The Quantum Wanderer

I wake up a little sleepy, but refreshed. I could have slept more, but then we also have too much going on right to just lay down and sleep any more.

We all dress in our armors again, in silence. We go downstairs. Rudolph comes out to greet us.

“Good morning lord. Is there anything I can prepare…?”

“Not really, Rudolph. Where is lady Akiko?”

“She is in the ballroom, lord. She did not sleep. She told us that she was going to obtain further information before you start your travel.”

We all go over to the ballroom. Akiko is in a somewhat more comfortable attire, kneeling down over a book. She notices us and closes the book.

“Good morning, Akiko.”

“Good morning, honorable guest.”

“Did you find anything useful?”

“There are some ancient texts, but it is really hard to say what is correct to what is not. There is a report of a village boss’ son offending the goddess’s altar. He was apparently drunk, and he apparently did the unthinkable.”

“And? What happened?”

“The gate to the land of the goddess opened up; an army of tengu was released. They decimated the village.”

“What was ‘the unthinkable’?”

“The text doesn’t mention.”

I tilt my head a little.

“Anyway, please get your gear in order, we are going to continue our journey.”

Akiko does a deep bow and goes upstairs. The girls and I are staring at the mess that was done. There were books, scrolls, and other goods all around the floor of the ballroom. The jewels, gems and coins were still in my bag of holding, no need to take it out.

After some minutes, Akiko comes down the stairs. She is dressed like a priestess, with a bow in her left hand, and a pair of katanas in her belt. She gets close to us, and bow down to us.

“Can we please go?” She asks nervously.

I open the portal and we go to the outside of the temple. We jump through it. I take a look. To my left, the path of the goddess. To my right, the temple’s wall.

“Here, my lord?” Ruby asks, her left hand against the temple wall, already pulling a punch.

“Wait, Ruby. I don’t want to destroy any more than needed, and I want to avoid getting attention early.”

I turn toward the wall, and project a low frequency maser. Wide enough that we can pass, right in the middle of the wall.

Everything melts if the temperature is high enough. The stone becomes red, the point in the wall turns black. Pieces become bright red, small flames lick up from the wall, and it starts to melt. It gets even brighter, and the a round whole gets melted on the wall.

I cast a cooling spell, taking care not make it too strong. The stones start getting black. When the stones get cool enough, I pass through.

There is another tori, this time against the wall. The whole I dug is right in the middle of it. A little bit after that, there is a little wooden cabinet in the middle of the room. If my perception is correct, we are exactly below the altar in the main area of the temple.

The doors are facing the mountain.

As I am in front of the altar, the girls form a half circle around me. Akiko takes a step, and position herself in front of the altar.

She pulls out a scroll. It has a flower drawing in the back, kind of faded. She opens it and starts chanting. It is a series of syllabus, in a musical way. It is entrancing.

Some light emanates from the shrine, very lightly. Then the light fades. I take a step forward, and I notice that there is some golden light coming from Akiko’s belly.

Akiko falls down, sitting on her heels, in front of the altar. There is a drop of sweat coming over her forehead. Her breath is short. She stares at the altar, with a deeply sad face. She reaches inside the robe, and takes out a wrapping in a cloth.

She cradles the wrapping, as if it were a baby. I extend my mana sense. There is a weird mana signature. Very weird. There is no light, but I can still feel a humming of that weird mana. Like an old lamp, that is still hot after being turned off.

“Excuse me, Akiko.”

I grab the wrapping, and carefully unwrap. It is a small tail. Akiko doesn’t raise her head.

“The last piece of my daughter, honored guest.”

I think a little bit. I turn to Akiko.

“Can we try again?”

I position the tail, on the wrappings, inside the altar. Akiko doesn’t move. Opal approaches. She pulls Akiko up. Akiko is still under a daze.

“If my lord told you to try again, you try again.”

Aquamarine offers her the scroll. Akiko looks at them. Ruby is crossing her arms, smiling and nodding. Shandon is nodding as well. Cecilia tilts her head.

“He says some really weird stuff from time to time, but believe us, it always ends up well somehow.”

She grabs the scroll, and starts chanting again. The shrine starts emitting a golden light once again, but this time it gets stronger, because of the same light emitted by the tail.

I cast a small portal to a leyline above Akiko’s neck, so that she can absorb the mana. The strain gets reduced.

The light gets stronger and stronger, there is a pop, and the light goes out the altar, travels through the path delimited by the tori. At the last tori, two sliding doors appear. They open, and there is another place visible. It reminds me of the kind of portal that the snake came from.

“That’s it! Let’s go!” I tell them.

We all start running through the path. Except for Muninn and Huginn, that are flying by our side. After we finish crossing the portal, we are transported to a desert.

Akiko is the last one to reach the place. She has Hikari’s tail in her hand. Once she lands on the desert, the portal starts to distort, like a scene above the asphalt in the desert, and disappears in smoke.

This place seems weird. The air is breathable, but it feels weird, it feels fake. I look at Akiko. She seems less disturbed by the air than I am. Muninn and Huginn are flying in a weird pattern. It feels like they are learning to fly, stumbling and loosing their bearing here and there.

“Papa, this place is… weird.” Huginn says.

I extend my mana senses. There are small creatures all around the desert. Not as many as I found in the forest, but there is a whole ecosystem. Beetles, snakes, ants, scorpions, small animals. I try to push the mana further, but the mana in here does not collaborate. It feels like it doesn’t resonate. I have to push it, but it resists me.

After a couple of minutes, Huginn and Muninn, little by little, get used to the place.

I take a couple of steps, and I feel the difference in weight. Gravity is not constant, but rather it keeps changing a little bit, increasing and decreasing.

I leave a large sigh out.

“This is weird.” I mumble out loud.

“What, my villain?”

“Everything here feels a little weird. Even gravity. Mana here… It feels like a different flavor, a different frequency. It tastes weird.”

Cecilia takes a look at her hands. She stretches out her right arm. The mandala forms, but a very small fire ball comes out. Something unable to hurt anything seriously.

“Shit!”

The other girls take a look at her. The dragonesses try using magic as well, but their expressions are not good. They then open their mouths, and shoot their breaths against a different dune each.

The dunes react according to what is expected. Two of them vitrified, while one gets corroded by acid, and the last one explodes.

The girls decide to test running back and forth. Their speed is not diminished. Seeing this, Cecilia reinforces herself and experiments. It works.

Basically, right now, our problem is interacting with mana in the environment. Mana reinforcements work. It makes me wonder about the girl’s breaths, but I am not going to worry about some win.

Huginn and Muninn fly up to get a better view of the area. While they circle above, I concentrate on trying to understand the mana around us. I have had this kind of experience in the past, with Andrew’s guidance.

I don’t manage to get ahead by much, when Muninn and Huginn land on my shoulders.

Muninn points to a direction.

“There is something man made in that direction, father.”

“How far is it?”

“Not too much… I would say about half an hour? Flying here is really weird, it makes it hard to estimate.”

I sigh. Half an hour flight, for a crow, is far. It could be something like 25 miles. In a desert, on sand.

“Let’s go. That can be our first stop.”

We start walking. The whole time, I keep playing with my inner mana. Every breath I take, I try to mix my mana with the mana from the environment.

The sensation is weird. I don’t quite get it right, but I start feeling a little less oppressed here.

I start feeling the sand shift a little bit. My foot goes down deeper then it was going a minute ago.

“Everyone! Quicksand! Run!”

If we run, their impact on the sand is going to make us appear lighter. The quicksand is going to have less time to swallow us.

We run 50 feet when the sand explodes behind us, and a huge worm pops out of the sand.

Something looking like an earthworm, with a huge mouth on the very end, full of very large teeth, comes out of the sand.

Ruby shakes my shoulder, while looking at the monster. I nod at her.

“Just try to get the rest of the body out. I would like to know how big this thing is.”

She sighs.

“Ok, my lord.”

Ruby goes running back towards the worm. The thing’s ‘head’ turn in her direction, but keeps itself high. It looks like an animal trying to hear, one that cannot see. There is this obliquous stance.

The monster launches an attack, showing a lot more of it’s body. Ruby keeps running, making a circle.

That thing is probably 500 feet long. Ruby is smiling, when she turns around, and zigs to the side. Once the create goes a little bit past her, she makes a cut on it, the size of a person, using her broadsword.

She enters the hole she just made, and disappears inside the monster. After the slash, the monster turned to his right, to the position where Ruby was. Then it starts thrashing. Initially, a little, like it has an itch. Then like mad. Sand goes up where it hits the dunes.

After sometime, it drops dead, and from another hole comes Ruby. She is soaked in gore.

I put it in my bag of holding. Sand is still pouring down from the sky due to the battle. I take a look around and notice something odd… There are bubbles of gravity where the sand falls faster, and some where the sand is falling very slowly.

We keep walking towards the city. Opal sniffs the air.

“You are smelly, sister.”

Ruby puts her arm up, and smells under her arm.

“Not there. I am talking about the gore. Do you want help?”

“Don’t worry, sister. I will probably be able to wash up in the city.”

“I don’t think so.” Cecilia responded. “The city is in the middle of a desert, I pretty much doubt that they have enough for baths. I would even guess that drinking water should be expensive there.”

“What about opening a portal home, sister?” Ruby asks Opal.

“I can’t, sister. Everything here is… weird.”

“I am working on that.” I volunteered. “But I am still understanding how here works.”

“Fine! Pls help me, sister.”

Ruby extends her arms out, like a T. Opal opens her mouth, and starts blasting her with a fire breath, while walking in a circle around her. I stop to look at the scene.

The armor gets bright red, but it is more of heat emission than anything that can damage the alloy.

After Opal finishes a full circle, the organic matter that was on top of the armor is gone. Ruby smells her forearm, then tilts her head back and forth.

“Thank you.”

“Alright, let’s pick up the pace.” I tell them, and start jogging. Aquamarine picks Akiko up, doing a princess carry, and we speed up towards the city.

We go through the top of the dunes. In the distance, we see some movement in the desert. Some of it sand being blown, other places some sand caving in.

We arrive at a dry city wall, with a gate in front of it. It is a stone one, with the customary towers in the corners. There is no road going out, though. Out of the gate there is perhaps a 100 ff of road, and then the sand.

We look to the inside of the city, the floor is made of large stones. The houses seem to be made of clay.

There are a couple of guards at the gate. They are both humanoids, but they both have a snout, with different shapes. The one in the front have more of a square snout, while the one in the back has more of a rocket shaped one.

“Stop! Who are you?”

They speak the language of the south.

“We are travelers, we got lost in this desert.” Akiko speaks for us.

The guard attending us shows a face of pity, while the guard in the back sneers.

The guard in the back shouts to towards the city.

“Spirited!”

The door to the city opens slowly. We enter the city, and there is some movement inside it. Some guards running, they encircle us, pointing spears.

Their armor is made of pieces of different armor. Their breast plates don’t match the legging. Some of the armors have holes or are broken in some places towards the edges.

I am looking around, while a smaller being, someone that I can’t identify a species, comes walking. He wears glasses and he has a notebook in his hands.

Ruby is already tilting her head, I can hear the cracks. Akiko takes a step forward.

“Please, honored guest, let’s try to hear them.”

Ruby turns her head and looks at her. She is a little disappointed. We all wait, until the smaller humanoid approaches the group.

The dozen guards that encircle us all have very different expressions. The majority of them are looking at us with pity, while some of them are sneering. One of them is looking at my wives in a way that I am not liking.

“Good afternoon, humans. You have been caught by the portal, you are now in the land of the goddess. Drop your weapons and armor, you are going to be given tasks to earn your food and bed.”

He starts writing on his notepad. Looking at him closely, he has a very thin snout, but round ears. It is like his features don’t really match. When he looks up at us, I can see that his eyes have different collors.

“You. Name and profession you used to have in the lower land.” He says, pointing to Akiko.

“Akiko. I run inns.”

He writes stuff down. He turns to her.

“Good cleaners are hard to find. You will be working in the lord’s mansion, helping with the cleaning.”

He raises his head back up and points to Ruby. Not a nice idea. She already has this disgusted expression on her.

I raise my hand, the humanoid looks at me.

“What is it?”

I point at the guy with a strange look.

“I don’t like the way he is staring at my wives.”

The official raises his brow.

“So what?”

I enhance my brain and my body, and I move really fast. I cut the head of the guard off, and go back to the place I was.

His head falls off the neck, there is a fountain of blood that reaches 10 feet up in the air. It pumps twice until the body falls to the ground.

“Let me be clear. I will not be enslaved by this city. I would prefer we could talk, but I am not against using violence.”

The little guy is frozen, some of the blood spilt over a large part of the soldiers and him, hitting his notebook as well.

The other guards are frozen. We let our kill intent overflow, with the mana. The guards take a step back. They are shaking.

I understand that people should earn their food and their housing, but imposing the profession like this is not acceptable. We still have a lot of food on us, so we are not going to starve in the near future.

A bell rings on top of the wall, and then it starts to propagate, several bells ringing all around us. The little guy takes a couple of steps back, and ends up falling on his butt.

The people in the street start running towards the constructions and shut themselves in, while more and more guards encircle us. I turn to Muninn.

“Please protect Akiko.”

I reinforce myself. I jump over the guards, landing by the smaller beastkin. I grab him by the collar, lifting him up, and keeping him between me and the soldiers.

“Now, do you think they can react faster than me?”

The guy is silent.

“I am really in a bad mood right now!”

“PUT DOWN THE WEAPONS! PLEASE!”

The guards around lower the lances a little, but don’t really put them down. That is enough for us right now. I lower the beastkin. He raises both arms, the universal sign of peace.

“I AM SORRY! WE ARE DOING THIS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD!”

I tilt my head.

“That is a first. I enter town, you guys point weapons at me, try to enslave us, and that is for our own good?”

The beastkin is looking down.

“Yes, sir. You may not know yet, but you are not in your world anymore, you are not in Andrea…”

I keep myself in silence. I let his nervousness help him talk some more.

“I mean, how was it like in the place you came from? The other spirited all say that they were in a sacred mountain of sorts. In a forest of sorts.”

“Spirited?”

“Yes. Spirited away. You are now in the land of the goddess. Welcome to the Resonance Wastes.”

I take a look around. Considering the desert on the outside and the state of the city on the inside of the walls, the name is not really bad. The beastkin clears his throat.

“Can we please please continue this talk inside?”

“Inside where?”

“ANYWHERE! The goddess is bound to notice you this way! PLEASE!”

This guy is really frightened.

“Of course, you just had to ask. Perhaps with someone that can provide us a full picture of where we are?”

I let the beastkin go. He rearranges his clothes and starts walking, passing by me. The soldiers around are really pissed off, but they let my girls reach us.

The little guy points to a soldier and motions him to get closer. He whispers in the soldier’s ears.

“Go tell the elder what has happened here. Tell him I will be in the empty deposit by the inner wall. Also tell the guards at the inner wall to provide us a table and… Eight chairs. Actually, make it 10.”

He is unaware that my hearing is this good. The soldier sprints away, further in the city. The little guy turns to me.

“Come with me, please.”