Luke trudged onward on his journey deeper into the domain of Westfall. He didn’t know what it all meant but he was now twice marked with none of the marks complete. From the notifications, he’d need to nourish each mark to gain more access and a better understanding of the marks, which sounded simple enough if one knew what the marks required.

Given how the presence of the eclipse mark, which he looked favorably upon; had damaged the daunting Westfallen mark, it would seem quite the priority for him to figure out what each needed. This way, he would know what to do and what not to do in order to get the outcome he desired.

His stomach growled, pointing to a more pressing matter of nourishment, his own. This prompted him to look for a place to settle down before taking out some trail rations he’d had in his stores. Jerky, dry bread, and goat milk were far from the best he’d ever had, but the day’s hunger and fatigue made it seem like it. The sudden pangs propelled him into action and he wolfed down the bread and meat with much gusto, washing down each of a couple of mouthfuls with milk before offering some to Eleven.

She paid no mind to the milk and bread, but turned to the dried meat instead, and after a tentative sniff, she tried to bite off a big chunk, only to fall short of a bite and straight into a prolonged nom instead. This was due to the absence of teeth, which made a proper bite impossible, but the corrosive saliva eventually aided the little lass in eating through the stringy meat.

Luke laughed at the spectacle as she attempted to chew a mouthful without teeth, but a brief change in her appearance caught his eye, cutting off his mirth. Though short-lived, the aura around her form had materialized long enough for Luke to note its shape and color, and it had consisted of a superimposed brown film that matched her form, save for the protruding curved objects on either temple that were reminiscent of cow horns.

The aura began disappearing just as fast as it had materialized, slowly melting away in wisps of black mist, but Eleven’s regurgitation of her meal sped-up the process, dispelling it in the blink of an eye. Bad enough he’d had his own deficit, but a notification followed that made the situation worse.

Penalties incurred for the mystery: You shyte what you byte XP (Self): -1 XP (Eleven): -1

It was a compound penalty, which seemed to point to Eleven’s impartiality to everything he’d had to eat, so Luke would have to find something else for her to consume. A mental ask of her preferences garnered a garbled response, which was in the form of obscure life-forms of all shapes and sizes, with a firefly being the only one in clear view while the rest were shadowed.

The firefly had been the only thing she’d ingested to date, so it made sense why it was in the clear, but the shadowed forms brought more questions than answers. Did they represent all she was partial to, all she was yet to taste, or something else entirely? This he’d have to figure out in time.

◆◆◆

As the only partaker of the rations, his mealtime had been brief, and this was in part thanks to his low requirements for sustenance, and also to Eleven’s longing glances while he ate. He couldn’t stand torturing her with visions of his own enjoyment while she watched starving, so he’d chosen to call it a night early and look to her needs first thing in the morning.

They’d ventured deeper into the forest for a quarter of an hour before spotting a good place to camp. It was a small platform of hanging rock that stood at 30 meters off the ground and more than 50 below the hill’s peak. The difficulty in access would provide layers of protection for attacks from both vertical directions, from the ground and from the top, which would make it the best place to camp.

The lack of spacious crevices and caves nearby also meant any predators would have to come at him from some distance, and hopefully Eleven would spot them on and notify him should they approach on her watch.

Improvising his way with dips and protrusions as foot- and handholds, he managed to make it all the way up to the platform in a few minutes, and there he retrieved a few blankets from his inventory. He made a bedroll with some and used the rest for warm cover as he attempted to fade into sleep.

It took a while, but sleep eventually took him over, beckoning him to a refuge for weary minds. He gave in and began nodding off, but a series of weird events brought him back to the land of the wakeful in a heartbeat. First was the searing pain on his right sleeve, which was then followed up by a mental voice with a bit of reverb, and this combination managed to jolt him out of this, banishing all wisps of sleep with the stark reality he was about to impact the ground in full plunge. It didn’t take much after to realize he’d unwittingly blinked out of phase and fallen through the platform as a consequence, so now he had to act fast to avoid a painful landing. A phase bomb saved his situation, but the loud noise he’d made was sure to have alerted all creatures nearby of his presence, so he had to exit this area quick.

As he stood there dusting himself off, he couldn’t help grabbing his right sleeve, where that initial warning had originated from. He remembered the voice that had alerted him, how Eleven’s voice only made for the reverb whilst the primary had all been Gertie’s. He wondered if a significant part of Gertie had been incorporated into Eleven’s essence, and if that part of her was still alive and able to communicate independently, or if she was Eleven. He wouldn’t know by just sitting on the issue, so daring to dream, he looked the question at Eleven, who tilted her head at this as she communicated her confusion through their bond.

Not giving up yet, he chose a more direct way of wording before verbalizing the question this time around, but instead of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, he got a smack on the arm from Eleven’s tail, as well as an inscrutable string of communications through their bond, which he dismissed as the wee lass’s disgruntlement. Laughing it off, he went back to the business of finding another place to rest in and within half the hour he’d found it in a cave that was high enough to present issues to pursuers, whilst being shallow enough to commit only him. The clincher was the thick floor beneath it, which presented a phase boundary he’d discovered through appraisal, and confirmed via multiple failed attempts at blinking through it. It was perfect and he dosed off with little effort, beginning the relief of all the fatigue and tension he’d accumulated throughout the process of his escape.

◆◆◆

As had been the pattern for the last two days, he woke up to Eleven’s beeps, and since they had been measured and none-too urgent, he ignored the possibility of this being a warning for imminent danger. Due to this, he took his sweet time to shake off the sleep and rightly so, since the call ended up being a simple signal for the approaching sunrise.

Folding his blankets and returning them to his inventory, he called his familiar and she obliged him, immediately melding into- and availing him an extended recon range. This, he leveraged to its fullest extent in scoping his surroundings, and first he inspected his surroundings from the safety of his cave to ensure there were no predators nearby, before reducing the usage to half the capacity in order to hunt for small game.

A rocky hare caught his eye and he thanked whatever stimulus had caused it to blink as he would’ve missed it had it not been for this. It had been successfully blending into the environment until then, and that simple reflex had been a godsent.

Rocky hares were named more so for their anatomy, and less for their choice of habitat. Their relation to other variants of hare could be inferred from their general appearance, but where their more common cousins had fur, they lacked any and instead, they had an exoskeleton that resembled a dry plaster of plated mud where the fur would’ve been.

Blending-in was possible thanks to the adaptability of these plates, which could take on the coloring of any rocks or stones in their vicinity. Where camouflage fell short, they survived by falling back on their defenses first, which could be amplified briefly by realigning their plates to cover the gaps between them. This removed the chinks that stabbing objects could exploit whilst also providing a larger surface area for the absorption of blunt force, thereby lowering its overall effect. Though short-lived, the brief delays this tactic afforded them were usually enough to escape death since speed was their last resort, and they’d leverage this to remove themselves from dangerous situations.

All these qualities made for difficult prey and to catch one, one had to either attack with enough force to immediately overwhelm the hard skin or be fast enough to deliver the kill shot before the rabbit could harden. Since the former was currently impossible for Luke, he chose to go for the latter whilst supplementing raw speed with tact and skills.

Since it didn’t look like he’d spooked it yet, he chose a whimsical route towards it so as to not trigger its awareness, and a few minutes of misdirection had him on a perch above the still rabbit. Even though he’d never looked directly towards it after spotting it, he could still see it clearly thanks to the meld with Eleven. He watched it watching him, its eyes tracking his every move for the slightest hint of some awareness to its presence below. It had adjusted its hind legs as he’d gotten closer to it and now, they were directly beneath it. It seemed ready to bolt at the first sign of danger, so he had to execute perfectly, else he’d waste all the effort he’d put into the hunt so far.

Instead of pouncing immediately, he climbed up a few meters, making a show of circling the trunk slowly as he did so in order to gain the attention of the hare and lull it into a rhythm. He sped up once his second revolution had him out of the hare’s view and reorienting himself as he exited the zone of obscurity, he bet everything on this swan dive as he blinked into it.

Matching the countdown in his head to the estimated time of arrival a meter from the target, he let it lapse before materializing into a curved slicing motion that relieved his prey of its head before it could fully harden. It had been close, but his sickle had managed to cut through skin, bone and tube before the shifting plates could cover the crevices between its neck plates. A diagonal phase bomb followed, and this lessened the impact, and although he’d hoped for it to absorb all the accumulated force, he’d missed the timing by a split-second, and his body had ended up absorbing a bit of his momentum as damage. Nonetheless, the damage was negligible and succeeding in one try more than made up for the minor pains.

◆◆◆

Luke processed the catch, taking his sweet time so as to not spoil the products. With its head already removed, all that was left was a part of its hind- and forelimbs before he could continue, since these were now hardened all thanks to its last-ditch efforts at self-preservation. After setting them aside, he grabbed the hare by the neck bones, and bracing on a tree-trunk, he tugged hard, separating its body from the exoskeleton.

Next, he retrieved a few items from his inventory, and knotting two lengths of rope into the semblance of an adjustable cross, he fashioned the beginnings of a harness, which he capped off by coiling lengths of wire filaments onto each end of the cross. With the harness complete, all that was left was to attach it to a tree and to prepare the hare for the next steps.

It didn’t take him much longer to truss it up, disembowel, clean, and partition the edible bits after this, and once that was done, he placed them on a strip of bark before returning to the hardened parts he’d removed to the side before. He carved and scraped out all the live bits from the head, feet, and exoskeleton before washing them away and hanging them to drip for a few minutes.

As he waited for it to dry, he got a fire going and weaved a small grill with some of the left-over wire. After the blaze had reduced the wood into workable coals for the grill, he placed a quarter of the meat on the grill whilst depositing the rest his inventory. Although the sweet scents from the grill were already assailing his nostrils, the wait until the grilling was done would be pure torture if he just sat there, so he turned to Eleven and offered a bit of the raw meat in case she’d prefer that instead.

His mental offer didn’t seem to gain Eleven’s attention since her eyes remained transfixed on the grill, but a wave of the meat in her face finally did the trick. She wiggled curiously towards the raw chunk and after a few tentative sniffs, she moved in for a bite, and then another, before relieving Luke’s hand of the load and removing herself to a smooth rock for her meal.

◆◆◆

The meal managed to tide Eleven over the grilling period and once the meat was ready, they both dug in enthusiastically, with Eleven even more so despite having eaten already. As Eleven gave in to her indulgence, Luke was forced to temper his as he was stuck trying to make sense of the notification that had popped up the moment Eleven at from the grill.

+--------------+

|Personal Alert|

|--------------+-------+

|”The Root of all Evol”|

+-------------------+--+

|Class: Mystery Hint|

+-------------------+-------------+

|Mystery: You shyte what you byte |

+-----------+---------------------+

|Description|

+-----------+---------------------+

|”The road to evol is paved with -|

|- - - - bad assimilations” - - - |

+-------+-------------------------+

The description alluded to a trial-and-error process where the appropriate food for familial growth was concerned, and although it did not directly mention penalties and how they’d be calculated, the mention of ‘bad assimilations’ pointed to them being inevitable during the process.

He’d initially dismissed the possibility of any changes from the meal, seeing as no notification had popped up when Eleven consumed the meat raw. However, the alert had popped up soon after her consumption of the grilled meat, and this birthed questions as to how he’d prepare Eleven’s meals going forward. Was the discrepancy due to Eleven’s partiality to cooked food or was it a matter of the fire somehow unlocking the source’s essence for exploitation?” he wondered internally before communicating the question over their bond, but a mental response from Eleven wasn’t forthcoming.

Instead, as if in answer to his question, her aura flared up as it had with the trail rations, but where the dried meat had been accompanied by intangible horns in the aura around her, the hare’s meat evoked physical changes instead, and these came in the form of buckteeth and whiskers. Like the horns before them, the teeth and whiskers were but a brief materialization, and they began breaking down as fast as they’d appeared, leaving an unchanged Eleven, half a benefit, plus the penalty for her troubles.

◆◆◆

Penalties incurred for the mystery: You shyte what you byte. XP (Self): -1 XP (Eleven): -1 Incomplete assimilation! Calibrating adaptation…

+--------------+

|Personal Alert|

|------------+-+

|”Headstrong”|

+------------+------------------+

|Class: Addendum (Racial Traits)|

+-------------------------------+

|Source: Minor Adaptation (50%) |

+-----------+-------------------+

|Description|

+-----------+---------------------+

|- - ”Amplified defensive and - - |

|- - offensive capabilities for - |

|- - head-related attacks.” - - - |

+---------------------------------+