10 TWLA 10

"Wait, there's a way back to Earth in there?" Jeremy said.

King smirked. "Every base has a 'hop box'. If it doesn't have one, it ain't a base. Don't think about it too much, though. If you go back before spending some quality time here first, you won't like what they do with you. In your case, you're a lifer anyway, more likely than not.

"If you toed the line and played good pet, the best you could look forward to would be a 'tag and release' breeder. All unknowing, you'd wake up one day dead, living with your kids having been taken from you or thinking they died. The operators would never believe they could trust you to be an employee after dumping you here to die with no training or preparations."

Bitterness and hate like a painful coiling snake in his chest, Jeremy said, "Then why would I do anything for them at all?"

The tyrant looked at him like he was stupid. "Look around you and answer your own damn question. There's only a lot of three things out here. Death, worse than death and things the operators want."

Patience temporarily used up, King put on his 'don't mess with me' face as Rainmaker took over. "It's the carrot or the stick, Blue Jay. I doubt you need me to tell you that they are masters of both. When we get to the human controlled base, expect to have one of each waiting for you."

Any more questions he might have asked were temporarily forgotten as he watched Caesar waving arms in the air crazily. The leaf crowned young man was looking back the way they'd came with a wide smile. All as one, he and the rest of his companions looked back as well.

At the top of the plateau, a deceptively small looking cloud of dust drifted off to one side as a hair strand of something whipped wildly in the air. A gush of grimy black water came out of the cavern entrance. From their distance, it was barely noticeable but up close it would have been a life threatening deluge of disgusting filth. The 'hair', which was probably terrifyingly massive at reaching distance, flailed sluggishly a few more times before falling down.

"Yay! She did it! Never mind visiting, now. It might be a little sad but Scampers is going back home," Caesar said with a sentimental, teary eyed grin.

Rainmaker went pale. "Did I just witness the death of a nightmare!? What... A hundred water conjurers working together couldn't have done that. I don't think ambient magic would even support a movement of power on that scale, that quickly... I would have felt... something through the water in the air."

Caesar said, "Scampers' been working on that for a long-long time! Now the operators will let her work for them and she can go home! She caught it completely off guard and killed it good!"

The leafy crowned young man rambled and hopped around like a fanatic fan boy while Rainmaker secretly gave him a look of sympathetic pity. King tolerated it for awhile as he looked on in grim faced stoicism. After looking between the two veterans, Jeremy patted where the 'dry ball' had been stashed away.

He was new to this world and to magic but he could tell the difference between something controlled and something that wasn't. If anything had survived that, it wasn't something even remotely human. Caesar was right about one thing, though. Scamp had been planning that for quite some time.

As much as he didn't want to, Jeremy handed the 'dry ball' to Rainmaker while Caesar was still lost in his own happy fantasy. "How she did it, I guess. Lots of them. Is there something we can learn and use from this?"

Rainmaker's eyes widened. "Yes. This is what she gave you for saving Caesar? Blue Bird, this is her legacy, a 'how-to' version of whatever it is, exactly. It would have taken a long-long time of deconstructed and reconstructed rune work from operator devices to make this.

"While we travel, keep Caesar occupied. I need to discuss this with King. I don't need to tell you how significant this is or important to not openly talk about with anyone, do I?"

Jeremy tried not to take offense but he was sure it showed a little. "A sock with less than forty bucks in it and a trip to the emergency room taught me that lesson long before I got here. Scamp knew what she was doing when she gave it to me. I just hope I made the right choice."

She looked at Jeremy solemnly. "I promise you. If King tries to treat you unfairly on a contribution this big, he'd have to kill me to keep me from walking away and taking you with me. I really don't think things will turn out that way, though."

Before the man in question came over to check out what the muted conversation was about, she gave him a hand signal.

Curious and eager to be moving, the tyrant said, "Your girlfriend just flushed the world's largest toilet, Caesar. We need to make as much distance from it as we can before The Hush comes."

No one was in a mood to argue with that. There was a feeling of disgust and a more subtle one of danger from being so close to several generations worth of waste and the vile things that might have been living in it. And it wasn't until the plateau wasn't visible to the naked eye anymore, that those feelings began fading away.

During a rest and re-hydration break, a few short times later, that Rainmaker gave Jeremy a meaningful glance. Picking up the intention, he plopped down next to the leafy headed guy. Getting the antsy fellow to stay put was a challenge laid to rest by leaning on his roll as group medic.

Using his new sensory skills, he prodded around Caesar's healing parts as he said, "I'm kind of curious how you got hurt to begin with and why no one followed through. Normally, when someone's out for blood, they don't just stop and stare daggers at you from a distance once you're down."

With a chipper smile, as if he wasn't taking about an incident that he almost died in, the leaf crowned guy said, "It's a game! Every long time where I'm a fast one, I try to snag some stuff from Rose's mulch pile. She let it happen because I was good training for the guardians and I didn't take that much. It was an accident, really.

"Well, I think it was. People were killing each other. Then again, the guardians hate me. They do try to hurt me and they wouldn't care if I died. That's for sure!"

Jeremy said, "Sounds dangerous for a game."

Caesar sat in silence for a bit, then said, "Guess it doesn't matter if I say anymore... It was more than a little firewood or crafting material I was snagging. Unopened flower buds were one of the things Scampers could use for her dry balls."

Jeremy tried to get more out of the guy but Caesar had clammed up on the topic and was getting interested in what was going on with Rainmaker and King. Seeing that it would take a bit more than casual conversation to keep the leafy headed guy's attention, Jeremy swallowed a little dignity and asked, "What's it like? Being with a girl, I mean?"

Caesar's gaze swiveled back to Jeremy. "You're still a virgin?... It feels good but it's kind of scary, kind of weird and kind of boring since I like guys. You'd be better off asking someone like King. He'd probably like talking about that."

The leaf crowned young man laughed at Jeremy's awkward and stunned expression. "Don't feel weird about it, okay? I only see a soft belly pillow when I look at you, alright?"

Suddenly looking sad when Jeremy subconsciously made a little distance and remained tense, Caesar added, "I just want a friend, okay? I just stopped being young inside not too long ago. Until you... are there too, it's easy not to be certain ways around you. It would feel wrong."

Jeremy didn't know how he felt about it anyway. His head was filled with so much to sort out, Caesar's new reveal only registered as something he needed to be wary of but not much else. But, once again, he heard a piece of information his still all too human brain didn't quite grasp.

"This old and young inside business, it seems like you guys can just feel it, like an instinct or something. What's that about?"

Relieved to see that he wasn't being shunned, even if 'Blue Bird' was still tense, the young man was more than happy to explain. "Male plant types feel it way strong and females don't seem to sense it at all. Your inside self is still a baby... sort of. It's not ready to fight for place and be a daddy, okay?

"My inner self tells me that mixing it up with you that way would be way wrong. Doesn't matter if it's serious fighting or... other stuff. It's telling me I should like you and try to be close to you... In a friendly way, alright? But, I probably would want to anyway because 'life saver'!

"Beast types can all notice but girls seem to care a lot more about it than males do. The older girls will gang up and attack males that try to mix it up with a 'young one', though. There's other types too but I don't know anything about them."

Thinking back to his first experiences with Rainmaker and King, Jeremy thought that it checked out and made some sense. It was a bit disturbing that it was all based off the growing non-human element inside. And as Caesar rambled on about some other details on instincts, Jeremy was getting a suspicion that whatever that element was in him, it was neither beast nor plant but he was far from free of a secondary nature developing within.

More an internal musing than a real question, he thought out loud, "I wonder what that second nature comes from. It's possible that it's random coincidence but that doesn't sound right."

Caesar looked at him with wide eyes and said, "You don't know? We were chosen because we had that something inside of us already. This place just...wakes it up and shakes it up."

Rainmaker's chimed in, "Having latent magic potential isn't enough. You have to have a touch of something extra to be sent here... You could be the descendant of some supernatural entity, a victim of a curse or any number of things that gives you a kind of second nature.

"It gives something for the corruption to be attracted and attach itself to. Otherwise, adaptation and survival aren't possible. There are several candidates who are weeded out before they even know what happened to them, returned to the mundane world with a strange story to tell but no real clue what happened to them."

King called an end to their rest stop. There was a faint smile on the man's face and an obvious improvement in mood. He even gave Jeremy a faint shoulder squeeze and shared a few pearls of wisdom here and there on various things. Choosing to volunteer the dry ball to the group was starting to look like it wasn't a bad idea at all.