Chapter 6: 6- How About Jerry

Look, I know what you’re thinking: a village full of women exactly like Auralla, and me with some mad skills. Now that I’ve figured out power sharing over dominance, clearly they’ll all accept me, and it’ll just be a big bone fest day in, day out. All their nubile young maidens will want the power I offer, and they line up at some ceremonial tent, maybe already nude.

And I can honestly say I hoped for it. Deep down in my jeans I hoped for it, though the more realistic upper brain knew it wouldn’t happen like that. Sure I hoped for it real hard. But that isn’t what happened. Nah, I’m destined for the city, and I’m going to take it and make it mine… so first I have to get there. And then I gotta set up shop, and once that’s going, do a lot of stuff, take over city operations, then renovate and live the good life. Sunspire is not in the cards for Evan Westfield, not for long anyhow. Sad but true.

I woke up to my relationship with Auralla having crossed over from Normal to Bronze. I didn’t have any stars in Bronze yet, but I found a bronze medallion next to a picture of her face, complete with the rainbow tips of her silvery hair, and the face paint. Beastmaster’s Mark also had a new write up.

 

Beastmaster’s Mark

*Passive ability*

*Bronze tier, Zero stars*

Normal: Your Clever, Sly, Quick and Attuned attributes are boosted significantly. While in the wilds, you deal hand to hand damage as though you had claws. While wearing fur or leather, you gain a moderate intimidation bonus, and moderate damage reduction.

Bronze: Each morning, a beast you have befriended or personally killed will materialize as a magical summon. It has the same stats as the typical beast of its type, but obeys you implicitly. If this beast is destroyed you will suffer one magical backlash injury.

You gained this ability after joining with Auralla of Sunspire. This ability’s tier is tied to your Relationship with Auralla of Sunspire.

 

Also, and this was fun, the tattoo on my chest was no longer a darker tanned skin tone sometimes rippling with magic color. Now it had a bronze metallic sheen to it. A quick glance at Auralla showed that her Drifter’s Mark also had the same thing. When it hit the light just right from the tiny windows in the sleeper compartment, it again had that magic ripple of iridescent color. I rocked back and forth and let the blue/pink/green/purple appear and slide over the thing, then slide back the other way.

The moment I opened the door to head out for my morning piss, a striped jiddara leapt out of the tattoo on my chest. It was very briefly shimmery iridescent in color, the shifting color of an oil slick, before realistic color and texture overtook it. Still, its too many eyes glowed with shifting colors. It regarded me silently, the way the other one had.

Terrifying.

Most people watching movies or TV shows always think: oh, I could take on a lion. I could handle a gorilla in the wild. I could stare down a hyena, and at the last moment, I’d slash its throat before it got me.

Those people are wrong.

If you went up against even a chimpanzee it would tear your junk off, tear your arm off, and you’d be bleeding out in seconds. Hell, if you went up against even the smallest of the big cats you’d be dead. Coyotes kill people sometimes.

Everyone’s bravado until they’re actually confronted with a big cat almost the size of a hippo with a vertical mouth and about a million teeth. Then they pee themselves.

It regarded me with four glowing eyes.

I sucked in a shaky breath. “Don’t watch,” I told it. It turned away, and I had myself a nice pee near the truck, happier than ever that I hadn’t been eaten by a jiddara.

As a side bonus, I was also happy to have a jiddara available to create with this new ability. I had it run several rings around Mack just to see if it would. It sprinted out around the semi several times before returning to sit down and regard me coolly.

“You’re really scary, and that’s going to take some getting used to, but I’m glad you’re here. Maybe you can talk some sense into the Domi, because…” I put my hand close to my mouth, as if I were confiding a secret to the close friend. “…that sounds like dominant to me. Coincidence? Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

The jiddara didn’t respond.

“You need a name,” I told it. “How about… Lara. Good memories of my high school sweetheart.”

The jiddara, with its sideways face and all its teeth, went ‘hrf’.

“Okay, you’re sleek and dangerous, but definitely not cute. I don’t want to sneak around my hometown with you trying to find places to get busy. I could go with something dangerous, like Scythe Cat or Taker of Souls, but I’d rather have fun with it. How about Jerry?”

The creature didn’t respond. I nodded. “All right, Jerry it is.”

Auralla was delighted at the sight of Jerry. I realized that Truffy, her beast companion, also had the glowing eyes. It had been difficult to spot, and we’d been busy last night with important matters, so I hadn’t seen it at night.

She also refused one last sexy fun time before heading into her village, telling me with a faint smile that I was stalling and she needed to be back amongst her people. Yes, I argued, I definitely was stalling, but it was early morning, and we could sit naked around breakfast, and feed each other beef jerky scraps and see where that took us… but even in my mind, beef jerky wasn’t an acceptable breakfast, and definitely not the romantic prelude to fun between the sheets I wanted it to be. Ah well, I’d have to live with the several encounters I’d had with the hottest girl I’d ever been with.

Priority one, aside from not having her village reject and murder me en masse, was to learn how to find food and cook it. I was hopeless in the kitchen, having survived off entirely too much ramen for me to be comfortable ever admitting.

It was cheap, and I was helping pay for my then-girlfriend to have a roof over her head to fuck around behind my back. I didn’t know that at the time.

We drove up after a light breakfast. Auralla had magical storage in that bracelet of hers, and produced a flint, but I showed her my lighter. With a fire going, she also magically brought a hunk of cheese out of nowhere, and some large eggs, and finally some bread.

“I have to get me one of those,” I told her.

She grinned. “Bread? I can show you how it is made.”

“Obviously the bread. I’ll need to grab a bit of your sourdough starter and get the recipe. No, the bracelet! I looks like extra dimensional storage.”

She nodded. “The Domi explained that anything put inside is magically shrunk and frozen in time. I am uncertain how it works, but it is very convenient.”

Especially for people who just picked up their entire village and went hundreds of miles to establish that village elsewhere.

Her face darkened with more hatred I didn’t understand. “The only place to buy them is the city… we were forced to make a contract with a traveling merchant. It was very complicated, and cost the village much.”

Auralla wasn’t a nobody in her village, then. They wouldn’t have entrusted her with something so expensive otherwise.

After a very satisfying breakfast of not jerky, Sunspire rose to greet us about thirty minutes later. The name was no joke either: someone had climbed up on one of those floating boulders and erected a lighthouse on top of it. The very top of the tower was nothing but a ring. I figured it was maybe a few stories high, but the closer we got, the more gigantic this phallic structure seemed. By the time we’d gotten there in Mack, and parked a good five minute walk from the village, it looked to be about a hundred feet tall, and the ring maybe twenty or thirty feet across. It was like with traffic lights back on earth: there’s no good frame of reference until you see someone on a ladder truck working on them. Then they look absolutely massive.

“They have known of our coming since we began the journey this morning,” she said.

“I’ll just let you do the talking,” I suggested lightly.

“Of course not!” She seemed insulted.

“Kidding. I was kidding!”

I got more experience toward my Clever, even though I’d said something stupid. That was fun.

“It’s a movie trope,” I explained.

“I do not know what that means.”

“Look,” I said. “After this… whatever happens here… I’d be honored to have you with me. Traveling companions, maybe. Wait, what am I saying? You can’t just abandon your people.”

Again a confused and confusing expression washed over her face. “You are a strange male, Evan of earth. Do you know what you’ve done to me?”

I thought this over. Honestly, I had no idea what I’d done to her, except for rock her world a couple of times. Unless she meant…

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A mute horror stole over me, and sank a weight into my guts. Then a sheet of ice came over my body. “There’s no… you can’t know already… you’re with child?”

She burst out laughing.

Startled by this, I just gawped at her for several seconds. This wasn’t the response I’d been expecting when my palms went clammy from the very idea that I’d have a kid in an alien world where gender roles were very different, and I hadn’t even pieced together half of what I needed to.

“No,” she laughed. “No, of course not.”

Okay but what did that mean? Did people on this world reproduce asexually, where they just divided in half one day? Or did a stork bring them delivery style?

I didn’t know what to do if she said no. Maybe make for the city by myself. It sounded like other dudes were to be found there, only they were the douchey ones that turned Auralla’s stomach. I could sell the stuff out of Mack and make some coin, figure out how to live on blackened everything, and… what? Eventually make my way back to earth? Honestly, if I could stick with Auralla, being in this world was vastly preferable.

Maybe I’d miss my old buddies from high school, Tim and Alan. Maybe I’d find a way to bring them here.

I fixed my eyes on Auralla, and felt no pang of loneliness. No apartment, no money, no food, no cell reception, but… I had a magic big cat. And I had the most beautiful girl in the whole world.

“I can take you as far as the city,” she said. “Once this is over.”

“How about until I learn how to cook something by myself? I’m hopeless without you.”

She laughed again.

“And I mean, being with you is… really good. I’d like it to continue. I like you.” My cheeks were getting hot from the embarrassment. What was this, high school?

Her face softened with regret and anguish. ”Evan, I—“

I held up a hand. “You have people here. It’s fine. I couldn’t ask you to give up your whole life for a filthy male.”

The look she gave me was full of hurt and embarrassment. “I’ve given you my word. I will help you make your way to the city.”

“You know I’ll spend the whole time trying to get into your pants,” I said without thinking, and she laughed in response.

“There are worse ways to spend a journey to the city,” she responded, with foggy and lust-filled eyes.

I looked at the Drifter’s Mark on her neck. Back to the matter at hand. “Okay, so your people are going to ask me questions then?”

“Not… exactly.”

The people were coming out of the village toward us, and time was running out… had run out. Auralla opened the door and stepped down out of the truck, leaving me and Jerry alone.

“Well, buddy, let’s try not to get anyone killed, least of all us.”

Maybe I was talking to The Czar.

From here I could now make out the large tent city and the sheer number of alien creatures everywhere: pigs covered with colorful feathers and thick spines, something like a parrot on a girl’s shoulder, but midnight blue and trailing what looked like flowing blue black smoke, several more of the six-legged shuffling things with the porcupine quills and the anteater mouths, and people riding those big shaggy doluss things. One of them had what appeared to be an orange octopus covered in electric blue jaguar rings, wrapped around the woman’s upper body, peering out at me over her shoulder with its big bulbous head.

I noticed their weapons next, and their species after that. Spears, javelins packed into quivers, bows and arrows, a crossbow over there, and plenty of swords were in attendance, along with shields, some helmets, but almost no armor. Almost no clothing either. Auralla wasn’t overdressed, but few of the villagers were dressed in more than the short top and short pants she had on.

Because they were all women, you see. Even the ones that were clearly not human and also clearly not mammalian were females.

I noted several pointy-eared ones, mostly with hair in soft colors: lavender, mint green, aqua, wheat gold, like that. I just put them in the ‘elf’ category until I knew what to call them. Others were half the size of the humans but with adult bodies. Halflings, I called them. There were dwarf women, stout and thick of body and feature. Orc women, with gray or green gray skin, short tusks, and towered above most of the others. There were several cat women, with big pointy ears, tails, skin the color of a tiger or a lion, and stripes, spots, or leopard ring patterns over parts of their not-clothed bodies.

Several of them had sort of elemental features: one had twiggy hair with leaves and flowers growing out of it, and she had gray brown skin with bark patterning, while another had flowing, watery blue-green hair that seemed to go against gravity, with sea foam green skin and completely black eyes. I would later learn she had shark’s teeth as well, and gills. The last of them was wispy, not thin and willowy, but her skin was fog colored, like white with a hint of gray, and hair that was always being blown behind her, like she had a fan in her face. Her eyes were completely white, no irises or pupils. They appeared to be every bit the mammalian human female that the others were. The tree girl, the dryad I guessed, had thick, strong features but still had the full breasts like Auralla, while the other two were slimmer, with smaller bodies and fewer curves.

There was a dragon (or lizard) woman, and again, while she wasn’t a mammal, she didn’t have breasts like most of the others, it was clear somehow that she was female. The same went for the insectoid person, who looked like a seven foot mantis with segmented hands instead of those horrible death blades for arms. She was female too.

And there were humans too, of most shapes and sizes. I noted that not one of them had that spongy softness that comes from working in an office every single day, or eating American restaurant portions for decades, or both. A few were big boned and big hipped, but decidedly strong. Even the ones with square jaws didn’t have plump faces. And again, all females.

No males at all. Just me. It was very intimidating.

A cadre of friends came to welcome Auralla back to their lives: cooing over her, hugging, cheek kissing, fawning over her. There was gratitude that nothing in the wilds had snatched her up and away from them. They linked arms with her and led her away from me, where they could safely talk in conspiratorial whispers about the new mark on her neck, and the man.

The people of Sunspire, with their creatures and their different species and their not much clothing, began to coalesce around me in a loose ring, talking amongst themselves.

Okay. This was not at all overwhelming or unsettling. These were civilized people and not barbarians who would kill and eat me. Auralla had claimed to be ready to escort me to the city, which meant my chances of dying in the next few minutes was low. I was probably going to be okay… but probably didn’t meant definitely.

“Greetings, people of Sunspire!” I called, and added in a sunny smile and cheerful wave for good measure. “I come in peace.”

“State your peace,” the water lady said coolly.

Big deep breath, I thought, and don’t fuck this up.

“I’m a Drifter,” I said. “Arrived two days ago, still not sure what Drifter even means, but I was fortunate to meet Auralla yesterday. We, uh… shared essence.” That was the diplomatic way of saying ‘we got freaky in public, even though no one was around’.

There was no hiding it, she had my giant magical hickey on her neck.

A lot of heads turned to regard a somewhat abashed Auralla. One of the orc women grabbed her head and exposed her neck. For just a moment I thought someone was going to slice her throat, but instead they all stared at the Drifter’s Mark.

“I mean no harm and no disrespect, but I’m new here and could use a guide to this… world. Perhaps some clothes that would help me fit in here, a hot meal, a day to learn and a night to rest before I go on my way.”

I earned a tier of the Diplomacy skill here, which tacked on experience to my Charming attribute, but mentally told the UI not now. This was a tense and vital situation, and required deft handling. Since Charming was my lowest attribute, I really needed to push on this one.

“You are a male,” the fog lady said.

Shit. How should I deal with this? The idea that popped to mind was take me to your leader.

“Are you the Domi? Or one of the Domi?”

Her eyes narrowed, and she darted a look at Auralla, who was enveloped in a gaggle of attention around the Drifter’s Mark.

“I’d like it very much if we could speak privately, or just away from prying ears. I assume many of your people have excellent hearing.” I caught her skeptical look again. “I promise there’s no trick here.”

“All who say the words ‘trust me’ are untrustworthy, Drifter.”

“Fair. Fair.” I changed tack. “Look… I will, if you want, just take my truck and get gone. I’m not in a great position food-wise, knowledge-wise, power-wise, but I’m not going to walk into a situation where there’s a knife at my throat. I also don’t want you all feeling threatened. I can even offer gifts if you like.”

I must’ve said the magic words.

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