Chương 85: Let the Adventure Begin

Loki I woke up to a voice on the other side of the wall saying, "No, the two-by-four, not the two-by-six you idiot." I had no idea who was talking or what they were talking about. I stayed still under the blanket and listened, but the conversation seemed to be over. I sat up and shifted to human form. Fox shape was fine for sleeping in a corner, but I wasn't going to spend the day curled up on the floor. I stretched, adjusted my shirt, and walked toward the kitchen. The cabin was already busy.

Shelly was at the counter, slicing fruit into bowls. Pierre was at the table using a lint roller on his sequined purple clothes. Abe and Tala were absent, but I figured they were just busy doing whatever they normally do. Nobody reacted to me walking in. In Asgard, a stranger appearing in the kitchen would have resulted in drawn weapons within seconds. Here, I got a glance and a fruit bowl.

"Morning," Shelly said, pushing a bowl of berries and banana slices toward me.

"There's rice if you want it."

"Thank you." Pierre looked up from his lint roller.

"Sleep okay? That corner gets cold at night. I can grab you a spare sleeping bag from the garage."

"The blanket was fine," I said, which was true.

"Cool." He went back to his sequins. Then, without looking up he said, "So, Abe says we've got plague rats coming. Maybe a week out." He said it the way someone might mention that the weather was supposed to turn. I waited for the tension or even the urgency. However, there was no war-council energy. It just wasn't there.

"He mentioned that," I said since the raccoon had told everyone the plan the previous night. I still wasn't comfortable calling him Abe, but if that was what he wanted to be called, so be it.

"Derek's sourcing cold iron. He knows a guy at a salvage yard with cast iron pipes. Should be here by tomorrow." Pierre held up the sequined sleeve, squinted at it, and kept rolling.

"Abe wants your help designing the trap. Something about you knowing ironwork."

"I have experience, yes," I agreed. I wanted to correct him since I wouldn't be making a trap but a funnel. The trap would be the Liminal Lands. The mortal Derek and I would be in charge of redirecting the plague rats' movements. I ate my fruit and tried to process the weirdness. What a strange place. The meeting happened an hour after breakfast in the living room. Abe sat in his recliner and Tala sat on the armrest beside him. Pierre leaned against the wall while Shelly took the couch.

Derek had arrived partway through and stood near the door with his arms crossed, listening. I sat in a chair in the corner. I was still getting used to being included in things. Apparently, the meeting was just a formality, though. Nothing new was discussed and it broke up quickly. Part of me wondered if it was just an excuse to get everyone together in the same room at the same time. It was a waste of time, but it wasn't my place to say so, so I didn't. After that, I spent the morning with Derek.

For a mortal, he actually wasn't that bad. He didn't talk much. He unloaded cast iron pipes from his truck, measured the clearing near the pit, and sketched a rough layout on butcher paper. When I suggested angling the barriers inward to create a natural bottleneck that would compress the rat swarm as it approached the pit, he looked at the sketch, grunted, and adjusted the lines. That was the extent of our creative collaboration.

I basically just stood there, nodded and agreed with whatever he said, and basically shut up while he did all the work. After about an hour, he said, "You're not bad at this."

"Thank you," I said, puzzled. I wasn't sure if Derek was mocking me or being serious.

"You build stuff before? Wherever you're from?"

"I didn't build, exactly. But I spent a long time around people who did," I admitted. He nodded like that made perfect sense and went back to measuring pipe. I realized, even though I was doing nothing, spending time with the human construction worker planning a plague rat funnel wasn't so bad. I was actually enjoying myself. The work was practical. The goal was clear. Nobody was trying to trick me, manipulate me, or test my loyalty.

Derek just wanted a second set of eyes on the problems to make sure he didn't miss anything. Around noon, Pierre wandered over with sandwiches. It was veggie wraps, which seemed to be the household's default food. He sat on the tailgate of Derek's truck and watched us work. Or more accurately, he watched Derek work. I was starting to feel superfluous.

"So," he said between bites, "what's Asgard like?"

"Large and dramatic," I said, not really wanting to talk about it.

"Sounds exhausting," Pierre said. Obviously, he was more bored instead of truly curious. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"It was," I said before I could stop myself. Pierre just nodded.

"Yeah, that tracks. You seem like somebody who could use a break." He finished his wrap, crumpled the foil, and tossed it in the truck bed.

"Hey, we do game nights sometimes. Poker, mostly. You should come."

"I'll think about it."

"Luke cheats. Fair warning." He walked off toward the tree line to check on something. I stood there holding a veggie wrap and wondering when casual invitations had started feeling like gifts. Groot found me in the afternoon. I was sitting on the porch steps, taking a break from the pipe layout, when she pattered up on her root-feet. She'd been practicing thorn walls all morning and had dirt and bits of bark stuck to her leaves.

"Hi," she said.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Of course."

"Abe said my thorn walls need to be thicker for the rat funnel. I've been trying, but they keep getting thin in the middle." She twisted a leaf nervously.

"Do you know anything about walls?" I did, as it happened. Dwarven fortifications used layered defenses, and the principle translated well to living barriers. I explained the concept of a double wall, an outer layer to absorb initial impact and an inner layer to catch anything that got through. Groot listened and then she spent the next hour trying it while I watched and corrected. Her first attempt was lopsided. The second was better. The third was genuinely decent.

The thorns interlocked in a dense pattern, and the double layer created a barrier that would give the rats serious problems.

"Is that good?" she asked, bouncing slightly.

"That's very good," I admitted. Surprisingly, I wasn't irritated or bored at all. She beamed. Then, because she was Groot, she said, "I am Groot!" and immediately looked embarrassed.

"Sorry. I keep forgetting. I just get excited."

"Don't apologize for enthusiasm," I said.

"It's not a weakness." She tilted her leafy head at me.

"You seem sad sometimes. Like when you think nobody's looking." I didn't have a response to that.

"It's okay," she said.

"The boss was sad for a while. Tala told me. Now he's still grumpy but it's a different kind of grumpy."

"What kind?"

"The kind where you complain about everything but you'd fight a dragon for the people you're complaining about." She paused.

"He actually did fight a dragon once. Well, not fight. More like yell at one until it left. But still." I was still trying to formulate a response when she patted my knee with a leaf and pattered away to show Rocket her double-layered thorn wall. I sat on the steps and watched her go. Not long after that, some intruders arrived. However, instead of immediately imprisoning them, scouts just made the announcement over walkie-talkies.

I heard Pierre announce from Derek's walkie-talkie, "Three humans on the public trail. Backpacks, cameras, and one of them is wearing a raccoon t-shirt."

"How close?" I swear, I could hear Abe sighing as he asked the question.

"Quarter mile. I've been walking near them pretending to be a hiker, but they're heading in this direction."

"Keep a watch on them," Abe said. My first instinct was to say something snarky about stating the obvious, but that would have been rude to my host, so again, I held my tongue.

"Obviously. I can't exactly chase them off yet. They're on public easement." I picked up a nearby walkie-talkie.

"I can handle this," I said.

"Let's not chase them away. We can give them something real enough to satisfy them and controlled enough to protect everything else."

"What are you offering?"

"Shapeshifting or illusion lessons. Basic, temporary, harmless. I charge them in planar crystals." I paused.

"They get something real, you get currency, and they stop looking for things they shouldn't find." Abe thought about it for maybe three seconds.

"The lumber clearing, east side. Far enough from the cabin."

"That's what I was thinking," although of course, it hadn't been what I was thinking about at all.

"Set it up. Pierre, send them east." Abe paused, then added, "I'm trusting you on this, Loki. Pricing, rules, whatever you think is fair." The words hit harder than they should have. I nodded and headed for the clearing. Groot grew me a sign when I asked, and I carved into it quickly. TRICKSTER'S TEACHINGS Shapeshifting Instruction: Beginner to Advanced Planar Crystal Payment Only No Refunds. No Insects. No Complaints. The adventurers showed up ten minutes later.

A tall one with a camera, a short one in the raccoon shirt, and a quiet woman who'd already pulled out crystals before the other two had finished gaping. The tall one said, "Dude. Are you an NPC?" I smiled.

"I am an instructor. I teach shapeshifting and illusion. Do you have payment, or are you here to stare?" The woman was a former falconer. She wanted to be a hawk. I taught her, and after twenty-five minutes, she shifted for twelve seconds and came back gasping about how sharp the world looked through hawk eyes. The tall one managed thirty seconds as a house cat. The short one asked if the raccoon god was real. I told him that questions about divine entities were above my pay grade.

And of course he wanted to turn into a raccoon. Part of me was insulted they learned so quickly, but I finally chalked it up to the system Gaia gave them. It probably helped a lot. They left with their crystals spent and their curiosity satisfied. None of them had any idea how close they'd been to a baby dragon, a pit trap, and ninety incoming plague rats. I sat in the clearing alone, holding fifteen planar crystals. The afternoon light came through the trees in long slanting bars, and the clearing was quiet.

I'd taught four people today. Groot in the morning, and three humans in the afternoon. Nobody had forced me to do it. The raccoon had said "I trust you" and meant it. When I got back to the cabin, Abe was on the porch going over the barrier layout with Derek. He looked up.

"How'd it go?" he asked.

"Fifteen crystals. Three students. One with real talent."

"Good, keep up the good work," he said before turning back to the blueprints. I stood there for a moment, watching a raccoon and a construction worker plan a rat trap while a werewolf in sequins stacked iron pipes in the yard and a tree nymph practiced double-layered thorn walls using techniques I'd taught her. I went inside, shifted to fox form, and curled up in my corner. Rocket had left a painted acorn on my blanket with a note that said "WELCOM PRESINT" in crooked letters.

I tucked it against my chest and closed my eyes. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I fell asleep without dreading what would come next. For the first time, I also wondered what the humans had seen from their viewpoint. What was the world like when seen through their eyes?