Chương 73: A World of Drama I

When I woke up from a micro-nap that really shouldn't have been as refreshing as it was, the chicks were still tuckered out from the long flight. After some preening by Momma-Bird of their gray and yellow feathers (she looked at me judgmentally until I double and triple checked for any unwelcome passengers), they huddled close for a continued nap. The great steel heron was looking about ready to conk out as well.

What I thought that meant was that I could explore around after squeezing myself out from under her metal feathers. Instead, as my head popped out the other side, there was a squirrel staring straight at me. Not an alien squirrel with three eyes, nor a magical one flying by its mental might. Just a normal eurasian red squirrel.

"She is here," it said in an ominous tone. I blinked at it, my lower half still squished under tons of plumage.

"Of course you can talk. And who might you be?" It raised its little hands, piercing the sky, leaning back so much I could see its yellowed teeth.

"She is heeere!" Its squeaky voice was echoed by many others in the forest.

"She is here, she is here." There at the edge of the clearing stood a semi-circle of deer, wild boars, rabbits, martens, badgers, and no bears. This seems like a good time to retreat and pull the drawbridge up behind me. Then again, staying inside the nest wouldn't get me anywhere. I scrabbled out from under Momma-Bird's wing, keeping an eye on the animals while I dusted myself off.

"So, I'm here now. Whaddaya want?"

"A game," the entire clearing echoed.

"A game."

"For you to get off my roots," the tree next to me grumbled. I sheepishly took a step to the left.

"Can any of you show me the way towards civilization? I'm pretty sure I saw a small town nearby."

"Sure, I can shows ya!" A small chipmunk jumped from a tree onto my hand.

"I know a lizard who knows a girl who knows a guy. I'll gets you to 'em… after you beat me in a game of course."

"You know what, on second thought I think I can find it myself."

"Party poooooper," the clearing sang.

"Booh, boooring, boo!" Great, now I'm lost and feel terrible. What kind of animals even are these — wait. Where is Rico? He said he was home which means… this really is Faeworld. Explains the talking animals. I suppose building rapport might not be a bad idea. Alright Sam, remember the fae rules: Respect hospitality, be polite, and don't make any promises you can't keep. Oh, and watch the pranks.

"Alright. Just one game. What kind do you prefer?"

"Chess," the chipmunk squeaked.

"It's the only game anyone needs to know."

"You all know chess?" I asked. The assembled animals gave variably vague affirmations.

"We're playing with my board, and one special rule," the chipmunk said. A swarm of its chipmunk friends descended on a grassy patch, quickly sorting a small wooden gameboard and the various pieces into position.

"What's the rule?" I said, squinting at the truly tiny board. One could reasonably expect that a chess-afficionado chipmunk might play with a chipmunk-sized board, but this board was small even for someone so diminutive in size. The individual pieces weren't even half the size of my pinky's fingernail.

"If you knock over a piece on accident, like so," it snipped one of my pawns away, "then it is lost. Forever. Like your very body if you lose to me."

"Forever, forever," the animals chanted around me. It was going to be impossible not to knock over a piece, let alone even just grab the right one. Maybe with some tweezers I'd have better luck. [Proprioception sensors] save me.

"Oh. Uh. Right." I could feel their stares boring into me, judging, looking for… something.

"May I start right away?"

"Naturally," the chipmunk smiled genially, which was mostly undermined by it rubbing its little hands together and cackling evilly. Naturally, my pawn was not replaced. Great. The animals were blatantly cheating. Or are they? I let my index and thumb hover over the board, the combined surface of their tips equalling the entire wooden gameboard. Sweat pearled on my forehead. A twitch, a flick. The chipmunk's white king toppled off the board. The chipmunk stared at it slack-jawed.

"Whoops." I grinned.

"My mistake. Hey, so since you don't have a king anymore, does that mean I win?"

"I… I was going to do the same fucking thing!"

"I would caution against it. Flicking your own king off the board seems like an unwise move."

"Not my king, your king!" The chipmunk grabbed its elastic cheeks and yanked them down hard enough that its eyes seemed to bulge out of their socks.

"Dammit, dammit!" A grown doe with the bearing of nobility walked up to my side.

"You have won this bout—""Won this bout, won this bout," the clearing echoed.

"— for which I congratulate you—""Congratulations, congratulations."

"— and will you all kindly shut the hellworld up?" The clearing went quiet.

"Thank you. Now, where was I?"

"You were going to show me the path towards civilization, considering my challenger is busy crashing out on the forest floor." It was honestly kind of off-putting, watching a chipmunk ugly cry-screaming while kicking the air with all four of its limbs.

"Ah, yes, well." The deer cleared its voice.

"Unfortunately you have agreed to a series of contests. And we all know that one is coincidence, two a pair, and three a throuple."

"Uh-huh. So, what's a series?"

"Seventy-eight games."

"Seven to eight? That's not too bad. I can do seven. Or eight." To this day, I didn't know that deer could look at you with eyebrows raised.

"Eight. We will do eight." There was a booing from the chorus, causing the deer to stomp its foot on the ground.

"I swear, if you don't all stop moaning you won't even get to draw lots! Now pluck some bushels of grass and the ones with the six shortest straws get to determine the order of their challenges." Ooh, so it was like an entire tournament? Fun. All I got to do for fun these past months was hunting giant bugs in life-or-death battles in the forest, and dancing. Not to make a dig at dancing. I learned it the hard way. It was painful, but oh did I learn.

"So why is everyone so pumped to have a go at me?"

"Oh, no reason. But if you lose you'll turn into an animal and one of us gets their real body back."

"What?"

"What? Nothing! Nobody heard anything." The Doe cleared her throat.

"Naturally, I am your next challenger. The challenge is chess… with a twist." A quartet of fawns clumsily carried a rather oversized chess board into the clearing. They struggled with setting up the pieces. No hands, just hooves. I helped, naturally, which earned me a lick on the hands by the bravest fawn, and a snort from the doe.

"We will play chess as is normal, without touching each other's pieces. However, after every turn, we race from one edge of the clearing to Old Oaksen by the red mushrooms. The winner gets to take the next turn, even if they have taken their turn previously. Will that be acceptable?" The idea of turning her suggestion down didn't even enter my mind. It would be impolite in the extreme. She held some authority over the forest, and thereby I was her guest.

Naturally, the doe didn't bother to elaborate which of the trees we were supposed to race for. I looked at the other clearing. One of them had to be Old Oaksen. Just had to find which one it was. It sure would've been easier with Rico around. Then again, this doe challenged me in a contest of speed. That was one contest I wasn't going to lose." I accept." The doe ducked her head, and gracefully picked up a piece between her lips — naturally she had given herself white.

The moment the pawn clacked onto the board, she zipped off, prancing at a speed that couldn't have been normal for a deer. Oh, me and my big mouth. I took off after her, passing by eroded statues and ruins with carved imagery of stern and austere looking humanoids. I do wonder: Were the fae the first people to conquer this world? Demons on hellworld sprouted off of them, so they have a precedent for interstellar colonisation. Boy I sure do hope I didn't land in the backyard of the hegemonic, slave-taking type.

I really could use a day without having to spill some poor fool's blood. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. +++ Silica Aisling Va'lxlmxlpo was an odd type of fae: Too tall not to be creepy, too strong to play with her peers, too awkward to stick in a dress. She was the type that hated her parent's choice of name despite the power it gave her — human words were after all not thoroughly bound by the magic of the word.

Nothing brought her more joy than the peace and quiet of her assignment as peacebringer in this manor far-away from the dramas of court, despite her father's stern reminder that she was uplifted from her pixie state to that of a true Va'lxlmxlpo, and as such owed him fealty like a daughter. Her appointment would only last so far as she remained more useful here than in a dress dancing the fallen-leaves-death-dance in the verdant court, no matter her skills at that.

If only he knew why every alternative assignment that kept on cropping up always turned out so… inconvenient. When she fulfilled her duties to perfection, there was little reason he could find to reassign her. Fealty went both ways after all. Currently, a frown was etched on her elfin face. Silica Aisling Va'Íxlmxlpo was gearing up for war. It was the only reasonable course of action when a terrorbird that eclipsed some castles decided to make its nest in the penal forest she oversaw.

She tugged on a leather glove, the jetblack persimmon wood scale plates shrinking to fit the rest of her armor and adhere snugly to her hand.

"Open," she commanded the wall of her mansion, decorative roots and mosses retreating to reveal a wall of weapons. Blood-letter sword, hooked gryphon claws, never-feeling blade of eternal regret… ah. A root tendril extended to offer her the weapon of choice. It was a lance twice as long as she was tall, made of the unbreakable solidified marrow of some mythical creature or other — she'd stopped bothering to listen to craftspeople's boasts after a weapon that could slay anyone had exploded in her hands.

She hummed in appreciation at its weight and balance. A good baseline. But it could be more.

"I hereby summon the strength of the stag that serves me, the speed of the doe whose life I own, and the sturdiness of the 731, 514, 221st part of the moon, which I rightfully secured as reward for service rendered to the house of Va'Íxlmxlpo." The weapon shone with a triple enchantment. Now it was a lethal tool of deathbringing, befitting an executioner. This would pierce armored feathers quite nicely.

"I… don't think that will be necessary." Her gaze stabbed to the right. Her lance followed. The pixie that had dared raise its voice ducked behind a vase depicting the wild hunt, except instead of depicting a horde of violent pixie and fae noblemen, it was subverted to depict a horde of also violent pixie and fae noblewomen.

'The furies' it was called, crafted by a human craftsman who sold his sense of taste and hearing in exchange for the ability to craft wondrous items out of loamy earth some thousand years ago. The vase, a collector's item in some homes, but a decoration among many in this one, slowly slid into two parts. I… liked that vase.

"Hey, so hitting a pixie as a fully realized fae is not really fair play, you're basically exploiting your position of power to bully me, and by the way, I would be thankful enough to forgive this act of aggression against an ally if you but listened to me talk for five minutes." He rattled his desperate pleas out within seconds, finishing just as her blade stopped a twig's breadth away from his neck. He gulped, rubbing his neck, all the while Silica was struck at how… coherent this pixie was. They usually weren't.

Pixies were creatures of pure instinct, and the instincts of lesser fae were barely tolerable at best.

"I… I-er," her voice was stuck in her throat. Again. Damn whichever prankster through it would be funny to give an executioner a voice like a mouse.

"I-I… Insolence," she finally muttered.

"Yah, well, I'm a pixie. It's sorta what I do." The orange pixie peeked over the edge of the pedestal with the half vase still on it.

"Don't mind me, I'm just a mild mannered pixie passing through." Silica doubted it. This was no lesser being. He had the mind of a razor shark and the face of a seasoned courtier.

"W-who sent y-you?"

"Call me Rico," the pixie said.

"And no, I am not sent by your patron, liege, enemies, nemeses, wandering hedge-pranksters, friendly rivals, or spurned lovers. Not that you get many, I'm sure. Executioner, really, just my luck." Silica opened her mouth in protest, only to be rudely cut off.

"Or would-be lovers. Sheesh girl, I get that you don't like company given all the, er, statues of ungracefully petrified trespassers, and the fact that you oversee a prison forest, but really, you don't even have housekeepers?"

"I-I do!" They visited once a week to clean her mansion top to bottom before scurrying off awfully quickly. But nobody needed to know that Silica Aisling Va'Íxlmxlpo couldn't keep company without scaring them half to death.

"Then where are they?" Silica paused but briefly.

"I-Invisible…"

"Invisible, huh?" The pixie claiming to be Rico crossed his arms.

"Bullshit. The king of the verdant court doesn't have enough magic to make his servants disappear all willy-nilly at his leisure, and neither do you." They stared at each other for a tense moment, him knowing that her carefully crafted image of bone-chilling competence was hiding an insecure elf, her that he couldn't do much with that information if she just cut his head off once the five minutes were up.

"Now, I know what you're thinking: 'Uuugh, why should I listen to this annoying pixie when I can just cut its head off?'" Her hand twitched.

"But honestly, I'm quite attached to it. And I hear you're attached to your solitude, so I'll tell you the deal to get us all out of your hair: There's a girl with the heron, a girl you won't miss. She's somehow built rapport with the bird. Talk to her before you try to lop its head off. You might find that she is quite amenable to solving this issue with words." Silica tsked. A druid, then? Those animal-enslaving bastards were two faced crooks.

The pixie, seeing that she wasn't convinced yet, sighed, his figure almost collapsing onto the pedestal.

"Can I vent for a second?"

"What's a vent?"

"Alright, cool. So, the girl's name is Sam, and she is a soul-stealer. But she has this thing where she approaches you with such honesty and just, just genuine joy of being able to meet you… it's called friendship."

"Friend… ship?"

"It's a mutually beneficial non-binding non-verbal agreement for general assistance, socialization, and association. Friendship is when you can insult each other and not mean it. And I fear I am starting to become addicted." Oh. Well, that made a bit more sense.

"L-l-like a lover?" The pixie sighed theatrically.

"I see I'm going to have to practice explaining the concept a bit more. Go, confront her at your peril, but keep your mind open. I promise I'll only plunder some of your sweets while you're at it — hey, hey, don't pinch the wings, those are delicate!" She ignored the pixie's protests, plucking him from the pedestal and situating him in a pocket on her chest. Because what self-respecting executioner didn't have pockets on their war-dress? The pixie is spouting illogical nothings.

Best to keep him where I can see him, and ignore his prattle. I'll turn him into a chipmunk eventually, for barging into my home uninvited. Silica huffed. Whatever a friendship was, it didn't sound nice at all, and not just because there weren't any nearby rivers to fit a ship of any size on. After all, what good could ever come from socializing when everyone was just trying to deceive you and catch you in a verbal contract? +++"You took my pawn. Yay! Good job." I applauded, hauling the me-sized pawn off the field.

This was the eighth challenger, a boar with super-boarean strength. Naturally, his giant board required the granite pieces to be moved under great physical strain and a time limit. Move your piece too slowly, and your turn was forfeit. The current game had been going on for half an hour. I was starting to pity the exhausted-looking boar. He toppled right next to his rook, letting rip a squeal of relief.

"T-thank you, madame Sam," the wild boar huffed. As strong as he was, boars were natural born sprinters. They weren't built for endurance like humans were.

"Y-your move." I moved over from one side of the field to the other in three big leaps.

"I'll just move my bishop over here… aaand that's check and mate. Good game." The canopy rustled. Something big, heavy, and hard hit the earth, throwing up a smokescreen of dust and pine needles. It was an elf — long ears, sharp features, similar to the one I'd seen as a ghost, but not quite. She was dreadfully tall, though I suppose that just meant she was slightly taller than I was.

Her skin was deathly pale, two whiteless eyes staring at me through a spartan-like helmet with neatly swirling patterns of wood on it, crowned by the antlers of a great stag. The arm clutching her ridiculously oversized weapon was not at all lithe, but brimming with the same muscle that filled her frame from top to bottom. She looked like a ghost that haunted a HEMA gym, but as my mind was processing that thought, my mouth was already moving.

"Goth fae baddy? Damn, are those arms real or did your parents chisel you out of granite?" The elf blinked at me.

"What?"

"What? Sorry, my mouth just does that sometimes. Talks entirely on its own, haha. The name's Sam. What's your's?"

"S-silica. Y-you…"

"Yes?"

"You should get that checked it is dangerous to run one's mouth in a fae forest especially for outsiders especially for you." She said that so fast I would have had difficulty understanding it without my extra stat points. She gave off an impression like she really didn't want to be talking to me. Which was fine. Not everyone had to be a people person. However, that wasn't going to stop me from doing my thing.

"Oh, it's not all bad. I got to learn a bunch of different ways to play chess. It was honestly quite fun!" Somewhere in the distance, a chipmunk was sobbing.

"I, er, am a bit unsure whether they're all talking animals, or people that have been turned into animals."

"T-the latter," the tall elf said.

"Punishment in t-the verdant court is games or d-d-death."

"And you prefer games?"

"I am impartial," she said without stutter.

"I am Silica, executioner, warden, keeper of the peace." I stared at her, the flared dress-like armor, and the weapon brimming with so much magic the air around it was a vibrating haze as if it was producing an enormous amount of heat. Then it clicked.

"Oh come on. The fae invented magical girls before us too?" I kicked some dirt, much to the confusion of the goth fae. One of the trees turned around to frown at me. I scooped up some dirt and placed it back on the unearthed root.

"You don't make any sense," she said.

"Oh hey, your stutter's gone."

"I should k-kill you where you s-stand for i-i-intruding on my domain." She brandished her fourteen foot lance. The cutting edge gleamed along its entire length through a god-ray sneaking down through the canopy.

"Nevermind. Also, that would be pretty rude. Can't we just be friends?"

"F-f-friends?" The elf's face took on an entirely different tone of color.

"I, why would, you, me… we just met!"

"All the better!" I shot her my best disarming smile.

"If we're friends, we can help each other with whatever's bothering us, honestly. Honesty is easy, you'll see." She seemed to chew on the word, tension slowly bleeding from her stance.

"I have… your bird is… on my lawn…" I snapped my finger.

"Right. That. Dangit, I thought she regularly uses this place for a roosting ground."

"S-she does." The goth fae paused.

"And you chase her off with… that poker?" I gestured to her weapon.

"S-sometimes, I use a club. She is a-a-a… an-noy-ing."

"Well, she at the very least tolerates me, so let's see if my word holds any weight." We walked up to Momma-Bird. She'd had the time for barely an hour of shut eye before someone was ready to bother her again. That someone was me.

"Oh great mama bird," I called, making her poke her head out of her pile of metal feathers, "this distinguished person here wants you to get off her lawn. Can you do that? I know some places you can roost on in peace, preferably a small island in the pacific ocean! That's on Earth. Do you know where Earth is?"

"Squonk," she squonked, then made a sound like a trilling dinosaur.

"Yep." I turned to Silica.

"I have no clue what she is saying." Her shoulders drooped slightly.

"I w-was… n-not sure what I was expecting."

"A bird-whisperer?"

"Birds don't w-whisper. They scream and y-yell obscenities all day. I dislike birds, conceptually, and p-p-practically." I shot her a side-eye and a raised brow.

"Can't you try to make friends with her?" This elf seemed to be an overthinking silent type. I knew what life like that was. Every small problem turns elephant-sized when all you can do is think at it. Sometimes, all you need is a small push to understand that you can just go out into the world and do things. Slowly coming to a decision, she stuck her lance into the ground and pulled off her helmet, revealing a waterfall of silky hair in a purple so dark it might as well have been black.

With one outstretched hand, slowly, she approached the giant heron. Momma-Bird watched her intently as her hand caressed a metal feather with groove in it, a groove that looked suspiciously shaped to fit her long-ass lance. When she retracted her hands, she let out a barely perceptible sigh.

"I still don't like b-birds," she finally said.

"But this one can s-stay for a while. It seems too insipid to do o-otherwise. The offer and statement extend to you as w-well."

"Oh. Nice." I shot her a thumbs up.

"Hey, wait, you just called me dumb."

"You g-gambled with a number of convicted criminals eight times with your body on the line. Eight is the number of bad luck, and still you managed to succeed. Evidently, your pixie hasn't told you the first thing about the rules of us fae. The world will eat you a-alive if you approach everything with the naivete of a new-born foal."

"So, you're going to teach me in exchange for me getting the bird off of your backyard?"

"I, er… yes?"

"I'm going to need to learn the language of the birds though," I muttered.

"We can make a trade?" she hedged.

"I know a place where you can trade something of yours for the language."

"That sounds great!" I went to grab her in an eight-armed hug, which she sidestepped in a rush of air. She was staring at me like a spooked rabbit, edges of her nose flaring.

"You stop stuttering when you're confident." I grinned.

"It's kinda cute." She made a noise like a tea kettle. Did I do that? Well, I sure hope this is a sign that I've made a fae friend. I really don't want to spend another two months here. I've got things to do, places to be. But helping this insecure giant black-and-white fae can't take too long, can it?