“What do you mean, ‘So?’! Didn’t you hear me? We’re in a freaking ball! There’s like, geography in every direction!” Rita exclaimed.

“Yes, Rita, that’s Aer,” Gora said, patiently.

“Yes, I know there’s air! What does that have to do with anything?” Rita asked, exasperated.

“No, Aer. That’s what the world is called. A-E-R. And yes, of course it goes all the way around, it’s a hollow. Were you expecting something else?” Gora asked, a curious look on her face.

“A planet?”

Gora and Samual looked at each other.

“What’s a ‘planet’?” Samual asked.

“Big, round thing? Twirls around its axis? Orbits… stuff?” Rita replied, making a circling motion with her finger.

Silence. Samual, Gora and Bob all just stared blankly at her, completely lost.

“We used to have axes on the farm, but my da’ always used to smack us when we played with them,” Bob filled the silence. Nobody even bothered to shut him up.

“No! That’s not…” Rita started, then just groaned and slid down to a seating position.

“Everything you can see out there is the hollow. It’s an empty sphere of air with the sun in the centre. It doesn’t matter where in the hollow you are, down is always towards the outside, which is dirt and rock. That’s the ground you’re walking on,” Gora explained.

Staring up at it had made Rita feel ill. Heck, just thinking about it made her queasy. It was too big. Far too big. Looking up at it gave her the most horrible feeling of vertigo as her brain struggled to properly process the sheer scale.

She took a deep breath to steady herself, focusing her thoughts. “My world is not a hollow. It’s… kind of the reverse,” she began.

Astronomy had never been her best area, but she proceeded to explain the basics of planets and orbits and stars as best she could with what she could vaguely recall from half-remembered tv and internet documentaries.

“So, you have like, millions of suns?” Gora asked in awe.

“No, they’re called stars. And its billions. Trillions possibly, I’m not sure, I can’t remember how many are visible with the naked eye.”

“But you said each of these stars is a sun?” she pressed.

“Well, yeah. Basically,” Rita replied with a shrug. “They’re just far.”

“Just how frigging hot is your world?”

“No, they are really far away. Like, really, really far. You can only see them at night after the sun has set…”

“What’s a ‘night’?” Samual interjected.

Rita stared at Samual. Had her translator just run out of juice again? No, it was still there, tucked into one of her last five socks and she could feel the tingle of it drawing its tiny bit of power from her newfound well. But how could they not know what a ‘night’ was?

“You know, when the sun sets and… it gets… dark…” she began, realizing how stupid that sounded even as she said it. Here, the sun had nowhere to set to! Of course it stayed in the sky all the time! Where else would it go?

But that meant… they did not have nights here. Just eternal daylight.

“Your world gets dark? Like, with no light? The entire world?” Gora asked, aghast. “You have billions of suns yet somehow your world goes dark? Are you sure you’re not from one of the hells? One of the really horrible fringe ones?”

Rita kept trying to explain, but when she started to describe just how far the other stars were, Gora cut her off, saying she was going to give her nightmares.

Which brought on another discussion on how you could have ‘nightmares’ without having ‘night’. Turns out it was one of those weird translation things, and Gora’s word for nightmares translated directly into ‘bad dreams’. There was no concept of night involved, because everyone slept during the ‘day’.

Even their concept of a day was strange. It was a period of time of approximately twenty-five hours, but nobody paid much attention to it. People went to bed when they were tired and woke up when they were rested. And somehow society worked that way.

“Then why do you even have a ‘day’ at all?” Rita asked.

“Well, we have to measure time somehow, right?” Gora guessed, shrugging.

“Average sleep plus wakefulness cycle,” Ava mumbled, barely loud enough to hear. She had been sitting quietly, staring at a point in front of her feet, but apparently, she had been listening in. “Study done two-hundred years ago… word absorbed into language…”

“Hey, Ava. Starting to feel a bit better?” Gora asked.

“Hungry…” was all she murmured.

“Sit tight, I’ll bring you something,” Gora said, getting up to take her and Zaxier some food.

The sight of it made Rita’s stomach growl. She had been so caught up with all the weirdness around her she had not even realized how hungry she was!

It was strange. She had gone more than a day with barely a bite to eat and no real appetite for anything but essence, and now all of a sudden, she was starving for anything BUT essence! Either the big meal of the stuff that she had sucked out of the Tree had kickstarted her digestive system or, more likely, the Tree itself had been doing its magic bullshit that somehow prevented her from getting hungry.

“Er… Gora? Do you still have any of the food left over from the last Campsite?” she called out awkwardly.

Gora shook her head. “Sorry, just gave the last of the dried meat to Ava. You have any more berries, Bob?”

Bob began digging through the pockets of his coverall. “Might have, hold on… ah! Here!” He held out a single partially squashed berry, some of its juices oozing over his fingers. It looked like he had fallen on it at least once and had had to scrape it out of his pocket. It also looked like it had been there a while.

“Ah, no thank you, Bob, I don’t think… I mean… I was rather looking for…” Rita tried to apologetically wave off the offered smear of mouldering goo and berry flesh.

After convincing Bob that his berry was probably not edible anymore and should really be thrown away or it was going to make his tummy hurt, Samual handed her a travel ration from his own backpack, wrapped in some kind of cheap paper. Nothing fancy, just some dry cookie-bread-type things that resembled hard-tack and two pieces of tough, dried fruits.

She had barely started to dig in when something moved among the rubble outside, causing some loose stones to clatter across the ground.

The reaction was immediate. Gora and Samual sprang to their feet before Rita had done more than glance up, weapons almost leaping into their hands.

In a single, smooth motion, Samual tossed the spear that he’d been holding at Rita… who was completely unprepared to catch it. It struck her in the arm and head side-on and clattered across the ground, nearly making her drop her food in the progress.

Glinting in the light of the sun outside stood another of the flat, round cockroach-like creatures that she had seen before. It cocked its head at them, as if it was regarding them with curiosity. The front of its shell looked decidedly sharp, as did its mandibles.

Then Gora took a single heavy, noisy step forward and the big bug turned and ran, disappearing among the buildings in the distance.

Gora grunted as she watched it go. “Nothing’s acting normal anymore since the damn Tree shrivelled.”

Rita quickly picked up the spear that she had dropped. It looked pretty fancy, if a little impractical. The haft was smooth and springy, and perfectly sized for her hands to hold which made it appear a bit on the thin side to properly support itself. The point at the front consisted of two thin, sharpened bands of metal that spiralled around each other before joining together to form the sharpened tip. It looked a little like a corkscrew. It also looked flimsy as hell, like it would break the moment you tried to stab something with it.

“That’s not normal?” she asked, going back to eating.

“Slasher Beetles are usually suicidally aggressive chargers. The moment they spot something they rush it with those razor-sharp shells and mandibles of theirs. But that’s the third monster that poked in here and just ran for it the moment we noticed them. Honestly, they act more like animals than monsters.”

Now that Gora mentioned it, there was no sign of the stream of violent impulses that would usually flood her mind when around the others. If it truly affected the one who was in control between her and Alice and not, say, picking one of them at random, then she should have flown into a murderous rage the moment she had woken up. Instead… nothing.

But if the Tree had been the source of it, then maybe it had stopped when she injured it and made it shrivel up into the ground? If all of the monsters were now suddenly acting without their usual aggression… maybe the only reason they had been so aggressive all along had been the Tree’s mental commands. And the only reason she had managed to avoid it had been… Alice. Because she was broken and had Alice inside her, whenever the Tree tried to exert control, she just sidestepped it by letting the other part of her take control. That was why it had been so adamant to ‘fix’ her; she was not listening to it!

If not for Alice, she would have just been another of these monsters. Maybe one of the more intelligent ones, like the Droopies, but she would never have been able to get close to anyone else without losing her mind. She would have been killed on sight by anyone who passed through. Or, even worse, she might have killed them and come back to her senses in the middle of eating someone!

“That spear of yours is interesting,” Samual remarked, interrupting Rita’s thoughts. “And by interesting, I mean useless.”

Rita glanced up at the spear resting on her shoulders, two of her legs clasping it between their knees to stop it slipping off.

“You gave it to me,” Rita mumbled between bites. She was happy to find she could still chew food normally, despite her two weird extendable teeth.

“I returned it,” he corrected her. “You were holding onto it when I found you after the Tree.”

She was? That was strange. The inside of the Tree had not really been real, but rather some kind of pseudo-real mindspace, at least as far as she understood it now. More of the useless little factoids she didn’t quite understand. She shouldn’t have been able to take things out of it… probably. Besides, the only ‘spear’ she had had in there had been the broken balance bar with the sharp point. This spear looked nothing like it.

“That can’t be right. Are you sure?” she asked before shoving an entire slice of dried… huh, she wasn’t quite sure what this fruit was. Tasted a bit like oranges, but it was yellowish green. Tasty though.

“Did you find a different looking spear inside?” Gora asked, returning from checking up on Ava and Zaxier.

“Not really,” Rita said. “Just the broken half of a pole. I’d hardly call it a spear, even if one side had been sharp-ish.”

“Spirit-weapon,” Gora replied cryptically, before drawing her own blade and held it out to Rita with one hand. “Try it.”

Confused, Rita put aside the last of her meal and carefully took the offered weapon with both hands… and promptly had it crash to the ground the moment Gora let go.

“Holy shit! This thing’s heavy!” Rita exclaimed as she struggled to drag the heavy lump of metal across the concrete, kicking up sparks as she did.

“To me, it’s as light as a feather,” Gora stated as she scooped it up again. “It’s a spirit-weapon, bound to me. If anyone but me attempts to wield it, it’s an overly heavy chunk of slightly sharpened metal. Completely impractical as a sword. But in my hands…”

She swung the blade with the loud ‘whup’ sound of displaced air that stirred the dust on the ground.

“It’s the best sword I’ve ever used, ugly as it is. In the same way, if Samual or I tried to use your spear, I imagine that it will be unable to stab through a sheet of paper. Very rarely, things you take into or find inside the Tree change in some way. Don’t know the specifics, but I know they become bound to you somehow in the process and if anyone else tries to use them, they just suck.”

“I have a magic spear? Cool!” Rita grinned, flipping the spear over and checking it over closely, the ration finished.

Gora shook her head. “Not magic, no. If the Tree gave out magic weapons half the mages in the city would be joining the Delver’s guild and demanding to go in. It’s just… a good weapon. But it doesn’t do anything special. Not like a proper magic weapon. Those are rare as hell and have personalities of their own half the time.”

Wow. Gora’s weapon broke physics and she did not consider that worth calling magic? Just how strong were actual magic weapons?

“So… what can my spear do then?” Rita asked.

“Stab things, most likely,” Samual replied. “But only as well as you can.”

“Well how hard can that be? Pointy end goes in the other guy, right?” Rita grinned and tried to spin the spear in her hands above her head in a flourish.

The back end hit a rock and the sudden jolt made her fumble the spear and drop it. She yelped in pain as it bounced off her head.

“Why do you keep dropping things?” Samual asked with a sigh as he picked up spear and handed it back to her.

“Sorry…” Rita mumbled, rubbing her head. “I frighten easily.”

“And when you get frightened you drop things?”

“Yeah, kinda. I’ve broken three coffee mugs that way,” she admitted sheepishly.

“We will have to break you of that habit then,” he stated as he got up.

“What do you mean?”

“Get up. Time you learned how to fight with a spear,” Samual said.

“But I still have things I want to ask Gora!” Rita complained.

“You can ask once I am sure you won’t kill yourself.”