by Macronomicon
Upon closer inspection…it still looked like a cheap plastic toy. But there was writing on the side.
The Cleansing wand emits a penetrating cone of Cleansing light that scours away grime*, removing it from existence.
To use, hold the wand in your dominant hand and inject Myst into the bottom of the wand while aiming at the objects or persons to be cleaned. The Cleansing Wand is not rated for more than 125 Nitsu of Myst per second, any more may break the wand and result in severe injury or death.
Do not use Cleansing wand in a manner other than for its intended purpose. Do not tamper with Cleansing Wand. Doing so voids all warranty and may result in serious injury or death. Life-aide is not liable for any damages caused by using the product other than for its intended purpose.
*grime is defined by the user’s subconscious, Life-aide is not responsible for aberrant users who view other people as grime.
At the bottom of the wand was a little rounded cap with the words ‘insert Myst here,’ stenciled onto it.
“huh.” Jeb grunted, re-reading the label, complete with warnings.
“What?”
“You know how you can turn hairspray into a flamethrower and a microwave into a gun that can cook people from a distance, and fertilizer into an I.E.D.?” Jeb asked.
“Uhh..Yeah?”
“I think the same concept applies, here.” he said, eyeing the seam of the cheap plastic wand.
If it said tampering with it could lead to severe injury or death, that meant careful tampering could lead to severe injury or death…for other people.
We’ll put that on the backburner. Jeb thought, slipping the wand in his belt. Even if it was pink and girly, and somewhat condescendingly marketed towards women, it was still his first piece of genuine magical equipment.
“Alright, where to next?” Jeb asked, pulling out the map.
Chapter 4: The worm stick
***3 days, 7 hours remaining Until Safe Zones expire***
“Okay, so there should be some kind of treasure in here,” Jeb said, as they crawled beneath the low-hanging branches of a bunch of weeping willows. Or at least they looked like weeping willows. I’m not a botanist.
They were forced to squat and crabwalk through the area because of the lack of standing room.
“The map says, and I quote, a raw myst lens capable of creating an infinite cornucopia of food is preserved in the low-hanging forest.” Jessica said, glancing between the map and the nearby landmark, which in this case was a giant hominid skull.
Neither of them were particularly in dispute that starving to death was an outcome to be avoided. If there was an object that could convert Myst into food, they could move light and if one of them got injured, as long as Jeb had Myst, they could hunker down and avoid endangering themselves by hunting.
Why is it called a lens, though? Jeb wondered as they scanned the forest floor, searching for some kind of piece of glass, or a gem, or something. Jeb imagined a golden gem on the end of some kind of cornucopia horn.
He should’ve known by now that nothing with Myst was simple.
“I don’t think there’s anything here. if this lens was here, maybe another team already got it.” Jessica said.
There was no guarantee they were the only survivors, after all. They’d seen signs of humans every now and then, but after Redbeard’s group, Jeb was hesitant to actively seek them out.
Once bitten, twice shy, I suppose.
Given his ability to negotiate with fairies and move shit with his mind, Jeb could more than pull his weight, so to speak, but those traits weren’t visible to the naked eye, and if there was anything Jeb knew about human nature from the army, it was this:
If nobody saw you doing something, you didn’t do it.
The point being, if his prospective teammates couldn’t quantify or comprehend his contribution to their team, he’d most likely sink to the bottom of the group’s totem pole, being a cripple.
He’d get saddled with all the menial shit like skinning potatoes and cleaning gear in addition to fairy negotiations and using telekinesis to help fight monsters.
Being the ‘fairy bitch’ didn’t sound like a particularly good deal to him, so Jeb was…neutral about finding a larger group to work with. Jessica didn’t seem particularly eager to find another group either, for various reasons.
So they didn’t follow up on these traces, going their own way instead.
“You might be right. We can’t afford to spend all afternoon on this one thing. Twenty minutes.” Jeb said. Jessica nodded, scanning the ground and low hanging branches as they scuttled through the greenery.
It’s not up in the trees is it? Jeb thought, glancing up, but not spotting anything. He turned his gaze back to the ground, scanning the damp forest floor.
A bit of wiggling movement caught the corner of his eye, and he glanced over.
There was a stick lying in the grass, partially rotted, and covered with worms that seemed to be having a grand time wiggling all over it.
“weird,” Jeb muttered, crawling over to it and picking it up. It was about as thick as his wrist, and covered with dark spots of rot, a foot long and bearing a stub where a smaller branch was sheared away. It was just a stick, but the worms didn’t obediently fall off when he picked it up, either, clinging with uncharacteristic tenacity.
“What’s weird?” Jessica asked, glancing back at him.
Jeb held the stick up so she could see it.
“So? It’s a stick.”
“You don’t see the worms?”
“What worms?”
“Here,” Jeb said, crawling over to her and holding it up for her to inspect. She glanced down at the stick for a moment, then looked him in the eye.
“What worms?” she asked.
Jeb held the stick closer to his face, blinking and trying to clear his vision. There were definitely worms on the stick. Idly he tried to scrape them off, sloughing the worms off onto the ground, where they…faded away.
Worms emerged from the stick, once again clasping tight to the rotted wood.
“Oookaaay,” Jeb said, eyeing the ghost-worms.
“Okay, what?”
“You should really raise your Myst,” Jeb said, glancing over at her.
“And start talking to myself?” She waggled her hand. “I’m good.”
Hmm. Myst lens… Maybe…
Jeb siphoned Myst out of his core, then pushed it through the rotten stick.
He watched as the Myst poured into the rotten stick, then refracted outwards in a thousand different directions like motes of light.
Imagine this: A piece of polished glass shaped exactly like a rotted stick. You put light into it, and the bumpy and crooked nature of the stick causes the light to scatter in every direction.
That was exactly what happened to the Myst Jeb put into the worm-stick. It scattered in every direction like beams of light, peppering everything in the vicinity with tiny motes of Myst.
Everywhere one of these motes landed, a worm was created – a real goddamn earthworm – filling the clearing with thousands of the wriggling bastards.
Needless to say, tons of motes landed on Jeb and Jessica, as well as the tree branches above them.
Jess actually made the first girlish squeal Jeb had ever heard her make as dozens of worms rained down from the branches above, landing on her shaved scalp before wriggling around in irritation.
Jeb’s girlish squeal wasn’t far behind hers, honestly.
“Ack, son of a bitch!” Jeb shouted, scrambling out of the low-hanging canopy and brushing himself off violently, while Jessica did her own little ants-in-the-pants dance off to the side.
Once they were worm-free, Jeb looked at the stick more closely.
“You know, I think this is-“
“Don’t say it,” Jessica warned, pointing her sword at him threateningly.
“ – the fairy cornucopia,” Jeb finished, inspecting it further. Finally, he felt something kick in behind his eyes,
revealing the object’s identity to him.
Raw Worm-Summoning Myst Lens (gargantuan)
These finger-length sticks coalesce in areas of dim light and natural decay, and have been used by Fairy clans for generations to guarantee a source of food in even the leanest times.
The farmers of Pharos will often hire shamans with these lenses to bless their fields, as worms will greatly enhance the quality of the soil as they go through their life cycle underground.
Jeb glanced back under the low-hanging branches.
He hadn’t noticed before, but one of the worms was a good two feet long, wiggling vigorously, as big around as his thumb, while some others were tiny and nearly hair-thin.
Did it depend on how big the mote was? He thought, looking back at the stick. The information said they were supposed to be the size of a finger, and that his was gargantuan.
I think I’ll hang onto this.
Jessica sighed. “I’m only eating worms if the alternative is violent death or starvation.”
“Fair enough,” Jeb said, tucking the worm-stick in his belt, right next to his cleaning stick before consulting the map.
Newly alerted to the fact that the map was written from a fairy’s point of view, Jeb consulted their next location more judiciously, skipping things like ‘super amazing flying machine’ or ‘heavy artillery’. If the cornucopia summoned worms, chances were the flying machine could fit a couple fairies if they were lucky, and the heavy artillery probably fired nuts.
He focused on things they knew would benefit them: Bosses, stat-boosting treasure, and Myst lenses.
A few hundred meters away was a ‘dungeon’ of ‘giant’ flesh-devouring beetles. Chances were they weren’t actually that big.
The dungeon itself was a small, one room affair, and it was said to guard a human relic, some kind of circlet that increased Nerve.
If they could get that, his Nerve might be high enough to attempt the sirens to the south.
Defeat them, and then they could go north or west. Jeb hoped soloing the Siren boss would give award him the extra Nerve he needed to stay competitive, but if it didn’t, he’d reluctantly drop a few points from his levels into the trait.
Not being able to see Jessica move was a bit eye-opening, and the stealthy creatures to the North and West demanded a great deal of Nerve to spot before they ambushed.
Jeb didn’t wanna get diced up or poisoned before he knew what was going on. That meant he had to take the forest’s bosses in the appropriate order.
But first, we’re gonna see if we can’t get this crown-thing.
The dungeon itself wasn’t hard to find. It was a raised, barrow-like mound of dirt with a cavernous entrance leading into darkness.
When he shined a light into the dungeon, it revealed a short hallway followed by a room with a jewelry box inside of it.
Easy peasy.
“Let me go first,” Jessica said. “There could be traps. We were in one like this a while ago that had sawblades. It killed one of our guys.”
As tempted as Jeb was to man up and take the lead, he understood that without his foot, and having significantly lower physical attributes, he was probably dead weight in the heat of the moment.
He waved her ahead, and she ducked into the doorway, followed shortly by Jeb.
I wonder if the ceiling is stable? Jeb wondered to himself as he hopped down the hall, which was why he missed the glowing beam of light that appeared ahead of Jessica until it was too late.
“hold up,” Jeb said, trying to grab her shoulder, but her foot had already gone through the beam.
“What?” Jess whispered, tensing.
Jeb didn’t answer, watching in amazement as a line of bright energy flashed along the hall, deeper into the room, where it rose into the ceiling. A fraction of a second later a thousand beams of Myst touched the floor, and a thousand scarabs were created in the blink of an eye. A fraction of a second later, the light pulsed again, and another thousand scarabs were birthed, nearly directly on top of the others.
And again, and again. Fifteen times, the light pulsed, forming a roiling mound of flesh-eating scarabs.
“Crap, we should –“ Jeb’s voice cut off when he heard the door closing behind them. He glanced over his shoulder and spotted a cleverly disguised wall of stone sliding into their way.
Damnit.
Jessica lunged past him and struck the wall of stone with her fist, creating a thunderclap that echoed through the one-room dungeon. The stone shrugged it off.
“Son of a bitch!” Jessica growled, slamming the wall again. In the distance, the swarm of scarabs was beginning to investigate the noises in the hallway, along with the interesting smells…
“We just need some time,” Jeb said, mind racing. “There’s probably a lever in the main room that opens the door.”
“What, past the death swarm?” She demanded. True to her words, the swarm was nearly three feet tall, ten feet wide, and approaching rapidly, leaving no room in the cramped hallway to skirt around or over them.
“Stay calm. We’re gonna wait them out,” Jeb said, pulling out his new toy.
“No way, you-“
“You’re gonna wanna cover your mouth,” Jeb said, drawing in as much Myst as he possibly could, burning it, then funneling his core’s corona through the stick in pulses, mimicking the trap’s summoning mechanism.
In moments, the hall was flooded with squirming worms.
Delicious, squirming worms.
Jeb formed the last of his free energy into a thin wall of Myst between them and the rest of the hallway, forming a telekinetic barrier.
Moments later, the swarm of hungry scarabs crashed over Jeb’s worms like a wave, consuming everything they could get their mandibles around.
They pressed up against the barrier, forming a flat wall of blue beetle carapaces, heedless of the two humans holding their breath on the other side, praying that it would hold.
Jeb could feel their weight pressing against the telekinetic wall, focusing all his might on keeping it as steady and strong as possible.
After a good ten minutes, the feeding frenzy began to slow down as the scarabs ate their fill of worm. Stuffed and lethargic like thanksgiving day, the beetles gradually unswarmed, forming a thin coat of iridescent carapaces across the floor, walls and ceiling as they went into hibernation to sleep off their glorious meal.
The whole wait, Jeb was pulling in more Myst, getting ready to do it again if he had to.
“Can you make it to the next room?” he whispered, once things had settled down.
Jess glanced at the beetle studded walls and nodded.
“My class ability as an Assassin allows me to lower my mass to nearly zero,” She whispered back. “I can walk over these guys without them even feeling it.”
That explains how she did those anime style attacks.
“The bridge is yours,” Jeb said, disconnecting from the barrier and watching it diffuse into the environment.
True to her word, Jessica was able to walk across the beetles without them even noticing, using tiny finger-holds on either side of the wall to basically float past the beetles on the floor. She got into the main room, looked around a bit, and turned left, out of sight of the primary hall.
A second later, the door began rumbling open.
The beetles did not like that. their antennae twitched, and they seemed to rouse themselves as the walls shook.
Jessica landed feet first on the far wall like an astronaut in zero G and jumped down the hall, speeding down the short hall without touching anything except for Jeb.
Jessica slammed into him, and the two of them tumbled out of the dungeon, into the free air of the outside.
They got to their feet, making sure the swarm wasn’t closing in on them and getting ready to take some more distance if that was the case.
The swarm seemed to have no interest in crossing the threshold into the outside world, clumping up near the entrance. They were still full, after all, an
d not interested in going outside their territory.
Still need that circlet. Damn, if only I could make fireballs or something. oh wait. Idea!
Jeb haggled with one of the local fairies to bring him the bottle of antiseptic alcohol in the first aid kit back at base camp, and a few minutes later, he was squeezing the clear fluid on the swarm, grinning like a backyard bar-b-que-r.
“And I cast…fireball.” Jeb said, dropping one of the survival matches on the swarm.
It went up in flames, and the two of them spent the next few minutes resting, listening to the pop and hiss of scarab bodies ruptured by the heat of the flames.
You have gained a level!
You are now level 14!
Jebediah Trapper
Unclassed, Level 14
Body 10
Myst 29
Nerve 8
***Later***
***3 days 4 hours until the Safe Zones disappear***
“You sure you don’t wanna try one?” Jeb asked, holding out a cooked scarab. “Some butter and these things would taste just like crab.”
Jessica sighed and took the scarab out of his hand and popped its back off with her thumb before hesitantly scraping the meat out with her teeth, imitating him as best she could.
“Damn.” She said, looking down at the roasted insect in her palm with newfound respect.
“Right?”
The next time they went into the dungeon, Jeb took the lead, inching forward and carefully watching for any beams of light.
He spotted the beam right where it had been last time and drew a little circle around it with a piece of charcoal before continuing on.
Jessica dutifully hopped over the mark and followed after him.
The room was a simple set up, a square room with a lever on the left, a jewelry box on an altar at the far end, and an unlit candle nook on the right side.
Minus the trap, it was downright insultingly easy.
Jeb opened the jewelry box from a distance with telekinesis, wary of another trap, but nothing happened. The box contained the ‘circlet’ of Nerve.
As Jeb had feared, the circlet wasn’t big enough to put on his head. It was a tarnished silver ring just big enough to put on his pinkie finger.