Manning.

The sylva that now called my forest home was an interesting creature. Ash had told me time and time again that the sylva was not a fairy, but watching the way she interacted with the forest and the wanderers around her, I’m not sure I buy it.

At first she was a very shy creature and would flee to her pear tree whenever I had guests, which wasn’t super often, but that gradually changed. Since she’d arrived she got more accustomed to the forest travelers and wandered farther and farther from the dungeon clearing each day, usually with Rocky in tow. That was the name we were going with. His reception to the name was… strange. He looked a bit confused but he got used to it eventually. It was a good name, when I first created the hedgehog mutant I was convinced it was dumb as a sack of rocks.

Anyways, she had been getting more and more brash as the days past. Brash might not be the best adjective, but definitely puckish in an almost-malicious way. Her current activity was a really good example actually.

“Come on, Sarah. It’s really fun and nothing bad has happened to any of us so far.” Roger, that damnable Roger. He was one of the teenagers that had moved in with the flourishing village that popped out outside of my forest. He and his friends had a particular habit of doing stupid things like peeing in the homes of my hedgehogs or defecating in the homes of my hedgehogs or, well they just did various cruel things to the hedgehogs. Today he was trespassing with a new face for me, a young girl named Sarah with a likeable face and blonde hair.

“I don’t know, Roger. I’ve seen the dwarves smoking plants in the tavern before, and they always seemed a little out of it. The forest can be dangerous and I don’t think we should be doing this.” Smart kid.

“Sarah. Even if the dwarves were smoking something bad, and they aren’t, it isn’t the ivy. The ivy is a completely different beast, it’s like a fairy leaf or something.” As he spoke he ripped a vine of multicolored ivy off the side of stoic oak tree. I’d grown the ivy with a slight hallucinogenic property to punish people who foolishly tried to climb trees or camp in bad spots. I hadn’t foreseen the human habit of consuming or smoking everything they could get their eyes on. “Sweet, red and burgundy today, love this strain.” The obnoxious kid held up his homemade, forestmade?, cigarette of toxic ivy wrapped in corn husk with an unhealthy gleam in his eye.

“I don’t know, Roger. Where are Derik and Hank anyways?” Sarah walked toward the edge of the path as if she were going to leave and head back to town. Roger, not wanting to lose his chance to get closer to the girl he was pursuing romantically (I assume), set his cigarette down and followed her to try and convince her to stay.

Naturally that was when the Sylva struck. She and Rocky had been hiding in one of the branches of nearby trees watching the kids since they arrived. She fluttered down while Roger was busy trying to console Sarah and unwrapped the cigarette. Seemingly out of nowhere the impish nature spirit produced a very fine mince of the hottest pepper I’d managed to cultivate within my forest and spread it out throughout the cigarette before re-wrapping it and escaping into the trees.

Had I not been watching for it the whole time, I would have missed it in a blink of an eye. Good thing I don’t blink. The only visible sign she’d been there was the wrapping itself, she was much better at rolling a corn husk than the shit-for-brains child.

“No, seriously. Look I won’t make you smoke it, Sarah, and Derik and Hank will be here any minute. Let's just wait for them.” Roger walked back over to his cigarette and plucked it off. After blowing on it for a second he rubbed it under his nose and took a whiff. If I had lungs I would have been holding my breath, but luckily he was just as dense as he looked. “Man I’m good. Getting better at rolling these things every day.”

Sarah had visibly calmed down at this point and both of the kids were leaning on trees waiting for their friends to arrive. Apparently Roger got bored, because he popped the cigarette in his mouth and held up his thumb to the end of it. After vehemently staring at his thumb for six or seven seconds, he managed to create a small fire that danced above his thumb like a candle light.

Sheltering his flimsy spark from the non-existent breeze with his other hand, he brought his thumb to the edge of the husk and inhaled, pulling the fire into the cigarette and igniting the tip. For several long seconds nothing happened, just a stupid looking kid puffing on a stupid looking cigarette and blowing stupid looking multicolored smoke out of his nostrils. Okay, so the smoke looked cool, but that was all me and had nothing to do with Roger.

Finally, he got to part of the cigarette that had the flame pepper puree. At first he didn’t really react apart from pulling the cigarette out of his lips and squinting at it between two fingers. Roger turned so red that I was beginning to wonder if he was going to actually catch fire. He was even redder than the time I had one of my hedgehogs shoot a couple spines at his danglers while he was defecating in a vacant burrow. I didn’t even realize that reds got that deep. I took a moment to archive the color away for use in the future, maybe a new strain of ivy?

Once tears started sliding down the side of the cherry-faced Roger, Sarah noticed something was wrong.

“Roger, are you okay? Why aren’t you breathing? Oh my, oh my, I knew we shouldn’t have done this. I’ll go get help right away!” When she realized that he was having issues she’d walked over to check up on him, by the time she finished talking she was making for the exit path. Before she could get two steps, Roger reached out and grabbed her hand while violently shaking his head no.

“Don’t. Get in trouble.” His voice was strained, and then he started wheezing. This led into nerve wracking coughing that shook the forest around him. Not literally, but all the birds and critters in the vicinity stopped making noise to listen. The coughing kept escalating, but he was able to get a breath in every now and then.

After a couple minutes I started getting a little concerned. Had my innocent little Sylva murdered a sapient? Even if he had it coming I did not want that responsibility on her shoulders at such a young age. A quick look to see how she was fairing showed me that the little spirit was literally rolling in laugher, positioned on Rocky’s back and entangled in his fur. How she was finding this funny was beyond me, and I assumed she knew something I didn’t so I redirected my attention to Roger.

At this point he’d managed to remove his shirt and was lying down on the ground while he succumbed to his coughing. His entire body was a darker red than the pool of blood that the swordsmen my birds murdered so long ago had left on the ground. Not only that, but he was sweating profusely, and even his sweat had a pinkish tint to it! Either the pepper had a lot more concentrated fire mana than I’d thought, or he was blushing far too much for his first time unclothed around a girl. Probably the former.

“This. Hurts. So. Ugh!” Between each breath he tried to calm Sarah down to prevent her from running to the adults and telling on him. I didn’t know the local policies and laws, but I was pretty sure the kids weren’t supposed to be smoking questionable substances in the forest by themselves. Or at all, really. Then Roger did something that surprised me.

As he was complaining about how painful it was he abruptly turned away from Sarah and belched very loudly. Also, he was burping fire. The coughing slowed down a little bit and the entire forest was silent as a part of the path slowly smoldered and crackled away. The part of the path that had just been bathed in fire.

“Holy shit.” Roger’s eyes suddenly lit up, literally. His hazel eyes took a very slight red glow that would have been imperceptible to anyone but a dungeon. He held up his hand and it ignited instantly in a low blaze. He tried to breathe fire again to no success, but for the next five minutes he began showing off his newly discovered prowess for fire magic.

By the time he’d managed to burn off all the excess fire mana running through his body he had Sarah looking hot and ready. Really inflamed her desire and all that. She walked up to the still-shirtless teenager and pressed her lips to his while her hands were against his chest, signaling that she was ready to work up a sweat too.

I took that as my signal to redirect my attention elsewhere and contemplate what I’d just released into the world. Maybe he wouldn’t realize that there was a pepper ground into his cigarette? Oh man, he was going to be smoking a lot more ivy.