeneration, and he also spent a couple of hours making more dissolve and brittle bone potions. It crossed his mind to label them, but it was clear which was which; dissolve was purple with little peppercorns in it, and brittle bones was pale orange like water mixed with rust, and had a thin layer of oil floating on top, which came from the inpurus herb.
Maybe this was why Cason didn’t label his potions. Cason had become so used to brewing things that he knew everything by sight. It still wasn’t the best way to work, but Jake was beginning to see how an experience alchemist like Cason might get overconfident.
As well as the potions, he took a couple of bottles of water from the well near the shack, and he packed some fruit and dried meat. He didn’t know how long he was going to be out, but he needed to be ready for anything.
By the time he was ready to go, the afternoon had peaked and the sun was starting a slow decent. He guessed they were in the middle of what passed for autumn in Sarametis, and the nights approached sooner and sooner, though they were sunnier than autumns back home. Way over in the north, at least a hundred miles away but visible since it must have been on a high ground, was the dark forest. The last time he’d seen it, when he climbed a tree, it had seemed foreboding. Now, the sunlight hit the red leaves and it seemed to shimmer in the distance.
With his gear ready and his plan resolved, there was just one problem; Cason had been infuriatingly vague about his trip, and had refused to tell him where he was going. This left him with the whole of Reaching Crest island to scour.
Luckily, he had the answer. He faced the rows of potions on the alchemy counter and checked each one. Two thirds along the row, he found the brew that he needed. It was a little vial filled with blue liquid, and little flecks of gold swam around inside it.
It was the potion of follow that Cason had pointed out to him a few days earlier. The gold swimming things were live creatures. They were called follow-mites, according to Cason, and the blue liquid they swam in kept them healthy and honed their follow instincts. By combining the potion with something from Cason’s body, like a fingernail or a hair, he could track them down.
Thirty minutes later, he realized there was a flaw in this plan. No matter where he looked in the shack, even when using Cason’s runework magnifying glass, he couldn’t find a single strand of Cason’s hair. He thought that with such thick hair and a bushy beard there’d be tons of it, but no. There wasn’t even any on his mattress. It was as though the old man had taken painstaking care to make sure not a single piece of him was left behind while he was gone.
Luckily, Faei wasn’t so cautious. Or paranoid, whatever form Cason’s personal brand of mental issues took. After abandoning his search for strands of alchemist beard, he soon found one of Faei’s impossible long, fire-kissed strands hanging on the back of a chair.
He left the shack and then wedged the broken door behind him. He was slightly worried that he was leaving the shack unprotected, but there was no choice. Faei and Cason were obviously in trouble, and Jake was pretty much the only friend either of them have. And even then, ‘friend’ was pushing it a little.
“Better get going,” he said to himself.
It was still too early to say what kind of day it was going to be, and even the sky seemed unsure about to do. In the east, clouds gathered in a thick, grey mass and look ready to rain down a storm for the history books, while the sea-blue sky of the west spoke of summer days.
It was time to get going, but he didn’t have a direction. He uncorked the follow potion and watched the follow mites swim in their blue juice. He tipped it slightly and let a drop fall into his palm. Then, he waited.
Nothing happened. There was only one way to activate the potion, it seemed. He was going to have to break his new number one rule, the one he’d created after seeing the dissolve potion at work.
Never drink something unless you know how it works.
Still, at least there was one blessing in all of this – that he hadn’t found any of Cason’s hair or fingernails. He’d much rather sip a potion mixed with Faei’s hair than the old man’s.
He had a tiny drop of it in his palm now. He stuck out his tongue and then ever-so-gently dipped it in the potion. It had a sweet flavor, like a sugary passion fruit, followed by a soapy aftertaste.
He looked around. The hill sloped below him, and the dead grass plains waited at the bottom. Beyond that was the rest of the land, a place he’d barely seen any of. Reaching Crest was an island, but it was a big one. Judging by the map in Cason’s shack, Jake judged that it was around half the size of the UK. Since the map was encased in a wooden frame and fixed firmly to the wall, he couldn’t take it with him. Without the follow potion, he’d have had no chance.
Fortunately, it had started to work. A blue line began to form near his feet. It was thinner than a hosepipe and was hazy-looking, like the white streaks that aircrafts left behind them. He bent down to touch it, but his fingers dispersed it. When he moved his fingers away, and the blue line began to snake down the hill.
That was the follow potion at work, then. Time to get to it. He hefted his leather bag on his shoulder, gave the shack one last salute, and then took his first step down the hill.
The follow potion led him on quite a trek. Rather than taking him over the convenient pathways and throughways, the follow potion seemed to prefer shortest, most direct route from point A to point B. It gave no consideration to the fact that sometimes, the shortest route to the goal didn’t really work for a human. It didn’t, for example, realize that Jake couldn’t walk over water. This was no satnav device, that was for sure.
A ten-mile walk, which should have taken three hours, took Jake over five, since he was constantly having to alter his course away from the one the follow potion wanted him
to take. The thin trail of blue mist didn’t appreciate that it wasn’t a good idea for him to walk straight through a solid stone cavern side, nor did he want to follow the mist over fifty yards of thorny bushes, some of them sporting spikes so sharp that they’d puncture metal.
At least he was seeing some of Reaching Crest. It was a predominantly green island, with large portions of it untamed. There were still plenty of towns and villages, and even a couple of cities, though he only knew about the cities from the signposts he sometimes passed.
Every so often, Jake glimpsed a town in the distance. Once the trail even led him so close to a village that he could smell the sweet aroma of baking bread and hear the chatter of a few people nearby. Where possible, he avoided the road and the towns.