The Quantum Wanderer

After those tiring days I enjoy taking my time off.  I have to find a hobby.  Culling the few beasts that venture close to the village is a once a week time, at most.  And even so, when it is my turn.  Muninn has been helping as well.  I already noticed that sometimes, when he goes out, he comes back kind of full, and stays a couple of days without any appetite.  At one point, I would turn my senses on, and kind of watch the whole thing.  Muninn would enter the forest, he would go to a place full of crows.  They would get together, and then Muninn would attack whatever needs to be attacked.  With his razor improved claws and beak, nothing around could actually face him.  I wonder what level of adventurer would be able to strike it down.  He is still shy to most other people.  Either that or he just ignores them.  That’s for the good, if he lands on someone’s shoulder, he can really hurt.

I also noticed that there are a lot of crows on the start of the forest around us.  Kind of like there was when I was feeding the crows.  Well, I kind of like the buggers.  They never really attacked any villager, and the villagers now to leave them alone.  I think everyone is kind of happy with this.

I could travel around, but I would enjoy better if I could take Cecilia with me.  I think I will check with Leopold on coming clean.

Perhaps I should also visit the demons, I wonder how they are going with the desalination project.

Let’s visit Leopold first.  I open a portal to check, I hear voices, I close it.  I am not going to spy.

I go inside the guild, Cecilia is reading, life is really stopping to a halt here.

“Cecilia, what do you know about dragons?”

“Mostly what everyone knows.  Big, flying,  deadly.  Legends in the past report there being 2 dragons killed.  The last one of them, apparently, by the hero’s team.  Everyone, except for the hero, died.  He brought back this huge head, some leather some claws and some bones.  But the beast was apparently big, size of a big house big, so he was forced to leave the rest to feed other monsters.  Recently, there has been this uproar in the guild, about 3 different groups slaying one dragon each.  Everything seems to be a little hush-hush, tough.  There is even the rumor that there is a new adamantite around, but only guild upper echelon know about him.  Why?”

“Do you know of anything stronger than a dragon?”

“Gods?”

“No, I mean some creature that can be killed.”

“Hey, dragons are not ‘creatures that can be killed’.  Duhh.  But then again, there is this big rumor around.”

“You spend the whole day here.  How do you know about the guild rumors?”

“Leopold writes about them.  And he has a comm crystal.”

“Comm crystal?”

“Yes, there is an open secret that city guilds and above have a crystal that allows two people to talk.  They both have to have the crystal, of course.  And the crystal is not publicly available as well.  It’s supposed to be expensive, like platinum expensive, and since all materials end up going through the guild, the guild ends up getting all of them.”

“What else have you heard?”

“Hey, those are guild businesses.  I can’t tell those to any steel adventurer…”

“What if I put my mithril out?”

“The tag has to be big enough to have your name on it…  You know, rules…”

We both laughed.

“I am going to take a look at the forest, see if there is anything around for supper.”

“Good luck.  Your crow friends have been eating everything.”

I go into the forest, and check on Leopold again.  Good, he is alone.

“Leopold.”

He looks up.

“Sure, come on.”

I portal in to his office.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“I am thinking of telling the stuff to Cecilia.  I was thinking of going some places, some cities here and there, and taking her along.”

“Well, I wouldn’t recommend.  But it is your secret.

“Why?”

“You’re not even married to her.  What if something happens?  If she blabs, it’s your life on the line.  The guild warrants secrecy, but not if the issue was not with us.”

“Sure, noted.”

“An unrelated question, do you know if there is anything stronger than dragons?”

“Gods?”

“Cecilia said the same exact thing.”

“Well, we are lucky enough to know about dragons.  Have you heard of the term picture monster?  Basically, if something is stronger than dragons, then we will never be able to get closer.  You may try to visit the ley line, though, and find out.  Just be careful, you may find out something you can’t deal with.”

“Noted.  Thanks.”

“No problem.  By the way, I am going to be sending a Comm Crystal to Cecilia.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?  You know why.”

“Ok.  I decided that I am going to postpone a little bit, and then I will tell Cecilia.  Oh, by the way, I am thinking of visiting Andrew, there is something that I want to pass by him.”

“HOHOHO…  Are you going to open that small portal to check before you teleport?”

“Huh…  I think you deserve your revenge, I guess.”

I opened a small portal, and Andrew was just sitting, reading a book.

Leopold made this woman’s voice.

“Andrew, Andrew, why did you abandon us, Andrew?”

He stood up, looking around, his sword at hand.

“Andrew, Andrew, why did you abandon your son, Andrew?”

He then looked up, and saw the portal.

“Har har har.  U-ou.  Good one.  What’s up?”

”Andrew, I wanted to check something with you.  Do you have a moment?”

“Sure, come on over, kid.”

I open a portal, and go to Andrew’s place. He offers me some tea, and we sit down.  I tell him about my trip to the demon empire, and the way they talk about Latina nowadays, and tell about the current emperor.  His eyes shine.

“So, do you want to visit her great-great-great-nephew?  I don’t know if I said enough greats, but…  He is so much like what you describe of her.  What do you think?”

“I don’t know, kid…  Do you think they would want to meet at all?  They think that I killed her, basically.”

“I am going there, I am going to pay a visit.  I can ask them, and if he wants, then I can portal you in.”

“Ok.  What the heck, why not?”

I portal myself to the room in the palace.  I see a lot of bottles of that drink in the bookcase.  I open up the door, and sure enough, right outside, there is a guard posted.  He is trying to keep himself straight, but he didn’t have that responsibility air.

He looks at me, and shouts something.  He takes a lot of deep breaths, makes the universal hand gesture for me to wait, and runs away.  I come back inside, and sit down on the sofa.

I am waiting for some time, perhaps some 10 minutes.  I fix myself a drink.  The taste is the same.  This thing is so good.

Then I hear a knock on the door.

“It’s Rajesh.”

“Sure…  Er… Come in?”

This is his palace, why am I saying that he can come in?

“Good morning, friend.”

“Good morning.  How have you been?”

“Busy.  So, so busy.  I have the usual subjects that I have to pay attention to, pertaining to the administration, right?  Rules, laws, some very high stakes judgings, and what not.  And then you just dropped all that on our last encounter.”

“Ok?  Sorry?”

“Nononono…  Don’t be sorry at all.  I have been putting some resources on doing the water unseaing device.  That’s what we are calling it.  Do you mind if I call someone from my Natural research team?  She is helping me, and she speaks [common].”

“I don’t see a problem at all.  Actually, I have someone that I was thinking of introducing to you myself.  Remember that I told you that I hadn’t heard about Latina on the human side?  I…  Kind of lied to you on that.  There is this one person that knows the legend of Latina.  I wonder if you wanted to talk to him.  He is definitely a Latina expert.”

“Sure, you got my attention.”

I open up a portal to Andrew, and tell him to come over.  The emperor is astonished.

“He…  He is about as strong as you.  Another human like that…  How many of you are there?”

“Well…  I am unique, he is unique.  Other than that, I don’t really know.”

“Hello, “ says Andrew, in a kind of awkward way.

“Hi.  My friend here tells me that you know about Latina’s tale?  From another viewpoint?”

At that point, there is a knock on the door.  A female voice yells something.  The emperor stands up.

“Ah, here she is.  Her name is Siratra.  She doesn’t have the highest of degrees, but she will, and the old geezers are way too set in their ways to be able to do any change.”

In enters a very attractive demoness.  Well, she would be attractive if she took a little more care of herself.  Her hair was not really brushed, she was carrying a lot of scrolls.  She has this black hair and blue eyes, and her horns kind of look good on her, they are smaller and softer looking than other demons.  Her body was nice, but not one of those everyday gym ones.

She saw the group of people, and Muninn was at that window. She bowed to the emperor, and said something in their language.  Then bowed to Andrew, and said something different.  Andrew pointed to me, and said something in their language.  The emperor said something.

She bowed to me, and said in [common].

“It my honor to meet you, Great Adventurer, friend of all.”

“Huh…  Don’t worry about that.  Say, can you show me how the water unseaing is going?”

“Sure, sure, come with me.”

She leaves the scrolls on the sofa, and heads towards the door.  I go right after her.  Muninn flies to my shoulder again.  I really enjoy my time with this bugger.  As I am closing the door, I can hear some words from Andrew.

“So, let me tell you about the Latina behind the legends…”

And I leave Andrew and the emperor talking by themselves.  I go with Siratra, she just doesn’t stop talking.

“Your information that water can be captured after boiled is revolutionary.  We never thought of that.  It is affecting even magical research on both water and air schools.  You have no idea!  And then that design!  The idea for using the water’s smoke tendency to go up, to store it in a place where we can just use its weight to distribute.  Who came up with it?  Where did you learn that?”

“I heard that using aqueducts to distribute water was done in a village a long time ago.  As for the design, that is just a suggestion.  It’s not optimized, probably.  You guys are going to be able to improve on it.”

She stops, and stares in my face, as if I am some kind of specimen.

“How is it to know so much?  How does you heart keep so much information?”

I giggled a little.  She noticed that she was too close, and we got back to walking.

“Lets go to the water unseaing device.”

Wherever we walked the palace, the guards would salute us.  She seemed very important.  We left the palace, and walked a road in front of it.  It was barren, as most things are.

“We just started to get some water.  Some of the nobles wanted the emperor to spend some of it to raise a garden here, as a symbol of our future.  The emperor refused, he said that the symbol of our future should be healthy children.”

“Do people love him?”

“Yes, we all do.  He is the first in a long line of violent emperors.  He had to kill his brothers with cunning, though, to reach the throne.  I hear that, as a military commander, there is no equal.  But in a brawl…”

“Well, everyone has a strong and a weak point.”

“Really?  What is your weak point, Great Adventurer?”

“I have several.  I am just working on them…”

“Yeahh…  Right…”

As we leave the front of the gate to the castle, we go by the people on the streets.  Some of them touch the other on the shoulder, point to us.  A lot of them bow.  They always say the same thing.  I didn’t expect Siratra to be so famous.

We walk for some time.  We stop talking, because Siratra kind of looses her breath.  We have been walking on a brisky pace.

As we get closer to the wall that envelops the city, I see that there is this big water tower, inside the wall.  And, on this tower, there is a large pipe coming in, from the outside.  That water tower has a pipe on the bottom, that feeds into this fountain of water near the floor.

“Just… puf puf…  One minute… puf puf..”

Siratra is trying to recover her breath while I inspect it.  Everything seems good, actually.

At some point, she recovers her breath.

“What do you think, Great One?”

“Huh…  You can call me Adventurer.”

“Sorry sorry sorry.  Forgive me, Great Adventurer.”

Now she is bowing down.

“Hey, I am not your emperor.”

“I know, Great Adventurer!  We are aware!”

“Just treat me normally.”

Now she is kind of frozen, the big eyes looking at me.  I look at the wall, it is about 100 feet high.

“Can we go up this wall?”

“Of course, Great Adventurer, but we would have to go up through the military barracks, it is going to take some time.”

“I could probably lift us.  Do you mind if I carry you?”

“Of course not.”

I pick her, princess carry, and I undo the bend of gravity, leaving just a little.  Then I do a jump, and we are going up.  Once I land on the wall, lift the anti-gravity spell, and I start to take a look at the tower.

The outside pipe is right over our heads, and I see that it looks kind of frail.  But then I think that it must be so, because it is not really supposed to take pressure.  The vapor is going up as a flow of air.  And a frail pipe will not allow anyone to use it to climb the wall from the outside.  The water compartment is actually a lot bigger when seeing it this close.  It looks like a circle 15 feet wide, by some 10 feet tall.

I go take a look, following that pipe, and I see that that part of the wall is chasm, that ends up in a little rocky sand.  And, a little away from the walls, there is this black cauldron like.  I extend my senses, and I notice that there are some fine sheets of metal on the wall close to the cauldron.  Very good.

“You guys did a nice job here.  How much water is this producing?”

“It depends on the day, Great Adventurer.  On a sunny day, we can get two of those to the brim in a day.”

I make my math.  Using meter, always easier for me, that would make 2.5 meters of ray, 3 meters high…  A little less then 60 cubic meters, that is a little more than 18 thousand gallons.

“Somewhere around 18 thousand gallons?”

“By the gods…  How?”

…

“Yes, depending on the water mage, they can generate 10 gallons of water a day.  And this is just the first prototype!!!!”

I let her calm down.

I look at the distance, and see that kind of far away I can see the range of mountains that splits the continent, almost in two.  At a distant part, I can see some clouds.

“Anyway, I saw that you have sea on this side, and you have a montain range there…  Does it rain on the mountains?  What happens when it rains there?  Are there no rivers that cut your territory?”

“Huh?”

“Ok, let me break that down…  Usually, even if water is not boiling, it produces vapor, that’s the water smoke.  The vapor tends to go up, and form clouds.  See at that point there?  Those white things?  They are clouds, they are water that became vapor, went up, and got to a point of balance, until it rains.”

I look at her, and I can see that I have overloaded her with information.  Well, there is only so much that can be done on one trip.

“Let’s go back?”

“Sure…”

She holds me by the neck, distracted.  I have to princess carry her so that we can get down, but I notice that she is doing this out of reflex.  I lift her up, and we go down smoothly.

We go back to the castle.

The walk back is slow, Siratra’s mind is very far away.  There are more people on the streets, bowing to her, and repeating that phrase.  I can’t really repeat it, the thing about hearing stuff in a strange language.

We finally get to the room where we find both Andrew and Rajesh.  At this point, they are just sharing a drink, the door is open.

“Yo, kid, let’s go home?”

“Sure.”

We say our goodbyes, and the emperor and Siratra leave the room.  I open a portal to Andrew’s, I leave him there.

I open another portal, and go to the forest close to Frolk, and walk home.  Again, this is night already.  I knock the door, and hear a very impatient Cecilia on the inside.   She checks that I am ok.  I take a bath, and get some sleep.

Next morning is the usual, breakfast, Cecilia…

I was kind of bored, so I decided to do some additional investigation, specifically regarding this planet, my body, higher altitudes…

I put on my gear, and I go in the forest.  This time, I make Muninn stay around the trees.  This time I can’t take him.  Then I try to fly up, using my anti-gravity spell.  At some point, I reinforce my lungs again, and I see that I am spending mana to breath.  But not a lot, actually, and my mana recovery at this point could take care of it.

I go higher and higher, until I can see the whole planet.  I turn my mana view as well.  It is also a blue planet, like Earth, but the continents are different, and with the mana views it is possible to see some arcs that come out of the planet and dive back inside it.  One of them, in the lake that I had been shown in the map.  The ley lines.  I can see the continent I was.  They called Andrea, both the continent and the planet.  People had not distinction between the two, because they thought there was only one.  It matched mostly with what I remember from the maps. 

I can see, way close to the curve, another one.  And this have more ley lines the one I came from.

It gets me curious.  I keep the same altitude, and portal to the top of it.  I am so far from land, that I am most invisible here.  I look down there with mana eyes, at the edge of the continent and see… Dragons.  Lots of them.  All sizes.  Some of them have horns, like the ones I have seen, and some of them don’t.

I wonder why all the dragons I have seen had horns.

I see one of them, with horns, drinking water at a lake.  It is big.  Way bigger than the Parent I had killed.  I get close, using my stealth.  He stops drinking for a minute.

“Hello, human.”

The shock stops me in my tracks for a second.

“Are you food?  Or just a splat on the ground?”

“You can talk [common]?”

“We all can.  We also know how to talk [demon], [elf] and [dwarf].  Why, is one language the most that puny mind can handle? Hahaha”

…

“So, did you come here to challenge?”

Seeing that there is not going to be another option, I decide to go big or go home.

“Yes.”

“Take you pick.  Should I call one of my grandkids?  Perhaps a hatchling?”

“No, you will do.”

I assume a fight position.

“What a lack of manners.  If you travelled this distance, to challenge us, at least do it our way.  Our arena.  For all you are.”

“Huh?”

“I knew you were simple minded, but not that simple minded.  Come challenger, follow me.”

He took flight.  If were not completely buffed for the fight, I would have lost sight of him.  But I flew, with the anti-gravity spell, some wind magic, some propulsion magic…  I had to use it all, but I was able to keep it’s speed.

We got to a mountain chain, that had a lot of caves nearby.  At the bottom of the valley there was this plain, that was deeply scarred, burned, all sorts of destruction.

“HEAR ME! HEAR ME! HEAR ME!  I HAVE BEEN CHALLENGED.  FOR ALL YOU ARE!”

Heads started to come out of the caves.  Mostly heads with horns, and some heads without.  The heads with horns laughed. 

“BY WHAT, HOGGAR?  AN ANT?  A CHIMP?  I CAN’T EVEN SEE IT FROM HERE!!!”

The laughter continued.

“Hear me, human, when this rock touchs the ground, the fight starts.  If you do it before, the others will tear you apart.”

“Wait!  What happens if I win?  Will I be able to leave here alive?”

“We mock and we laugh, but we still obey our traditions.  If you win, even if you are hurt, you will be granted time to recover, and put affairs in order before a next challenge.”

“That sounds reasonable.  Let’s do it!”

It laughs, and throws the rock in the air.  I buff my brain to the most, time is almost stopped.  I prepare a soul absorption spell, a big sanctuary spell, as well as a big CO spell.

When the rock hits the ground, the fight begins.  I cast all three spells.  Hoggar holds one of his nostrils with a finger, and spits fire from the other, with a mockery face.  The flame dies, both from the lack of mana and from the lack of oxygen.

Now his face changes, and he prepares a big breath.  I put all the oxygen close to his mouth, keeping the sanctuary spell.

The flames blow up, and he takes a step back.  He gets enrage, throws a roar, and starts to run in my direction.  I point my arm at him, and shoot.  The spike is shot when his mouth is open.  I fall down from recoil.  I am stronger, but I think I put in more mana as well.

I see his head go up, it pulls his hole body about a meter from the ground, and then falls down.  His eyes are blood shot, and some blood starts flowing from his eyes, nose and ears.  He is dead.

I try to make the experience come calmly towards me, but it doesn’t work.  I feel my skin burn, as if I had received a breath, but I know it is not.  Everything goes black.