The Oasis

[greatcleavage]

What the heck was he doing here?

Beneath the shade of the palm fronds, Roy stared out at the desert that stretched out in every direction. Somehow he'd found himself here, against all logic. A weird sidequest? A dream? Maybe he was dead again and his spirit had been hijacked.

Well, what could he do but wait and see what came along? The oasis showed signs of being used by travelers, so he wouldn't be stuck here forever anyway...

Comments

[greatcleavage]

"If we get arrested I will do what is in my power to navigate our release through the system," Roy corrected. "Unless the authority is illegitimate."

[najaran]

She frowned back at him confused. "How can authority even have parents?"

Gooligan gave a double mustached face... um.... mustache.

[greatcleavage]

"'Illegitimate' has a broader meaning than that," Roy said, his mind going relatively numb.

[najaran]

"Grandparents?" Some days she was as bad as Elan.

[greatcleavage]

"A meaning not tied to the concept of family."

[najaran]

"Oh." she turned to face forward again but not before he caught the hint of an impish grin.

[greatcleavage]

"I wonder how badly it would count against me to leave you in jail longer than is necessary," Roy grumbled.

[najaran]

Naja tossed back her head, laughing. "I am glad we're friends now!" He was fun!

[greatcleavage]

"I'm so glad I can contribute to your delight and enjoyment of life."

Why did this keep happening to him?

[najaran]

"And hopefully I can towards yours!"

[greatcleavage]

"Stranger things have happened," Roy said with a shrug, "albeit not often."

We should figure out what they'll find, lol.

[najaran]

"Hey, why would that be strange?!"

[greatcleavage]

Roy chose to ignore that question.

"Hey, look on the horizon. I think I see something."

[najaran]

She looked up and squinted. "What is that?"

[greatcleavage]

"Looks like civilization of some sort." At this distance, heat shimmer made the true size of the town, or city, or outpost, difficult to distinguish.

[najaran]

"Great! I hope they have loads of great places to eat! I'm hungry enough to eat a room full of mushrooms!"

Gooligan made a small distressed whimpering sound.

[greatcleavage]

About to comment, Roy paused.

"That's oddly specific," he said after a moment.

[najaran]

She grinned a bit. "Oh it was great! the more we ate the more they grew!"

"They were trying to suffocate us to death, it was one of the tests of the gates. But ancient magic was apparently no match for Najaran's stomach," Gooligan said wearily.

[greatcleavage]

"Hold on. I want to actually hear this story with context." It sounded almost interesting, if he could manage to get a solid answer out of them.

[najaran]

Najaran grinned. "Okay, but it's a bit of a long one," she warned. "So, remember how I said one time I was arrested for being a Cepter and Alta had to bust me out?"

[greatcleavage]

"Yes, I remember you'd mentioned that." Which it and of itself was another story to hear, but never mind that now.

CW: gore/bodyhorror

[najaran]

"So Alta and her crew, which was at that point herself. Ganz, and Joaquin. They were actually really scary when we first met," she said with a laugh. Joaquin knocked out a bunch of guards with he chemicals and stuff and Alta got into my jail cell without me even noticing her touch the lock, and Ganz was surrounded by people on the ground with a huge double sided axe. I know now that they didn't kill anyone, but at the time Gooligan and I were terrified."

She stroked Thunderbeak's head as she spoke, remembering. "They wanted to get into the legendary city of Bisteam. They needed help getting past the nymph, Kigi who guarded the gate. Just getting to the gate was something though. Like this one time Alta asked me to get firewood, and what I thought were just stumps turned out to be Treefolk, or when we ran into that mantrap that Joaquin was so excited to catalogue that he almost let us get eaten while he studied it, and even getting attacked by another Searcher team! But actually, Kigi helped us out of that one. She summoned her Gargoyle to chase all of us away, but Ganz already had Dumdum's troops freaked out and so most of them just cut and ran. The rest tried to fight her, but her Cepter power was at least 4 thousand."

"FOURTY" Goolligan corrected.

"Right, forty thousand. So they were no match. There were reasons I was taught never to use my cards against Non-Cepters, the normal people wouldn't stand a chance. But I understand now why Kigi was doing it. She was the last one left to defend her home, after all," she said, sadly. "Dumdum left his wounded and called everyone else to retreat. So I got my cards back from Alta and used a Tower Shield to defend the wounded soldiers. Kigi was really upset, because she said we humans worry so much for each other but don't hear the pain of the forest." She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, subdued as she nodded. "She was right, I didn't pay enough attention to the world, none of us did. But for some reason, she let us challenge the gates anyway. Probably because of the deep spawn that was spying on us. She.. She was trying to fight a horrible corruption I didn't know about at the time." She swallowed a bit. "I know about it now, though, and have been fighting," she assured him before resuming the story.

"We passed through a stone gate that just looked like three stones, one on top of the other two, but when we went through we were in this weird room made up of square stone blocks. It was filled with skeletons all over the ground, except where we entered. Their torsos were all twisted around. Most of the jaws were broken. And the old skeletons were mixed with the newer bodies, like someone had jumbled them all together." Oddly, she was lighter and more her usual self talking about this than about Kigi. "And then these weird looking mushrooms started sprouting out of the bodies. I thought the corpses were coming to life and laughed. Then Joaquin started laughing. Soon we all thought everything was hilarious. Joaquin looked them up in his book, and apparently they're a kind of poisonous mushrooms that make people laugh themselves to death and multiply tons when attacked. I tried not to laugh. I thought of scary things, but then Gooligan sprouted a bunch on his head and said he had grown hair and I just lost it. Joaquin attacked them, which was when he found the entry about them reproducing. And it was all just so funny, but then I started wondering if they tasted as funny as the smelled..."

[greatcleavage]

"So you ate the mushrooms that you'd just been told were poisonous."

Just to be clear. That was what she'd said. It wasn't the worst plan in the world... if you had a Fortitude save that was much, much higher than he expected hers could possibly be.

[najaran]

"They looked yummy," she said with a shrug. "And there were tons of them. And we were going to die anyway, so why die hungry right?"

[greatcleavage]

"Well, that's certainly logic." By some definitions of the word, in any case. What a weird and disturbing ending to what had shaped up to be an interesting if painful adventure.