Chapter 4: 4- Brood Swarm

We didn’t have time to completely empty the trailer, but I was stronger now than I’d ever been in my life, on account of the ability I’d gained from the ‘essence sharing’. Even that stint where I’d gone to the gym five days a week with my other ex for a month, I wasn’t as strong as this. I was up in the trailer and slicing through the cling wrap surrounding the pallets of boxes, then tossing boxes out onto the tall grass.

The cab had been my first idea: hunker down, maybe see about round three with my new (only) ladyfriend in this weird place, and then a little jovial conversation afterwards.

Trouble with that plan was her porcupine bear anteater beastie. It was her stalwart companion. It listened when she told it to turn around because she was going to get freaky with a Drifter from another world. It listened when she told it not to eat my face off. Therefore it was only fair to make room for the porcupine beastie, and since I couldn’t see the two of them would want to separate, that meant Auralla too.

And me, because I liked her, I liked the company, and definitely not least, I liked the sharing of essences.

Auralla got the idea and began chucking boxes out of the trailer with me. Soon enough the first faded black plastic pallet was thrown out. It rolled awkwardly to a stop, and we hopped up into the trailer to continue the purge.

Two minutes later, Auralla stiffened. “They’re close.”

I peered at the dent we’d made in the trailer’s load: not much.

“You and I will have to be up here. Your buddy just has to make do with this space.” Your typical American pallet is 48 by 40 inches, or four feet by three feet four, meaning barely enough space for an animal the size of a grizzly bear.

She stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled, and the beast came grunting over to us, peered up, then climbed inside while I clambered up onto the half-cleared second pallet load with Auralla. It was cramped; I’d need to stay hunched down—

The buzzing of gigantic insects was audible now, which initiated panic mode.

“Pull the doors in!” I snapped.

“What?”

I shoved her aside and dashed outside to grab the big barn doors for the trailer, first the one closer to the swarm. I got a look, and they were sailing in our direction at a good clip, now only a hundred feet away.

I wasn’t going to be fast enough. Swearing loudly and continually, I dashed across in front of Auralla. She was busy staring fearfully down at me, not dumbfounded, but confused anyway. By the time I grabbed onto the second large door, the first of the buzzing things swooped by, sounding like a mosquito who’d been engineered by the insane scientists at Jurassic Park. This trailer had a pair of fabric door closer straps, installed courtesy of yours truly.

The second one landed on my shoulder, but I had enough speed to leap up, take Auralla’s hand, and swing the rest of the door closed while the thing sank its gross proboscis into my flesh.

 

Warning! You’ve taken damage from a Normal source. Your Tough attribute informs your overall health level, giving you five injuries, and two critical injuries before death.

You’ve suffered one injury! You’ve been poisoned!

 

Darkness enveloped us, just briefly. I clawed at the thing on my back and was gratified to hear it screech in protest, then grabbed the big body and chucked it, hard, against the wall. It promptly died, as the UI window informed me.

 

You have defeated one Brood Swarm. A minor increase has been applied to your Fierce attribute.

 

I didn’t have time for that, and pushed all notifications out until the threat to my life was dealt with. The UI complied, thankfully, by getting the hell out of my way to let me deal with the matter at hand.

The door was banging open and closed because I was bleeding and Auralla’s hold on me wasn’t as complete as I’d otherwise like. Another one of the things nearly got inside, but I yanked the door closed and sliced it in half. The trouble was, my body was wedged in between the last pallet and the doors themselves. The only way I was going to keep this door closed was to flatten myself like a pancake, and neither of my abilities did that. Auralla was hauling on my arm, but there was a whole lot of me that wasn’t arm.

Another Brood Swarm locust got in, was promptly squished by the door, and then two of them flew buzzing into the trailer when I nearly pitched backward and outside entirely.

“Reach down and grab this,” I hissed, and pulled her hand downward to the strap. That done, I leapt up onto the half-cleared pallet and got a face full of bug.

This time I raked it with my clawed hand, and it bashed into the trailer wall. It fell behind Auralla, still twitching, but that stopped when I crushed it against the wall with one of the boxes.

The last one in here must’ve buzzed further into the trailer, into that small gap above the rest of the cargo. We didn’t have the tools to deal with it, unless Auralla’s beastie could flatten itself down and slither after it.

The good news was that the bastards were outside the trailer. I could hear them thumping against it, but none of them had jaws of life for mandibles or explosive projectile stingers or anything. So far, so good.

The poison could wait.

After a good ten minutes of listening to the thumps and bumps outside, they stopped. During those ten minutes, I started to feel woozy, and I became aware that my heartbeat wasn’t hammering in my chest. It was slowing. Also my arms were feeling heavy, and it was hard to hold my head up.

Occasionally we’d hear some buzzing from deeper in the trailer, but then Auralla’s companion would growl and the buzzing would drift away again.

“Are you hurt?” I mumbled. My tongue felt like it was twice its normal size.

“Luckily no. You?”

“One of them poisoned me,” I told her quietly.

“Oh!” she cried, and let go of the door strap in order to fish something out of her bracelet magic containment device. I needed to get me one of those as soon as possible. The door fell open a good six inches, bringing in blinding light, but no killer bugs.

I couldn’t feel much relief. I couldn’t actually feel much of anything.

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“Brood swarm poison will sap your energy until you lay down, unable to move. Then the swarm will return and strip the flesh from your bones.”

I’d killed one of them with relative ease, but if I only had six injuries left before death, it was easy to see how quickly they’d take me down. Although I couldn’t see them retreating, I figured we were okay as long as we stuck near the doors.

“Not something I want to have happen. You know the antidote?”

“I’ll heal your injury first. Your wounded state will allow the poison to burn through you faster.”

Moments later, she had something applied to the wound. It stung, and fiercely, but it also radiated soothing heat throughout my body. The UI showed a bar called ‘injury’ that was fully red, but it began to fill up with green. It would only take a minute or two to fill up the whole bar.

While my strength gradually returned, I chucked more boxes out of the trailer. Eventually I ended up killing the last two stowaways with grim satisfaction. I didn’t bother checking to see what was in them and whether or not they’d break. In the back of my mind, I knew it would be best to keep every bit of earth stuff I could, because it might come in handy. I could sell it, or at least barter it.

On the other hand, safety.

I needed to get to a place where I could take more than six injuries. The UI helpfully supplied the necessary information.

 

Injuries! Injuries are tied to your Tough attribute. Increasing Tough will increase the number of injuries you can suffer before being Broken, falling Unconscious, or Dying.

 

“I need to get tougher,” I told Auralla, who was mixing up a paste with a mortar and pestle. “How do I do that? Sit under a freezing waterfall, bash a training dummy for hours?”

She laughed. “You have the answer already, it seems.”

Training would do it, then.

She mixed the paste with water and had me drink. Thus began my training: the smoothie I drank was the foulest thing I’d ever tasted. I quickly gulped it down and leapt out of the trailer after my backpack. That had the energy drink I needed. The cool, sweet and bubbly soda washed the taste of the antidote down.

Another meter for poison appeared beneath the injury meter, but it was far slower to advance the little green bit. It was barely a sliver, while the injury one was two thirds along. In the meantime my body felt heavy, and I had to take a break from slinging boxes.

Auralla leapt down from the trailer, avoiding the random scattered boxes, and peered off.

“Are they gone?”

She nodded. “They spent a great deal of energy attempting to kill us, and they will need to find food fast.”

We cleared out the second pallet, and I got a better look at the stuff I was unloading. I’d been bound for a local Meijer, which meant I had a huge variety of products: dry goods like cereal, canned goods from fruit to Stuff Posing As Meat, boxes of t-shirts and sweaters with all sorts of designs, light bulbs, some small appliances, and weirder stuff, like fake plants, bags of potting soil, tools and toolboxes, and still more.

In my altered state, I hadn’t paid attention to the manifest, but this was like striking gold. Instead of dumping off all this perfectly usable stuff in the middle of the savannah, I packed a bunch of the discarded boxes in the cab, in my tiny living quarters. The light bulbs were probably less than useless, but you never knew.

The swarm was finally far enough away that it wasn’t a threat.

I swung the conversation around to Auralla’s world while we loaded and unloaded a little bit of junk. The action figures could stay, but the fake plants were another story. This world had no need of fake plants.

I needed answers, which meant checking the menu windows and settings while she explained everything.

“I need to know, and you need to tell me,” I told her. The sudden fear of pregnancy popped up, but I squashed it back down. If and when that ship appeared at port, we’d sail it together somehow. I knew literally nothing about this woman, about the sort of people she came from, and whether or not they just found strangers to impregnate them out of some cultural tradition I wasn’t yet aware of. Maybe it was an Amazonian culture and they didn’t need me for anything other than the offering I’d already given her.

She began explaining, hesitantly at first, but with increasing confidence and less looping back around to get to what she’d already covered.

The world didn’t have a name, it was just the world. However, the grasslands here were called The Great Grass Sea. They stretched far into the distance south, to where they ran into meadows and farmland, cities and copses of trees, forests and foothills, and finally mountains. The mountains were simply called The Teeth at first, but he asked her what they were named. The Teeth of Kentir was what she called them.

While she went, I opened up the map my Intrinsic Abilities showed off. Names were beginning to appear on the map: Teeth of Kentir, Great Grass Sea, and then a number of villages in the area: Sunspire was Auralla’s village, but another was called Riverhall, and a third was Beacon Point.

From there, she talked about the wildlife, mostly the doluss who grazed and allowed themselves to be shorn for wool when the summers grew hot. The jiddara hunted doluss, and that was pretty straightforward. She rattled off names and hierarchy on the food web, but I stopped her when she started talking about monsters the size of mountains. That sounded like nonsense, first of all, and I had also gotten super distracted by system screens.

I still had Male left to read… or at least skim, and I needed to get to it.

There was a lot to read, and I needed to scroll down to get through it all, but the essential basics were this: males had control over coupling, meaning me, and there was a choice of whether to take the abilities of a girl I had sex with, which meant one of the female’s high level special abilities was just given over. The other option was to share, which meant the male would receive a lower level power, a mix of both partner’s powers, something unique and new.

So I had the option to take something powerful, or generate something less powerful. I turned back to the Male ability and read on.

I learned that the dominance meant lowering the female’s ability growth for an extended period, and also making it impossible for another male to take an ability from a dominated female unless… if I read this correctly, one male had to defeat the other. Then the victorious male had the option of adding females to his ‘coterie’, a word I wasn’t familiar with, or setting them free.

By contrast, sharing the power like I’d done wouldn’t limit the female’s power growth. I got the impression that it actually boosted her power growth, because the female also gained a power from the deal.

So the options were quick and dirty, beneficial for me, detrimental for her, or slow and steady, beneficial for the both of us. It was easy to see why other males might take the dominance option, but it was less easy to see what it really meant for other females living here.

I realized Auralla was still talking, but the words weren’t sinking into my ears. The dominance thing was… interesting, and I was wondering what it meant for societies at large. I’d only met one person, and she was from a village, so that meant more females, and more males. I didn’t yet know the ramifications of males stripping the power out of their partners, but I was very curious. I had a few ideas and none of them were palatable.

It was just about time to venture forth.

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