The gauge for He Who Slumbers was a thermometer of sorts, blue at the bottom and red at the top, with a number of notches and percentages. Right now a hovering icon of three cartoon Z’s rested at 25%, slowly rising and falling as if the Z’s were themselves sleeping. Well, 25% seemed pretty low, honestly.

Hidden Objective Completed! – Ritual Components

He Who Slumbers has been an insidious plague on the world for untold eons. However, he is not invincible.

Reward: 500 xp, plus a card of mythic quality useful to the one who has completed the quest.

“What is it?” he asked, once they’d gotten back topside. The sky was beginning to turn the deep indigo of pre-dawn, with a spot of warmth over on the horizon. Corbin was amazed to discover he hadn’t been looking up at the stars before. Now though, he saw them strewn out about the sky in the hundreds of thousands, with the Milky Way splitting the sky like a glittering ribbon. And not one, not two, but THREE moons. One of these was larger (he thought) than the typical moon of earth, but the other two were much smaller.

She hadn’t responded.

“Come on, don’t be all secretive. What’s the card?”

Her face twitched, and she whirled on him. An accusing finger was pointed down in his direction. “Understand one thing, bird.”

She grimaced, flashing her teeth at him, and while that happened Corbin realized her aura was different. Before it had been mostly green, with popping spirals, but now it held a twinge of holy, pure white ringing her.

“What… should I understand?”

She hesitated again, pointing down at him in her fury while the words jumbled around in her mind. “When we are finished transforming you… I am done. Done, you hear me? Whatever direction you travel, I’ll be headed the opposite way. You’ve gotten me into nothing but trouble from the beginning. You separated us from my group. You got us into danger time and time again. And I told you we should leave this alone, you didn’t listen… I told you I didn’t want to know this… you didn’t listen again.”

She took another look at the card in her hand, and threw it down onto the stone floor.

Her aura didn’t change. It didn’t change back to the way it was before. The knowledge she’d just received from that ghost wizard in the dungeon… that was permanent.

“We’re through together, Corbin of earth. I fulfill my promise to you and we are finished.”

***

Corbin collected the relk’s tails, which they didn’t need, in silence. They were easy enough to obtain, provided you could get them to shoot downwards, or into a large enough tree. He hadn’t known this, but they were highly venomous, the tails. If he’d been stabbed with one he probably wouldn’t survive, because who knew with Kyessy now. Maybe it had been the disintegration of all her clothes, or getting her sleeping bag fully saturated, or getting a bunch of her skin melted off, but he doubted all of those. No, it was the He Who Slumbers thing.

She’d taken the volcanic rain of fire death thing completely to heart from her mother and father. She was dead set against messing with the thing in the mountains of the north, whatever it was.

The quasid roots were easy enough to rip up out of the swamp, provided you didn’t have any long-nosed jiddaras around. These things had snorkel noses and would explode up out of the water any time someone (Kyessy) went towards the quasid plants, which were magic and healthy and all sorts of good stuff, so people and monsters loved them. Dane and the crew would’ve recognized them even if they weren’t covered in spiky protruberances, by the sideways mouth and the overabundance of teeth. He warned her on three different occasions, and eventually he got quite close to level 11. In any event, the dark quasid roots were theirs, though they needed to be stored in glass bottles to avoid creating masses of magical disturbances in her inventory. They would’ve learned this lesson the hard way except that the game AI warned him, and her inventory was somehow hermetically sealed against time, space and weather.

That left the marsh yims.

They traveled back north, avoiding the magewood tree, the draklings (he couldn’t stop himself from referring to them as kobolds) and the still-sleeping wyrm.

The marsh yim hive was a miserable affair with her like this. He could easily draw them out, but they came in fours and fives. More importantly, and she hadn’t told him this, the death of one marsh yim brought the hive on full alert, to deal with whatever was killing their number. Even more importantly, that pheromone or whatever alerted them… oh yeah, it was stuck to the person who had killed the first marsh yim. Meaning he’d just doused himself in a neon sign that said ‘I killed you brother, whatcha gonna do about it?’

He took several different hits off these things, because oh yeah, even even more more importantly, some marsh yims could fly if they had to, and this was the crazy part: they just sloughed off four of their six legs to do it. They’d just rip off their own legs, and a pair of wings would unfurl from under the carapace, then they took to the air after him. Kyessy left these until last, mostly because she was being a gigantic butt, and also because the ground-based ones were coming after her and she needed to multi-arrow them to death.

He was getting Luck (Serendipity) messages left and right, telling him he’d dodged this and that attack, putting the yims at a disadvantage. This allowed him to swoop around and snare them up in Entangling Razor Vines, which was usually a death wish: they’d die on impact once they fell to earth.

Or Kyessy would get to them.

He hit level 11 after a good two hours of almost constant flying and fighting. Each individual marsh yim wasn’t too hard, but the punishing constant push to fight was exhausting. One point went into Endurance, and the other into Luck. That gave him a little bit of extra oomph when it came to continuing the fight, plus five desperately needed hit points.

He dove down after the one Kyessy was fighting, and realized the battlefield was now (other than those two) still. They’d killed off something like eighty-five of the damn things.

Kyessy flashed with a level up, yet she still glared at him when he landed and immediately fell over.

“You performed admirably,” she said stiffly.

He just groaned in response. Everything was pain. Maybe it was just his imagination, but the breeze gently drifting over him felt like teensy razor blades.

“This was supposed to be a suicide mission,” he said later. They took their sweet time approaching the yim nest again; they’d done a fighting retreat the whole time, leaving a long trail of bodies to be looted. She picked up small piles of silver, venom glands, carapaces, and the odd card every eight or ten bodies. He could barely keep up by hopping along behind her, keeping an eye open for an ambush.

“The queen will be inside, surrounded by males and soldiers,” she said.

“How do you know?”

She kept the new tone, a dead-eyed neutral voice he didn’t care for. It was worse than apathetic, stoic Kyessy. “The human I… the one I loved. He was a beastmaster. Eventually he got roped into a job where he went collecting marsh yim wax and other ingredients. He would always argue against killing them if it could be helped.”

“A monster beekeeper. Did he smoke them out, take the honey, and leave them all alive?”

She nodded, but didn’t elaborate.

“Stay here. I’ll be back.”

“But–”

“You don’t have hands, and we’re not looking to kill the rest. You won’t be helpful here.”

Ouch. Brutal honesty.

He did as directed, perched atop of the nearest tree and keeping a lookout while she climbed up the hive. Before she got to the top she sliced a huge chunk out and produced a glass bottle, which collected the honey: a silvery goop instead of the usual sun-kissed gold. The wax she stored in her inventory. After five more big hunks of hive, it didn’t appear reduced much at all. She also had a big glass jar full of silvery honey.

Quest Completed! – Ritual Components

Serrell has agreed to commence the ritual to transform you once these items are brought back to her.

Reward: 3000 xp, +1 skill point

He immediately jumped into the menus and, while he intended to grab another point of Inspect, he waffled over the other skills he hadn’t looked into at all. Apparently the number of Knowhow skills was limitless. Ritual magic was probably one of these. Also, Serendipity and Kismet had literally saved his life in the past.

He pecked at the skills options until he came to a series of three dots he hadn’t seen before. This was an explanation of what the skill levels meant.

Skills offer a multiplier of the Attribute when calculating a check. At level 1, the multiplier is 1.5x instead of simply 1, but afterwards your Attribute is considered double, triple, quadruple, etc for purposes of Attribute checks. Thus, if your Agility is 12, and your Sneak is 1, you make checks as though your Agility was 18. A Sneak of 2 would boost this to 24.

Beware! Saving throws are made at your base Attribute level, regardless of skill level. It is possible to boost your resistances through items, cards, species and class abilities.

This meant Luck checks were basically always happening, whether he succeeded or failed. The full ramifications of this were beyond his tiny bird brain, but he knew a possible min/max when he saw it.

“Oh hell yeah,” he muttered, and bought a rank in Kismet.

If only he’d seen this before… honestly though, in thinking it back over, he probably would’ve gone with the same choices. He’d only gotten a few skill points, and spotting things for Prissy, and later Kyessy had been priority numero uno. Most of these baddies were ambush hunters, explosive and speedy at the outset, but usually lacking if their prey survived the initial attack. True Sight had been a huge blessing in that respect.

“Are we ready?” she asked.

“To go become myself again?” he asked. “Absolutely.”

A pang of guilt struck him, for no good reason. He hadn’t made her promise to fix him. He hadn’t dragged them to this town with its shady warlock and its weird magistrate. Still, she was peeved at him, and he didn’t like that.

“Let’s do it, then.”

***

They traveled in silence. Real, actual silence, which meant she’d unequipped his card. No more telepathic communication. If there was any doubt about her sincerity over her threat to leave once he got in that ritual circle, it was completely gone now.

He was curious about the card she’d received from the ghost wizard, but not curious enough to have her go postal on him. She kept on her guard, of course, and equipped his card as soon as there was any trouble so he could aid in combat, but he sensed a new manic edge to her actions he didn’t like. It was as though all the adventures they’d undertaken thus far has slowly looped around and around her body, tightening in on her and causing her to breathe more shallowly, causing her eyes to dart this way and that every time something moved, and in general making her even more unpleasant than she’d previously been.

In retrospect the only thing he’d have changed was to let her leave the chamber before engaging with the ghost wizard. He still wanted to know how to awaken, confront, and defeat Vethros. It wasn’t his duty, exactly, but he felt like he’d stumbled onto a calling. Even if he was only a raven, he’d been a pretty damn good one thus far. He’d far outstripped Prissy in brains, decision-making capabilities, and knowledge of fighting tactics, though she’d caught up pretty quick. He could even say with pride that he either did as well or better than Kyessy on almost every challenge they faced together. He’d saved her… how many… countless times anyway. At least three. More than that qualified as countless, surely.

“I’ve only got three visible toes to count on,” he muttered.

Kyessy snorted, but didn’t reply.

And if she didn’t see the Vethros quest as a good thing, well phooey on her. She could be part of something grand, a quest capable of changing the whole world for the better. Not many people on earth got that chance. The old Corbin has never gotten that chance.

Or had he?

A sudden flash of his life appeared before his eyes: he was standing in a huge parking lot, at a KMart or Target perhaps, and staring down a massive line of cars. These people were all here for his help. They needed reassurance that they weren’t sick and dying. They needed him to perform his duties with precision and care, so they would know in a handful of hours whether they should fear for their lives or not.

He had a face shield on, a mask on so tight it would leave blood blisters on up his cheeks, and a whole series of one-use protective equipment. Heh, one-use. This was his third day in the same ill-fitting scrubs.

The lady in the car coughed a few times behind her car window, and he waited patiently for the coughing fit to subside before rolling it down.

“Hi, what’s your name?” he asked. He peered at the chart and saw this was one Sherri Wilson. She had asthma.

“Sherri,” she said. She was having trouble breathing. “Th… thank you for this. I d…” She couldn’t even finish her sentence, wheezing in great gasping breaths. This lady definitely had it.

“That’s all right, ma’am. Just lean forward and I’ll swab your left nostril, then your right. Then I want you to head straight to the ER and tell them Corbin sent you, okay? Follow those signs.”

She nodded, then sat real still while he gave her the PCR halfway to her brain. She winced, and silent tears rolled down her cheeks.

“You have kids at home? Everybody accounted for in the Wilson house?”

She held up two fingers. “B… babys… sitter,” she managed.

“Pull right on through to the ER, Sherri. Don’t you worry, we’re going to get you fixed up, okay?”

He radioed as soon as she pulled away, telling the understaffed, overworked ICU they had another one with shortness of breath incoming.

He came back to the present. Yeah, Kyessy was wrong. She had a duty to help people just as much as he did. You couldn’t just live in a world and not give back; people raised you, people taught you, people supported you, and it was your duty to raise, teach, and support somebody else in return.

He had this crazy feeling Kyessy would say she was raised by wolves, or the only person who taught her anything had been the monster who’d murdered her entire tiefling tribe or clan or whatever, up in the Spine of Creation. Then she’d say she repaid the world by hunting down and murdering that monster.

As soon as he blinked, he blasted off Kyessy’s shoulder, and nearly got a relk’s tail in the face. He vowed to stop trying to bring his past back, and stay in the moment, so he didn’t get ambushed and murdered.