“Am I doing it correctly? Princess?”

Receiving no reply, Henry tried flipping the clay tablet upside down, only for it to be slapped out of his grip.

“You sedated sloth!” yelled Karnon. “Does she have a mouth? You’ve obviously got to become an elemental so she can shoot her messages into you!”

Henry threw his arms up in disbelief. “Then this has been an utter waste of time! The Cloak won’t let me use skills while transmuted.”

“Are you certain about that, my protege?" The God’s eyes sparkled with a mischievous glint. "Are you willing to stake 50 billion gold on that claim? It’s on, 50 billion gold! Bring it out and weep!”

“I’m not betting anything.” Henry summoned The Cloak and inspected it again. The line ‘Items and spells cannot be activated for the duration.’ had been deleted from the tooltip, the God having somehow removed the restriction.

An image came to Henry's mind of a breeze blowing past an unsuspecting noob and frying them with a .

“That’s ridiculously broken.”

“Yes, I’ll have to change it back afterwards, so don’t grow too attached. How much Universal Productivity have you got left?"

"Not enough for a full language."

"Spin around and close your eyes. I’m going to top you up using a secret technique handed down by my grandmother.”

As Henry followed the instructions, he overheard Karnon popping open a bottle cap and chugging down a couple mouthfuls of a liquid that smelled like brandy. The next moment, a kick to his butt sent him hurtling forth.

Your Universal Productivity has been restored. 92,160 out of 92,160 remaining.

(Author's Note: in case anyone notices that this figure is much larger than earlier, I botched the math at the start of the story.)

Henry's skull was about to crack on an ivory makeup stand when a pink gust caught him and lowered him gently back down.

“Thanks, Princess.”

Karnon shapeshifted back into a tube of wind. “While you’re studying, I’ll be preparing for your final lesson. I'm going to make you feel so close to those ancient Celestial bodies, embedded in the universe’s canvas, that you'll swear you can touch them! Bye.”

The God then wriggled into the cavern wall.

Alone with the pink tornado, Henry draped the cloak over his shoulders and used . His clothes faded away, and his body began to whistle, as it first turned translucent, then black, sand being picked up through the soles of his feet and spread by his internal currents.

His consciousness condensed into an Elemental Core, a single wisp of wind near where the middle of his brain had been. This Core could float in any direction at a jogging-speed, so long as it remained within a body’s length of a solid surface. Thus, he could scale walls and hover under ceilings, but not fly.

To adjust his shape, he could navigate mentally to a 3-D projection of himself. Anywhere within 2.5 metres of the Elemental Core, his parts, from an eye to an atom, could be reshaped by imagining the desired form. Because the process was somewhat manual, the feat he’d pulled off against The Redeemer—transforming into water and moving through the carvings in the tree in two separate directions—had been spectacularly difficult, taking him weeks of practice to execute.

"In comparison, today's transformation will be a breeze."

Laughing at his pun, he became a puppy-sized tornado.

The Princess immediately ‘spoke’ to him by spitting a furball-like clump of pink wind. Passing into his centre, it burst inside of him, invoking an unsettling sensation.

While he translated the message, miniature scrolls, ink splotches, and quills orbited around his Elemental Core.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

Congratulations! New Language Book created. Saanian Tornadese (Southern) (0.040% complete).

In his Mental Library, a book wider than an office-desk materialised, most of its pages blank except for dictionary entries corresponding to the words he’d heard and a chapter on how to form them.

Skimming the chapter, he realised that Karnon’s difficulties with Tornadese had little to do with laziness.

The wind furballs or Elemental Utterances were analogous to a ‘sentence’. Packed inside them were dodecahedrons, 30-pointed shapes, whose edges were defined by wind currents – these were ‘words’. A word’s qualities - its consonants, vowels, tense, etc. – were encoded by the distance between a dodecahedron’s points and its centre.

Complex stuff.

If he didn’t have , he could not have dreamed of forming such structures. With the skill, though, phrases he heard were registered as being memorised perfectly by his character, including their pronunciation. From there, the game system would automate the translation work, saving him all effort.

Two methods were available for generating a wind furball, the first through reshaping the winds of his elemental body, the second through . Since the first had a maximum range of 2.5 metres, he would have to use the second, although this would require them to devise a method for hiding him whenever he gathered Elemental Charges.

Since he hadn’t learned ‘yes’, he fired off a wind furball repeating her question.

Her reply to that contained a hint of irritation, the feeling being conveyed by an exclamation-mark dodecahedron. “Speaking to royalty or elders, it’s considered impolite to aim messages so close to our centres."

Filing that information away, Henry used an Artist skill to distribute the clay tablets across the sand in neat rows. He approached one, depicting a bow-carrying Karnon pursuing an antelope.

“Hunter,” said the Princess.

He moved to a tablet with a carving of a spruce tree.

"Sugar Spruce.”

Next.

“Can you learn them that quickly? You better not be trying to scam us.”

“Hunter. Sugar spruce. Sugar royalty and elders. Can you learn impolite messages? Scam me.”

“Show off...”

Henry carried on, steadily building up his pace until the Princess was firing over a hundred furballs per minute.

Half an hour later, armed with a basic vocabulary, he began interviewing the Princess about herself, both to improve his syntax and grammar and to learn enough about Wind Elemental culture to avoid committing a deadly blunder.

Given Tornadese’s complexity, he repeatedly exhausted his Universal Productivity pool, Karnon returning 19 times to replenish him with booty kicks.

When he found out from the Princess that Wind Elementals had invented a type of music player by shrinking wind furballs and packing them into arcane devices, Henry gave her some gold to zip back to her Empire’s marketplace and purchase all the audiobooks she could find. By listening to these, he was exposed to a more advanced vocabulary and grammatical structures than could be gleaned from casual conversation. Moreover, the male voices fixed a feminine speech pattern he’d inadvertently adopted by speaking exclusively with the Princess. (But, really, he just wanted to expand his book collection.)

Thus, in the time it takes to bake a 6-pound turkey, the Tornadese language book reached 98.3% completion, sufficient for the task ahead.

“Fast,” said Karnon, wiping off a spot of oil grease from his cheek. “I’ve decided on a bonus lesson: teach me .”

“That's not even remotely a lesson, but, sure, as long as you promise never to appear within 500 kilometres of me after today.”

“Hahahaha. So how are the wedding plans coming along?”

“There’s one hiccup.” Henry pointed at the bubblegum tornado in the background, who was testing which combination of bridal gowns looked prettiest in her spin cycle. “The Princess is arranged to be married with the son of a family friend. Did you know that in advance?”

“Yes.”

He hadn't.

“If you insist on continuing this farce,” said Henry, “I’ve formulated two plans after researching their legal system. First, convince her betrothed to give up voluntarily, which would require you to kiss up to his family and locate a suitable substitute bride. Naturally, since I'm not going to stick around for the centuries that would take, you would need to learn Tornadese yourself. I should be able to produce a Tome of Rapid Language Absorption series to help you in a few hours.”

Karnon yawned. “What’s the second option?”

“Defeat her betrothed in a duel.”

“How strong?”

“Tier-11, a bit weaker than you.”

The God shapeshifted his head into a wolf's and barked, “In the pursuit of his Path, an Earthfriend must be ready to go to war!”

Whipping out a scimitar with a nanometre-thick glass blade, he slashed the air back and forth, slicing a grain of sand drifting by into ten equal sections.

Worldcleaver - another Ortheerian sword.

“But the challenge format is six against six,” continued Henry. “Can you talk five Zone Guardians into participating?”

The God resumed his human face and stowed away the weapon. “The Earthfriend abstains from violence until all his options have been explored. My protégé, neither of these are satisfactory, has Nature not provided a third Path?”

“A third? Well, there is one, but it’s a bit...how do I say...”

In the corner of Henry's vision, a bridal gown flying behind Karnon's head folded into an OK-sign.

Deep within The Living Fortress, The Southern Wind Elemental Wind Palace.

Two royal tornadoes, each housing countless treasures, were touring the palace’s cactus garden.

“Your daughter has snuck out again,” said King Anaparha, the smaller of the tornadoes. “This is the fourth instance this week. I’m not happy, Brother Vadaa.”

Inside the bigger tornado, Emperor Vadaahavaa, were two crown-wearing skeletons, which he used like eyebrows to form a frown. “And what do you expect me to do about this, Brother Anapar? Cage her? She’s not a humanoid; she can escape through small gaps.”

“We must push the arrangements ahead. Wed her to my Gilii by the next moon alignment.”

“You have not produced an adequate bride price.”

"The harvest has been poor."

"The Tenets are The Tenets."

King Anaparha ‘mumbled’ by firing a wind furball into the ground. “And you have not produced an adequate bride...”

Emperor Vadaahavaa could make out the slight but chose to ignore it. His friend wasn’t wrong.

“Your Imperial Majesty, your Majesty!”

Twirling around, the two faced a guard tornado with the swords swirling inside. Accompanying the guard were two other tornados, one bubblegum pink, one azure.

Emperor Vadahaava frowned again. “It’s you, the corrupter of my child. Because of you, she escapes off into the night and dyes herself this ostentatious shade.”

“Father, he’s my one true love, please—“

“SILENCE, GIRL! Is he a pigeon’s sneeze? Let him defend himself. Hover forth, corrupter, and explain your actions. If your excuses humour me enough, perhaps you will leave my palace alive.”

A tense moment of silence followed, during which the azure tornado hovered motionless, showing not the slightest trace of fear at the power of the one whose wrath he tested.

Eventually, though, registering the signal coming from inside it to move, the azure tornado hovered forth a few metres.

“Greetings, your Imperial Majesty, Protector of The Southern Lands, wielder of The Dashishata Key. I apologise for not introducing myself earlier. I was born Nacib, son of Zadagan. Today, I am better known as The Silent Storm, who tamed the winds of Kubar, Dvoriyan, Myard, Kulon, and Atar’ragaganath.”

King Anaparha scoffed. “O mighty Silent Storm, you speak of these obscure winds through such a feeble voice. Are we to be impressed?”

In an odd response to this, the azure tornado broke into a coughing fit, stirring up a thick, mucousy internal wind that masked the tiny tornado inside him gathering Elemental energy. “Sorry, I have a cold.”

“A likely story, do you—“

“Quiet, Brother Anapar,” interrupted Emperor Vadaahavaa. “Your deeds in The Elemental Plane precede you, Nacib, son of Zadagan, Master of the Five Winds.”

King Anaparha froze at the mention of The Elemental Plane. This was the home plane from which their kind had been displaced millennia ago, long before his birth. No Wind Elemental save Emperor Vadaahavaa, a Tier-12 Tornado, had the strength to go back.

“However,” continued The Emperor, “Your prestige does not in any way justify leading my eldest daughter astray.”

The azure tornado, after a short delay, tilted the top of its tunnel in a nod. “This is true, wise Emperor Vadaahavaa. Explaining away my offences is not the purpose of revealing my identity, but rather to demonstrate that I am not entirely unworthy.”

“Not unworthy of what?”

The azure tornado coughed until he hacked up another wind furball. “King Anaparha, Tamer of Sathaana, I must beg for your forgiveness. The winds of fate have decreed that the promised union between Princess Pateela and your noble son, whose name I dare not sully, cannot be fulfilled. I have come to beg for the Princess's spiral in marriage.”

King Anaparha’s wind speed raced. “Impudent! No matter your accomplishments, The Tenets of Vi’akatii enshrine the sanctity of the Bride Promise. The bond may not be broken by something as fickle as 'fate'."

The Emperor agreed. “The Tenets are the pillars supporting The Permanent Peace. The circumstances according to which a Bride Promise may or may not be forsaken are known to all.”

Cough, cough. “I do have just cause, your Imperial Majesty, but it would be preferable to discuss the specifics in private.”

“No. Brother Anapar is of my breath. If I am to dissolve a three-century-long Bride Promise, then he should be privy to the cause. Explain yourself or be off. For settling The Bandaalaa Wars, I will allow you a day's headstart.”

A threatful gale was carried in the message, but, still, the azure tornado showed no hint of nervousness.

“Omnipotent Imperial Majesty, be that as it may, the—excuse me.”

Cough, cough.

Princess Pateela, unable to wait any longer, stormed forward. “Dad, I’m getting married to him whether you like it or not! Our union has been blessed!”

Opening up a tunnel into herself, she gave a clear line of sight to her centre of mass, where a tiny purple tornado was spinning.

Crash! Pitong! Thunk!

A racket sounded as the treasures contained within the royal tornadoes flung out and smashed against the garden’s cacti.

Then, an even louder noise rang from above.

“OH! MY! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!”

From a cloud where she’d been eavesdropping on the conversation, a gust of wind descended and wrapped around the Princess’s ‘belly’.

“SO CUTE! Vadaa, we’re going to be grandparents! Contact a priest immediately!”

The Emperor, ashamed, whispered to his companion. “It seems, old friend, that while I tended the empire, I neglected my home. Will you accept Princess Sudara instead? She’s...” His younger daughter was worse.

King Anaparha shook his tornado tail in condolence. “Our children readily absorb our riches, but what of our morals, what of our sense of propriety?"

Meanwhile, the azure instigator of this disaster hovered in place, oblivious to the plan’s success or failure.

Suchi.

Through the combined efforts of the players and NPCs, The Slums had been restored to their usual state of poverty and lawlessness.

While Henry was bullpooping his way through a shotgun marriage across the ocean, here, in the ‘Duchy of Australasia’, another beautiful union was about to take place.

A group of young women were staring daggers into a stranger.

They’d been high-fiving after freeing their wagon from a pothole when he’d forced his way into their celebration.

“Excuse me,” asked the group's Cutthroat, “where did you come from?”

The stranger scratched his handsome head. “Uh...I've been lifting from the side."

"Why? Did you think we were too frail to do it ourselves?"

"Uh...Coach Brown said we’ve always got to help each other. 'If the field’s wet and your teammates are slipping up, lend ‘em a hand to get 'em back on their feet.'”

The young women, ignoring the odd quote, shared a knowing look between themselves.

His avatar’s beautification cranked to the max...his forwardness...his choice of a Fighter, whose class visual indicator had added to his rippled muscles glittering specks...and why was he shirtless? The answer: a pick-up artist.

An Arcanist presented her palm in rejection.

“We’re not interes—“

The stranger high-fived her.

“How dare you!”

She gave him a sharp slap, then, harrumphing, signalled for her friends to continue pushing their cart along.

Watching their departure, Handsome Dan was perplexed.

That was the fifth time he’d been assaulted today by someone he’d helped.

Strange.

These ‘Villagers’ had a strange way of expressing their gratitude.

Oh, well.

He happily marched along, continuing his exploration of The Slums.

Following his separation from his teammates, he'd trained to become a Fighter and then joined in on Suchi’s relief effort.

Independence? It wasn’t so bad.

Passing by the gates of one Village, he did a double take, his handsome eyes widening in shock.

In the stables inside, a familiar figure, recognising Dan back, flashed its shabby teeth.

“Donkey Bro!” Handsome Dan sprinted over to give the ugly donkey-monster-king a warm hug. “How have you been, my man?”

Donkey Bro brayed in complaint ('Life is torment.'), although, deep down, he was pleased by the reunion.

“Been hitting the irons? You're lookin' buff bro! Nice!”

Hee-haw (‘I have set down the Ascendant’s path. With my ever expanding might, soon a new age will be ushered in, The Age of Donkeys.’)

“Where’s Big Bro?”

Hee-haw (‘After I help him dig tunnels, he abandons me here, to wallow amongst these unwashed plebs. Fuck horses.’)

Through Byzantium Village’s gates, an NPC entered with a toolbelt around his waist. Spotting the shirtless Offworlder chatting with the donkey, he approached to introduce himself.

“Hello, I’m Gabor, one of the Village’s Ibanmothe employees. What brings you here?”

Handsome Dan rubbed his chin. “Have you seen...what was Big Bro’s name? Bob? He’s from San Francisco.”

“I’ve never heard these Offworlder terms.”

“Bob, he’s the guy who owns this donkey—” Donkey Bro headbutted him (‘I am my own ruler.’) “About this high, wears masks.”

“Oh, you mean the latest recruit.”

“Latest recruit?”

“Yeah, he stopped by to drop off his mount, saying he’ll sign up officially in a few hours.”

Handsome Dan’s face went blank, as if the energy required to power its handsome expression muscles had been diverted to help his brain digest this revelation.

“Latest recruit?”