Chương 33: Chapter Thirty-Three: Lice

Book One: All Is Silent at Beckett's Sound Part Three The Lighthouse The bugs were the size of dogs, some bigger. As they swarmed, they stepped on top of each other, crawling, racing like a flood of legs and teeth. Their metal chitin armor clinking together sounded like pickaxes in the distance. A thousand pickaxes being swung by a thousand miners. They were coming. Hollis and Royle could run for miles and still not be free of their pursuers. They could hide, but they would surely be found.

What they needed was a proper shelter, and they had almost finished building one when the bugs attacked. Almost was not enough.

"How long do we have?" Hollis called out when he found himself in a divot in the ground next to a large tree.

"Not long at all," Royle said.

"I can hear them right behind us." Hollis tossed a bundle of sticks down on the ground, arranged them in a stack, and then sprinkled dried flecks of campfire moss on top of them. He then opened his canteen and poured it over the top before giving Breath to the moss and bringing the campfire to life. Whatever power it possessed to keep predators away would not possibly be enough to guarantee their safety, but it might be enough to delay. He then turned back to the large tree.

From what he could see, it was a pecan tree, nothing special in this forest despite whatever magic it held, but he wasn't here for its magic. He was here for its heft. He took his newly made walking stick, thrust it into the ground, and then leaned it up against the side of the tree. With Breath, the staff took root, securing itself in place, intermingling its woody tendrils with the root network of the pecan.

"How long?" he called back again.

"They're here," Royle said.

"They stopped for some reason. It's like they're tiptoeing." Hollis looked back and said, "Willo, give me a Spotlight." The brave glowbug Willo flew in front of Hollis' hand and then shone brightly. An orange beam of light projected outward, revealing the creatures waiting in the darkness. [Naturalism lvl. 6] You see a swarm of miners' lice. The population has overgrown. No kidding, Hollis thought. In the game, miners' lice were about the size of a baseball.

They were an easy way to get ore, mostly copper, which they consumed from the earth. He didn't even know they could get this big.

"They're getting braver," Royle said.

"I'm on it," Hollis said. He pulled a roll of fabric from his pack and began to unwrap it. It was made from flax, sturdy and lightweight. Normally, fabric like this might be waterproofed with beeswax or a similar substance in order to form a protective tarp, but that wasn't why Hollis brought it. He brought it for practice. He had no idea he would only get one try. He took the fabric and draped it over his walking stick, wrapping it tight against the trunk of the pecan tree to create a limp lean-to.

He needed to focus. He had never done this before. It was never practical. The only reason he knew it existed was that he had seen it in a shop menu in the game, completely overpriced for a beginner, but its item description had intrigued him. A Quick-Shelter, a craftable item that could instantly create a sturdy refuge in the wilds. Of course there was no shop to buy one from, and even Otis couldn't make one, though he could confirm they existed.

Hollis focused, searching inward, summoning forth those imbued magical memories of his fictional youth in Periapt, growing up in the Outer Islands. You stand before your master, your curiosity growing stronger than your fear of reprisal.

"How do you build a Quick-Shelter?" you ask.

"Same way you build a coffin if you don't do it right," Thompson Sr. says with a chuckle. Hollis opened his eyes. Text flew by in his inspector. What he wanted was a memory, something that felt real, something he could draw on from within himself, not a wall of text. The magic of Periapt allowed him to change his past to gain knowledge about skills and crafts that would have taken a lifetime to cultivate. He needed to focus. He needed time. He looked back over his shoulder. Willo put up a Spotlight again for him.

The bugs were a bit closer. They were getting antsy. He could hear them climbing all over each other. The fire put fear in their hearts; it was clear, but the hunger, well, hunger could be persuasive to any creature. And these were quite fearsome creatures. He could tell that they had been feeding on a copper mine, most of them, and the others had been feeding on tin. They didn't have the right luster for silver, but they weren't dull enough for iron.

The metals from their diet could be seen working their way through the chitinous armor spreading over the bugs' bodies, imbuing their claws with an almost beautiful ornamentation. Some even had crystals and jewels growing out of them, but there was a reason they were called lice despite their fearsome appearance and greater athleticism than the sluggish Earth version. It was because they fed off blood.

"How do I make a Quick-Shelter?" you ask again.

"Same way you build a coffin if you don't do it right," Thompson's words echo. Hollis knew the basics. He had been mentally preparing for this for quite some time. Flax was a plant, and like most plants, it should be simple to graft the ability of one plant onto another. The pecan tree, or even his newly made water staff, both had in their latent magical DNA the ability to grow strong, powerful bark on their exteriors, the kind that was hard to get an axe through.

The question was, could he make that graft in such little time? He had never done it before.

"They're coming," Royle said. He reached out his cupped hands, which held Jaq in mouse form, but soon the mouse grew into a horse right under him.

"I'm going to distract them," he said.

"Buy you a little time. You better make it worth it."

"Just leave," Hollis said.

"Just go back to the others. You can outrun them." Royle felt down on his horse's neck and then somberly said, "No, we can't. They've got us surrounded." Jaq would know. His species could magically find exits where a human might not see one.

"I'll get it done," Hollis said.

"Good," Royle said, his voice breaking a bit. He bid Jaq to ride out as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small handful of pebbles from his vast collection, and then threw them with great might up into the air, out toward the edge of the false firelight where he heard the clanking armor of the lice. With a flick of his wrist, the pebbles turned into missiles, falling down at speeds that didn't make any physical sense, pelting the miner's lice like hail against a tin roof.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. These things were impossibly tough. Some of those blasts were enough to push the creatures into the dirt, creating craters, and yet the bug itself would be fine, its metal shell simply too powerful to give in. Royle rode off, and the bugs followed. Most of them. A few stragglers stayed, inching closer and closer toward Hollis.

In Periapt, the power of magic wielded by humans, or even the magic of the creatures they bonded with, was limited by their skill level. The false fire, like Willo, had the Warning Beacon ability; that's what Hollis figured, even though he couldn't see it because his Taxonomy skill wasn't high enough. Unfortunately, Warning Beacon scaled off of Storytelling, a skill that Hollis had not put enough effort into. He would have to amend that soon if he couldn't figure out the Quick-Shelter.

Those few bugs that remained, Willo blasted with will-o'-the-wisps imbued with that very Warning Beacon, successfully driving them off, but Hollis knew it wouldn't last. He turned to the flax canvas, pressed it against the bark of the pecan tree, and once again sent a sincere question back into the past.

"How do you build a Quick-Shelter?" you ask.

"The same way you build a coffin if you don't do it right," Thompson Sr. says with a chuckle. ~-~ SEVENTY-TWO HOURS EARLIER Hollis risked death as he stood in Tawny's garden well after sunset. The fog would be rolling in from the sea already, but that didn't matter. It would take hours to reach the edge of the canyon. Of course, it had already been hours. It didn't matter. He needed to work. Building a shelter on Earth was a matter of preparation, practice, and know-how.

Hollis had all three, but the shelters of Earth weren't going to cut it here on Periapt, at least not the average one. Here, explorers had a preference for lean-tos in a pinch, and not just a bundle of sticks pressed up against a rock. No, they liked living shelters. Shelters packed with dirt and sticks and then given life so that they could secure themselves and become sturdy.

They also liked when you had twenty guys in your party acting as lookouts in shifts so that everyone could get some rest and the horrors of the wild could be kept at bay. Hollis didn't have twenty guys, but he could make a shelter as sturdy as anyone else. His Bushcraft skill was good for that. It was a broad skill that covered many different things but didn't allow expertise in any of them. He didn't need his Engineering skill to build this shelter, not unless he needed it to outlast a particularly powerful foe.

Bushcraft would do. The problem was it was slow. It took more than an hour to make a proper shelter, at least one that you hoped to withstand the curiosity of a nighttime predator. Hollis needed practice. He placed a clump of moss, not campfire moss, just the old-fashioned green stuff with little magical property beyond filtering water and imbuing anything that slept on it with a dreamless, days-long slumber. He gave it Breath and allowed it to take over the wall of sticks and dirt.

Soon he was giving Breath to the entire wall as it came to life, spreading its roots and branches, intertwining, strengthening, becoming sturdy. It took so much Breath, Blood, and Mind that he could barely stand between attempts.

"Royle tells me the fog almost made it to the edge of the canyon last night," a voice called from behind him. A woman's voice, older, concerned. It was Tawny. Hollis turned to look at her.

"I have pretty good timing, don't I?" he asked. Behind her, her adult son Paul was playing with that flying wooden bird, getting it to fly in circles before losing track of it and banging it into a wall, which entertained him to no end. Otis had already had to repair it multiple times.

"It's windy tonight," she said.

"You'll probably see some fog spill over the edge. Are you all right out here?"

"I'm fine," Hollis said.

"I think you got the trick all figured out," she said as she surveyed the row of walls he had built using nothing but twigs, moss, and dirt.

"No," Hollis said.

"This took me hours and hours. I asked Otis how to speed it up, and he said to start earlier." Tawny laughed.

"He's got a rare form of genius, doesn't he?"

"I'll say," Hollis replied. She looked up at the edge of the canyon as if she were expecting to see fog pouring over, but all that lay in that direction was starlight.

"It always gets worse in the summer," she said, "but this summer it's speeding up. It may be our last." They had been running experiments in the weeks it took Hollis to prep for his journey to the lighthouse. At first they were looking to understand campfire moss, to comprehend its interaction with the fog, but their most urgent findings had nothing to do with the campfire moss.

The fog was building up right at the edge of the canyon, inside of a large divot that couldn't have been any closer to the hospice without being right on top of it. It felt like any day the fog could pour over the edge and whatever death it contained would fall right down on top of them. The walls that Hollis was building were for practice and for fortification; whatever spilled over the edge would have to crawl over these. If there were large groups of enemies in the fog, it would at least break them up.

It was the least Hollis could do. It was also the most.

"Do you think the door could withstand whatever it is that's out there?" he asked. He had tried to ask this before, but there always seemed to be someone around they were trying not to scare with talk of the inevitable.

"For a while," she said. She sounded confident to Hollis' ears, but how could she possibly know?

"What exactly do you expect them to do against that big metal door?" he asked. Whatever group or society had built that underground lair, they certainly knew how to build defenses. The only thing that had managed to get through their walls had been an earthquake that exposed the very entrance they were standing near.

"On my first night here, I managed to hole up inside an abandoned house. The fog seeped in through gaps in the walls, and I had to sleep on top of a large cabinet, but otherwise it seemed I was safe. There were animals that lived inside that house too, about the only animals I've seen over there outside of the burning forest."

"I don't think anything would stop them once they figure out we're here," she said. She stared up at the edge of the canyon as a large gust of wind blew overhead. The subtlest wisps of fog made their first appearance.

"Did I ever tell you why we left the farm?" she asked.

"No, you must have left that out," Hollis said.

"Whatever it was that was in the fog, they figured out where we were keeping our cattle," she said.

"We tried to seal up the barn, but the cows were too noisy, and once the fog reached us, it was only a matter of time. They broke through the barn pretty easily, whatever they were, and slaughtered our entire herd except for one cow.

"That cow they played with," she said.

"They knew where we were too, in that farmhouse. This thing, it dragged that cow out in front of the house but didn't kill it. I didn't know what was going on. The poor old girl was trying to get away, but every time she did, it would just drag her right back out in front of the house. It wouldn't eat her. It was using her as bait. It knew we were in there, all of us, and it was trying to lure us out. It could have torn down the walls, destroyed the building, but it wanted to toy with us, to play a game.

It had a cleverness, a cruelness. We sat there all night listening to it play with that poor cow. That's when we braved that square well and found this place. I don't know how long we would last, but however long we survived, once the fog gets here, it wouldn't be us getting to decide." Hollis nodded. He knew that there were some terrible creatures in the world of Periapt. He wondered how long it would be before he found the one that would end him. ~-~ NOW Nothing was happening.

Hollis held the fabric up against the tree and willed it with all his Mind, all his Spirit, all his Blood if that's what it took, but grafting the ability to create thick, armored bark was difficult, and he had no practice. There was a reason they had relied on more traditional sheltering methods. They never imagined they would have so little time to get it done. Nothing prepared them for this. Royle rode by on his horse, keeping a good distance.

"Not yet," Hollis said loudly but not yelling. He knew that Royle could hear him. Dozens of large metallic miners' lice raced behind Royle and Jaq. They sounded like a wave of destruction, and yet they were surprisingly delicate. They weren't destroying the plant life or vegetation. Most of the noise came from them crawling on top of each other, their metal armor clanking together. Royle was in trouble. While most of the swarm was having difficulty keeping up with him, not all of it was.

Four of the bugs, the biggest ones, were easily gaining on Jaq even at full gallop, because the lice could jump almost like fleas. They didn't just jump forward; they jumped up ten, fifteen feet in the air before landing. Hollis had to help. He dropped the cloth to the ground and pulled out his rifle.

"Spotlight," he said. Before the words even came out of his mouth, the orange beam of bright light shone into the distance, emanating from his glowbug companion. The Spotlight strengthened Hollis' eyes, allowing him to see everything in its path. He could see the individual plates of armor on the louse in his sights. He could see the gaps between them. He had to hope that would be enough. He took aim and fired at the louse nearest to Royle. One shot, one kill.

The bullet managed to weave right in between the armor plates and, in doing so, completely obliterated the creature's insides. [Marksmanship lvl. 6] The creature had been jumping up at the moment of its death, and its body followed that trajectory, but when it fell, it fell limply, like a puppet with its strings cut. There were three more gaining on Royle, so Hollis took to them in quick succession, using Willo's Spotlight to enhance his accuracy.

Even with that advantage, his next shot missed, dinging off the armor of the bug without the louse even noticing. His next shot, however, got right in the eye, killing it. It took him five more shots to clear the next two as they gained distance. He barely managed to do it before Royle had left his line of sight, taking the swarm of lice with him. When he had come to Periapt, he spread his ammunition around between his person and his backpack.

If he had known that he would lose his pack, he would have kept all those bullets in his pockets. As it was, he would run out of ammunition before he ran out of lice to kill. He needed to figure out how to make a Quick-Shelter, and he needed to do it while he still had blood in his veins.