Izzy Chapter 4: Should Have Seen That Coming, Really (Patreon)

By the time the sun had gone as high as it could be bothered, Izzy was feeling good. Her stomach was full of bugs, grubs, berries and mushrooms, only a few of which had made her feel sick, and she'd found a hollowed out tree where she could sleep. The tree was even close to the brook, so water was no problem. Things were already looking up.

She just wasn't sure how to avoid getting eaten in her sleep.

With any luck one of those vinelings would help with that, so that was what she’d decided to devote the rest of her day to. The description of the spell said that she could use a skeleton or a “similar structure” as the base for it. She was pinning a lot of hope in that second option.

Looking down at her handiwork, she felt quite pleased with herself. On the ground before here were a bunch of sticks of various sizes, which she’d gathered and arranged into a pretty good imitation of a skeleton. At least she thought so. Two sticks for each of the limbs, a long one for the back. A bunch of little ones for the hands and feet. She even had a big piece of bark for the head; she’d drilled eyes in it with her arrowhead.

Yep. Pretty good.

Pointing her staff at the figure she willed vines to come up and wrap around the sticks and make them move. She felt the magic connect to the place where her mana was and—

Nothing.

Izzy scowled furiously and tried again, then a third time. Nothing and nothing! “Stupid sticks!” she hissed. “Stupid magic! Work!” She shook her staff at the sticks, willing the spell to work.

Nothing.

She sat down heavily, legs straight out, and glowered at the sticks. Why hadn't it worked? Why hadn't the mana done its thing? She thought about it, tried to really dig into the memories still floating around in this borrowed body, and something occurred to her.

She checked the gourd on her Summary. It was almost empty.

She huffed apologetically at her pile of sticks and lay back for a while, watching the clouds pass by above as the gourd filled drop by drop by drop. She stretched one arm out straight up, and it didn't pass through the Summary, even though it looked like the thing hung right in front of her. That was weird, but no weirder than shiny squiggles that suddenly meant things when she focused on them, so she ignored it.

She missed clouds. That thought came suddenly and from nowhere. She missed how they felt on her face, cold and wet, as she passed through them. And how pretty they were from above, like fluffy hills.

She missed flying. Being stuck in a grounded mortal body hadn't been so bad when she didn't really remember anything to compare it to.

Lying there, facing the sky, Izzy blew a long, bored raspberry. She then immediately leapt to her feet, sputtering and wiping her face when said raspberry returned to her. Bugger it! Bugger flying and bugger vinelings! She was taking a walk. A walk to clear her head, and let her mana fill up, and maybe find some more mushrooms; of the things she'd done since being stuck in a grounded mortal body, eating was so far her favorite, and that should do wonders for her mood.

She set off along the brook, staff in one hand and broken arrow in the other. The sun continued its journey across the sky. Every so often she’d stop and pick something interesting to eat. She was sure that she’d never eaten as a wind spirit, but Survival and her goblin memories made it easy to spot nice morsels where they grew or crawled, as the case may be.

She played around with her magic, too. She was supposed to be saving up mana, but she was dangerously understimulated, and it was fun! She didn't know what the limits were, but she could make plants grow! Not much, but seeing a green shoot pop out from a tree trunk was absolutely fascinating. It didn't work on mushrooms, which was disappointing, but still!

She could even do it from pretty far away when she used her staff to point at whatever it was, which she put to good use. Scaring the crap out of birds by making a twig grow up their butt was hilarious.

She walked along, making things grow and never straying far from the brook, until she heard something very unexpected. Something that supercharged her curiosity until it overpowered her limited caution and good sense.

In the distance, the sound carried on the wind and just at the edge of hearing, someone was crying.

Izzy’s long ears twitched and twisted, homing in on the direction of the sound, and she followed it without hesitation. It didn’t sound like the giants. It was too high-pitched for that, higher even than her own voice.

As she got closer she realized that the voice wasn’t just crying so much as it was ranting, just in a really high-pitched voice. She couldn’t make out words, but the tone was unmistakable, hurling curses and abuse and cries for help, all mixed with a frustrated anger that had the voice’s owner in tears.

Wow, Izzy thought. Goblin ears are really good!

She snuck closer until she reached a clearing. In the center of the clearing was a magnificent old tree, with a massive trunk that Izzy could have run laps around for exercise and foliage so dense that she couldn’t see past the first layer. The branches hung so low that Izzy thought she might be able to touch them if she reached up on her tippy-toes. Under the tree, and around it for a length or two, nothing else grew. Not a fern, not a flower, not a blade of grass. Not even a single mushroom. Years of the tree’s shed leaves lay thick on the forest floor, choking out anything that might try to take root. And on the carpet of leaves lay little white lumps.

The hollering was coming from somewhere among the tree’s foliage. There was nothing for it. Izzy would have to climb the tree to find out what was making all that noise. And if it wasn’t dangerous, this tree was a lot more interesting than the old, hollow one she’d found. It was so… big!

Curiosity burning in her stomach, Izzy crept forward. The old, dry leaves crunched softly, but she was light on her bare feet, and she was sure that only she could hear it over the voice which just never let up. She’d gotten about a length in under the hanging branches when she tried to lift her foot, and felt something pull it right back down.

She looked down at her foot and tried to lift it again. The whole leafy carpet moved with it, pulling her foot right back down. She lifted her other foot experimentally. Same effect, or lack thereof.

Huh, she though. That’s probably no good.

She was about to try and use her arrowhead to cut her foot loose from the leaves when one of the nearby lumps caught her eye. It wasn’t all white. It was more like a wispy gray, with leaves hanging off it in places. It looked like it was withering away, and the wind had pulled it open to reveal… a pile of bones. About half her own size, if she was any judge.

Oh. That was very bad.

It was right about then that the giant spider dropped on top of her head, knocking her unconscious.

  *

Izzy was, again, rather surprised to wake up at all. She remembered a rustling above her, and looking up to see a nightmare of fuzzy mottled green and brown falling on her. She’d had time to think one word: Spider. Then things went dark.

She found herself waking as one of several targets of a torrent of abuse, and while she could tell that it was in a language she understood, her head was much too wobbly to make any sense of the words.

Part of that was because a spider bigger than herself had dropped on said head, and she might be a little bonk-sick. Another part was probably that she was dangling upside down. She was wrapped up in a cocoon of silk, attached by a thick thread to a branch deep inside the crown of the giant oak.

The cocoon was surprisingly comfortable, supporting her very well as she dangled. The only real discomfort was the blood pooling in her head, and her arm being bent tightly against her chest where she still held her staff.

“...should kick your arse, you bastard! Feck do you get off giving me hope? You too, Sylvana! Bringing another poor shite here and then it’s a thrice-damned goblin! Fecking spider…”

The ceaseless rant was starting to make sense. For one meaning of “sense,” at least. It didn’t say anything very interesting, though, so instead she focused on the new squiggles hanging in the air before her, demanding her attention.

[New Quest: Reclaiming Mother Oak. Reward: Experience and variable.]

[New Task in Quest ‘Reclaiming Mother Oak’: Free yourself!]

[New optional sub-task in Quest ‘Reclaiming Mother Oak’: Free your fellow captives!]

Another Quest! She wasn’t entirely sure what those were — she had no memory of ever having one before waking up the way she was — but she’d finished one before, and it had given her a level and her nice new staff. And freeing herself was something she wanted to do anyway.

Her fellow captives, though…

The abuse was mostly coming from behind her at the moment, but a breeze was making her slowly spin in place. Soon she came around, and there, hanging just a little higher than herself and wrapped up in a ball of silk, was a tiny figure. It wasn’t the only cocooned creature in the tree — Izzy counted a half dozen besides herself — but it was the only one heaping curses on her, or which looked alive at all. All she could really see of it was its face, which was similar to her own but with bigger eyes, smaller, still pointy ears, and a very, very wide mouth which it was putting to good use insulting her, the tree, the spider, someone named “Sylvana,” and pretty much everything in sight as tears ran up its forehead into the hair dangling below it.

“Feck are you looking at, you shite?” the figure spat at her, its red rimmed eyes locking onto her own. “Three days I’ve been here and the fecking spider captures another poor bugger, and is it a human or an elf or anything else that can string together three fecking words to make a sentence? No! It’s a fecking goblin! Oh, don’t be looking at me like you understand a word I’m saying. What, trying to figure out how to get your mucky hands on me so you can pull my wings off? Sod you!”

Izzy was stunned by the tirade. So stunned that she didn’t say a word as she spun around so she was facing away again. Whoever this creature was, it clearly didn’t think much of goblins.

Her cocoon slowly stopped, then reversed its spin, bringing the creature back into view. Its abuse had gotten more general while she was facing away, but now it became directed at her again.

“Coming around for another gawk are we, bugs-for-brains? Well come have a go if you think you’re hard enough!” The figure started thrashing, tear-sodden hair swinging everywhere. “I’ll gnaw yer fecking ears off! I’ll ram that stick up your arse until you taste wood, you—!”

“Hey! Shut up! Shut up for a breath!” Izzy shouted back. “Why’re you so rude?”

The little creature abruptly stopped its tirade, staring at Izzy. It hiccuped, snorted once, hard, and spat straight down. Then it said, in an almost conversational tone, “Oh, it speaks! The greatest goblin genius of the ages, I’ve found, haven’t I?”

Izzy had spun past by then, but blew a raspberry anyway. That young human had been surprised at her talking, too, when she begged for her life. Surprised enough to let her kick him in the nose.

“Maybe I am,” she said as her direction reversed again. “So… you want to get free from here, or what?”

“Of course I fecking want to get out of here! Do you see many ways of making that happen, oh great gobbo genius?”

Izzy looked around.

“Where’s the spider?”

“Buggered off after stringing you up. Dunno where. Might have more trees.”

“Hmm.” She saw her broken arrow on the forest floor, close to the pile of bones. Maybe? She didn’t have any better ideas.

Her mana gourd had filled up another bit. She had no idea if it was enough, but it was more than she'd had the first time.

“When will it be back?”

“Feck do I know? It comes by and drains the web once or twice a day, then goes again. Your fecking luck that it was here for a nibble when you blundered in.”

“Drains the web?” Izzy blinked at the creature. She’d seen the dried out bag of bones on the ground. “It won’t eat us?”

“It’s a fecking mana eater, isn’t it? The web drains our mana, and the spider drains the web. It won’t kill us. It’ll let the thirst do that, stupid bug that it is.”

“Right. Mana eater. Drains our mana. Mm-hmm!”

Izzy checked her gourd again. It was still full about a fifth of the way up. Drops still dripped into it.

She shrugged. “If you say so.”