Amusingly, of the seven who had decided to remain within my base overnight, two -- Annaka and Trisaldan -- had decided to avail themselves of my guestroom while the other five chose to use the temporary housing I'd set up for them. Having a cot rearranged for Trisaldan to sleep in the guestroom was easy enough, but the commentary that Annaka gave upon seeing the full setup of the room itself was, well.

"What material is this mattress made of, Vincent? It is so soft! I feel as though I might sink in just laying on it."

"I bred a common marsh reed to produce much more and thicker fluff than it does feral, and thanks to the double-layered linen it is relatively easy to contain. It's not the best for padding but it's a damned sight better than simple straw which was my predecessor option. And if you'll notice, I'm actually still using regular strawgrass for the greater portion of the mattress beneath the bedroll top.”

“Linen? That’s what you’re calling this fabric?” She actually poked at the bedroll surface with a finger.

I shook my head with a suppressed chuckle “Oh, yes. It’s made from the stalks of the marsh reeds. I can have you shown the process at some point if you like. For now, I suspect you’ll also find the washroom somewhat different from what you are accustomed to as well. Just … try not to use up all the hot water, eh? It’s on a shared reserve.”

“Hot water? Reserve?” She turned to look in the direction I was pointing at, and actually dashed off in curiosity, turning on the hot and cool water one at a time and then both. She then looked with that scrunched up face of confusion at the water and actually sniffed it. “I do not understand. The ishuar is so… dulled … in this. It is as though it were dead. But how could water be dead without also carrying decay?”

I blinked at her statement, and in my defense so did her escort or servant or lieutenant -- whatever, so did Trisaldan. “I… the water is purified. Cleansed of contaminants both sedimentary and living.”

She turned to look at me, her curiosity now something more analytical. “You … consider living things to be unclean? But then why do you make so many new ones?”

I quirked an eyebrow. “It’s not that simple, princess. People get diseases in a number of ways, but one of the more common is by having the living beings that are too small to be seen that are all around us wind up someplace they don’t belong. As much as we depend on them to be healthy, if those same beings that we carry in our guts for example -- should they wind up in our blood, it could very quickly kill us. This is why gut wounds are so very often more fatal than others, even if they appear to be equally severe at first.”

“Fascinating. We ishuata of course know of such things, but for you to know of it without sensing the ishuar at all -- the path your people took to knowledge must have been a very curious one indeed! Very well, sir Vincent -- I shall try to respect your home during my stay here. We shall discuss more in the morning.”

Apprehensively, I left the pair to their own devices, but not before setting a homunculus to try to listen into the room and raise an alarm if they make any hostile moves. I also barred my own bedroom’s door before settling down to sleep for the evening. I had never had an easy time of sleeping when not in my own bed, and despite the room being so similar in design and dimensions to my bedroom back at the manor, the different scents and stiffness of the mattress made an impact on that. Turning down the cover over the lightcrystal to a bare “night-light” minimum and trying to focus on simply emptying out my mind of all thoughts about how close I’d come to the brink over the last few days took some effort, but eventually I nodded off.

~~------------~~

When I awoke in the morning it was to the sound of my bedroom door rattling against the cross-bar I had put in place. In a panic, I rushed to don my weaponry, leaving the saber and pistol unsheathed as the rattling of the door became all the more insistent. Carefully sliding it aside, I allowed whoever or whatever was at the door to pull it open while placing the pistol at waist height.

I was quite annoyed when it turned out I was aiming well above the head of my own clockwork-harnessed minion. I glared at him to convey my sense of irritation only for it to groan-hiss at me with a mild amount of urgency and point down the stairs in the general direction of the kitchen.

“I am not awake enough for this.”

I followed my faithful clanking arachnid companion down the stairs and discovered to my chagrin that one of Annaka’s warriors was apparently trying to use my cooking equipment to prepare their morning meal. They were of course doing it all wrong, as evinced by the fact that the shelfruit was on the verge of filling the cabin with smoke as they were literally using my lampoil as cooking aid.

I rushed over and grabbed the skillet that one of them must have brought with them -- it actually seemed to be made directly from some form of extremely hardened wood, of all things -- and tossed the wasted materials into the sink, pouring water over it.

“That was not food! You almost burned this house down, you fool!”

It wasn’t until I settled down the cooking utensils and got out of my homunculus’s way that I realized that I’d actually said that last sentence in what I believed to be perfectly fluent ‘alfar’ as their language’s word for themselves -- and their language -- was pronounced. One of my homunculi must have made a point of transcribing all of my last night’s conversations into the library overnight, as my un-assisted mastery wasn’t that good before. Improving, yes, but good enough to not realize I was using it until after I had already done so? Nowhere near so much.

Not one to look a gift-horse in the mouth, I turned and looked at the soldier or warrior or whatever and, pointing at the pot of oil he’d carried into the room, followed that up with more. “This is not for cooking. It is only for making fire. It burns, and cannot be eaten.”

His response was all too classic as it was very clearly that of a young man trying to defend his actions even though he now knew he’d made a mistake. “But it is oil. What good is oil if not for food making?”

I didn’t even bother dignifying his response with one of my own. I had said what I needed to say on the topic, and just started shooing him out of the house with the wave of both hands like I was warding off a bumbling dog or pig. As I dislodged my unintentional potential arsonist, it occured to me that the other five men outside might be similarly engaged in odd shenanigans due to poor assumptions.

Walking over to their tent, I called out in a no-nonsense tone. “Oi! You lot. Touch nothing that isn’t yours. You want something, ask for it. Do anything else, I’ll knock your upside your pointy ears. Got it?” I didn’t give the others a chance for a response from them, either, as I went back inside the house and reviewed my library for any further potential insights into their language as I waited for my minion to finish his cooking for myself and my guests.

I must’ve lost track of time, somehow, because the next thing I knew I had the princess’s ear flicking against my hair and her nose over my shoulder. Ignoring how I jumped in surprise, she barreled through the moment in a blatant focus on satisfying her own curiosity. “Is that in your language? How curious. Here, what does this say?” She pointed at a random bit of text.

“It’s a … the sounds of your words. Then my words, the same.”

“A translation? But how do you write our words without… our words?”

I nodded in affirmation, even as I repeated the new to me -- at least, new to me without the tonic -- word. “A translation, yes. I sound it out. All word-sounds have a written form. Not just words, but sounds. It is not always perfectly accurate but … hmm. Perhaps…” I crack open an alfar-to-english dictionary that is resting in a shelf adjacent to the working desk, and show her the first few pages, where I sound out the lettering on the alfar side, then say the English corresponding word. “You see? It is also recorded this way.”

“How clever! You are full of interesting ideas.” She nodded to herself in affirmation. “Now… before you go to prepare meals for us this morning, my Trisaldan tells me you have used the Cabalite blood arts in your domestication of things. I would like to see it, with some of our own food stocks. Can this be done?”

I nodded again in affirmation, trying to conceal how exciting I found the idea of obtaining more diversity in my food supplies. “I need seeds, or living roots; nothing already dead. But … yes, yes it certainly can be done. What did you have in mind?” She pulled a soft brown-leather pouch out from where it was tucked into her belt and tossed it to me. Opening it up, I saw a small collection of nuts and partially dried berries. If I didn’t know any better I’d say three of the nuts are the acorns I have yet to find in any of the trees in this forest.

I guess I’d needed worthy challenges -- I should just be glad that I found one that didn’t scream telekinetically in my head. I smiled bemusedly at what I was about to do, even as I stood up and said with confidence, “Follow me, Annaka. Though I fear that this will take some small amount of work to get done properly. In the meantime, I’ll have one of my homunculi prepare a basic meal for all.” Said meal would consist of a carrotato flatbread wrap around herbs, rice, and sauteed shelfruit -- otherwise known as a breakfast burrito minus the cheese. It’d get the job done, but seriously though. I miss cheddar. Oh, and eggs. Oh man I need to figure out eggs.

~~------------~~

Heading over to the lab with the small audience in tow, I checked to make sure that I had at least three of each of the items in the little pouch that the noble alfar girl had handed to me. “I did not exactly plan this space out for an audience, and it is all quite delicate work. There’s no real risk or hazard to it, but it could be spoiled quite easily and it requires quite a lot of focus. So please -- only those that need to be in here, be in here while I work?” The five curious lookie-loos all grumbled their consent before only Annaka and Trisaldan remainer in the lab with me. A thought struck me as they began to make their way out. I downed a communication tonic to be sure I could successfully convey the idea “Actually -- if this is to be our first exchange, I would appreciate it if a few of you would be willing to spar with some of my hunting spiders. No lethal moves, just exposure to each other’s way of acting. Any of you who agree -- I’ll have a decent spear made for you per my best specifications, and it will be yours to keep. Both while on my compound and once you make your way beyond.”

The grumbling immediately ceased, and I could see that Trisaldan was conflicted by his desire to once again be armed and his desire to stay by his princess’s side. I cut the conflict short by making him another offer. “Trisaldan, Annaka -- I’ll have swords much like my own made for you two. A gift of appreciation that you chose peace rather than the blade.” This mollified the man rather more than I’d anticipated.

The easiest of the items in the pouch were her berries. There were a handful of them, and sorting through to find which were the most viable for my needs was the work of a mere moment or two. I set aside several and began the process of rendering them down into their psychedelic essential components. Both Trisaldan and Annaka heeded my warning to remain silent, though I noted at one point Trisaldan grabbing her shoulder even as her mouth began to open. While the down-rendering began, I stood up and headee towards a latch door to enter the basement of the laboratory, which was only moderately well-lit by the cooling light crystals and the growth lights which kept the isolated essential samples from decaying in their petri-dish like containers. The container I was after was relatively early, as the domestication essence was one of the first I had obtained and isolated. It took me almost as long to allow Annaka and Trisaldan down and then escort them back up as it did to actually obtain the domestication essence. I could see the question clear on her face but I avoided answering rather than focusing on what I needed to handle next. With great care to avoid accidental contamination of the container as I made my way up the chitinite step-ladder, I placed it down next to the alchemical cauldron and began to methodically isolate the major traits in the berry to learn what I could about it. The mana cost was relatively minor as I was just going for largely “general” traits.

As I’d expected, the alfar people hadn’t done much in the way of genuine domestication to the berries, but it was also true that they needed -- normally -- to still be succulent in order to successfully mature into a bush. Although, now that I looked closer, a bush wasn’t quite the correct term for what kind of plant these berries grew from. It would be better described as a branching vine, or creeper. Curious. So I’d need to have a scaffold created to grow these things but … in all honesty, that was probably the better option. Introducing the domestication trait to the … hm. These would be significantly sweeter than the clusterberries, so I guess I could call them exactly that. Sweetberries. Introducing the domestication trait to the sweetberries would probably require a few generations to get it to anchor down properly, and since I was largely putting on a show for this anyhow I figured I might as well get on with it.

Once I had successfully drawn the revised sweetberry essence into the remaining three partially dried berries, I grabbed some reeds and rope from the warehouse and found an empty-ish area near the shelfruit plot. Laying down the reeds in a criss-crossed manner with rope binds, I placed the three dried berries roughly equidistant from each other but adjacent to the trellis, and proceeded to enact the earliest of my sanguinism rites -- as simple as it was given that it amounted to little more than bleeding on the plots of ground I had buried them in. After a moment’s thought while that was going on, I decided to see if adding a growth crystal to the mix would accelerate them further. It wasn’t like they were going anywhere. When I turned around, I saw that the group of elves were all watching me with widened eyes.

“What?”

It was Annaka who responded. “This… what you did. We felt it. That is what you call your sanguinism? You bleed on the crop and thus it grows? That’s all there is to it?”

I shook my head in negation. “Well, visibly maybe. There’s a … way of thinking? Yes, a way of thinking that is necessary along with it as well. A cognitive component.” I found that there literally wasn’t an alfar way of saying either the words ‘cognitive’ or ‘component’. Interesting. “Anyhow, give it about a quarter to a third of the morning and the bush should be mature.”

“But … it takes two years for a trellisvine to fully grow. And with this, you see it done in the slightest fraction of a day?” So they call it ‘tellisvine’, huh? Eh, when in Pointy-Eared Rome, I guess.

“The process won’t actually be complete for another three or four rearings from the fruit, actually. It needs to be repeated at least once more, with those berries that best fit what we want from them, before it can be called even minimally completed and the truly domesticated cultivar is produced from the semi-feral trellisvine berries you brought me. I suspect you’ll find what I do with the acorns far more interesting, however.” I dusted off my knees as I stood up from the reed trellis and made my way back over to the lab as I spoke.

The princess once again made that scrunched up face of concentrated curiosity -- one thing was for certain, her education hadn’t included diplomatic training. She was bad at holding things back habitually. “Howso? What, will you grow them as the seeds of grass?”

“Hardly. It needs to be a woody plant. No, I was thinking it would be a good hybrid cultivar of your trellisvine, in fact, to have one that produces clusters of acorns instead of berries.”

“Oh.” Heh. She looked about ready to facepalm, like she had maybe looked into a bag labelled “dead dove” or something. I can even visualize her saying to herself, ‘I don’t know what I expected’.

The process for the acorns is relatively quick, though I was getting rather excessive in the amount of mana I was expending in each individual trait I had to isolate in order to get down to the point of the seeds for the oak trees the acorns would grow into. I did also find some hints at greater dormancy than other crops I had access to had, but that wasn’t my focus at the time. I found myself taking my time and breathing through the headache as it developed, until I could swap out the trellisvine berries with the acorn exterior. Strictly speaking, the new vine would be sterile, as the seeds of the berries couldn’t successfully grow through the acorn material. But simple cutting/splicing with regular trellisvine berries would do the trick, though it did mean each unique generation would have to go through the same alchemic process rather than simple manual selection.

As the group watched me repeat the process for the new acorn-vine, the barest shoots of the first were already starting to grow up. I noted once I repeated the sanguinism process, however, that Annaka was literally praying over the first vines I’d planted. I didn’t really think anything of it until I noticed how the vines were wrapping themselves around the trellis almost as if someone were manually optimizing the growth-path of the plants. It was then that I clued in that maybe there was something going on here, given that the elves all had clothing and armor made out of kinds of bark or woven vines. She’d already said she was an ishuata, and I’d simply absorbed it without comment as meaning some kind of mage. Seeing what I was now seeing, I began to get the notion that an ishuata was probably what I would call a druid.

Damn but I wished I could actually sense or feel mana and get an idea of what was going on there, beyond the visually obvious. But sadly, it just wasn’t meant to be. No amount of mental contortionism could get me any sensation of what she was doing. Frustrating as this fact was, it wasn’t new information, just reconfirmation of old. Just Let It Go, Vincent. Just Let It Go.