Chapter 28: 25: Behind your back

Author's note

Just a quick thing to mention about nymph. The elves in this world have the masculine pronoun "ro," the feminine pronoun "re" and a gender neutral pronoun "ra." "Ra" is used almost exclusively to refer to nymphs. There is going to be no place to bring up lore like this explicitly, so I thought I would put it here.

Also, since English unfortunately does not have a simple gender neutral pronoun, I have been using the singular "they" to refer to nymph. There are some places where this becomes clunky though, particularly one line where I have to wind up using the term "they is" (because "they" is a singular term in this case)

Aerien’s POV

I wound up being discovered during my attempt to retrieve that nut Ether guy had shown me before. I likely should have expected as much, I had made quite a bit of noise after all.

With a wave of his hand, the luminescent stones across the ceiling lit up and illuminated the room as well as a house on Earth would be lit up. From there, he cleaned me up and brought me upstairs. Next, he went back down to finish cleaning. With him distracted in this manner, I set to work immediately. He was not going to let me have that nut for magic practice at all at this rate.

The very moment his head was out of sight, I got down and began to utilize my true fastest means of travel in my current pre-walking state. Once I confirmed my direction, I positioned myself sideways to my destination and got fully down on the ground. From there, I began to roll. I rolled with my knees tucked to my chest, and I controlled my exact direction with my arms.

Due to the bulk created by my knees, if I were to also wrap my arms tightly to my chest it would create an egg-like shape to my profile. This would mean I would gradually turn in whatever direction the small end of the “egg” was. In the case of my arms wrapped tightly to my body, that would be my head. However, if I expanded the circle made by my arms outward a little, thus making my legs the small end of the “egg,” I could turn the other direction. And, every 2 or 3 rolls, I would confirm I was still going the right way.

The principle behind this silly little stunt is incredibly similar to doing ukemi in my previous life. My head is still too large proportionate to my body, so it gets in the way of me doing a proper ukemi. However, these side rolls, or as we used to jokingly call them, a “barrel roll,” were getting the job done well enough. In my dojo, these were considered the rolls you would do if you simply did not have the coordination to do a proper ukemi. They were considered simple and valued lowly, only a footnote in the lessons as something you should consider an option but not something anyone really ever practiced. However, right now, I was in exactly the condition where I didn’t have the coordination for a proper ukemi. And, therefore, this maneuver was really coming in handy.

I had to stop my eyes from rolling in my head by the time I reached my destination, but as I looked down I could see Ether guy was only just getting started on the process of cleaning. That’s perfect. I need to do this now then while he’s not expecting me. It would be easy if he hadn’t turned the lights on, but you can’t have everything work out in your favor. In this case, having gotten into position faster than his expectations will be very much in my favor.

I couldn’t wait for my head to stop spinning, but that did not mean I was going to skimp on the safety measures. I immediately turned my butt to the stairs and started crawling down backward, putting plenty of pressure down on each step with my arms in order to cushion and slow the descent of my feet with each step. The perfect combination of speed and stealth. Or rather, as perfect as it can be given my limitations. I was going to be pushing this little body to its limits this time.

As I began to focus on the idea of stealth, I suddenly got the very distinct impression someone was watching me. I immediately tucked myself to the back wall and laid myself flat on the step halfway down the stairs. I looked to Ether guy, and saw that he still had his head down as he was sweeping the floor.

That was odd. Well, I will worry about it later then. Time to continue. I have to find it before he does, or else this entire little misadventure would have been wasted. But first, I have to get out of sight. I am keeping a far more careful eye on Ether guy now, but that sense I am being watched simply will not go away even when he’s giving no obvious sign he’s noticed anything. In fact, he seems rather frazzled if anything. Chances are, his range of perception is more narrow now than it would usually be for him.

The moment I reach the bottom of the stairs, I take stock of what Ether guy is doing again, and I allow my eye to carefully trace across the floor. I can’t see that nut anywhere. Well, I guess I ought to find a better vantage point to look from. I bring myself low and go into something between a bear crawl and a spider crawl, the major difference between the two being how low your butt is to the ground and subsequently how bent your knees have to be and how far they flare out to either side of your body. The spider crawl happens to also be the ideal way to stealthily move low to the ground. Unfortunately, I have not quite developed the control in this body yet to do a true spider crawl, but this approximation is close enough for now. And besides, it’s a bit faster and definitely quieter than the baby crawl on my hands and knees.

There is one problem with this tactic I notice rather quickly though. All of the furniture in this house is part of the tree it’s made from. This means, there is nothing to hide under because nothing is sitting on the floor. Rather, it’s part of the floor itself. Even the table is raised up from the floor. Perhaps the chairs are the one and only thing in the entire house that’s not part of the house itself.

In this situation, there will be no perfect cover. However, I do have a plan. I manage to find my way around to a bit of an alcove. This is a roughly round room, and the things like shelves and such are built right into the walls and not free-standing structures. However, one portion of the room seems to be somewhat sunk back away from the rest of the room. There is no true cover in this entire room, however this little alcove is at something of a blind spot to the stairs. If I hide here, and I can get Ether guy to go up the stairs, he will not see me. I have just the thing to make him go up there too. Let’s just hope it works.

I lay myself flat on my chest, glancing up at Ether guy, and then I begin to think in my mind about how obsessed I am about finding that stupid nut. In the process of causing my mind to become active with such thoughts, it causes my meditation and that fountain of energy from outside this world to shut down. Now, whether this works or it doesn’t, either way it will give me more information on how it is Ether guy is able to detect the changes in my spirit energy and all that. In a way, it might actually be more convenient to me if this fails. It will mean I will not have to be anywhere even close to as cautious about this in the future.

Unfortunately, as soon as I feel the fountain of energy running through my spirit stop, I also see Ether guy freeze in his tracks. [Oh, what now!] He groans. From there, without even looking up, he stands and begins shaking his head as he approaches the stairs.

[No, she’s not up there master! She’s down here already. Hehehe.] I feel my heart sink on the spot as a greenish-blue looking miniature figure of a child springs out from the wall, barring Ether guy’s path and breaking my entire plan. [She’s right over there.] The glowing ethereal humanoid points directly at my location. Great! He had some invisible partner I didn’t know about! That REALLY makes things easy now doesn’t it? Easy for him that is! This is totally unfair!

[What!? Aerien!? How? How did you get down here so fast!?] He has a mystified look on his face as he rushes over in my direction. Not having anything else to do at this point, I roll to my back and then sit up, facing away from him. After this, I roll a little more, getting onto my hands and knees as I try to quickly and futilely crawl away, even though I already know I’m caught.

For some reason, as soon as I stopped my meditation, I had a very clear idea in my mind about where the thing I was looking for was. It was a last ditch effort, but maybe if I could at least get it in my sights before he reached me… THERE!! Just as Ether guy is reaching me, I spot the thing a little larger than a walnut shell on the floor, about a foot or so from the nearby wall.

“Mmmmm!!! Mmmuuu…!!!” I cry out in frustration, reaching my hand out toward the nut as I am scooped up off the ground.

[Aerien? What is it?] I continue to cry out in frustration, reaching more and more insistently toward where the nut is. Finally, Ether guy sees it, and he bends down to pick it up with his free hand as he holds me in his other arm. [Is this what this is all about?] He asks, turning the thing over a few times, just out of my reach, before absentmindedly starting to hand it to me. Just before it’s within my grasp though, his hand freezes. [Wait! Were you TRYING to make me go up stairs?] He gives me an absolute death stare at these words, but I pretend not to notice and continue reaching for the nut as I become more and more restless and whiny.

Ether guy lets out a sigh and winds up letting me have it. [I don’t even know what to say about any of this anymore, you are honestly frightening girl! And you don’t even care, do you?]

Well, if he was just going to assume I was a normal baby now, I might as well run with it and enjoy the plausible deniability it gave me for most things. Now that I actually had my prize, I held it in both hands and stared at it. For some reason, now, I could feel something from it I had not felt before. Ether guy had mentioned before that the nut was intelligent or something of the sort. I didn’t feel it before, but now I was able to feel something like a sleepy consciousness buried deep inside this thing. Actually… there was something a little familiar about this consciousness. It felt almost like…

I suddenly looked up with the realization, and then I looked over to the bluish-green glowing tiny humanoid hovering in the air, looking similar to the pixies one might see in a video game of some sort, except without the wings. The small humanoid ghostly being that had ratted me out simply smiled at me in amusement as Ether guy seemed to be struggling for words.

I was not quite certain what this creature was, but there was something about it that seemed somewhat similar to the consciousness I felt from inside this nut.

[Alright Aerien, come on now. It’s time to stop it.] Ether guy interrupted me, snapping his fingers to get my attention. [Come on, don’t look at me like that.] He says, giving me a serious look. [You know what you’re doing now, right? You did it on purpose this time to make me go upstairs. It’s time to stop.]

I continue to look at him with a blank expression. I’m pretty sure I know what he’s talking about, but at this point it’s better to play at not understanding him at the very least. In other words, ‘I may know what I did, but I don’t understand that you’re complaining about it.’ Yeah, I might be a little salty about the issues when he yelled at me about this earlier and got Levin and I upset.

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[Stop making yourself sick Aerien, there’s no reason to be doing that right now.] He says, looking down at me with an intense look.

[I’m not.] I respond to him in all seriousness, still refusing to restart my meditation. If it’s going to be causing problems like this all the time, I think this right here may be the perfect opportunity to break Ether guy of his expectations on this subject. Channeling that energy is not actually my natural state. I can keep it up fairly constantly, but that meditation is actually an altered unnatural state for me to be in. Even if I can’t express it fully to him right now, it is best that he learn at least that much as soon as possible.

[Don’t tell me you’re not!] He says, gripping me tighter.

[I’m NOT!] I repeat even more insistently.

Ether guy lets out a sigh and walks over to the table, then places me on top of it. He then lifts up his hand and then begins waving it around me. After this, he has something of a difficult expression. [Hmm… it’s different from before.] He says, now carefully considering me.

[But Aerien, PLEASE stop doing this for now, Ok? I need to sleep right now. It looks like you’ve figured out how to do something, but it’s dangerous to play around with that sort of stuff, Ok?] His tone made me feel a little bad for messing with him like this. By the sounds of it, he will likely be willing to hear me out tomorrow when he has the time for it.

[Ohh… kaaayyy…] I ascent, and then resume my heaven-void meditation. After having finally fully shut it off for the first time in months, it actually takes some effort to restart. I have to focus my own energy in my hands, running it through my fingers, and circulating it through my body for a moment before opening the gate of heaven and gate of void in order to allow the energy stream to resume.

It really does feel quite odd that this simple combat meditation that only served to give those in my style some celerity of mind while performing complicated maneuvers had such an incredible and dramatic effect in this world, but I had seen people’s reaction to it many times now and my doubts about it were being settled.

[Nymph (falmarin) will be watching you tonight] he said, indicating the glowing pixy-size child. [They will tell me if you do anything like that again, so please don’t]

“farmarn?” I respond, trying to pronounce the name I just heard when he gestured toward the glowing creature who ratted on me. I direct a dirty look toward Ether guy’s little spy. Now I know why I had gotten the sense I was being watched.

[(falmarin) is the spirit of this house, they are in every wall of the house itself, so, even if you don’t see (falmarin,) they (is) there.]

Even worse. Has he always had this spy on us? I feel a sense of violation suddenly when he reveals this information to me.

[Alright, well, let’s bring you back up stairs. Now, be a good girl this time and go to sleep, Ok?]

I felt like telling him now about how I don’t sleep since, from that comment, he obviously doesn’t know. However, I wound up holding my tongue on that one. It’s pretty clear it would only worry him more right now if I tried to express that. Besides, with my limited vocabulary, it very well may come out as though I was just being defiant and didn’t want to go to sleep.

I wouldn’t say “OK” to it, that would be lying, but I could just say nothing and stare down at the nut in my hands. Just then, I realized something as I was staring at that nut. I could no longer feel the consciousness from it. That’s when it finally dawned on me. ‘The fire method!’

It made perfect sense. I could detect where this thing was the very second I stopped the heaven-void meditation which supplied my body with all the spirit energy it could possibly need. Under normal circumstances, an elf’s body is constantly absorbing spirit energy as though they were using my style’s fire method from birth and it was constantly active. According to Gaerien, spirit energy was an energy that contained thought.

It all made sense now. This nut radiated spirit energy, that’s what had allowed me to sense it. And, it was also my absorption of that spirit energy that allowed me to sense the consciousness within the nut. And, now that I had my body flooded with an over-abundance of spirit energy directly from heaven, I was no longer absorbing any from an outside source, and therefore I could no longer sense it.

Well, it looks like the importance on convincing Ether guy to stop freaking out every time I cut off my meditation just went up. If the same holds true toward humans, this will effectively mean that my meditation will have the opposite effect in this world from the one it had on Earth. I guess the weaker spirit energy of the humans here is to blame.

So, my combat meditation is actually detrimental toward my method of combat. I’m definitely going to need to find a fix for that. It may be a long way off until I even have a body capable of combat, but I just don’t think I could get by anywhere near as well without the ability to sense intent.

I am definitely going to have to ask Gaerien if there is a method to fix this.

Author's note

I have been working hard over the weekend and managed to introduce a 2nd advanced chapter to my Subscribe Star account, and also introduce a new level. As of now, there are 2 tiers you can subscribe at.

The "Basic tier." For $1.50 per month, you can get 1 advanced chapter.

The "2nd tier." For 2.99 per month, you can get 2 advanced chapters.

Both will be updated before it is updated on Scribble hub, and if I get a chapter done early then I will post the chapter to Subscribe Star early. Also, as for the pricing, I actually would like to be able to make it lower. Unfortunately, PayPal decided to engage in something called a corporate boycott. This is a dirty business practice where they try to muscle out a competitor by denying them services. As a result, Subscribe Star has to use foreign payment processors which take a more significant cut off the top. As such, if I were to set my prices any lower, more of what you pay would be going to payment processors than would be going to me.

There are cheaper services out there, but the big names like Patreon are part of this dirty deal, and so I'm boycotting them out of principle. These are matters of my own personal choice I am telling you up front, and that's why the prices are the way they are and are not cheaper. I will understand perfectly well if you do not want to pay this price. I made a personal choice to use a more expensive payment processor, and you can make your own choice whether or not to support me. All I can do is explain my reasons.

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