Chapter 14 - First Contact VII

Claire activated Llystletein Authority as she sat down and got ready for lunch. The skill was the only way for her to acquire a warm meal. Her surroundings contained all the lumber she needed to roast just about anything she could kill, but she had no knowledge of kindling a flame, nor any experience in the culinary arts.

Llystletein Authority

Actions

- Establish Safe Zone (Cooldown: 6 days)

Spawnable Drinks

- Cosmogoblitan (50MP)

- Mimicosa☆ (500MP)

- Stale Water (25MP)

Was Mimicosa always that expensive? And why is there a star?

Spawnable Food

- *NEW* Fried Frogpole Wings (300MP)

- Grilled Veaber Tail (200MP)

- Hellhog Bolognese (500MP)

- Pulled Orc (150MP)

- Stale Bread (25MP)

Wings? I’m a bit skeptical because it’s frog meat, but they looked more like bird wings. Maybe I should give them a try. Worst that could happen is I waste 300MP, and it’s not like I have much else to spend it on.

Her mind was set on the menu’s latest entry, but she didn’t summon it immediately. First, she started with a stream of stale water, which she used to wash all the blood and grime off her hands and weapons. She wanted to clean her clothes as well, but there weren’t any places for her to change, nor any other clothes for her to change into.

My dress is already ruined anyway. Thank the Gods Father isn’t around to scold me about it. Again.

She was tempted to at least give her cloak a rinse, but she refrained. She had no idea how long it would take for the ragged mantle to dry, and time was of the essence. The halfbreed wanted to spend as much of her time exploring as possible, and sitting around and waiting for her laundry would only lower the amount of distance she could cover before she needed to return to her safe zone.

After settling for just patting herself off, Claire called forth a plate of frog wings against her better judgement. She knew that it would take a while for the dish to take form, so she closed her eyes and spent a few minutes listening to the sounds in her environment. There were nearly too many for her to make out even while fully focused. Going from an eerily silent system of caves to a loud, bastardized amalgamation of worlds left her senses so overloaded she was starting to grow irritated with her oversensitivity to sound. The rustling of grass was often overlaid with the buzzing of insects and the squawking of birds. The chirps made by the smaller critters scattered throughout the boggy meadow-forest were barely audible with all the marine life splashing about. Fish were leaping in and out of the water as they desperately strived to escape avians, crocodilians, and avian crocodilians alike. Even the aggressive croaks made by the feathered frogpoles were often covered up by the louder, more frantic barks made by their prey.

Her eyelids slowly opened once she felt a weight in her hands. The frog wings were just as heavy as the veaber tail, albeit not for the same reason. Veaber tails were heavy because their shells were made of stone. The wings, on the other hand, had their weight come as a factor of the platter’s size. The ceramic plate that formed in the halfbreed’s hands was a whole meter wide.

A set of six distinct wings made up the dish’s centerpiece. They were arranged in a cascade, propped up for the sole purpose of display. Frankly speaking, the amount of food was nothing short of extraneous. Claire was hardly intent on finishing a single wing, let alone six, even if they were every bit as delicious as they looked. The feathers that had once coated the bony structures were gone, replaced by a perfectly uniform, golden brown layer of breading that not even her father’s hand picked chefs would have been able to reproduce.

There was a side dish as well, an assortment of tubers and other root vegetables, chopped up, grilled, and slathered in a fiery red sauce. An entire bowl of the crimson dressing was placed at the center of the platter, likely to serve as dip for the wings. The condiment made up the vast majority of the dish’s scent profile. She could practically taste its citrusy notes, sweet and delectably sour, even prior to taking her first bite.

The natural frog-eater tore a piece off one of the wings, dipped it into the sauce, and dug in. After taking a moment to chew the meat, she found her worst fears confirmed. It was everything she hoped it wasn’t. The texture had seemed fine at first, but that particular sentiment only lasted until she got through the breading. The skin underneath was still too chewy and elastic. It lacked the fluffiness that she would have expected from a deep-fried dish. What bothered her even more than the texture was the bland yet fishy taste characteristic of frog meat. It tasted just as bad as the boiled amphibians that her mother often forced down her throat. The sauce’s scent was the only reason she managed to choke the first bite down.

Washing her mouth clean of the aftertaste with an unhealthily large dose of stale water, Claire made a vow of vegetarianism that was sure to be broken by dinner time and immediately hurled all six wings into the marsh. The local fauna proved much more capable of enjoying them. Countless tiny fish gathered around and began nibbling away at the breaded meat. One man’s trash was another’s treasure, after all, even if one of the men was a teenage girl and the other a school of fish.

In time, the frog meat attracted more than just the local marine life. A group of birds swooped in and promptly began feeding on the discarded flesh. They were corvids, crows slightly larger than their non-monstrous counterparts. At a glance, they seemed relatively normal compared to everything else she had encountered in the region, but a closer inspection led her to realize that there was much more to them than their above-average sizes. They were mechanical, at least in part. Some had glowing, cybernetic eyes, while others had mechanized wings or feet. One was more machine than it was flesh, its wings the only part of it that looked even remotely organic.

The manner in which the metal parts were put together reminded her of a smith’s or artificer’s work, but she knew that couldn’t have possibly been the case. It was commonly known that not even celestial craftsmen were capable of turning living creatures into automata. In other words, the crows were dungeon spawn, just like everything else.

Most of the crows were only interested in the frog wings and left as soon as the bones were picked dry. But of course, there was an exception. A single individual, the most mechanical bird in the group, appeared to recognize that Claire was the source of its meal. It hopped over to her with confidence, ruffled its own feathers, and even squawked for effect.

“What do you want?”

Claire eyed the curious bird with suspicion, placing a hand on one of the makeshift daggers strapped to her thighs just in case. Likewise, the avian was also on guard. It started off roughly ten meters away and cawed at her several times before cautiously hopping in her direction.

“You can’t have any more. This is mine.”

She couldn’t understand the bird’s attempt at vocalization, but the way the feathered construct eyed the vegetables on her dish spoke clearly to its intentions.

“Come any closer and I’ll hit you.”

Likewise, the avian was also incapable of understanding her. Either that, or it simply didn’t care for the threat, as it hopped over to the sauce-covered platter nonetheless. Claire tried to shoo it away by lightly waving her hand at it, but it leapt over the limb, onto the plate, and stole a carrot from right under her nose.

Having decided that enough was enough, Claire drew her dagger and stabbed at the mechanical bird, only to discover that it was more agile than her. The thrusters hidden beneath its tail lit up, boosting it into the air before the bony weapon could reach. It cawed at her while flying circles overhead, as if to mock her inability to strike it down. Adding insult to injury, it deposited a large unsanitary splotch of white and black right in the middle of her unfinished dish. After confirming that its bomb had landed on target, it gave one last victorious squawk and flew off into the forest above.

Did that really just happen?

Claire was appalled. It took her a good few moments to process the chain of events. She looked up at the woodlands, down at her plate, and up yet again before she finally started to tremble with rage and indignance. Standing up, kicked the plate into the marsh, and without a word, began chasing after the miscreant that had ruined her meal.

Her Tracking skill kicked in the moment she began focusing on the bird’s trail. It wasn’t very precise, but as far as the angry half-reptilian was concerned, knowing the direction that she needed to go was more than good enough. She was seething with anger, but her rage didn’t blind her. Her mind remained functional enough and kept her clear of any monsters in her way. She did note any she hadn’t seen before, of course, but only as things that future Claire would likely find herself concerned with.

Fueling her rage even further was the rocket-powered bird’s speed. It was much faster than she was; its literal rocket-fuel allowed it to speed away at a pace that she couldn’t have possibly kept up with, even without any monster-shaped obstacles along her path. The bog contributed greatly to the halfbreed’s lack of speed, in part because she had to wade through water of an unknown and ever fluctuating depth, and in part because it was simply uncomfortable. Her clothes were instantly soaked and dirtied by the muddy brine. Her skin wasn’t faring much better either. Some of the filth even made it past the scales lining the soles of her feet, which led to a sensation even worse than when she tried walking around with wet socks in her youth. Coincidentally, that had been the last time that Claire had ever worn any sort of footwear outside of a formal setting.

It took Claire roughly half an hour to catch up to the bird, which had covered the same amount of distance in less than a quarter the time. She didn’t understand why it had suddenly stopped, but she was more than happy that it had offered her the opportunity to pursue it.

The halfbreed reluctantly crouched low enough to cover everything but her head with swamp water as she came up on what Tracking had marked as her destination. Covering her scent almost seemed unnecessary. Sneaking was active and capable of at least partially masking it, but she didn’t know how sharp the crow’s senses were, and she doubted that she would be able to take it down if it noticed her before she launched an attack. It had already proven itself quick enough to evade her strikes.

Her skill directed her eyes at a particularly tall group of trees, where she found her target sitting comfortably in its rusted cast iron nest. Strangely enough, she realized that both the bird and its home were right side up even though the tree they were in was upside down.

The nonchalant manner the crow carried itself in only served to fuel her rage even further. She was more than willing to put it down, but even then, she found her eyes pulled towards something completely unrelated. Claire realized, upon giving her surroundings a quick once over, that there was much more to look at than a corvid in an oddly oriented oak.

There was a building.

She didn’t see it until she got much closer. It was hidden by a set of trees whose canopies came mere centimeters from touching the marsh below. It wasn’t built into any sort of clearing. If anything, it seemed abandoned, reclaimed by nature. Vines ran along its sides and many a tree’s roots had pushed their way through the sand-coloured bricks. Some of the extruded stone pieces had even been outright removed by nature’s might. More surprising was that the forest floor wasn’t the only place where the building touched the ground. The stone tower was in contact with both surfaces.

Unlike the base that had been ruined by the vegetation, the base that integrated itself within the marsh was clearly designed for its environment. The two meter tall rectangular entrance was too high off the ground for the bog to reach. It stood on a raised platform featuring a multi-layered doormat stitched together from dirty rags. Its placement and design practically screamed for any would-be guests to step on it and wipe off their feet. Even stranger was that both the door next to Claire and its mirror image, which opened up into the forest above, featured two distinct sets of doorknobs, one at waist level, and another at what would have been the same height if the world was flipped on its head.

Claire couldn’t wait to explore the tower, but first, she had a debt to settle.