by Macronomicon
His foot –scratch that, stump – was wrapped in bloody rags that were only showing a bit of red from oozing blood.
If he weren’t quite so freaked out, he might have given himself a pat on the back for doing such a good job with the wound care despite the morphine burning a hole through his short-term memory.
“Goddamnit, half the MRE’s are gone,” a man’s voice called from the other side of the tree, causing Jeb to stiffen up and hold his breath.
“Looks like most of the weapons and armor are still here, though.” Another voice joined the first.”
People!
Jeb leaned over, battling a sudden dizziness as he crawled around the side of the mossy oak.
He almost faceplanted before he managed to drag himself back into a seated position facing the seven humans rummaging through his crates.
“Oh, would you look at that!” the biggest one, an oversized man with a shaved head and a great bushy beard said, turning to face Jeb. He was wearing heavy armor which exposed thick, bulging muscles arms, and wore an oversized axe on his back.
“The corpse wasn’t a corpse after all.” He gave a meaningful glance at a nearby man, slender with receding hair, wearing just a leather cuirass.
“I’m sorry boss,” the man said, throwing his hands up. “I’m not a doctor. I din’t feel no pulse.”
“Well, whatever,” the boss said, glancing Jeb up and down. “He’s not a corpse yet. Come on, Kyle, pack up the food,” he grabbed an extra backpack and tossed it to a younger looking teen who kept casting uncertain looks at Jeb.
“Are you…robbing me?” Jeb asked,
“I don’t think of it as robbing, so much as not wasting the resources on people who’ve got Less’n a snowball’s chance in hell.” The leader said, unconcerned by Jeb’s stare.
“Why, you gonna try and stop us?” The leader asked, glancing over his shoulder at Jeb.
They both knew the answer to that.
“Maybe we should grab the sword, too. It looks solid.” One of the seven said, a short man with wispy hair, looking over at Jeb’s blade.
“Try it,” Jeb growled, holding the blade out. “And lose some fingers.”
He was absolutely sure he didn’t strike a very intimidating pose with his back slumped against the tree, missing a foot.
One of the seven, a woman with piercing blue eyes, pulled out an arrow and aimed it at Jeb’s face, heedless of the fairy sitting on top of it, waggling its feet.
They can’t see them?
“Naw, Everyone, calm down. I’m a firm believer that everyone deserves a shot.” The big man said with a grin. “Not that kind of shot. A chance. We’re not gonna kill a guy for a blade when we’ve got so many to choose from already.”
True, they looked pretty well armed already.
“Now get over here and pack up, our friend there knows we’ll kill him if he moves away from his tree.”
The icy-eyed woman put the arrow away, forcing the fairy to take flight or fall.
“Do the bikini armors work?” Jeb asked, raising his voice to cut through the din of people sorting through his shit, deciding what to take based on weight and relative value.
The bald mammoth of a man chuckled and shook his head, eyes twinkling with mirth. “No, they do not.”
“Damn.” Jeb briefly considered offering them a trade, medical supplies for information on the layout of the forest, then decided against it. He didn’t want to give these mercenary fucks anything more, especially not something so valuable as information.
His hard-won information.
Besides, I’ve got an idea for how to get some of what I need back.
In another half-hour, they left him alone, treading into the west, toward the raptor part of the forest.
They’d left a few of the less useful supplies behind, things that were heavy, like sledgehammers, or functionally useless as a weapon, like the garrote wire.
Hah, they left the atlatl. Took the arrows and spare bows, though.
Most of the bladed weapons were taken, leaving Jeb’s shortsword and a left-handed cleaver. All the medical supplies were gone –assholes– along with the food and sundries.
Assuming he didn’t get gangrene and die, his next concern would be dehydration, followed by starvation, and then finally finding something to wipe his ass with.
Still, I’ve got a solution for some of these problems.
Jeb detached the shield strapped to his arm and dug into his front pocket with his trembling left hand, pulling out a bag of M&Ms and shaking it in the air.
“Who wants to earn some M&M’s?”
“Ooh, me, me!” fairies literally came out of the woodwork, jumping up and down in excitement.
There were a lot more than last time.
That one fairy who left must have brought more.
“Now, the person who steals the most of my shit back without anyone noticing gets a whole M&M! Hard candy coating with that perfect crunch, and a soft chocolaty center. These have been warming up in my pocket, so you know the insides are soft and delicious.”
The fairies lost their damn minds.
“Hey bossman,” Jeb called after the fairy leader, who was about to streak through the sky at his bidding. “I’ve got a better offer for you.”
“Really?” The fairy said, flitting down to sit on his wounded leg. Jeb resisted the urge to swat him off.
“Yeah, do you know how Myst works?”
“Of course.”
Jeb felt like facepalming.
“And could you teach me how to use it?”
The fairy boss of the tree scowled, looking Jeb over with pursed lips. The Fairy realized he had the upper hand, now.
“This is powerful knowledge, of great value. For fifty M&M’s I will teach you this.”
“Five,” Jeb said, holding up his fingers. The morphine was starting to wear off, and the pain in his legs was rapidly getting worse, but he couldn’t let this little bastard overcharge him.
Objectively, fifty M&Ms for the secrets of magic was probably an insanely good deal, but Jeb wasn’t the type to let someone set their own price.
“Foolish human, you have no leverage. Without this knowledge, you will die, and we will pick your corpse clean. The M&M’s are practically ours already.”
“Oh, really?” Jeb asked. “What if I did this?” Jeb tore the top of the bag off and slid a mouthful of M&Ms into his maw, crunching down on them with a satisfied groan.
“NOOO!” the Fairy squeaked with outrage. “You villain!”
“Carefull, I’m getting hungry. I might have to…” He made to tilt the bag into his mouth again.
“Fine! Thirty M&Ms, and not a single delicious morsel less.”
“Fifteen.”
The fairy boss’s lower lip trembled, and Jeb raised his brows, tilting the bag up toward his mouth.
“Fine! Fifteen M&M’s for the knowledge of Myst….But anything else costs extra!”
“Deal.” Jeb glanced at his leg. Damn, I wish I had thought of this before I charged out into the wilderness like a dumbass.
Eh, fuck it, how was I supposed to know a shot to the heart and a good spearing was a half-measure? I did as well as can be expected for a normal guy with a normal Body.
Jeb was lucky to be alive, foot or no foot.
Now that he knew exactly how bad off he was, he was going to take every advantage he could possibly muster.
***Jessica Stile***
“So, what did he do after we left? Any hidden stash or anything?” George asked as Jessica got back from observing the injured man. Her Nerve was higher than the others, enhancing her senses and mental processing power. It made her quite good as a scout.
“No, he just sat there, talking to himself and threatening to eat a bag of M&M’s.” Jessica said with a shrug. It was behavior that she’d never seen short of raving lunatics on the street corner.
“I knew it,” George said, nodding. “He’s one of those crazies that raised their Myst. Explains
why he got wounded fighting those easy-ass boars.”
“Either that or a suicidal diabetic.” One of the team chimed in.
The rest of the team chuckled, but Jessica was unable to shake an odd sense of wrongness. Unlike a typical crazy person, his conversation had been entirely coherent, if only half of the puzzle.
Do you know how myst works?
And could you teach me how to use it?
Hmmm…
“Hey, which one of you took my knife?”
Chapter 2: Smarter, Not Harder
Luck favors the prepared.
-Louis Pasteur
***Jeb***
Draw the Myst in… Jeb visualized the Myst being drawn into a fiery core at the center of his being, the flames slowly being stoked as they were converted to…something else.
Draw was a measure of how quickly he could bring fuel into the tiny sun that he’d kindled at the core of his being, Storage was a hard limit on the size of the little sun, and output capacity was the speed at which he could pull magic out of it.
Of course, it wouldn’t do to draw too much out of that little sun just under his lungs, because if it went out, he’d have to start growing it again from scratch…and that had been a bitch.
Nearly a week spent meditating and trying to breathe in Myst before he’d settled on the image of burning it, rather than using it as sustenance, or bathing in it’s essence, or using it to lift his consciousness to a higher plane, or whatever the flowery language was at the time.
He was a twenty-first century boy, after all. Burning things for fuel appealed to him.
And so he wound up with this little star of golden light that was slowly growing inside him, rather than a root that joined heaven and earth, whatever the hell that meant.
Once he had the image down, it was just a matter of sucking the golden energy out with a straw. The straw represented his output. The size and how close it was to the star inside him were all factors.
After meditating with next to no blood for six days, eating nothing but MRE’s and bound up like a bear in winter, He finally did it.
He drew in Myst, burned it, and siphoned off a bit of that glowing orange energy, pushing it out into the real world, and knocking over his blade, which was leaning up against the tree.
Telekinesis, motherfucker!...Probably.
He was pretty sure the sword wouldn’t have fallen over by itself. Pretty sure.
Let’s try something lighter.
He grabbed a pebble off the ground, held it in his palm, and pushed the orange energy out, forming a small but dense platform underneath the rock.
The rock floated up into the air, buoyed by the magic beneath it, and Jeb felt like he could kiss someone. Anyone.
I have made fire! Look at what I have created! The scene in Cast Away where Tom Hanks pounded his chest, celebrating his accomplishment could not have done the sensation any more justice.
“Fuck yeah!” Jeb pumped his fist in victory, which made his shoddily crafted pegleg slip off his knee, jamming into his still-healing wound and dropping him into the dirt with a howl of pain.
“Worth it,” Jeb groaned into the dirt, before rolling over and checking his bandages. There was a little bit of seepage so he changed them out the bandage and continued. It hadn’t gotten infected, so there was a reasonable chance he could survive.
At least until the end of week two.
The loss of the Safe Zone was, for all intents and purposes, Game Over.
For now.
Rather than try killing an enormous turtle that dominated the forest sky when it passed by sometime in the next six days, his time would probably be better spent ensuring that he could survive once the Safe Zones were no longer safe.
That meant he still needed to get levels.
Not even that first kill that he lost his GODDAMN FOOT to get had netted him a level, and he needed to get twenty of them before he got a class. A class which, according to Acorn –he’d bothered to learn the boss fairy’s name – should provide him with a boost in power and the ability to specialize.
Specialization meant the ability to choose a focus that leaned away from foot-based combat arts like swordplay, archery, javelin throwing…pretty much anything that required muscle power had been compromised by lacking a foot.
He needed twenty levels, and he needed them fast, or else he was limping duck.
Which was why he’d decided to industrialize.
“Alright, pick up the pace,” Jeb said as he clomped back and forth along the defined edge of the Safe Zone, where a horde of fairies were using magic to dig a pit trap for Kruskers, tiny beads of sweat beading on their tiny brows as they concentrated on moving dirt with spade-like projections of Myst.
“Only closers get M&M’s. Are you a closer Leaf-Wind?”
“Yes sir, M&M lord!” Leaf-wind shouted, redoubling his efforts, flinging more dirt up and out.
“That’s right,” Jeb said with a nod. He’d taken the arguably unethical approach of paying the fairy with the most productivity an M&M at the end of each shift, leaving the others to stare on jealously, balling up their fists with impotent rage.
Unethical, but cost effective.
He’d heard about employers giving large bonuses to the top performing earners as a way of paying a relatively small amount while squeezing extra free labor out of their entire workforce by making them compete.
Too bad fairies don’t have unions.
“Wait, isn’t he just paying us one M&M for all of us to work as hard as we can?” one of the fairies asked. “Don’t we, on average, earn a tiny, tiny fraction of an M&M per shift?”
Oh, crap!
“Kid, I like you,” Jeb said, approaching the fairy. “What’s your name?”
“Smartass, M&M-Lord.”
“Listen Smartass. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You make a good point, but you failed to point out that…” Jeb said, holding up a delicious chocolate confection. “One of you could have the whole thing!”
“My pile’s the biggest!” One of the fairies said, standing proudly on a pile of dirt almost as tall as Jeb’s waist.
“Not if I have anything to say about it!” another shouted, throwing himself into digging, throwing shovelful after shovelful of dirt onto his own pile.
Good old capitalism.
Jeb turned his gaze back on the fairy giving him the stink-eye.
“Smartass, smartass, babe, your talents are wasted digging,” He said, taking the fairy over to the other side of the safe zone to negotiate.
It was there that he introduced Smartass to the sweet, sweet world of bribes and croney capitalism. All in exchange for being the voice of reason for the other fairies, keeping them competing against each other and not bothering thinking about difficult things like average payout and employee compensation.
I feel pretty bad about all this. If the fairies are anything to go by, humans are going to tear Pharos a new asshole.
Once his rule over the little folk was assured – he had enough M&Ms to last a month, conservatively – he applied himself to learning how to use his new magical powers more effectively, copying what the Fairies were doing and creating a phantom spade to literally shovel the dirt up and out with his mind.
After a little bit of experimentation, he found it was more efficient to seep the orange glowing magic evenly into the ground, freeze it in place, then yank it out in a great big chunk of earth, rather than use the magic like a shovel.
After a day, he was moving earth faster than the fairies, hollowing out chunks of ground about two feet deep and one in diameter, and growing.
Breath Myst in, Burn it, siphon the glowing corona around the star out, careful not to take from the star itself. He needed to keep growing the orb inside him, until the amount that he siphoned off of it without damaging its glow was substantial enough to be practically useful.
But when is that day coming? Because my time here is dwindling.
Between him and the fairies, it onl
y took two days to get the holes dug, one more day to carve the wooden stakes and put them in the traps, and only a couple more hours to cover the holes reasonably well. A human might be able to tell something was up, but a krusker in the heat of a charge wouldn’t notice anything…hopefully.
Only gonna get one shot at this.
“Alright, next mission, people,” Jeb said, clapping his hands together. “Whosoever leads the most kruskers into the pit traps gets….a candy bar!” Jeb pulled a Snickers out of his pocket. It was the tiny sized one that comes as a side to the mac and cheese, but it was absolutely gigantic compared to a single M&M.
“It’s mine!”
“No, I shall be the one to obtain it!”
The fairies scattered in every direction, and in a matter of minutes, Jeb was confident he’d have the experience coming to him rather than having to risk life and limb to get it.
All he had to do was wait for them to fall into the hole, then stab them from above until they stopped moving. If he understood the way Fate or experience worked in this system, he’d be one the fast track to making up for a week and a half of lost time.
Doing things the smart way is often boring, Jeb thought, fetching his finishing spear made from his shortsword and a nice thick sapling.
“It was you!” A familiar, masculine voice shouted, dragging Jeb’s attention to the far side of the Safe Zone.
“Crap.”
It was the dude with the shaved head and the big, bushy beard, along with the severe blue-eyed lady with the bow. The two of them looked worse for wear, covered in blood and superficial wounds. They were also alone, the rest of the crew seemingly dead or gone.
Between Jeb and old redbeard was a huge pile of pilfered goods. All the weapons, medicine and food they’d stolen from him, and more besides. The Fairies weren’t paying a lot of attention, so they just grabbed….everything.
“You stole all our gear!” the brawny man shouted, spittle flying out of his lips, vein bulging on the side of his head. “Men died because of you!”
A manic giggle bubbled out of Jeb at the complete absurdity of the hypocrisy.
Old redbeard did not take kindly to Jebs’ giggle, lowering his head like a bull and charging, axe drawn.