Death Cap - Thirty-Three - Playing by Your Own Rules

Things were growing pretty well. With Bet taking care of selling my mushrooms I had a lot more time to spend on the farm, which meant more time draining my mana to push for faster growth.

In the two weeks since I struck a deal with Markham, I had delivered two batches of mushrooms to the union, earning me a tidy little profit. I hadn’t revealed that I’d be able to produce healing mushrooms yet. It had taken until that very day for the [Healing Chimes] to mature.

For such tiny mushrooms, they certainly took a long time to grow.

Maybe that had something to do with their potency. There had to be some sort of magic at work with the way they functioned. Just ‘healing’ someone wasn’t a thing. The body was a complicated mess of interlocked systems, redundancies, and inefficiencies that somehow all came together to keep a person thinking... most of the time.

I was more than a little curious as to how the [Healing Chime]’s healing mechanism worked. Were there side-effects? Was it rapid cell growth to promote healing? If so, was there an elevated risk of cancer or more rapid telomere degradation?

I started to stock up some money to find some texts about it. There had to be something available out there.

In the meantime though, once I had a few [Healing Chimes] I could start testing them. I didn’t feel noticeably different after eating a single one the other day. Maybe that only counted as a microdose? Maybe that had healed something that was such a minute issue that it didn’t make a noticeable difference to me?

The other mushrooms were growing at a much more satisfying rate, though the [Skunk’s Lament] were being grown elsewhere, in one of the abandoned homes nearby. I’d have to grow any hybrids there too, which was annoying, but manageable.

I was humming to myself (Some earworms from the before were still stuck with me, even after so long away. I could probably mumble through the entirety of Bohemian Rhapsody if I wanted to) when there was a knock at the door.

Bet was due to arrive at about this time. In fact, she was a tiny bit late by my estimates.

I put a mask on and grabbed some [Dead Man’s Cough] in a small leather sac, ready to be squeezed into the face of anyone hostile on the other side of the door. Sir Nibbles stood up.

Paranoid I might be, but it was for some good reasons.

I opened the door and found Bet standing outside, alone, as she should be. She was hunched over, breathing hard. It was clear, at a glance, that she was injured and in terrible shape.

“What the hell happened to you?” I asked.

Bet stumbled in, and I tossed my sac aside and ripped my mask off to steady her shoulders.

“Hey, hey, okay, come here. Nibbles, off the chair you lout. Sit, sit.” I guided her onto my stool, then ran over and poked my head out of the farm, looking for trouble. Seeing none, I closed the door and turned back to Bet.

First, I had to put my feelings aside. It wasn’t time to panic. Triage things. She was hurt. Gash on the forehead, a hole opened on the knee of her pants where she had scraped some skin. There were more injuries than that, but she was hunched over and I couldn’t see them through her clothes.

Then I noticed what was missing.

“Where’s the table?” I asked.

Bet sniffled. She looked up to me. Someone had hit her eye. It was turning blue already. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I... please don’t fire me.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” I said. I rushed over to the tap, grabbed a bucket, some cloth, and some lye I used to decontaminate stuff. “Stand still. Breathe in as best you can.” I filled a bucket with water, then tossed in a sprinkling of lye and mixed it with the cloth before returning to her. “Where’s the worst injury?”

It was hard to coax her into allowing me to help, but eventually she gave in. I wasn’t taking no for an answer, and while her pitious moans when I applied disinfectant on her open cuts made my heart strain, it didn’t stop me.

She’d been kicked in the sides a few times. I was pretty sure she’d broken a rib or two, judging by the discoloration on her torso and the pain on touching her. Fortunately, her lungs were about as fine as could be for someone living in the slums. It didn’t feel like her ribs had shifted too much. A clean break, maybe?

I hoped so. There was no way we could afford any sort of medical help.

She had some nasty bruises on her arms and one of her wrists looked like it had been dislocated, then shoved back into place. It was swelling and she was clearly favouring it. Her fingers still moved, and weren’t numb.

I bandaged her up as best I could, staunched the bleeding after disinfecting it, then I pulled out a box and sat across from Bet. She was still taller than me, much to my slight chagrin. It wasn’t important.

“Here, eat these,” I said. Three [Healing Chimes]. It was about a tenth of what I’d managed to grow. I could give her a dose every day until she felt better. It might help, maybe.

It would lose me some profits but... Feronie-damn it, she was a child. A hurt child. That took precedence over my own profits.

Bet chewed carefully, and I noticed another bruise forming on her jaw.

“Who did this?” I asked.

She didn’t know it, but I was asking her to point me to the person I’d kill next.

Bet sniffled again, but refused to cry. She looked angry too. That was fine. If she wanted to cry, she’d cry, and if she wanted to be angry, then she’d be angry. As long as I got my names and she felt better, it was all well with me. “There was four of them. Boys. Older boys. They stopped me on the way here and said they wanted the money. I said no, and then one of them pulled a knife.”

I cursed in the back of my mind. “Just random thugs then?” That would be a pain in the rear to track.

She shook her head. “They were dressed good.”

“Dressed well, how?” I asked.

“Not like us,” Bet replied. “Not like proper slum clothes. They were a bit dirty, but they... just weren’t from here.”

I kinda knew what she meant. There wasn’t a dress code to the various slums, but there were differences. We mostly got our clothes third-hand or from one of the local general stores. Those were fed by local factories, which made their own sorts of clothes.

Our part of the slums were overalls and big, thick shirts. Closer to the Gutters and they had pants, belts, and thinner shirts. By the Ditz dungeon they had overalls too, but they were usually green rather than blue.

It was subtle, and it wasn’t perfect. After all, we weren’t wearing what we were by choice. Still, there was a pattern to it, one I had sort of just picked up without meaning to. When I went to the market I could tell more or less where someone was from by their threads alone.

I grabbed some paper from my workstation and a pencil. I rubbed the end on the edge of my desk, shaving some of the wood off to make writing easier. “Describe them,” I ordered. “Every last detail you remember. But.. if you can, tell me which detail you’re certain of and which you’re not.”

Bet nodded. “What will you do?”

“Get my money back, then some,” I growled.

Sir Nibbles made that strange laughing sound of his.

Bet gave me what details she could. These boys were all older than us, but they were still boys... technically. Teenagers might have been more appropriate. A few had cigarettes. They all wore coats and, importantly, had shoes.

“What were these assholes doing so far from home?” I muttered.

“Mugging me?” Bet said, but her voice was so low I almost failed to hear it.

That was... plausible. “You’re taking the week off,” I said.

“I can’t... I mean... sorry. I can take extra shifts at the dungeon, um, will you ever do this again? Need me?”

I glared, but not at her. Then I stomped over to one of my racks, shifted aside some particularly vile mushrooms, and plucked out a few coins from a sac surrounded by fungi. “Here’s your pay for the week, and then some. Take a shift or two off. Rest. We’re going to be working extra hard next week. Oh, and I’m giving you some more mushrooms to eat, you will eat them on the days and time that I’m writing, or else I’ll find out and be cross.”

While I plucked some [Healing Chimes] and wrote her a note on when to take them, I stewed on all the terrible, terrible things I would do to the people who’d hurt one of my employees and taken my stuff.

I was pretty sick of people in general, but those who took from me most of all.

***