Chương 23: Chapter Twenty-Three: Out for a Pack of Rabbitines

After bringing all of the patients back to the hospice for dinner, Hollis returned to the Mother's Bath to help Tawny finish gathering her supplies. She had several crates' worth of candles that needed to be packed up. Luckily, she stored those in a crevice at the base of the canyon wall instead of asking Hollis to lug them back for her.

"These for healing or ambiance?" he asked as he stacked the last of them in their hiding hole. Neither answer would surprise him. Tawny was diligently finishing her housekeeping of the area. She didn't even look at him to answer.

"The folks here trust me. Still, it takes a lot of courage to jump into the mouth of a beast like Mother just for the asking. The candles help keep things calm. They sap emotional energy from the air, if you believe in such a thing." Hollis was ready to believe almost anything he learned in Periapt. He followed the light emitted by Willo and pondered what he had witnessed.

"Your patients believe it, don't they?" he asked.

"They do," she said.

"Truth is, Mother here is harmless if you can climb out of her maw. Or get pulled out. Never thought I would resort to this type of thing. Used to be a respectable doctor once." The great beast blended in with the sprawling river. The white caps of its spinning whirlpool were worrisome, sure, but they didn't seem out of place next to the real rapids not so far away. He and Tawny walked back to their shelter as fast as they could.

There was no telling if tonight would be the night the fog spilled over the edge of the canyon and they learned what it hid the hard way. As they approached the dining area, Hollis asked, "You cultivated all these plants, right?" Her healing concoctions relied on a great many herbs, roots, and saps to work, though Hollis wondered how much of it was like the candles at the Mother's Bath, just meant to ease the mind of harsh realities.

"I did nothing anyone of my training wouldn't," she said humbly. Then, letting a hint of pride seep through, she said, "Started with almost nothing but the herbs in my kit brought here from the Outer Islands and some ingredients the cooks left behind." She had pots and planters filled with all sorts of botanicals, from vines and flowers to shrubs that smelled like cat urine. She had breathed life into them and brought them back from nothing but tiny flakes of plant matter? Hollis was gobsmacked.

It was exactly the sort of thing he was hoping to hear. Tawny went directly to the kitchen area to help Jane with dinner. Otis was grilling up all the salted cedar elk left after the rest was smoked for jerky. It was amazing how quickly the food went. Torches were lit around the dining area, as were bioluminescent plants that were strategically spread around the compound. Willo had to check out each one, perhaps hoping they would dance along to his light.

"Suppose you needed to give them Spirit to accomplish that," he said. Regrowing from scraps was no easy feat.

"Don't know a better way," she answered. He nodded and then asked the question he had been hoping to bring up since failing to revive his sour gum root into a proper plant.

"How exactly do you do that? Give something Spirit?" he asked. Tawny smiled.

"I was waiting for this. Kaziers never can figure it out, not on their own.

'Course, you all have your magic, don't you. Won't take long for you to know it better than I do." She was talking about skill points. If Hollis really wanted to know how to give his sour gum root Spirit, he could find out. It was advanced knowledge, but with a few assigned points he could learn plant cultivation quickly. Unfortunately, learning things the old-fashioned way had its merits. Keeping ahold of his free stat points did too. He didn't know when those would come in handy.

"And if I want to learn it the honest way?" he asked.

"You'll have to do it the way I did," she said. Hollis leaned in, waiting to hear what she had to say.

"While I have you here, think you might help with the vegetables?" she asked, nodding toward a stack of carrots and onions freshly pulled from the garden. Dinner was running late. The folks in the hospice were rarely even awake past dark, except, it turned out, on days they went down to the river for a cleanse with Mother.

"Sure, why don't I just wash up," he said, folding his sleeves up to his elbows. His level 2 Cooking skill wasn't doing him any favors as he took a knife to the gnarled orange carrots whose starchy body was shaped like a corkscrew. Out of curiosity, he gave the taproot a bit of Breath, and the whole table of them started spinning like they were trying to drill down into the earth they had just gotten pulled out of. Willo flashed with the light of laughter.

Tawny's son Paul giggled as well from where he was watching by a nearby wall, as he wasn't allowed in the kitchen. [Naturalism lvl. 6] You see Caver's Carrots that have been harvested and prepared for consumption. Ancient tribes of Periapt used to cultivate this plant to till hard, cracked soil in preparation for other crops. Their white tops are ultrasensitive to sunlight, adapted for growth in the mouths of caves.

Specimens planted in direct sunlight can grow to an unmanageable size and become woody if not harvested quickly. Hollis laughed at the spinning roots, but soon, his mind turned back to his walking stick project. Even simple produce held the power to make his imagination soar. What if the power that allowed these carrots to drill and dig could be given to the roots of his future staff? He stood, daydreaming about what he could do with a drilling walking stick while he peeled and cut the carrots to length.

By the time he was done, they were as neat and even as those corkscrews could ever hope to be. When he showed his work to Tawny, she said, "Thanks," dropped his perfect carrots in a pot of water, and later mushed them into food even the toothless patients could eat. Next, he was onto the onions. Best as he could tell, they were normal in every way. That was strange for Periapt.

"So you want to give Spirit to something, huh?" Tawny asked.

"Mind telling me what?" Hollis chopped his onions and said, "Trying to take a root I found in the facility here and get it to grow a proper trunk and leaves. Sour gum tree root. Want to make a walking stick out of it. A little project." Tawny nodded.

"Good choice for a water staff. Good healing properties, nice astringent… won't have to worry about anything leaking when it shouldn't… But you can't get it to grow in the direction you would like?" If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Hollis shook his head.

"Well, if giving it Spirit is what you're after, I have some bad news. There are no shortcuts," she said.

"Even for Kaziers it can take a while to get a feel for it." That was a weakness to Periapt's system: it could give you all the information you desired, but at the end of the day, knowledge was not understanding. Hollis had avoided spending his free stat points for this exact reason.

"Is it more art than science?" he asked. She looked at him like he had asked a profound question. He realized that this must not have been a cliché in Periapt. She took a moment to think as she stirred the pot.

"Some would say it is an art. A magical art at that. Sorcerers and warlocks and the sort used Spirit in the old stories—" She stopped talking as a bug nipped at her ear and rustled her gray-blond hair. Instead of swatting it, she simply tilted her head and waited. Seconds later, one of the barrel-shaped flowers in the open dining area turned and shot the offending bug out of the air with a small seed.

"But talk of magic and sorcery is a bit old-fashioned," she continued, "I was taught about it like it was a part of the body, you understand, a muscle humans don't really use all that much. We don't actively wield our Spirit, so we can't even feel it. What we had to do when we were apprenticing, was get some critter that fed on Spirit and let it feed on us. You let it keep going until you felt pain. Where the pain was, that was your Spirit. Slowly, you become aware of it, then you learn to use it.

Other than that, it's just practice." It wasn't much, but it was a lead. Hollis thanked Tawny, and they finished the quick dinner, a fish stew and elk chunks on the side, and served it to the patients. Hollis ate his share while contemplating what he had to do. He had gathered a peltwalker skin that he knew for a fact manipulated Spirit in one way or another, but that rug was staying rolled up for the foreseeable future. The thought of letting it feed on him was out of the question.

He didn't even know if it was the right sort of feeding. Willo landed on the table in front of him, and both of them knew of an answer. They shared a mind and a memory. On the night he had made an Accord with the small glowbug, a bat made of darkness had been harassing the swarm, trying to steal their Spirit. Hollis didn't know if he wanted to go that close to the haunted shore again, but it was nice to know he had options.

~-~ The next day, Hollis rose early to get a head start on his trip east to catch a rabbitine or two. This was not agreed upon ahead of time, but when Hollis awoke and started getting ready, he found Royle ready and waiting outside. He had barely managed to get out of the compound without making the massive wooden door vibrate and wake everyone up. He wondered how a blind man had done it.

"You wanting to go with me?" he asked.

"I thought it was you going with me," Royle said from atop his horse Jaq.

"Now hurry up, daylight's a-burning."

"It's still dark outside," Hollis said.

"I can see a bright light," the horseman said.

"I'm not that blind." Willo had moved close to Royle and was checking him out, his tail aglow. They laughed it off and went their way. Hollis didn't mind having company. He had worked much of his adult life to escape his home world, but he found some comfort in knowing there was someone else like him in this place. Heading eastward was more difficult than he had anticipated. The survivors had stopped returning to the town of Beckett's Sound years prior, even to scavenge.

The path was difficult to find, and the only reason it was possible at all was that Jaq remembered it. He trotted ahead of Hollis, his giant mouse-claw feet barely making a sound. After they made it to the top, the sun finally rose to greet them.

"Now that's the dull, blurry spot I remember," Royle said as he stared into sunrise. He took a swig from his canteen and asked, "So are we actually here for rabbits or did you have something else in mind?" Hollis hesitated to answer. Royle offered him the canteen, a gesture of friendship. What was he worried about? That the Kazier would tell on him? He grabbed the canteen and took a drink.

"If we find out some secrets of that fog you all are so afraid of, would it be so bad?" he asked. Royle took his canteen back and laughed.

"Be awful convenient, wouldn't it? God, I hate being trapped here, not knowing what to do or how to do it. Well, come on, what's your plan?" Hollis cleared his throat.

"Scour the town and nearby forests for evidence. I didn't get a good look when I was up here before. I was looking for you all." He walked forward through a small glade, north, to where the town should be. There were small clusters of trees spread around them, but he could still see that this used to be a neighborhood. A nice neighborhood at that.

"Your plan is to look around?" Royle asked as he bid his horse-mouse to follow.

"Oh my god, it's the blind leading the blind! Your plan is to go take a look. I thought you had something. This whole, 'we should build rabbit hutches' scheme had to be cover for something... Go take a look." When he said it like that, Hollis did feel a little out of his depth, but he recentered himself. This was a world of mystery waiting to be solved, or so the voice on the starting screen had said." Return to Periapt is a point-and-click adventure game," he said.

"In the tutorial, you may remember, the world unfolded the more you looked at it."

"I recall."

"Well, we have to look at it, or you know, explore it," Hollis said.

"There have to be clues. I am forced to accept that thousands of people ran westward when the fog came, and somehow they saw nothing, but there have to be clues. This whole world is steeped in thematic intrigue. My money says this fog is somebody's fault." He was really gambling that the world itself ran on the rules of the CD-ROM he had played. If it didn't, he really was in trouble.

"Lots of people saw things in the fog," Royle said.

"No one could describe much of anything, or they contradicted each other. Half of it was lies, and the other half were rumors. If there was a worse time to have lost my sight I can't think of one." It was only then that Hollis considered a possibility he had yet to even think of: was Royle one of Tawny's patients? A man who loses his sight in the dangers of the abandoned continent would need some sort of care, Kazier or not. He thought better than to ask.

"So anyway," Royle said.

"How exactly are you planning to take back those rabbitines anyway? You aren't going to string them up, are you?" Hollis reached between his pack and the small of his back and pulled out a cloth sack with a drawstring. He threw it up into Royle's lap. Royle took it into his fingers and felt its insides.

"How big is this? Are these tiny rabbits? I thought we were going to catch two or three."

"We are," Hollis said.

"Didn't I tell you what makes rabbitines special?"

"What you told me didn't make sense." Hollis grabbed the sack back from Royle and said, "They merge with each other. Phase in and out of each other, you know. They occupy the same space, like little nesting-doll rabbits." Royle laughed.

"You only need one sack to carry as many as you can catch."

"That's the idea, yeah." They walked on for a mile or so longer as the sun rose and the silent trees and fields deafened them. There was no life of any kind, rabbitine or otherwise.

"I swear they were right here," Hollis said.

"Running crisscross in and out of each other's fur like some sort of cartoon."

"Maybe there are hundreds within earshot of us," Royle said.

"But we can't see them because they're all in one rabbit." Hollis chuckled at the image of some lone rabbit out there waiting for them to pass. The last time he found one, he had found a proper game trail. He might need to do that again.

"You're mocking me," he said.

"Yep. Makes you think, magicians must just not exist here in Periapt. How could you impress people?" Royle asked.

"Magic is real. You pull a rabbit out of a hat, and people just wonder why you put it in there in the first place."

"We ever go back to Earth, though, our financial futures would be set," Hollis said. Royle nodded, but they both silently agreed to drop the subject of ever going back to Earth. They walked onward, crossing as much ground as they could on their path to town.

"You know," Hollis said.

"You say there would be no magicians here, but I think I remember seeing a street performer doing some sleight of hand and basic magic. Long time ago."

"Where?" Royle asked.

"On the docks," Hollis said.

"Not these ones; they were destroyed when I got here. The ones back in the Outer Islands. My character, I mean. When he signed up for the voyage to the forgotten continent, there was a street performer." He walked in silence, Royle riding behind him for a time.

"I think I might remember something like that," Royle said.

"Some guy yelling about them needin' able-bodied men for a great voyage. Firebreathers were there, except it wasn't a trick; they could just do it. It's weird, isn't it? Those memories. Kind of freaky." Hollis agreed. From the moment he had played Return to Periapt, it was like his past was split in two. In one half, he was an explorer raised in a wondrous land brimming with adventure. In another, he was just some lonely kid from a broken home. It was fortunate he was given another choice of which could be true.

He had chosen wrong the first time. They continued to relay memories of the Outer Islands, buried within the stories on their inspector screens, until they reached their destination.