Doesn’t matter.
“If you only knew the things running through my mind,” I tell Wolf with a yawn.
I’ve bored myself to sleep, and rather than finish out the night on the floor, I climb back into the bed and move next to Sam.
Wolf follows soon after.
I try to shoo him away, but he insists, and soon the three of us are sharing Sam’s space bed.
(^_^)
“Breakfast?” Sam asks as soon as I stir. “I see you and Wolf got comfortable last night.”
She sits on her couch in her silk nightgown, a cup of coffee in her hand.
“I tried to push him off the bed but he’s too heavy.”
“Sure you did.” She laughs playfully. “Why was your arm around him and not me?”
“He’s, um, warm?” I say with a grin on my face. “But really, there’s no time for breakfast. We need to get back to Lothar and start moving north. It’s time: we really need to see about your legs. Also, Florin – tell me we aren’t really taking him with us.”
“We can eat a quick breakfast there. I have some water in my inventory and a change of clothes for when we arrive in Unigaea. I’ll get cleaned up. And yes. Florin is coming with us.”
“I know, I know, collateral.”
Wolf hops off the bed and rushes over to the wall where the food comes from.
“Okay, maybe he wants breakfast.”
“Ramjet,” Sam says, and her AI goes to work quickly behind the walls. Once Ramjet is finished, Sam retrieves a dog bowl filled with pulled pork and places it before Wolf.
“Whatever you’re feeding him still looks good.”
“So now you’re hungry?”
“Maybe. Can I get … ” My eyes light up. “A burger to go? Or even better, a couple of breakfast tacos?” My mouth waters at the thought of breakfast tacos smothered in salsa with a side of pico de gallo, guacamole, and sour cream, just in case I feel like doing some customizing.
“That’s an odd look you’re giving me.”
“Tacos. Can Ramjet make breakfast tacos?”
“Of course he can.”
A few minutes later and I’m munching down on some of the best breakfast tacos I’ve ever had. Bacon, chorizo, scrambled eggs, pico de gallo, shredded Monterey Jack Cheese, fried avocado. I’m in heaven.
“We can officially go,” I tell Sam after I’ve wolfed down my fourth taco.
She rolls her eyes at me.
“What?”
“You’ve made a mess of the front of your flight suit.”
“Ah. Well, Ramjet can do the dry-cleaning too, right?” I look around the room, hoping for a response. None comes, and I’m just about to say something else when a green flash from her Blueshift wristband sends us back to Unigaea.
Now in her Hourglass Mage avatar, Sam looks up at me and smiles. She sits in the same place she sat before we left, still in her bloody robes.
“Damn, Sam.”
“I’ll get cleaned up, then I’ll see if I can change my condition in any way.”
“Glad to see you two,” says Lothar, who sits cheerily on his meditations box reading a letter. There is no hint of sarcasm in his voice, and as he looks at us over the rim of his oval glasses, I get the feeling that he is indeed happy to see us.
Florin Talonas is still tied up, fast asleep with his head bowed forward. I turn back to Sam to see her in fresh robes.
“Damn! That was fast.”
A basin filled with water appears, and a white rag pixilates into her hand. She dips it in. As she runs the rag over her face, it quickly darkens with her dried blood.
Sam rinses the rag out and goes back to work on her face. Another pass, and I see that Sam has aged even further, to the point that she now resembles a sixty year old woman.
“Stop staring.”
“Sorry,” I turn back to Lothar and shrug. “Um, what are you reading there?”
“A letter from an old colleague.”
Wolf circles around the friendly giant and trots over to a couple of rocks. His leg comes up, and he quickly lets any other beasts in the vicinity know that he has dibs on this space.
“It’s not another breakup letter, is it?”
Lothar chuckles. “No, nothing like that. My friend, Tignor, puts forth a theory in this letter regarding a way to use algomagic to theoretically OMIB-port from one Proxima world to another. Anyway, never mind, it’s a bit daft, maybe under thought. I forgot I’d stashed the letter away in my box! The things you find when you have too much free time. So, how was your trip to space?”
He folds the letter and places it in the front of his robes.
“It was, um, interesting, to say the least.”
Sam clears her throat as her Book of Time appears in front of her. “Let’s get this over with.” Her face now clean from the blood, Sam points the wand at her legs and fires off her healing spell.
I can tell by her frown that her spell hasn’t worked.
As the sand in her hourglass flows in the opposite direction, Sam opens her Book of Time to the page she has generated for her Speed Heal spell. Information regarding what I assume is the fact that the spell won’t cure paralysis materializes in black ink.
“Motherfucker,” I say as I move over to Florin Talonas. I’m just about to wake him up with a boot to the chin when Sam tells me to cool it.
“Let’s not resort to that sort of violence,” adds Lothar.
Wolf barks, his tail beating back and forth as he watches me crouch in front of Florin. He comes tearing over to me, barking and snarling at Florin.
“What the …?” I pull my Splintered Sword as soon as I see that Florin’s wrists are no longer tied.
The governor of Stater glances up at me with a look I can’t decipher. “You got me.” He slowly lifts his hands.
“What the fuck, Lothar?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” Lothar stands from his meditations box and peers down at Florin. “I didn’t know he was able to release himself!”
“Sorry,” Florin says as he raises his hands, “the rope wasn’t very tight.”
“Bullshit.” I keep my sword at the ready as I look him over.
Something isn’t right here.
“Relax, Oric, you were in a hurry last night,” Sam says.
I take a deep breath and slowly lower my weapon.
“I don’t have a weapon to fight you with,” Florin reminds me.
“I’m sure you do, in your inventory list.”
“My list mostly has potions, documents, and other frivolous things. I assure you.”
“He’s right, Oric,” says Lothar. “And for the record, Florin and I spoke a lot last night. He’s truly lost his memory.”
“And let me guess, he has no idea why he formulated this plan to take over Unigaea, including a false flag attack using southerners’ fear of Tagvornins to his benefit. Sound about right?”
Lothar nods slowly. “Yes, he has no idea why he wanted to do all that. We tried several different ways to try to uncover or somehow piece together what his intentions were before Sam’s attack, even so far as going through the documents in his list. Nothing.”
I point my finger at Florin. “Fine. But we will bring this back up again in the future. I don’t for a fucking minute believe that some part of you doesn’t know what happened. You seem to recall your RPCness well enough. This isn’t over.”
I sheathe my blade and whistle for Wolf to follow me. Once we get over to Sam, I help her up and place her on his back. “Welcome to your new wheels,” I say, realizing after I’ve said it how cruel it sounds.
Luckily, it’s Sam, and if anyone can take a joke, it’s her. “Does it come in an all-terrain package?”
“Actually, it does.”
“So how are we doing this? As we discussed over breakfast?”
She touches her hourglass necklace and nods.
“Lothar, get your ass down here and get as close to me as you can.”
I turn to Florin and glare. “You to
o, but get on the other side of Lothar. Touch his leg, or better yet, his foot. Touch his foot.”
Lothar drops to a knee next to Sam, and I remind him to get his meditations box.
“I’ve never done this before,” he says as he returns with his box, the ground rumbling slightly as he approaches.
Sam, now on Wolf, reaches out and touches my arm. I touch Lothar’s knee and Florin touches Lothar’s foot, as instructed.
Pink magic envelops us and we’re gone in a flash.
Chapter Sixteen: Tagvornin Erectile Dysfunction and Taelian Socialism
Away we go, making our way north by northeast, alternating between walking for thirty minute sprints and using Sam’s Time Skip spell. The spell has some sort of built-in AI, if that’s what it can be called, as it never seems to port us somewhere that can’t support the people being transported, including Lothar’s giant ass.
Speaking of Lothar, the friendliest giant this side of Karuna Island has gone full on buddy-buddy with Florin Talonas. You’d think the two were old college roommates, reminiscing about the cold night they spent in the woods of the Western Splits.
I’m not buying it.
Maybe it was the slight grin on Florin’s face earlier when he saw that I had discovered that he’d been untied. And what was he thinking, anyway? That I wouldn’t see the rope was missing? Was he planning to spring out at me or something?
He’s lucky I didn’t put an end to this then.
This thought, as we take a walking break – Sam on Wolf, Lothar and Florin chatting about Unigaean winters – naturally moves into philosophical query as to what the Obelisk is planning.
She has to know that Florin is with us.
Is the war still waging on, as if its key players are ever-present?
Why hasn’t she appeared before us, possibly on her fiery Shire horse, to offer sound judgment against Florin?
“We can skip forward in a few minutes,” Sam announces to the group.
“Why won’t you just use the word teleport?” I ask for the second time. It’s afternoon now, and a crisp breeze blows from the east carrying with it the scent of Blue Melon, which immediately triggers a fleeting image of Deathdale.
“Because this is a fantasy world,” Sam says.
“That it is!” Lothar and Florin laugh.
I glance right to see Wolf giving me a look that says ‘should I kill him or do you want to?’
Which one? I want to ask.
“Time Skip sounds cooler than teleport anyway,” explains Sam. “And we aren’t teleporting, we are actually speeding up time for ourselves.”
“I’m a bit confused on how this transportation method works,” Florin says.
“It is a form of Proxima time dilation. Sam is correct when she says we aren’t teleporting. If we were teleporting, it would be the same time, or possibly a fraction of a second later when we arrived. Think of it like this: every time we arrive, our clocks have passed the amount of time it would theoretically take us to travel the distance.” Lothar clears his throat.
“So we are actually traveling the distance, just not here, in Unigaea.”
“Correct, Florin! While Sam’s spell is in effect, we are actually moving through the OMIB – that’s Orthogonal Matrix Inverse Base, Florin – slowly, I might add. And when Sam goes to her ship, that’s fast-moving through the OMIB.”
A question comes to me. “If we’re slowly moving through the OMIB right now, why don’t we see the OMIB? You know, stars and shit.”
“We don’t see stars and whatnot because we are in limbo in the OMIB,” Lothar says, “waiting for time to catch up here.”
“And this is why the clock keeps skipping ahead by thirty minutes,” adds Sam. “We aren’t teleporting, we’re skipping, and the world continues to function for however long we are slow motion traveling through the OMIB. Are we clear now?”
“It gets more complicated than that,” Lothar says, “but we can save that conversation for another time.”
“How about we save that one for a bedtime story tonight?”
Lothar laughs heartily. “Oh, Oric, you are too old for bedtime stories!”
“I guess you’re right. So, let’s simplify this conversation. How long until we reach the Rune Lands if we continue at this pace?”
“Not as long as I originally anticipated,” says Sam. “Our first time skip today only put us forward half a mile or so, but since I’ve cast it several more times, it keeps increasing its distance.”
“I feel a math problem coming on!”
“We’ll work out the algebra later, Lothar,” she says.
“It’s not quite algebra. It is more of a velocity equation, specifically something that could be solved, I believe, by using the Schwarzschild metric, although I may be wrong in this regard.”
“Point is, each time I cast the spell, we are traveling at a compounded distance,” Sam says, “of about twenty-five percent further each time. Our theoretical time of travel is remaining constant, meaning it is still taking about the same ‘Unigaea world time’ of about thirty minutes, yet we’re going further distances.”
I nod, impressed that I can comprehend what the hell it is everyone is talking about.
Thank you, MIND!
“So when will we arrive then?” Florin asks.
Lothar retrieves a map from his meditations box. He then does just about the most primitive thing I’ve seen to calculate one of the more technical equations I’ve encountered.
Using his finger, the middle phalanx of his pointer finger to be specific, he gauges the distance from our current position to the Rune Lands, just outside of Tagvornin. He bites his lip for a minute as his mind cranks into gear. “We’ll be there at dusk, at around seven o’clock, give or take ten minutes. Is that what you predict as well, Sam?”
Sam nods, clearly impressed that he’s come up with such a calculation using a finger.
“Do I even want to ask how you figured that out?”
Lothar grins at me. “Of course you do. My middle phalanx measures a distance of 1.75 miles on my map. I counted how far we have to travel, and then thought of an equation that accounted for a twenty-five percent increase in travel every time Sam’s spell is cast added with our averaged walking distance, which seems to be a little over a quarter of a mile before Sam is able to transport us again. I can show you the equation, if you’d like.”
“I’m good.”
“You are the smartest NPC I know,” says Florin.
“I have a giant brain!”
(^_^)
A final pink flash and we arrive on the borders of the Rune Lands. Everything is white here, the trees are iced over and snow drifts jut out from the sides of the main road.
Our breaths are visible.
Lothar asks Sam what time it is and when she tells him, he shakes his head with disappointment. “I told you that we’d be here within a ten minute time frame; we’re here fifteen minutes before seven.”
“It’s fine, Lothar,” Sam tells him.
“Yeah, we have more important things to handle, such as the fact that it looks like all of Tagvornin appears to be evacuating. But still, it frustrates me.”
From our vantage point on a small hill, we can see that there are numerous tents, caravans, people, and livestock, the Tagvornin camp decorated by the occasional fire. The southwestern part of the camp is where the soldiers are staying, the guards in their red and black armor near the siege weapons.
There are also wolves, lots of wolves, ranging in color from black to white.
“Shall we?” I ask as I take a step down the hill. “Wait.” I hand Florin my lavender cloak and my Masking Hat. “Put this stuff on.”
“A purple cloak?”
“The color lavender is on trend right now, trust me. The old you was technically at war with the Tagvornins. I’m guessing they knew something about you coming to the north, otherwise they wouldn’t have put their military where they did. Anyway, you need to keep a low profile.”
“I see,” he says as he takes the clothing from me. “If you suggest I keep a low profile, then that’s what I’ll do.” He places the cloak over his shoulders and puts the hat on. Seeing him in my outfit only reminds me of how stupid I must look when wearing my lavender cloak.
I really, really should have thought hard about that purchase.
Buyer’s remorse, what can I say, Oric?
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Eric.
The Tagvornin encampment is poorly organized, and much to his delight, Lothar isn’t the only giant around. Others are visible on the horizon; the makeshift pathways that divide the encampment into sections are designed to accommodate those from Tael.
I’ve forgotten just how remote the Rune Lands can feel, this remoteness played out in the general appearance of Tagvornins. They are fierce, men and women alike, and they stand out in a crowd, less because of their red armor and more because of their other attire.
Tagvornins wear clothing made of leather and fur, what you’d expect from a northern population. Their haircuts and face tattoos are what set them apart from those that hail from other regions of Unigaea.
Every single Tag, regardless of age, has their head shaved.
The women only have the front portion shaved. The back is still long and the way it’s braided can indicate a number of things. Young girls have three braids, women of marrying age two braids, married women one long braid, and widowed women no braids at all.
So, business in front, party in the back.
The men have shaved heads and beards of varying length to make up for the fact they can’t get warm on top. Most wear akhlut caps with strips of fur hanging down to cover their ears. The older men have tattooed dots above their eyebrows; the younger men wear something akin to a black kilt but longer, and with leggings beneath to fight off the cold.
Shit if it isn’t cold here.
I can feel the wind blowing in from the Seleucid Sea, the air chilling my bones. It’s too dark on the horizon now to see the Red Plague, but it doesn’t take long for us to hear about its approach and the required evacuation.
“Damn city guards,” a man with a filthy beard rambles as we pass, “forcing me to bring my happy ass here.” He drops a bottle of wine and cries, “Come and take it! And fuck you!” he screams at Lothar.
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