An Age of Mysterious Memories

B 2 C 31: Economies of Scale

When I finally get home with only Luni conscious, no Lil in sight, Ag and Lao are beside themselves. I expect heated reprimands from Agwai, based on our one conversation in the swamp, but instead, they pull me tightest of anyone to weep with me. I can only share the tale of our trials once, before I need to succumb to my own panic and fear. I’ll drop into terrorspace to live through a thousand days of panic, so Luni can finally stop being my trauma faucet for a while. I’ve put her through so much, especially in the last few days.

I share the tale as best I can, my side of it, the mistakes I made. I start to lay into myself verbally near the end.

Lu stops me before I continue my thought train, “It’s okay, it’s okay. Somehow we’ll be okay. I, um, I don’t know how. But, but, but you’ll make it better. I know you will, you got this. Just, um, just don’t rush. Even though I want Lil back more than anything, don’t rush. You don’t have to take on your trauma alone. I um, well, I do love you, you know. I know you and Te are, I guess, main squeeze, kinda, but, but, Lil, I, I, Lil. I can’t. I just. Please, please be okay, and please share with me. Everything and anything. Please, L, L, I mean, Reggie? We, we’re, you and me, we, please?”

Luni’s asking to help keep her spirits high, full of love and affection. I nuzzle Luni’s head with what little strength I have, and I create two large beds out of massive piles of soft leathery leaves with inventory magic, to set Teuila and myself down upon. It’s more like one bed that’s just expanded in size honestly. I fashion a quick awning, to make it a kind of canopy bed. I strip most everything, including tattoo and danger wrap, I only wear the cushioned undersuit from the Valkyrie gear. Wordlessly I pat the space between Te and myself. Luni understands, and as she climbs in to cuddle between us, I slowly let myself fall into the sleep I know will be plagued by terrors.

Sure enough, physically, I can tell only about a day passes, but in the accelerated thinkspace, I put myself through my own personal hell for all of my sins. The nightmare-fest lasts for over two years. Somehow, just barely, I don’t lose my grip on reality in all that time. I don’t check back out to go on autopilot. I think I have a literal grip on something in reality, or someone has a grip on me. When I finally come to, I realize Luni has been holding my hand clasped under hers to Teuila’s for an entire day.

Fighting my panic about all of the events that transpired for so long, including the gutwrenching horror of possibly losing Lil took a lot out of me, and when it caught up with me, it took over two years to pull out of the nightmares. Even still, as hurt as she is, as lonely as she is without her constant bond, Luni looks after me and Teuila. A day in meatspace, but I don’t know if Luni was doing her own hurting in accelerated time. Lu and Te have both taken care of me, now it’s my turn.

My own physical pain is funny to me right now. I’m desensitized to most of it, except for my darn right wrist. I’ve got pulverized, powdered bones, melted limbs, broken limbs, even re-punctured lungs again, and always that right wrist reminds me of the hellish two days spent mostly wielding that greatsword. Why would our world give me a weapon whose density rivaled or beat any known element? What was the point?

Sighing, I give up on the train of thought to embrace Luni tightly, before I get up to help take care of Teuila. The soap stone helps keep her clean, the only thing to really do is feed her, comfort her if she spasms or has terrors, and occasionally move her so that her muscles don’t ache too greatly. The family mostly gives us privacy as Lu and I tend to Teuila. Most of them know they might send me spiraling down a rabbithole of panic. Lucky actually frequently takes up a post at the foot of the bed near Teuila, guarding her. He growls at me if I leave the bed, but he seems to not care if I’m cuddled tightly against Te. I wonder if Lao taught him that, to keep me resting, or if it’s just his natural animosity towards me.

One family member who invades our recuperation time once though is Mata. Mat comes in with seething fury, and starts shouting incomprehensibly at first, but I can’t handle the needless rage right now. I’m tempted to hurt him, to fling him away. Lu wants me to not guess things about Mata, so the only thing I can do is give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s angry at me that I let Teuila get hurt so badly. So, instead of lashing out and hurting him, I let him lash out at me. It’s mostly verbally, but he does slap me once, hard. He grabs the hand I try to raise to my face and he bites into my arm, tearing into my forearm pretty viciously, and I just stare in awe that he would go so far. I coat the wound in ice while his teeth are still digging in. I’m pretty sure I chip one of his teeth with my FFS.

Luni rides the waves of my thoughts during the whole ordeal, but she stays silent, she trusts me to handle it, and I guess I sort of did. I think I gave Mat’s tongue frostbite by accident. I’m trying to not get on his even worse side, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Lu starts warming back up to me, taking us into our private thinkspace for weeks at a time on some days. We talk about nature, ecosystems, my plans for helping reunite us with Lil. My plans for our settlement.

Some days, Teuila wakes up long enough to exchange a few sentences before the agony becomes too much for her to bear. She returns to her near catatonic state to avoid the pain when it does.

Some days, Lu and I will make silly bets on dumb things to decide who gets to pick a topic for a multi week discussion in accelerated thinkspace. One time I win our little wager. As my choice of topic, I joke that since we have currency, someday we’ll have visitors. We’ll maybe want to trade with them, or buy things from them, or sell things to them. So we need a shop for that. Luni immediately, excitedly volunteers to run the shop. I wonder if it has anything to do with her talk about fiscal responsibility and macroeconomics, words that hinted that she had some kind of glitchy memories like mine. Even if we say it will be a several weeks long discussion, it’s often intermittent chatting while cuddling for days on end in accelerated time.

Every once in a while, I break down in sadness and apologize, begging Luni for forgiveness once again, for costing us our dear Lil, and the time that they could be sharing together. Luni always absolves me, though I can see she hurts, she aches for our shared loss. She doesn’t blame me, but I can’t help but to blame myself. Although, that copy of Gae Buidhe should never have fallen into their hands. So a tiny seed of anger towards Mata continues to grow. I don’t know how he secreted it away, or why, but I’m not allowed to guess either. It’s far in the back of my mind, even compared to random projects I want to do for the family.

Still, as much as I want to begin the projects that I’ve got for the family, Lil and Teuila come first. I’ve joked about being a cryptozoologist, but in the video games and entertainment in my memory, phoenixes are notorious for going back to egg form, and rebirthing. If anyone or anything might be able to help Lil, or might know how to enable Lil to return faster, it would be a phoenix. Where might a being find a phoenix? Well, what better place to look than the very top of the volcano in Fire Biome?

Oh, right, I have to remind myself, and Lu, slightly, that they’re big birds made out of fire that like to roost in high places that are usually impossible to reach and impassable to normal people. Sometimes there’s even myths like Simurgh or something like that. One like that would be benevolent, and maybe want to actually help out. My skills have been skyrocketing on what I thought was going to be a peaceful trip to gather some wood, so I might be able to make the journey, even in my busted up state.

Still, I won’t risk myself needlessly without letting both of the girls know my plans, and getting their permissions. To do that, Teuila needs to wake for longer than enough time to say ow before passing out again. At least she’s able to intermittently come to her senses, but the pain is so intense she checks out again almost immediately.

Today, we’re able to exchange some conversation, and even laughter, so I bring up the idea to Teuila, with Luni, in shared thinkspace. The accelerated time buys us more conscious time with Teuila, now that she’s well enough to join the wavelength telepathically, at least for a bit. Luni is both trepidatious, and excited for the idea. She wants me to return immediately if there’s any danger. She knows I won’t turn around if I think I can handle a risk that’s thrown my way, but she still begs Teuila to tell me to go, and to tell me to come back if there’s any danger.

Teuila seems a bit dazed. She understands what we’re talking about, but it takes a while for it to dawn on her that we might be able to get Lil back. She grips my arm in our thinkspace and gives me an order, “If, if you can get my dorky lil’ dragbutt back, do it. Do everything in your power. You beat the effing serpent on your own this time, while you were already half out of your mind with worry and a quarter dead. Bring Lil back to me, to us, to all of us.” Teuila’s gaze is resolute, before it slowly becomes glassy, and glazed over. The pain overtakes her enough that she is ripped from thinkspace to retreat deeply into her own mind, beyond our reach once more. I choke down a sob and let several tears fall, silently acknowledging the power and desire behind Teuila’s request.

I steel myself to travel with a three quarters dead broken body, and Luni frets, worrying she pushed too hard, that maybe I should wait longer before heading out. To me, it’s all the same when I head out. I hate adventuring alone, that pain is greater than anything my body suffers.

I smile as I kiss Luni’s forehead. I ask her, “Lu, can you tell my plans to Sugar and Spice? For the store at least, the one we talked about for so many weeks. Maybe they can have it built by the time I get back. You can get a feel for, well, how it feels behind the counter, you can decorate it like you were talking about. Also, maybe see if Sugar can expand the pond a few meters?”

Luni adopts a forlorn smile, “Sure thing, hero, my hero. Come back to us, more than anything else, come back to us, no matter what. You’ve got this.”

I ramble one last ponderance, “I still don’t know if I should bring Lil’s heart along or not. It’s probably best if I don’t. If the phoenix exists, and if it’s benevolent, it might offer some form of help whether or not Lil is there. If it doesn’t exist, or if it’s hostile, there’s no reason to risk Lil’s core being away from you for even a moment. Still, I wish Lil was coming with me. Or you, or Te. But even just symbolic Lil, in their core would be better than journeying alone. I’m almost tempted to ask Lucky, but I definitely shouldn’t do that.”

I gather my resolve to head out. I have to travel by tendril, but it’s a fairly quick and painless way to travel. If only the journey itself were similar. Traversing Fire Biome itself isn’t very difficult, it’s a massive flat expanse, so I can thrust myself around via my tendrils, or my JT movements without worrying about too much. I’m not even worried about falling into lava all that much anymore. I probably should be, but FFS has gotten to be a pretty automatic response to almost anything. Between FFS and my continually growing thermal resistance, something that seemed like a natural disaster that spelled instant death seems like it can’t hurt me anymore.

I have to make camp on the plains in Fire Biome several times, but I barely even notice myself constructing a stone shelter and projecting an FFS downward as I sleep.

Climbing the volcano, I finally get to meet the lavultures Lil was talking about, back before we journeyed to the cragbeast warren. I remember a certain entity was last around the other side of the volcano, so I blindfold myself, despite my danger wraps only having a fifteen foot range ever since I gave half of the magic item to Mata. The shorter range on my tactile sense provided by the wraps doesn’t hamper me all that much in the long run. I can mostly just ignore the lava the vultures spew at me. When they realize lava isn’t doing the trick, most fly away in fear, a few stick around to try to take swipes at me. The ones that stick around get to feel why my fifteen foot sensory range is still adequate. It’s also the range of my tendrils, and my tendrils let me grip the birds out of the sky, yanking them to me for a quick subzero ice punch.

After slaying a few, some drop meat, feathers, things you would expect. I try the meat, and it’s delicious, it’s like a barbecue roasted chicken. Of course, eating a creature when in its territory summons the hatred of all of its kin down upon me. I’m all too happy to receive their aggression, to let out some of my own. There’s a staggering number of lavultures on the climb, but it’s something that keeps me on my toes, keeps me from getting bored, or thinking about how lonely I am. Keeps me from thinking about the weight of my sins crawling on my back. Wrath is supposed to be one of the big ones, right? That one hit me pretty hard. Sometimes I can get pretty prideful too. Oh well, better think about the birds attacking me.

I suppose they’re less birds, and more amalgamations of molten stone vaguely formed in the shape of feathered creatures that resemble scavenger birds. It doesn’t matter. One of the interesting semi rare drops from them however are scales. Not some sort of lavulture scale, but dragon scales. It feels like, even if there isn’t a phoenix here, maybe there will be a dragon, one that might know how to bring Lil back sooner.

That’s when I remember a fatal flaw in my plan, one that I keep stumbling upon over and over and over. I can’t communicate. If any Phoenix should exist, and if it should be benevolent, I’d have to pray to all my luck that it’s also psychic on top of all of that. Similarly, if I’m in some kind of massive dragon’s territory, even if I can hope it’s benevolent, even if it ends up being so, I can’t ask it for help with Lil.

Ugh, well, I may as well at least get to the caldera to see what’s up there. For now, I’ll take a short break at this terrace. There seem to be small chutes behind me against the volcano cliff face that I’m sitting against, but I doubt I’ll sit here long enough for it to leak lava out of them.

Hm, they might not be lava chutes, there’s many, many tiny feet slapping inside of them. Well, not too tiny. I feel a familiar spiteful presence float by me, and I get another glimpse of something, a kind of a candle. Some sort of super candle, only it’s not wax, it’s souls. I don’t know if that’s metaphorical or literal. Regardless, the entity passes through me into one of the many sprinting little creatures. Their shape is like little bipedal dinosaurs, sort of tiny velociraptors. I think they’re called oviraptors. Wait, ova or ovum, something like that means egg. Something has one or more eggs in the caldera. I need to protect it. Not just to hope to win its favor, but because it might be the only creature of its kind in existence.

Whether dragon or phoenix, I’m going to have to wipe out these little egg thieves to protect their nest.