7.2 - Greater Reforge Soul
The space elves had carved a small piece of the void out for themselves. The area had a theme of dense jungles mingling with strange forests containing trees Theo dind’t recognize. Conifers and deciduous trees mingled together with the tropical fare, giving a confusing backdrop to the stone ziggurats. As always—lurking from the jungle or poking their sunken-eyed faces around rocks—were the elves. They gazed on the alchemist and Tresk with a kind of madness that only his potent Reforge Mind potion could cure. Too much time in the void had broken their minds, although he thought of them as having simply lost their senses.
Zarali, Sulvan, and Bilgrob were ready back in town. They had a capacity of 150 elves for now, which was more than Theo had expected. Alongside that was Salire’s efforts to create enough potions to handle the influx. Not only did they need to heal the minds of the elves but also their souls. Things had finally lined up, and he was excited to get started.
“How do we round them up?” Tresk asked.
Theo took a seat on one of the many stone steps leading to the temple. He glanced at the shard behind him, reminded of another thing he had to fix in a short time. That relied on Elrin and his strange connection with the shards, though.
“Wait for them to come. And subdue any that attack.” Theo shrugged. He hadn’t found a better way to handle them. “You brought the rope, right?”
“See, this is funny,” Tresk said, withdrawing a length of rope from their shared inventory. “Because you normally find an alchemical solution to the problem.”
“A sleeping potion would be nice, right?” Theo asked with a sigh. A few elves moved closer to the steps, rushing when they thought no one was looking. One tripped, face-planting on the soft ground. The poor elf remained there as though she had successfully crossed the distance. “If this wasn’t so sad, I’d be laughing.”
Tresk laughed. “I’ll give a good chuckle for both of us.”
The first elf to go down was a woman. She was disheveled, her eyes sunken with a mad look in whatever light remained on her face. Another problem with lingering in the void as a mortal was the way it sapped a person’s strength. Theo suspected it took just about everything from these people. Each attribute was tied to a piece of that person, and the void sucked away every drop they had. Tresk overpowered her with almost no effort, pinning the woman to the ground and tying her up tightly.