Drip-Fed

 

“So, I guess we just stand here and wait?” Korith asked.

“Yup-puh.” Reysha let the end of the confirmation pop, then took another bite of gorilla arm. “Want me to eat you out while we wait?”

“No!” Korith answered.

“I’d wash out my mouth first.”

“That is not the issue! There’s absolutely no cover around and there’s monsters about.”

“…Since when are we against outdoor sex?”

“Since there is no cover around!” Korith squeaked. “Why are you like this, Reysha?!”

The redhead chortled at the exasperated question. “’Cause it keeps giving me funny faces to look at… finger action, maybe?”

“N-no, Reysha, please… don’t do stupid stuff.”

“Alright fine… little bit of making out?”

Korith wanted to answer no instinctively, because of how the conversation had gone so far. After Reysha had cleaned the blood off her full lips, however, one member of their polygynous party stared at the other with a lot more than platonic desire. “O-okay… but we have to stay vigilant!”

“I’m always vigilant,” Reysha purred.

While the landlocked half of the party were doing their best to keep busy, the slime and the angel were scouting out the lake. They had been told that the crash had happened near the south shore of the lake, but well within the murky expanse of the body of water.

Aclysia hovered above, keeping a lookout for any sign her darling gave her from within the lake. In a fortunate case, she would be able to see the mast of the ship in the upper layers of the murky water. In the absence of such luck, it was up to Apexus to find the target.

The humanoid chimera was naked. Taking the robe into the water would just have created unnecessary drag. In his state of nature, Apexus was slowly walking over the lakebed. His legs vanished, often up to the thighs, in the dense carpet of water plants and soft mud. Small animals, sharp rocks, and the occasional sea urchin pricked his feet. Only the last of that list was bothersome. Apexus devoured those that got stuck on his soles by enveloping them with his membrane. His feet resembled those of elephants because of it.

The lake was an interesting ecosystem and entirely natural. Most of the worlds’ biomes had been designed by the gods that had made them. The lake had been an accidental, later creation, coming about because of the interplay between tides, strong winds, and elevation.

A hundred years were not a long time in human generations, but for fish it was plenty of time to adapt. The salinity of the lake was considerably lower than the neighbouring ocean, but it wasn’t nothing. Because of this, the lake was not used as a source of water for the surrounding wildlife. Simultaneously, the lake was not big enough to support large marine predators. In that interim, the crocodile gorillas had taken up the niche as top predator. Everything else in the lake was a smaller version of their open ocean cousins.

Apexus stopped for a moment when he felt something solid under his steps. He bowed down and pulled out an algae covered piece of wood. He dropped it again a moment later. ‘Too overgrown to be what we are looking for,’ he thought. He was walking, rather than swimming, primarily because he did not want to drift over something. Visibility was terrible. The water was utterly dominated by algae and drifting mud.

The humanoid chimera felt nostalgic at the environment. It was different from the cavity in which he had formed, but close enough to invoke memories. Things had been much simpler back then. A simplicity that, given the choice, Apexus still would have surrendered in favour of what he had now.

The shape of the ship peeled out of the ‘fog’ slowly. Apexus thought it was a rock at first, then he made out the various markers of a crafted thing. The angles, the wooden planks, the nail, one after another it became apparent.

Apexus finished digesting what was currently in his feet, then pushed himself upwards. He swam to the top of the deck and disturbed several dozen crustaceans who were working on a corpse tangled up in rope. ‘The dead sailor tried to escape after the ship had sunk,’ Apexus guessed and carefully prodded the corpse. When it did not move, he disentangled it. It was composed of too much bone now to float to the surface.

Leaving that there for a moment, Apexus inspected the rest of the ship. Dimensions, position, and design all matched their targeted vessel. They had found what they were there for after just six hours of the humanoid chimera wandering about. There were plenty of other ships wrecked in this lake that he could have stumbled over instead.

Confirmation acquired, Apexus grabbed the corpse, threw it over his shoulder, and returned to the surface. Once Aclysia had spotted him she floated over. Her moth wings vibrated softly, creating the illusion that it was them, not the magic flowing under their fuzzy surface, that kept her airborne. “it appears your search has been successful, darling?”

“Indeed,” Apexus answered and inhaled deeply. It was easier to stay buoyant when his stomach was filled with water. “Stay here, please. I want to get this corpse ashore so we can get it buried.”

“Affirmative,” Aclysia confirmed with a little smile. “As a messenger of the divine, I thank you for your consideration, darling.”

The Monk just nodded, then swam back to the shore. Korith nearly jumped when Reysha suddenly broke the kiss. Pointing at the approaching party leader, the redhead smirked and said, “See, I am paying attention. That our undead?”

“Just dead,” Apexus reported and carefully placed the corpse down. “Can you dig up a grave for him?”

“Why? It’s just as good that the crabs eat him as the worms do.”

Apexus slowly shook his head. “It’s not about what he wants to be devoured by, it’s about where he would have wanted his body to lay. People largely prefer burials. We can offer that service. It is the correct thing to do.”

“I-I don’t mind,” Korith assured.

“I mind, what if I break a nail?” Reysha joked and inspected the claws of her left arm, just as she made it turn into a demon hand. “Seriously though, we should buy a shovel if we’re doing this type of work in the future.”

“We have to acquire a long list of things,” Apexus answered, then spread his wings. “We can talk more later.”

“Laterz,” Reysha waved.

“B-bye!” Korith added.

Apexus flew back to where Aclysia’s hovering presence marked the sunken ship’s location. Once back in the water, he first went for the main target of their Quest: the captain’s quarters.

Opening the door was difficult. The wood was swollen shut and the frame was partially sealed by barnacles and vegetation. It did not help that, three tugs in, the rusty doorknob came loose in its entirety.

Apexus decided to try and shatter the door. He hit the door once. It swung inwards. The humanoid chimera stopped in the middle of the second swing. ‘I am alone. No one saw that,’ he assured himself and gave the door another push to make it open the rest of the way.

A pocket of air was trapped under the ceiling of the tilted room. Between that air and the water swam a cloud of dissolving bed fillings, paper, bottles, and various other things. The room was in a state of total chaos. Not much marine life had made it through the closed door, but the storm had made a ruckus of it all before the water had given it a second whirl. The bed was out of place, the desk toppled over, but the chest was still in place. It rested against the bottom wall of the cabin and was located behind the now open door.

Apexus gave it a testing pull. It was heavy, but not as heavy as its bulky appearance would make one believe. The air still trapped inside gave it a degree of buoyancy. Not enough to actually float, but enough to reduce its weight in the water from the over eighty kilos it actually weighed with its content to something closer to fifty.

A load that a man of Apexus’ stature, an adventurer doubly so, would be able to haul the distance.

Before he engaged in that project, Apexus went deeper into the ship’s guts. There was another large air pocket trapped between the entrance to the bottom of the ship and the crew quarters. Apexus was tempted to flood it, if only because the lack of water made it awkward to manoeuvre the tilted staircase. ‘Let’s not do so without good reason,’ he told himself.

The crew’s quarters were in a much worse state. Water had torrented in there at a higher speed. The gap that had caused the ship to sink was located nearby and thus all kinds of marine life had taken up residence between the rotting hammocks. Three of the chests Apexus found were rotted through, their contents rusted or otherwise damaged to the point of non-functionality. He still grabbed what he could, storing it inside his stomach region. The fourth chest was in good condition. He almost missed it because it was nearly entirely covered in sediment.

Even though it was in good condition, water had seeped through the gaps. It was a sailor’s chest, after all, not that of a captain. Most of what was in there was clothing. A murky goo had once been paper. There was another heavily rusted locket and an impressive, large shell of some kind of giant clam. A talisman for good luck.

Apexus saw no danger in taking it all along and did so. Once it was stored in the adventurer’s bag of one of the other party members, it wouldn’t add to the weight. The chests, however, were not worth the retrieval.

With all of that done, he went back to the surface, informed Aclysia of what had transpired, returned to the shore a second time, loaded off the sailor’s trinkets, and then went to fetch the chest proper. None of that was interesting work. There was a short moment of excitement when he, mid-retrieval, was ambushed by another gorriladile. Beyond that, the only real enemy was time. Hauling the chest back to shore took him several hours. It regularly got stuck on things because of its broadness, which was a pain.

“That went smoothly,” Reysha commented when Apexus came back with the chest carried in front of him. “I don’t trust it. There’s no way we make a big amount of easy money.”

“Don’t jinx it,” Apexus requested.

“I’m doing the opposite of jinxing it. I firmly believe something fucky will happen. The Leaf will tumble into the endless void before we’re allowed to have actually good equipment and luxury stuff.”

Korith’s eyes, all the while, were glued to the chest. “C-can we open it? Can we?”

“Not yet,” Apexus answered.

“Not yet?” Aclysia landed next to the group, just as Apexus placed the chest down on a relatively dry and blood free part of the beach. “Darling, may I ask why we would open the chest at all? It is not our property.”

“I want to assure nothing crawled in. We won’t look through the contents,” Apexus stated simply. “We will not,” he repeated at Korith specifically.

“500 gold thoooooough,” the kobold whined.

“Oy, it’s my job to be the greedy, immoral one,” Reysha complained.

“It’s 500 gold. In coins.” Korith shifted her weight from one leg onto another. “Hoard disdains stealing from the undeserving, so I won’t take it, but I just want to… look at it, you know?” Excitedly, she ran a hand over the top of the chest. “Such good craftsmanship… when will we open it then?”

“When it is dry,” Apexus answered, then looked up at the fading sun. There was only a sliver of it left. They had been lucky and it still had taken them the entire day.

“I must inquire where you buried the corpse,” Aclysia said.

“Sure, bubble butt, follow along.” Reysha guided the angel over to where they had dug out and filled back up a shallow grave. “Best we could do with the tools we had. Shouldn’t be a problem, not much left to rot and all that.”

“It will have to do,” Aclysia sighed and put her hands together in prayer. “May your Spark find its rightful home in the Heavenly Trunk.”

The rest of the party stood a few steps removed, lacking the dedication to the faith to stand with the Priest. They could have done so for the show of it. Without sincerity, the gesture was unwelcome.

Nothing happened either, neither visually nor invisibly. No particles of light showed the passing on of an otherwise trapped soul nor was there an ethereal wind that blew over them with the gratitude of a departing consciousness. There was just an angel, saying her prayers for the dead, and those she travelled with standing quietly in respect of her faith.

It wasn’t until Aclysia lowered her hands that conversation resumed. “So, what next?” Reysha asked.

“Next we make camp,” Apexus stated plainly and pointed at the group of lights that was coming towards them.

The Atlas party was returning.