When Leel’s staff crashed into Matt’s skull, Lucy’s eyes winced shut. When she opened them a second later to see the aftermath, what greeted her eyes was an image of Matt standing up, holding Leel by his robes and lifting him slightly off the ground.
“That hurt, you asshole.” Matt was having trouble being appropriately angry. He had just woken up to find that someone he already wasn’t fond of had hit him in the head with a staff. But his barely awake brain was still in a fogged up state. Still, he was awake enough to feel some anger. He immediately went on to the next appropriate move, slamming his fist into Leel’s nose hard enough to send him sliding across the ground on his back in the opposite direction.
“Matt! You lived!” Lucy exclaimed.
“I did. Listen,” Matt turned his head. His brain was still waking up. “I really don’t want to eat any more of that honey.”
On the ground, Leel’s mana regeneration had apparently ticked over enough to give him another point of mana to pelt Matt with his pest control spell. As Matt approached, the spell pinged meaninglessly off him like bullets off a steel plate. Matt walked up, kicked Leel as hard as he could in the ribs, then bent down and picked him up by his collar like a kitten.
“What should we do with this? I’m all for the ‘chuck him into the trap room’ move.”
“Matt, are you ok? But not yet. The necklace, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” For better or worse, Leel had an enslaved guardian in his jewelry. In Matt's half-dazed state, Lucy had convinced him that job number one for him was to figure out a way to un-enslave it. “I guess if we kill him, it might hurt the guardian. Leel, is that the case?”
Leel turned his bloody face to look at Matt.
“I’m not telling you anything, peasant. How dare you hit…”
Matt slapped him. “Listen, dude. I’m the survival guy from the survival planet.”
He slapped Leel again. “Remember the whole thing you were saying about me being a dirty peasant? Pretend it’s all true. I can hit you a bunch more if I need to, I feel much better now.”
Leel managed to hold out another four or five slaps before caving somewhat. “That’s enough! I’ll talk, Matt. Set me down, so I can face you,” Leel said.
Matt did, keeping his hand wrapped up in the front of Leel’s collar, and his hand cocked back to hit him.
“The answer is, yes, you could kill me. But it wouldn’t help the spirit much. It’s been in there for hundreds of years, Matt. Whatever consciousness it once had is likely long gone. Even if time hadn't done it, the enchantments on the amulet would have.”
Matt and Lucy wilted a bit. They wouldn’t trust Leel at this point, but what he was saying made sense.
“And you can’t just… let it out?” Lucy asked.
Leel laughed, covering his mouth with his hand.
“Me? No, I’m afraid those enchantments were laid down by a much more powerful mage than I. I can’t break them. They're designed to keep the amulet safe and the guardian contained through much, much more severe damage than either you or I could generate. That’s what they're designed for.”
Matt held up his slapping-hand as a threat, hoping to wring a different answer out of his captive. Leel held his hands up defensively before suddenly letting his look of alarm dissolve away into a sick, conniving smile that almost made Matt pull away from him.
“But it’s not, I’m afraid, the only thing they designed for.”
Lucy began to yell for Matt to get back, but before he could react, Leel’s hand dropped to the amulet. Suddenly, Matt’s hands were both empty. Leel was gone.
—
It took Matt a few minutes to fully recover from everything. Once he did, he asked the obvious question.
“So is this like the last guy? Dragged back to his planet, probably?”
“I don’t think so, Matt. No body, for one. And at least we know he didn’t turn invisible.”
Of all the things Matt was currently glad about, he was most glad that he was alive. Somewhere down the list from there, maybe number three or four, was that Leel disappeared at a time when Matt had a hand grasped around his robe. The worst case here was that Leel had teleported to another place on Gaia, which meant that there was a homicidal asshole out there somewhere who had to kill Matt to get home. But since Matt could see a pretty good distance from his house, it did mean that they could probably relax for a little bit.
“I still don’t get how any of this worked, Matt. The bees make magic mana potions? Just… all of the sudden?”
Matt shook his head. “No. At least I don’t think so. But they do compress pollen.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Okay, think of it this way. Why do the plants not, you know, work? Why don't they have mana? They're plants. They need dirt, sunlight, and water. Water is just, you know, a chemical. I’ve drunk a bunch of magic water, and it didn’t hurt me or anything. Dirt is, I’m not claiming to understand the intricacies of dirt, but it’s mostly minerals and dead stuff. Raw materials. And the sun is just energy. The plants grow, so we know that’s working, or at least kind of working. So why don't they have mana?”
“Because you bought them from the estate?”
“Yeah, I thought about that too, but… I can’t imagine that’s the case either, at least by itself. Because the estate system was meant to be used, and who would buy the plants if they were all poisonous? The system wouldn’t want to sell mana-zombie plants, especially since the system seemed to be trying to get these people to trust it.”
“So what’s your theory, then?”
“I think… Okay, stick with me, but imagine that somebody bought a plant for an estate, on a healthy planet. Like Gaia, back before the scourge. We know the system uses energy to do what it does, right? And that it’s lazy. I’m guessing the life it would make wouldn’t be complete all by itself, but that didn’t matter because you were planting it in an environment that were mostly things that weren’t system created. They could probably piggyback off the mana everything else was producing. Or something.”
“And this leads to you randomly eating a flower… how? That was insane.”
“I just thought, Okay, we’ve got these seeds, and in a way, we got them from the Gaians. There wasn’t any way those people were going to use synthetically generated seeds. There’s just no way. Especially when the scourge came from one. Those were Gaian seeds, real ones. They had to be. So if any plant was going to have mana at all, it was going to be those. And if anything at all was going to have mana AND be food, it was the honey.”
“So you used your dying breath to eat monkey honey based on that?”
“Yeah, basically.”
“That’s…” Lucy was, for once, at a loss for words. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard, Matt. I think that’s the dumbest thing anyone has ever heard, anywhere.”
“It worked!”
“Yeah, it did.” Lucy plopped down on the ground, by Matt. “And I guess I’m glad you are okay.”
“Thanks. But, listen, we're not done yet, I’m afraid.”
“No?”
“Nope. There’s work to do. We need more of those seeds.” Matt took a deep breath, and sighed while looking off into the distance. “We have to… cultivate victory.”
“That’s incredibly dumb.”
“Shut up, Lucy. Let me have this.”
—
It turned out that the gift shop would only let Matt take one packet of seeds per trip, and required that he visit at least one exhibit before leaving. Even leaving the exhibits early, this meant each repetition took a few minutes. That was then followed by at least a few minutes of scanning the horizon to make sure that Leel wasn’t sneaking up on them with a refilled mana bar and a chip on his shoulder.
It took hours, but eventually, they had dozens of seed packets. Walking back, digging a few irrigation channels, forking down another mouthful of gross medicinal honey, and scattering the seeds took a few more, but eventually the initial estate plot was almost entirely ringed in by seeds. Where there were gaps, Matt assumed they’d eventually fill in by themselves.
“So what’s the hope here? Just having a ready supply of the flowers for the bees?” Lucy asked.
“That’s the first thing. But it depends on how mana works.” Matt held up three fingers. “The least-good way I can see this working is that just the flowers grow normally, and keep their mana levels stable. That’s good in the sense that we’d get honey, and lots of it, but I’m hoping for more.”
Matt folded down his index finger, leaving two more up. “The second-best scenario is that all the plants just need a little bit of a kick start to get going. And that being around the flowers, maybe getting cross-pollinated with the flowers, will let all the lettuces and fruit trees have their own, stable mana. Basically, they become real, healthy plants.”
“And the third?”
Matt dropped down to one finger. “If we are really going to bring this planet back, that means fixing the overall supply of mana. And I was thinking about that too. Either every lifeless planet that has ever birthed life had a constant amount of mana that was divided among all the life, or…”
Lucy snapped her fingers. “Or life makes a little more mana than it uses, right?”
“Yup. If we are really lucky, this will work in the short term like the mana generator we wanted to buy. And in the long term, like the really long term, if we get enough plants in a cycle it might start to give Gaia the ambient mana it should have anyway. That’s my thought, anyway.”
Lucy scrunched her brow. “Isn’t that also bad in the short term? This gives both the system and that magic asshole more to work with.”
“Yeah, true. But I don’t think we get the luxury of starving them out. This isn’t a problem we solve by playing it safe. We need to prep.”
“Prep how?”
Matt grinned.
“I have some ideas.”
—
Dozens of miles away, Leel was puking.
Any random chimney sweep could teleport, but long-range point-to-point portal-less teleporting was an art. Part of why Leel was proud of the Star of the South was that the emergency teleport built into it was not just functional, it was art. It would work in any kind of weather, in the midst of virtually any kind of non-dimensional attack, and with only minimal input from its user. It wanted to teleport people to places. Work of this caliber came only from the hands of the finest dimensional mages, and Star of the South was a true masterpiece.
Which was all well and good, except that it turned out “works with minimal input from its user” meant that the amulet was getting the minimum energy it needed to work from a small internal store of mana. To work well, it needed mana from the environment.
That it worked at all in this hellhole was a miracle, one that Leel was glad for. But it was definitively a rough ride, and Leel was just short of scrambled like an egg. He was beaten up, cast down, and worst of all, had no access to any of the dozens of magic tricks he knew to deal with just this sort of situation.
Finally, pulling himself together, he reached into his robes to pull out what little cargo he had brought with him to this abysmal place. Off-world quests were rare, but not so rare that wisdom regarding them hadn’t filtered down over the years. Making one’s wishes apparently clear during the process was said to help with whatever equipment one got on an off-planet quest, and it had worked swimmingly here. Sacrificing whatever else the system might have included in his loadout had resulted in exactly what Leel had wanted.
He had his bound amulet, decent if somewhat simple robes befitting a mage, and a fine if not strictly necessary staff to complete the picture. But most importantly, he had paint. A very specific, very affordable variety of arcane paint. Dipping the end of his staff in it, he got to work etching what would end up being a rather large magic circle.
The ambient mana on this planet was shit. There was no nicer way to say it. On a proper world, the array he was drawing would gather enough mana that he’d become a sort of living turret, capable of launching small, medium, and even some larger-scale spells indefinitely without worrying a whit about resource conservation. Here, he’d be lucky if it increased the mana density enough to get him to mid-double-digit levels of mana.
But it would do something. He could work with that.
When Leel’s staff crashed into Matt’s skull, Lucy’s eyes winced shut. When she opened them a second later to see the aftermath, what greeted her eyes was an image of Matt standing up, holding Leel by his robes and lifting him slightly off the ground.
“That hurt, you asshole.” Matt was having trouble being appropriately angry. He had just woken up to find that someone he already wasn’t fond of had hit him in the head with a staff. But his barely awake brain was still in a fogged up state. Still, he was awake enough to feel some anger. He immediately went on to the next appropriate move, slamming his fist into Leel’s nose hard enough to send him sliding across the ground on his back in the opposite direction.
“Matt! You lived!” Lucy exclaimed.
“I did. Listen,” Matt turned his head. His brain was still waking up. “I really don’t want to eat any more of that honey.”
On the ground, Leel’s mana regeneration had apparently ticked over enough to give him another point of mana to pelt Matt with his pest control spell. As Matt approached, the spell pinged meaninglessly off him like bullets off a steel plate. Matt walked up, kicked Leel as hard as he could in the ribs, then bent down and picked him up by his collar like a kitten.
“What should we do with this? I’m all for the ‘chuck him into the trap room’ move.”
“Matt, are you ok? But not yet. The necklace, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” For better or worse, Leel had an enslaved guardian in his jewelry. In Matt's half-dazed state, Lucy had convinced him that job number one for him was to figure out a way to un-enslave it. “I guess if we kill him, it might hurt the guardian. Leel, is that the case?”
Leel turned his bloody face to look at Matt.
“I’m not telling you anything, peasant. How dare you hit…”
Matt slapped him. “Listen, dude. I’m the survival guy from the survival planet.”
He slapped Leel again. “Remember the whole thing you were saying about me being a dirty peasant? Pretend it’s all true. I can hit you a bunch more if I need to, I feel much better now.”
Leel managed to hold out another four or five slaps before caving somewhat. “That’s enough! I’ll talk, Matt. Set me down, so I can face you,” Leel said.
Matt did, keeping his hand wrapped up in the front of Leel’s collar, and his hand cocked back to hit him.
“The answer is, yes, you could kill me. But it wouldn’t help the spirit much. It’s been in there for hundreds of years, Matt. Whatever consciousness it once had is likely long gone. Even if time hadn't done it, the enchantments on the amulet would have.”
Matt and Lucy wilted a bit. They wouldn’t trust Leel at this point, but what he was saying made sense.
“And you can’t just… let it out?” Lucy asked.
Leel laughed, covering his mouth with his hand.
“Me? No, I’m afraid those enchantments were laid down by a much more powerful mage than I. I can’t break them. They're designed to keep the amulet safe and the guardian contained through much, much more severe damage than either you or I could generate. That’s what they're designed for.”
Matt held up his slapping-hand as a threat, hoping to wring a different answer out of his captive. Leel held his hands up defensively before suddenly letting his look of alarm dissolve away into a sick, conniving smile that almost made Matt pull away from him.
“But it’s not, I’m afraid, the only thing they designed for.”
Lucy began to yell for Matt to get back, but before he could react, Leel’s hand dropped to the amulet. Suddenly, Matt’s hands were both empty. Leel was gone.
—
It took Matt a few minutes to fully recover from everything. Once he did, he asked the obvious question.
“So is this like the last guy? Dragged back to his planet, probably?”
“I don’t think so, Matt. No body, for one. And at least we know he didn’t turn invisible.”
Of all the things Matt was currently glad about, he was most glad that he was alive. Somewhere down the list from there, maybe number three or four, was that Leel disappeared at a time when Matt had a hand grasped around his robe. The worst case here was that Leel had teleported to another place on Gaia, which meant that there was a homicidal asshole out there somewhere who had to kill Matt to get home. But since Matt could see a pretty good distance from his house, it did mean that they could probably relax for a little bit.
“I still don’t get how any of this worked, Matt. The bees make magic mana potions? Just… all of the sudden?”
Matt shook his head. “No. At least I don’t think so. But they do compress pollen.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Okay, think of it this way. Why do the plants not, you know, work? Why don't they have mana? They're plants. They need dirt, sunlight, and water. Water is just, you know, a chemical. I’ve drunk a bunch of magic water, and it didn’t hurt me or anything. Dirt is, I’m not claiming to understand the intricacies of dirt, but it’s mostly minerals and dead stuff. Raw materials. And the sun is just energy. The plants grow, so we know that’s working, or at least kind of working. So why don't they have mana?”
“Because you bought them from the estate?”
“Yeah, I thought about that too, but… I can’t imagine that’s the case either, at least by itself. Because the estate system was meant to be used, and who would buy the plants if they were all poisonous? The system wouldn’t want to sell mana-zombie plants, especially since the system seemed to be trying to get these people to trust it.”
“So what’s your theory, then?”
“I think… Okay, stick with me, but imagine that somebody bought a plant for an estate, on a healthy planet. Like Gaia, back before the scourge. We know the system uses energy to do what it does, right? And that it’s lazy. I’m guessing the life it would make wouldn’t be complete all by itself, but that didn’t matter because you were planting it in an environment that were mostly things that weren’t system created. They could probably piggyback off the mana everything else was producing. Or something.”
“And this leads to you randomly eating a flower… how? That was insane.”
“I just thought, Okay, we’ve got these seeds, and in a way, we got them from the Gaians. There wasn’t any way those people were going to use synthetically generated seeds. There’s just no way. Especially when the scourge came from one. Those were Gaian seeds, real ones. They had to be. So if any plant was going to have mana at all, it was going to be those. And if anything at all was going to have mana AND be food, it was the honey.”
“So you used your dying breath to eat monkey honey based on that?”
“Yeah, basically.”
“That’s…” Lucy was, for once, at a loss for words. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard, Matt. I think that’s the dumbest thing anyone has ever heard, anywhere.”
“It worked!”
“Yeah, it did.” Lucy plopped down on the ground, by Matt. “And I guess I’m glad you are okay.”
“Thanks. But, listen, we're not done yet, I’m afraid.”
“No?”
“Nope. There’s work to do. We need more of those seeds.” Matt took a deep breath, and sighed while looking off into the distance. “We have to… cultivate victory.”
“That’s incredibly dumb.”
“Shut up, Lucy. Let me have this.”
—
It turned out that the gift shop would only let Matt take one packet of seeds per trip, and required that he visit at least one exhibit before leaving. Even leaving the exhibits early, this meant each repetition took a few minutes. That was then followed by at least a few minutes of scanning the horizon to make sure that Leel wasn’t sneaking up on them with a refilled mana bar and a chip on his shoulder.
It took hours, but eventually, they had dozens of seed packets. Walking back, digging a few irrigation channels, forking down another mouthful of gross medicinal honey, and scattering the seeds took a few more, but eventually the initial estate plot was almost entirely ringed in by seeds. Where there were gaps, Matt assumed they’d eventually fill in by themselves.
“So what’s the hope here? Just having a ready supply of the flowers for the bees?” Lucy asked.
“That’s the first thing. But it depends on how mana works.” Matt held up three fingers. “The least-good way I can see this working is that just the flowers grow normally, and keep their mana levels stable. That’s good in the sense that we’d get honey, and lots of it, but I’m hoping for more.”
Matt folded down his index finger, leaving two more up. “The second-best scenario is that all the plants just need a little bit of a kick start to get going. And that being around the flowers, maybe getting cross-pollinated with the flowers, will let all the lettuces and fruit trees have their own, stable mana. Basically, they become real, healthy plants.”
“And the third?”
Matt dropped down to one finger. “If we are really going to bring this planet back, that means fixing the overall supply of mana. And I was thinking about that too. Either every lifeless planet that has ever birthed life had a constant amount of mana that was divided among all the life, or…”
Lucy snapped her fingers. “Or life makes a little more mana than it uses, right?”
“Yup. If we are really lucky, this will work in the short term like the mana generator we wanted to buy. And in the long term, like the really long term, if we get enough plants in a cycle it might start to give Gaia the ambient mana it should have anyway. That’s my thought, anyway.”
Lucy scrunched her brow. “Isn’t that also bad in the short term? This gives both the system and that magic asshole more to work with.”
“Yeah, true. But I don’t think we get the luxury of starving them out. This isn’t a problem we solve by playing it safe. We need to prep.”
“Prep how?”
Matt grinned.
“I have some ideas.”
—
Dozens of miles away, Leel was puking.
Any random chimney sweep could teleport, but long-range point-to-point portal-less teleporting was an art. Part of why Leel was proud of the Star of the South was that the emergency teleport built into it was not just functional, it was art. It would work in any kind of weather, in the midst of virtually any kind of non-dimensional attack, and with only minimal input from its user. It wanted to teleport people to places. Work of this caliber came only from the hands of the finest dimensional mages, and Star of the South was a true masterpiece.
Which was all well and good, except that it turned out “works with minimal input from its user” meant that the amulet was getting the minimum energy it needed to work from a small internal store of mana. To work well, it needed mana from the environment.
That it worked at all in this hellhole was a miracle, one that Leel was glad for. But it was definitively a rough ride, and Leel was just short of scrambled like an egg. He was beaten up, cast down, and worst of all, had no access to any of the dozens of magic tricks he knew to deal with just this sort of situation.
Finally, pulling himself together, he reached into his robes to pull out what little cargo he had brought with him to this abysmal place. Off-world quests were rare, but not so rare that wisdom regarding them hadn’t filtered down over the years. Making one’s wishes apparently clear during the process was said to help with whatever equipment one got on an off-planet quest, and it had worked swimmingly here. Sacrificing whatever else the system might have included in his loadout had resulted in exactly what Leel had wanted.
He had his bound amulet, decent if somewhat simple robes befitting a mage, and a fine if not strictly necessary staff to complete the picture. But most importantly, he had paint. A very specific, very affordable variety of arcane paint. Dipping the end of his staff in it, he got to work etching what would end up being a rather large magic circle.
The ambient mana on this planet was shit. There was no nicer way to say it. On a proper world, the array he was drawing would gather enough mana that he’d become a sort of living turret, capable of launching small, medium, and even some larger-scale spells indefinitely without worrying a whit about resource conservation. Here, he’d be lucky if it increased the mana density enough to get him to mid-double-digit levels of mana.
But it would do something. He could work with that.
