Chapter 30: Not exactly an eyelid

By the time Sean woke up, it was already well into the morning. He didn’t even remember falling asleep. He had been fully planning on recovering his wind and doing something, anything to make himself more secure. Apparently, he had been a bit more nappish than he thought. But the fact that he was still alive was a great sign.

Best laid plans, I guess. What is this place? Sean thought, rising to his feet. The area he found himself in was what he thought of as a grove, in that there wasn’t much in the way of underbrush. But where Q  most groves were intentional, man-planted things like orchards or groups of trees in parks, this was different. It wasn’t manicured, or even cut in a way that he could tell.

Everything in the area was growing naturally, just in a way that somehow still felt planned, like an expert in feng shui had done their very best with a “wild plants” options in an environment-building simulator. Sean wouldn’t have bet his life on saying that the grove was designed, but it was pleasant in a way the rest of the forest wasn’t. That implied at least some choices had been made in its design.

Sean looked at his two weapons, and opted to arm himself with the Mystereamer as he walked through the grove. The trash compactor had it beat dead to rights when it came to absolute damage output, but it had a pretty long ramp-up time, all things considered. If he was going to be ambushed, he wanted a weapon he could come into play pretty quickly.

Sean wandered over to where the bears had stood last night, looking for any footprints they might have left. There were none. That didn’t surprise him. The system had said, mysteriously, that they were not quite real, and he believed it. Their names even included the word ghastly, and he didn’t think that only applied to the almost literal ghosts that popped out of them.

Not that he wanted to, but there would be no tracking them unless he got super-smell powers, or something of that nature.

The grove was home to a surprising number of fruit plants, mostly in the form of bushes holding various kinds of berries. Sean was more of an inside kid, but he had enough local knowledge to know that at least a few of them were poisonous. There were a few others that he thought he remembered were edible, but gave them up as he slowly surveyed the grove. The last thing he needed right now was an upset stomach, and he still had some rabbit left in his pack that should get him through most of the day.

The source of the luminescence he had seen the night before wasn’t visible. He supposed some plants might glow when they were overpowered by normal daylight conditions, but for the most part, everything looked like normal trees, bushes, and weeds. There was nothing that stood out as abnormal, besides the general nice arrangement he had already noted.

That was at least true as far as plants went, anyway. The center of the grove was interesting in a firmly non-botanical way all on its own. The ground there was raised in a large almost cylindrical shape, with a steep cliff-like drop off on one end, a ramping section with a shallower grade on the other, and rounded sides. It looked like someone had taken a giant Tootsie Roll, hit one end with a hammer, planted a few ferns in it, and called it a day.

Sean glanced around. Shaped mounds of dirt were suspicious. He didn’t have much experience with them, but they had to mean something. At the same time, the mound was the size of a full-sized touring bus, so getting a better sense of what had made it might just save his life. If nothing else, he’d get a good view of the surrounding area and maybe find something to hunt.

Sean went to the flattened, ramplike end and clambered up, marvelling once again at how much better DEX improved his climbing speed. There weren’t any obvious interesting features to the terrain except for its overall weird shape, no mutant gophers busting out to bite his legs or other dangers he could see. The tall edge of the hill was a bit higher than he had thought, not quite clearing the treetops, but still affording him a good view of the surrounding area.

The grove didn’t seem to have many animals in it, and likely no animals of the “are going to attack him and kill him” variety. He could hear some very conventional-sounding birds, but that was it. The next question in his mind was getting out of the forest entirely, and to do that he needed to know where the borders of it were.

Pumping as much power as he could into his legs, he made a big jump upwards to get a better vantage point. It was a massive failure. He could jump a lot higher than before, but it was far from superhuman. It made no sense that for all his improvements in movements thanks to DEX, his jumping ability was still so limited. After a few tries, he came up with a theory that jumping long distances or very high was a function of his STR rather than DEX.

On his best jump, Sean got about five feet into the air, but nowhere near far enough to see over the trees. Landing hard, he sighed. He’d have to backtrack to his tent and then start his hike through the forest again. Eventually, he’d find a way.

“Excuse me.”

A loud voice rumbled out in the area around Sean with a tone so full of bass, it vibrated the hill itself.

“Uh…” Sean gripped his knife tight and readied himself for combat, trying not to look entirely aggressive as he did so. “Hello. Yes. With whom am I speaking?”

“Cedarhelm. And while I hate to disturb your surveying, I feel compelled to point out that the area you are jumping up and down on is what amounts to my eyelid.”

Sean looked uneasily at the ground beneath his feet. It looked like dirt.

“Your… eyelid?”

“Well, not exactly an eyelid, I suppose. I don’t exactly have eyes in the sense you’d expect. But yes, it’s something like that. It’s the closest I can approximate using language.”

Sean did his best not to freak out. Whatever was talking to him, it hadn’t attacked him yet, a delay that, in the context of the last several days of his life, was an outright novelty. Given that it also seemed like a bad idea to start fights with baritones who were able to successfully conceal themselves while still carrying on a conversation, he wasn’t eager to get the violence festivities started just yet.

“Um, yeah, no problem.” Sean carefully sidestepped a few feet away from where he had been standing, hoping that would clear the area that the voice was referencing. “No more jumping at all up here, I promise.”

“Are you sure? The rest of me isn’t nearly as sensitive. I wouldn’t mind if you did so where you are standing now.”

“It’s not a problem. I couldn’t get high enough to see what I wanted to, anyway.” It was only sort of a lie. Under normal circumstances, Sean probably would have taken several more tries at seeing anything he could, but the voice didn’t need to know that.

“Ah, I see. Trying to see the edge of the forest, are you?”

“Something like that. But, listen, Cedarhelm? I hate to interrupt…”

The voice laughed. “But what am I? I was wondering when you’d ask. Jump down, if you could.”

He didn’t have to ask twice. As the ground shifted beneath his feet, Sean jumped off the edge of the hill formation, landing lightly on the ground below and taking a few large bouncing strides away from it. He then turned back, now trying especially hard to look harmless and friendly. Even though he just reached level 10, odds were that he was nowhere near the fighting capabilities of his new acquaintance.

As he watched, the formation shook, shedding dirt off the sides and dislodging a few unfortunate shrubs. The hill deformed up and out, like it was taking a big breath, then settled back down. And before Sean was the same great and terrible hill as before, but alive.

“There. Impressive, am I not?”

“Well, yes, I… Haven’t seen anything quite like it, Cedarhelm.”

The hill’s laughter rang out again, much louder this time.

“I apologize, my little human friend. I couldn’t resist it. There’s no need to pretend. I should be open to inspection now, however. When I’m dormant for too long, it masks it.”

True to the hill’s word, its system description popped up almost immediately

Cedarhelm, Dragon of the Forest (Level 156 Elite Entrance Contribution)

Somewhere farther away than you can imagine is a sea of trees so vast it covers the entire surface of a planet. No saw cuts at them, and no ax bites into their bark. They are protected, as safe in their native soil as a baby is asleep in its crib, watched over by loving parents.

To the trees, Cedarhelm is part father, part mother. He is half guard, and half gardener. He and the other dragons of his world work tirelessly to ensure the health and happiness of the forest. Or, at least, they did. Cedarhelm, as you have probably guessed, is a bit far from home these days.

Sean’s mind tried and failed to contain the sheer implications of a level 156 elite. After flubbing the conversion to understand it numerically, his mind returned to a vague, qualitative answer to the question of how he should feel about it. It wasn’t much, but “be very frightened” would have to do for now.

“You don’t… I don’t really know how to say this. You don’t look much like how my culture imagined dragons to be.”

“Did your culture imagine many dragons of the earth?”

“No, not really. I’ve seen a few pictures here and there, mostly dragons with wings.”

“I’m that, if not shaped exactly like an animal meant for flight, as wind and fire dragons are. One moment. This might help.”

As Sean looked on, the front of the hill morphed a bit, the dirt contouring to more reptilian proportions, and then splitting around the mouth to reveal a maw full of massive, razor-sharp stone teeth. It was terrifying, and Sean jerked back from it in fear. The thing could eat him in one bite if it wanted to. Then, just as quickly as the hill had changed, it changed back, settling back down into a mundane mound of earth.

“Oh, don’t look like that. I’m not going to eat you. I don’t know what you think I’d even get out of it, honestly.”

“A meal?”

“I’m from a planet of plants, young one. I photosynthesize. And for all its failings, this planet has wonderfully rich soil. I’m just fine without snacks.”

Sean took a deep breath. There wasn’t much of a chance that he could successfully run away. And even if he did, there were horrors like the Ghastly Bear still in the forest. For the moment, his best course of action seemed to be just accepting that he couldn’t change much about the situation and taking the dragon at its word.

“So…” Sean scrapped his brain for conversation topics. “What’s this entrance contribution title about? That’s a new one for me.”

“Oh, you know. The rich young sons of rich young tyrants want to get into a dying planet, and the system doesn’t want to let them in. How do you suppose they bribe it?”

“I don’t know. I’m guessing you?”

“That’s right. They capture a being, the higher the level the better, and propose to the system that it might save quite a bit of work if it doesn’t have to create an entire me whole cloth from scratch.”

The more Sean heard about this particular brand of space nepotism, the less and less he liked the offworlders. And considering that they had tried to kill both him and one of the very few friends he had, that was saying something.

“So they just nabbed you off your planet and sold you? Just like that?” Sean was pissed. “Just so their kids could attend some kind of fucked-up battle college?”

“Something like that.”

“I’m really starting to hate these bastards.”

“You and me both, little friend. You and me both.”