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A Gamer's Guide 337
🕑 Added 2024-12-08 11:00:04 +0000 UTCI’m not sure what else to do, so I approach her cautiously, entering the river and finding it to be warmer than my body temperature. Curiously enough, despite the fact that she hates me, she doesn’t notice my approach whatsoever. Even when I’m only a meter or so away from her, she’s completely focused on trying to bathe this small goblin child.
I clear my throat. “Excuse me, do you need—”
She jumps around, startled to the point where she completely loses her grip on the child. “What the—damn it!” No longer holding her, the girl starts drifting, splashing and panting. “Shit, shit shit—”
As easily as a dog catches a treat, I take a few steps and recapture the child. There we go. Hm? Don’t I recognize this one…?
Before I have time to figure that mystery out, Holly snatches her from my grip and clutches her to her chest in an oddly mother-like fashion. Panting, her face and hands red from the cold water, she takes a step back. Her face twists into a pure grimace of rage, comparable only to a mother bear protecting her young. “What—the—HELL do you think you’re doing?!”
I recoil, my eyes quickly falling down to the river between us. “Well, I was just… She was going, so I…”
She pants. When I look back up, I find the child in her arms abruptly turn away from me, gripping onto Holly’s blouse and hiding her face in it. Holly takes a few marginally deeper breaths. “Ten feet,” she says, breathily.
“What?”
“Ten feet! Now!” One hand holding up the girl, she summons her spear into the other one, using it to gesture at the shore. In turn, I look her over—at her reddened face and hands—and at the girl, shivering in her arms.
I hold up my hands in surrender, taking a step back. “Listen—I totally agree. However, I think you should be the one to go to shore, so you can maybe dry up a little and not get pneumonia.”
Still holding out the spear, her knuckles red and white, she stares at me, gnashing her teeth. However, now that neither of us is talking, we can hear another sound—the chattering of teeth. Startled, she looks down at the girl in her arms, her expression softening. “Oh, Lina…” She holds her closer, her spear-holding hand falling. Unfortunately, she’s soon reminded of my presence, the spear rising to point straight at me. “Don’t move.”
I obey with little effort and watch silently as she wades out of the river and back onto land, pointing the spear at me the entire time. Once she’s on land—a fair bit more than ten feet—she puts the spear back in her inventory, summons a towel instead, and uses it to swaddle the girl. While still keeping an eye on me, she kneels down, and tells the girl, “Lina, listen… Go back to the mansion. Warm up in the kitchen, and get yourself a change of clothes. I’ll be back in a bit and we can talk about all of this, okay?”
The little girl nods in a way that tells me she only recently learned how to nod. Holly smiles at her, hugs her tightly, and beckons her to leave. The little girl hurries towards the path back to the mansion and glances back several times before finally mustering the courage to leave fully. Once she’s no longer visible, Holly turns back to me, summoning her spear again.
I frown at her. “Is there really a need for—”
“Shut up,” she growls at me, pointing it at me yet again. “If I could kill you, I’d stab you right through the heart and let your body drift downriver. They’d find your corpse washed up on the lake shore in a week, and not even your mother would be able to recognize you.”
“That’s kind of unnecessary,” I mention off-handedly. “I doubt she’d recognize me as I look now, so doing all that wouldn’t change anything.”
She clicks her tongue. “You’re a nasty creep.”
“Okay.”
“The world would be better off without you.”
“I know.”
“I hate you.”
I shake my head in confusion. “Why are you saying this?”
Teeth bared, she approaches the edge of the river, making sure not to step in. “Do you really think that as long as you hate yourself as much as the world hates you, you’ll be impervious?”
I furrow my brows. “I’m not sure what that means.”
“It means,” she says deliberately, “that I don’t care that you don’t care. I’ll still hate you.”
“That’s great and all,” I say, trying and failing not to let my frustration show, “but I thought we were going to talk about, like… My staying here?”
“That is what I’m talking about.”
“Oh. Really?”
“Yes. This is about how within the span of less than a day here, you’ve already scared a little girl to the point of soiling herself. Not to mention apparently trying to kill poor Rett.”
I pause for a second. “You mean Lett?”
“...What?”
“Lett. He—well, anyways, I wasn’t trying to kill him, Glyph jumped to conclusions. She was in a bit of a state, so I couldn’t really… But, surely, he should have told you what happened?”
Suddenly, the ground beneath her feet is apparently much more interesting than keeping me in view. Her spear likewise falls slightly, despite the hand clutching it turning white-knuckled. “He… we…” Shaking her head, she looks back up at me, her face red with more than simply frostbite. “Whatever! It isn’t important, okay? You’d be a blight here, you’re not welcome, and I would be very happy to see you flushed down the river. Does that make it clear enough for you?”
“I knew this already,” I say. “And, if it makes you happy, I don’t really want to stay here either. However, the goddess of children wants me to be here, so I don’t have a choice. And, frankly, neither do you.”
She jerks back. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? What are you trying to—”
I start moving towards the shore of the river, my steps neatly shearing through the waves.
“Hey! St—stay back, damn it!”
I’ve closed half of the distance now. “I really didn’t want to pull this card, but…” I step onto shore. Although not by much, I’m taller than her. And even though she has a spear aimed right at my chest, we both know it won’t help. I stop, only a few steps away from her. “Can you stop me?” I let the tip of her spear press against my chest. “Can you stop me from fixing up the garden?”
She gulps, stepping back. “I—I…”
“Well? Can you?” I take a step towards her, closing the distance again.. Her spear pierces my shirt as well as my skin, and yet, no blood pours out. There’s only the sensation of a slight give, and then metal scraping against bone. Her eyes widen. Deep within her, I can see a tawny bit of hope flare alive, and she thrusts the spear towards me, striking it through my chest, through my heart, and out my back. Triumph paints her features, but as soon as she sees my face, it—alongside the meek hope she held—flickers out.
Her eyes widen, now lifeless and dull. With her hope extinguished, her knees give out from under her, causing her to collapse to the shore. “You…”
For just a second, I watch her where she sits, lifeless and empty-eyed. Removing the spear from my chest, I drop it in front of her. She doesn’t take it.
Shaking my head, I step around her, towards the mansion. I pause before leaving fully. “I’d really like for us to be able to make this work in a normal way. Maybe you won’t believe it, but I don’t want to hurt people anymore. Even if you don’t like me, I’ll stay true to that. So… When you’ve calmed down a bit, and you’re ready to talk about this like an adult, come find me. I’ll be in the garden.” As I make to leave, I suddenly remember something. “Oh, and…” I pluck the used-up towel from my inventory. “Here, this is… I tried to clean up where she had… It might need some better cleaning, but I didn’t…” Grumbling to myself, I hunch down and put it on the ground. “I’ll just leave it here. Sorry for that, by the way. I really didn’t mean to startle her.” Standing back up again, I turn back to the path to the mansion. “Bye.”
I wait a moment to check if she wants to reply or something, but she stays quiet, so… I guess not?
Anyway, the trek back to the mansion was fine, though I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt. I really hadn’t wanted it to come down to that, but she gave me no choice. What was I supposed to do? Especially after telling Rice we may need to stay several months… I couldn’t just go back on that. My hands are tied, really.
As I return to the garden, I find without surprise that about a dozen kids are swarming around Rice and Grandma, petting the drake and talking about how they’d always wanted to become riders or they’d never seen such a big one or how it looked super-weird. Rice, in turn, only chuckles, responding to them in kind by explaining how Grandma used to be a four-winged dragon that became so evil it lost all its wings. As the children ooh and ahh at her amazing retelling, I sidle up to her, humming theatrically. “I didn’t know you could speak Aetongue.”
“Of course I can! How else am I supposed to buy a room for the night?” she chides.
That does, however, bring me to yet another thought. “Wait a minute. If you can speak Aetongue, then how come you couldn’t talk with Holly and Glyph?”
Her jaw falls open. “I—” Her mouth snaps shut again. Slowly, her lips quirking into a smile, she turns to me. “You know what? I never even considered it! Here I was, trying to string Swedish and English into a comprehensive sentence, all the while they spoke Aetongue!”
“Brain fart,” I comment.
“What’s that?”
“You know, when like…”
Apparently, until now, none of the kids standing around Grandma had noticed my arrival. Three hoorays for my stealth skills! One by one, they discover my sudden presence, gawking at me like I’m a murderer at his victim’s funeral. My explanation of what a brain fart is fades out as I notice their gazes. Rice, likewise, goes silent. Now, we’re all standing in a group, the kids looking at me, and me, looking at them…
“...Boo!”
“EEEEEK!!” Screaming, squealing, the children all go running, scrambling and clambering over one another to escape back into the mansion, which is… Honestly a really bad strategic decision? Why, if I was actually trying to kill them, picking them off one-by-one would be easy in a place like that! The forest would be a much better choice.
…Then again, this wouldn’t be the first time I went child-hunting in the woods, so…
Rice punches me in the arm. “Prince, you’re horrible.”
I almost go to apologize, but the grin on her face tells me not to. I mirror it. “Don’t blame the punchline for the set-up,” I say easily. “Besides, who’s to say you didn’t train them to do that?”
“What, run away?” she asks. “One does not need to teach mice to flee the cat.”
The accuracy of her metaphor gives me pause. “Maybe not,” I say. “Maybe not.”
Comments
DeathTick
I'm glad Lo finally put Holly in her place. The pair were getting annoying.
JTP
All this lightness and humor is really scaring me. I HOPE nothing goes wrong.
