Outside Influences

When Bel finally dismissed her tree form, Cress sprang to her feet. Bel cringed as she remembered her temper tantrum, but Cress was full of smiles and eagerness without any sign of a negative thought.

“I wonder what she’s so excited about,” Bel mused aloud.

“Probably glad to finally get out of here,” Orseis griped. The cuttle girl was currently splayed out over a large rock, taking full advantage of the unwavering light from the Heart of Olympos.

Bel narrowed her eye at girl. “I’m surprised you can still move after eating all those wasps, Ori. Should we just roll you along with us?”

Orseis waved a tentacle. “I’m fine. Just give me a minute.”

With seemingly enormous effort Orseis rolled herself off of the rock. She grimaced as she slowly stood, looking slightly sick to her stomach.

Cress quickly moved towards Orseis, clearly worried that the girl was sick. Orseis waved her away with an embarrassed flush.

“I thought your abilities would let you keep eating forever,” Bel joked. “There are still a couple of wasps left, if you want to keep going.”

Orseis blanched. “No.” She slowly rubbed her distended stomach. “No, there are apparently limits to everything.”

Bel grinned. “Well, I’m glad you learned something.”

Orseis’ face puckered like she was eating something sour. “I hope you learned something too. Can we get through Technis’ Barrier now?”

“Well…” She glanced at Cress, who had transitioned from concerned back to overeager. “Let’s start walking first, or Cress may explode.”

She gestured to Cress that they were ready and the excited gorgon hop-fluttered fifty strides ahead before turning around and waving for them to hurry up.

Orseis turned green watching Cress’ athletic movements. “Maybe we should go slow,” she mumbled. “You know, in case something attacks us.”

Cress bounded back and put her hands on her hips as she inspected the overstuffed Orseis.

“Well,” Bel said brightly, “this is an opportunity to learn some new English words.”

She pointed at Orseis and made a pathetic face. “Sick,” she said.

It took Orseis less than an hour to recover to her usual self and their pace had advanced from a slow walk to a rapid bound through the Underworld’s vibrant forest. Unfortunately for Orseis, Bel had used that time to them the English words for every type of sick feeling, followed by words for eating, gluttony, juvenile behavior. Orseis had been to helpless to protest.

“Do you want to hear about the Barrier abilities now, Ori?”

Orseis snorted but didn’t answer.

“They’re really interesting,” Bel teased.

“Whatever.”

Bel laughed. “Okay, well, Flora’s form was really cool. I was liquifying those wasps and converting their bodies and cores into some kind of essence sap so I could absorb them more rapidly. You know, I actually ate even more wasps than you, but my stomach is fine.”

“Well, I’m so sorry for not absorbing them with my feet,” Orseis grumbled. “It’s too bad we can’t all be the beloved daughter of a goddess and a spirit with plans for lunar domination.”

Bel pursed her lips. “Am I being mean?”

“Yes, obviously,” Orseis responded.

“Huh. I think I want a second opinion.” Bel glanced at Cress.

“Just tell me about the Barrier,” Orseis pleaded, “before you teach her more words to make fun of me.”

Bel smiled. “Oh, okay. If you insist.”

Bel silently gloated as they bounced through the trees. Travelling through the forest had grown far more enjoyable once the trees had gotten larger and stronger than the spindly ones they had first encountered. Cress showed them that they could take advantage of the low gravity by simply jumping from limb to limb. The trees swayed precariously as they did so, but travelling through them bypassed all of the thick undergrowth and ambush predators that waited on the forest floor.

She would have liked to take some time to examine the forest – it was full of interesting plants with large, ornate flowers and wildlife that she caught brief glimpses of as she passed overhead. Maybe if she had been alone, but she wasn’t. She was supposed to be on a quest, and getting curious about the local wildlife probably wasn’t what Lempo had in mind for her.

Bel cleared her throat as she refocused her thoughts back to the wasps’ abilities. “The barrier abilities were really complicated, actually. Not because any one of them was really difficult, but because there were so many of them.”

Bel rubbed her earring as she thought of her brother. “James had a theory: creatures that evolved abilities would have lots of small, simple abilities that worked together to make a complex effect. The wasps’ abilities were a little bit useful alone, but were better working together.”

“Ugh,” Orseis groaned, “you sound like Flann dragging out one of his old stories.” She waved one of her tentacles impatiently as she used another pair to swing from a tree limb. “Just skip to the end; can we get through barriers now?”

“Well, maybe. If Technis is just stealing the ability from some wasps, then his Barrier is made of lots of tiny tiles that are linked, layered, and fused together.” Bel paused momentarily to make a twisting motion with her hands. “Like someone braiding and twisting rope. It’s stronger than the pieces. I took abilities to warp and unlink barriers, but if they’re too thick I may have a problem.”

“So you can’t get through it? What was the point of all that rampaging then?” Orseis derided.

Bel sighed. “Someone – or something – is creating the Barrier. It was clear from the abilities that they can’t make a sphere of them, only a dome. The force of anything hitting a barrier is sent to the other side of the wasp making it. Tunneling underneath will work, and so will eliminating the source.”

Bel’s eye brightened and she grinned. “I actually think I figured out something really interesting!”

She turned to make sure Orseis was paying attention before launching into a lecture. “I think the ability may have actually started as something to reduce air resistance while they’re flying. They can conjure a barrier in front of them to transfer the force of the air to a spot behind them. If they conjured barriers on both sides they would destabilize each other by bouncing the force back and forth until they ran out of essence.”

“That’s interesting, I guess,” Orseis admitted with far less enthusiasm than Bel had wanted. “Sounds like something James would go crazy about.”

Bel pictured her brother and laughed. “Yeah, he would. Hopefully he and Daran are doing okay.” She lost herself in worry for a few moments before shaking it off.

“Anyway, I took two abilities: one to unlink the barrier tiles and one to warp them.”

“Not one to make a barrier?” Orseis asked.

Bel shook her head. “It’s too expensive. I still want gorgon wings.” She lifted her chin at Cress, who was excitedly fluttering ahead and smashing anything dangerous with her maul. Bel felt a little bit guilty about leaving all the work to Cress, but the other gorgon seemed excited to rush ahead.

If I had wings, maybe I would want to rush ahead too, Bel lamented. The two abilities had set her back by forty strokes and delayed her ability to fly by an unknown amount of time. She was tempted to go out and hunt things for essence, but that sounded like something Orseis would do.

Cress shouted from a tree ahead of them, breaking up their conversation. “Here, look,” she instructed, pointing at a spot on the tree’s large trunk.

The tree bent under their weight as Bel and Orseis joined Cress on the large limb. It groaned in protest, but it held their weight. Once she was no longer worried about being dropped to the ground, Bel leaned over to inspect whatever had gotten Cress’ attention.

It was a series of pictures: an animal with a broken leash, some lines that were either a mountain or a wall, and a pair of people under a hut. Beneath the pictures were a complicated set of scratches that Bel didn’t understand. Cress had once again pulled out her navigation tool and comparing its readings to the scratches, so Bel guessed that they were directions of some kind.

Cress tapped the picture. “Is close.” Then she tapped the unfamiliar marks and tilted her head. “Is six, uh, six somethings far.”

Orseis snorted. “That clears things up, great.” Orseis looked at Bel. “Hey, if she’s already been to this place why is getting there so complicated?”

Bel tried to prod the girl’s unprotected stomach, but she quickly hoisted herself to a higher limb with a free tentacle. Orseis stuck out her tongue afterwards.

“It’s close,” Bel repeated. “That’s good.”

Cress nodded so vigorously that her snakes slipped from their positions. “Close, yes!”

“What’s the name of the place?”

“Name,” Crecerelle repeated. She pursed her lips and tapped on the symbols.

“Untethered wall town?” Bel guessed.

Cress shrugged, accepting Bel’s translation as good enough.

Orseis snorted. “We’re going to get there and find out that it’s a group of people who keep losing their livestock and don’t know how to make buildings with more than one wall.”

“Oh, stop,” Bel shushed her. “Maybe that’s how they got started and now it’s a big place with, you know, lots of walls. We’ll find out soon enough.”

“Sure,” Orseis replied with sarcastic cheer, “it’s only six somethings away.”

Six somethings turned out to be less than half an hour. Bel stashed that bit of information away for future use and took a moment to marvel at her first Underworld city.

Cress was eager to go straight to their destination, but Bel and Orseis needed some time to take in the sights. The forest came to an end at a vast depression beaten into the ground. It stretched as far as they could see, like an ocean of compacted soil filled with colorful grasses and wildflowers. The ground was rough and uneven, shaped by the footprints of creatures tall enough that their heads were lost in the clouds. A few of those footprints were deep enough to hold water, so the landscape was dotted with small, shallow lakes.

Bel had thought that the Titan was tall, but around these creatures he would have been on the small side. There were turtles that moved like mountains, enormous lizards with footsteps that could have flattened a village in Satrap, and snails as massive as a stack of whales. The only way Bel could tell that the last were living creatures was the obvious trail of stripped ground behind them.

The rest of the creatures were faster than the snails, but not by much. Bel watched in wonder as one of the lizards circled an equally impressive ape with fiery-red fur. The lizard had been sweeping its tail at the ape when she had first caught sight of it. A minute later and the attack was finally connecting. The ape slowly rolled backwards from the blow and began to fall.

“Are they moving in slow motion?” Orseis asked, perplexed.

Bel shook her head. “It’s falling slower because gravity here isn’t strong, but it’s also really high up. That tail swing covered the distance we would walk in an hour, I think.”

“How tall is it?” Orseis wondered.

Bel shrugged. “James could figure out the height of things using some trick with shadows and triangles, but I never learned it. I wonder if they can’t move too quickly without breaking. The force on their bones must be crazy.”

Orseis shook her head. “Not as crazy as the people who built that city in the middle of this.”

Bel inspected the city again, struggling to make sense of it. “City” made it sound like there was something planned and organized about it about it, which was wrong. There were walls, sure; huge sheets of snail and turtle shells were joined together to form the jumbled hodgepodge layers of the city, all joined together to form a long, narrow living space. Large, near-flat sections were used as the floors of each layer, and smaller pieces were fit together to create interior walls and bridges that spanned the open walking spaces. Underneath all that, the city had legs.

The legs were made of bones joined together, forming limbs foreign to any living creature. The straight bones were assembled into flexible triangles and parallelograms that bent as the creature walked, churning over the ground like a stiff-legged sideways centipede. A crank hung underneath the living space to provide power to the legs, and was in turn powered by a long, undulating sail that ran along the city’s length. It wasn’t moving quickly, but its steady, inexorable pace was easily enough to outrun any of the equally gigantic beasts that shared the endless basin.

Bel guessed that it was a feature of the design; she could see a large snail hoisted onto one side of the city. The catch was a swarm of activity, both of the denizens and of scavenging birds that filled the air around it. From their slightly raised vantage point, Bel could look down the main thoroughfare and see a steady stream of traffic hauling away meat and sections of shell for use through the rest of the city.

“Wow,” Orseis said as she stared in slack-jawed wonder. “I take back all of my complaining. Any people who hunt food that big are my kinds of people.”

Bel thought about rolling her eyes or teasing, but the city had left her speechless. “Yeah, whoever made that has got to be doing something right.”

Cress gripped them by the shoulders. “Great, right?” She gestured towards it. “We go now?”

Bel and Orseis nodded enthusiastically. Bel lifted a fist into the air and pumped it to show her enthusiasm. “Let’s go!”