Epic 254 (Patreon)

Hey wonderful people! You all looking great, did anyone mention that today?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tdY0uNtkzj8oNjCuf5lzMoyM5Cm6KGl9om5oQyk2ejk/edit?usp=sharing

The house was normal looking, some windows, a slanted roof, a welcome mat that looked homemade, and just enough overhang to make it look welcoming.

The issue was the fact it was attached to what could only be described as a lethal forest fenced in by some very thin brick walls.

A bird flew overhead, and a treetop peeled like a fruit from the tip to reveal a lamprey-like maw, and it made a quick snack of the creature a moment later in a puff of feathers.

Beta had been around trees, more than she ever wanted to, but this was a different kind of nature.

Yggdrasil had a veneer of trying to be a tree, an image he craved so badly he refused to change even if it might help his goals be achieved faster. It was why he likely needed slaves like Beta to do his bidding.

The desire to be a tree for so caked into that mad god’s mind that any hint of change was impossible.

This place looked like it didn’t care what you thought it should be, only that you should come a little closer, just enough for a bite or two. Beta tried not to let her bias against nature turn her away from a potential source of information as she knocked on the door.

It only took a few seconds for someone to answer.

A girl, not much older than how Beta presented her own form, opened the door with a strange sleepy quality to her. Her brown hair had streaks of green, changing texture at the tips where they began to blossom into floors. Patches of her skin also had the hint of turning dark like a tan, shifting to a bark-like texture.

But despite the eerie resemblance to the people Yggdrasil had infected around his tree, this girl had none of the malice or emptiness.

For a moment they just stared at each other, Beta out of awkwardness and the girl out of curiosity.

“You Dabberghast?” Beta grunted finally, and the girl nodded.

She didn’t look much at a glance, but Beta was the best example that looks didn’t really mean squat.

“You’re a druid?” Beta asked, and the girl nodded again, looking amused.

“Listen, sorry to barge in and all that stuff, but I need to talk to you. Mila, the hag, mentioned you had something going on with a tree?” Beta asked, and the girl nodded again, looking pleased that she was becoming so useful.

Weird, but Beta wasn’t going to throw stones.

“I wanna talk about how to help you. What’s your name or do you go by Dabberghast always?” Beta asked and the girl thought about it then shrugged.

Beta stared.

“Are you shy?” she asked, feeling like she was being the chatty one, and it wasn’t a feeling she loved if she was being absolutely honest. Holding conversations was not her strength.

Gamma tended to do that and Miss D had… well, she talked and you sort of wanted to join in.

Alpha was like Beta, which is why the tended to stand each other.

The girl, still amused, shook her head and opened her mouth. A moment later, wind whispered out, the sound of branches and leaves rustling in a dance turned to sound, a creak of wood as seasons passed, and eventually, the barest hint of shade protecting one from the sun.

“You speak tree,” Beta guessed, searching her monster library for something that might have the same skill.

She hadn’t absorbed any actual tree monsters. She hadn’t really considered why before, but it was likely because the old tree didn’t want her developing a taste for his kind.

The closest she had was some plants, and they used pollen to communicate…

“Do you,” Beta pointed with exaggerated hand gestures, “plan to go,” she walked on the spot with stomping feet, “kill,” she mimed stabbing someone before having to think then stood with her arms out in a t-shape,”a tree?” she finished.

Dabberghast stared, eyebrow raised before she pointed to her throat with a sharp slice but then to her ears with a thumbs up, her own expression turning exasperated.

Beta made her own flesh refuse the urge to flush around her own ears in embarrassment.

“Who is at the door, honey tree?” a man called and someone with a shaggy appearance appeared, holding a foaming bottle of something that sparked in the open air.

“Oh, hello,” he said, befuddled at the appearance of someone.

“I’m here to talk to Dabberghast, we just hit a few roadblocks,” Beta said, and the man blinked once behind his glasses.

“Which Dabberghast?” he questioned, sounding puzzled. 

“The one involved with trees,” Beta said quickly, arms crossing as she nodded to the lethal garden behind the house.

“...Which Dabberghast?” the man repeated, squinting.

“Uh, Mila mentioned she might want to kill a tree,” Beta said, feeling like she had done some assumptions and not enough questions at the time.

“Oh, my thorned sunflower! My beloved poisoned apple tree!” the man brightened, looking smitten with something at the mere thought of it. His face melted into a dazzling smile like Beta had reminded him of something so beautiful he was changed forever by it.

Beta leaned back like it might be infectious.

“I’m Kota Dabberghast, by marriage, and this is my daughter, Yige. She’s between lifestyles at the moment and isn’t speaking, but she’s quite hard to ignore,” he praised, pulling his daughter in, the resemblance undeniable, for a tight embrace that the girl endured with a look of suffering.

“You like your family,” Beta said, trying not to grimace.

“Of course! I’ll kill for my family, and have done,” Kota said before his face turned to something with a hint of danger that made Beta tense.

“I’ll tolerate no danger to my loved onces. Even a god who wanted my children learned that when I turned her into ingredients for a potion and bottled her arrogance,” the man said and Beta stared.

“I like you,” she decided. Anyone who committed deicide was alright in her book.

There was only one god allowed, and it was the one who didn’t even want to be one seriously.

They invited her in and the home was far warmer than Mila and Ruli’s. First, there was lest dead things mounted on the walls, another was life grew in any space available without overtaking the house. Plants and herbs of all sorts grew in pots, cracks near the window, and curled up along the staircase railing.

A hole in the kitchen stood out as the Dabberghasts had put a sign above it called ‘Feed Mimi’.

Kota offered her so many types of drinks it was like he was a nonalcoholic bartender.

“You made all those?” Beta asked as he opened more cupboards to show rows upon rows of bottles that looked personally labelled and corked. One part of the kitchen had a large metal door with a padlock on it, and to Beta’s enhance sense of smell, she smelled more exotic and dangerous brews out of sight.

“I was an alchemist by trade, but then I was kicked out of the guild for ‘crimes against ‘all gods’. It was just one little bottling incident really, but all the same! They can take the alchemist out of the lab, but they can’t… no wait that doesn’t work,” Kota paused, looking like he might wander off in a daze for a moment.

“They can remove the title, but they cannot remove the passion,” someone offered with fondness as the backdoor opened, showing an older woman with striking eyes that Yige also possessed. The woman pulled off gloves, showing a mix of soil and what looked like blood in equal measure like she had been fertilizing with a whole animal, not just its waste.

She was taller than her husband with more the stature of someone who aged well. Her husband was stick-like, like a wind might knock him over, the woman was stout like she would endure a hurricane.

Kota had made Beta a little tense for a moment, but it passed. Yige offered no feeling of danger, but this woman, this Dabberghast, made every piece of Beta go rigid with tension.

She felt intimately familiar, the energy that Yggdrasil had used until recently, that feeling of nature that he brute forced with his divinity. This woman wielded it like they were two-halves of the same coin, but under that was a predator, a very old and wise beast that allowed the tenderness of family to soften her edges.

A dragon of twigs and soil, relaxed with no reason to be a force of such deviation unless it was her intention.

Beta felt like Durence was filled with people like this.

Ancient monsters playing bingo or gossiping with nothing better to do.

“Kota, can you take the kids out for a trip. I and this young one need to chat,” the Dabberghast matriarch said to her partner who looked at her with no words spoken.

The woman looked back, relaxed and a little mischievous.

“Be careful, my love, you know how you like to poke people,” Kota said but kissed his wife on the cheek before leaving with his silent daughter in tow.

Yige looked back and gave a thumbs up near her ears, smile teasing.

Beta deserved that, but she wouldn’t admit it.

Now alone with the woman, some of the warmth of the home seemed to leave when Dabberghast’s family left the building, like the two ideas were linked.

“You hide it well, but there is a touch on you, I know well. My name is Holly Dabberghast and you… would you like to take a walk in my garden?” Dabberghast asked, smile small and yet the heaviest thing in the room.

“Will it let me walk out as myself?” Beta asked, not finding the idea of being swallowed by another over eager wild flower that exciting.

“You might lose some skin, but I don’t touch souls. Those are private,” Dabberghast said, voice thin like barbed wire.

Beta stared then stood.

“Let’s talk,” she agreed finally.

---

Prim was well aware of Delta and Nu plotting to finish the 4th floor, but she personally had little investment until Delta began to make it weird.

Or connected it to its natural conclusion, the Fishgeon.

The battleground sprawled out before her senses, as a Menu, she could grasp most of the place all at once, but she didn’t use this kind of power when she was personally down there, hunting down humans who thought they were the hottest thing since nuclear fission.

Most of the time, Prim was just enchanted by the tricks and ingenuity of people who ‘got’ the battleground. Ideas of ambushes, new outcomes that shifted the way every other warrior attuned themselves to.

Like an invisible force of change and power that she herself couldn’t spot, but obviously had impact on everyone involved.

A metaphorical force, she supposed.

A meta-force, if Prim felt affectionate.

The current focus of the meta-force was stealth archer ambush tactics, people fighting over the crow nests or the masts in attempt to become aerial death bringers.

Not Prim’s favorite method, which was why she mostly stayed out of recent matches, making her reputation spread, people thinking she had something planned.

They weren’t wrong, but it was amusing.

Prim was just putting the finishing touches on a new weather system that would make most of the snipers struggle to hit their own feet, let alone a target across the field, when she felt the battleground strain to accept a new fighter.

The mana levels of each person were a sort of indicator of a person’s experience, the largest didn’t always mean the strongest, but if it was large and refined, it stood out immediately.

A man with a fluttering open jacket showing a deeply scarred torso warped into the space, looking around the place with utter disinterest, an expression that made Prim seethed for a reason she didn’t name.

The look that said ‘what was this garbage?’ was clear on the fighter’s face, but Prim didn’t see a weapon on him. He took a few steps in as other players moved about, getting into the usual positions. The man looked around, still giving off that bored expression.

An arrow flew at his neck and Prim leaned into watch him vanish in a burst of light, but a moment later the arrow landed, barely breaking the skin, the light wound hissing over immediately with immense regeneration.

“I was expecting warriors… not cowards,” the man declared, raising one of his legs before he brought it down in a show of force, the impact splitting the ship deck below him in a massive split, the tear racing towards one of the masts which rapidly toppled over, sending three fighters to their fall, each vanishing in a flash of light as the impact was deemed lethal enough.

If Prim had eyes, they would be dilating.

The Meta-force was changing, dragged by a force that could grasp its ethereal chains. This man dragged it to himself with little effort and, even worse, little respect.

Prim enjoyed when the force slithered and evolved, but this felt like a chain, a collar being shackled onto her battleground by power alone.

Not even skill or tactics, brute strength.

Prim began to load her automaton body into the battleground, the demon smith had made it to be durable and strong, but this would its real test.

Would Prim be strong enough to pull the meta-force back into its natural position or had she finally met something that simply didn’t budge?

Prim thought about it.

Nah, she’d win.

Then she’d run her favorite game on his shattered pride.  

It ran on everything, after all.