BECMI Chapter 379 – A Curse Upon Thee, I Say!
My instructions to the fleet were cold and very on point. These natives were yyota addicts, interested in eating, lazing about, and having sex. The men of the fleet were to watch after the women, because the natives would think nothing of kidnapping exotic women for sexual partners, getting them addicted to yyota, and basically making pleasure slaves out of them.
The men had better avoid the native women, too, as they’d be plied with yyota juice and give them their everything for more. I gave them absolute permission to kill any native pulling such tricks… and then I warned ALL of the natives within three miles of our landing site what was going to happen to them if anything yyota was delivered to any of the crew.
In a drugged haze, many wouldn’t take the threat seriously, and there was going to be bloodshed. I gave the captains absolute authority to deal out such… but to otherwise trade equally and fairly.
The rear supply fleet was grounded in the harbor the natives hastily directed us to, and silver or other random trade goods were paid over for as much fresh fruit, meat, and bread as the islanders were willing to part with. Forager teams went out, formed from only the most disciplined of the crews, and I sat in the middle of the landing boats, with lines of MassDisks shuttling supplies and crew members back and forth from the boats off shore.
Also, I Shaped up a perimeter wall and several plazas on the beach with firepits for organizing proper feasts for the sailors, giving them all a chance to come onshore and blow off some steam, with absolutely nobody allowed past the walls I’d drifted along and put up without permission… and I was watching.
Four thousand rowdy sailors meant there were going to be fools and idiots who, through misplaced courage, ornery denial, arrogant stupidity, foolish daring, or gleeful overconfidence, were definitely going to find a way to outwit a foolish woman, elf, and spellcaster and do whatever the Hell they wanted to, and they just knew I couldn’t stop them.
What was I going to do, fight them all?
The examples made of the first few who tried to smuggle yyotas they found in the wild back into the camp were bloody and extremely public, with several overly defensive and zealous men killed for directly disobeying orders.
Then they did things like eat them outside the camps, and came stumbling back in, crying and puking and pounding their guts and wailing about unclean things to eat, and earned themselves the lashes they thought they’d outwitted, as well as a week’s wages for their utter idiocy.
I was watching more than them. I was watching Immortal hands at work.
Immortal whispers were goading the men into action, especially the weak of will and the weaker of morals. Happy to obey their own cravings and desires, the men tried to grab the precious yyota, which actually had a pretty good sales price for those who wanted them, and whose euphoric hallucinations were a nice escape from the doldrums and boring day-to-day existence of a sailor marooned in an alien world.
There was magic coiling around the fleet, multiple Immortals taking notes and binding their influence over us, to Cure or to Curse as they deemed fit, and not really interfering with one another as they did so.
This place wasn’t an accident. It was a test to overcome, and a source of problems. The yyota fruit was the current hurdle we had to pass.
Curses were percolating here, so I added one to the magic encircling the fleet, deftly and subtly so they wouldn’t contest it, thinking one of the others had laid it down.
The main thrust of it was that yyota fruits would be incredibly bitter to the tongue and violently allergic in the guts of any member of the fleet. They were going to have terrible times eating them, and if they just tried to swallow them down, the reaction was going to be violent enough to totally incapacitate them, without allowing them to experience any of the languorous effects the fruits were famous for.
So, yeah, go eat them out of sight, and get turned into a puking, stinking idiot who wasn’t going to be able to taste anything decent for three days when you outwitted the stupid elfin who thought she was such hot stuff, she did.
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The natives were singularly unhelpful in giving directions or descriptions to the other islands around us, having no ambitions to explore and never invaded from outside to be motivated to do so. They had tales about travelers coming by and trading for supplies and yyota, but food was all they had, nothing valuable, no mining, and very few dangers here, as if bodies stuffed regularly with yyota were warding off anything that might want to eat them.
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They did have wood, webbing, and feathery leaves inundated with the local aeromantic energies, however, and the birds and plants which supplied the things. Scores of men became puking casualties and lost their wages for their idiocy as we scoured the area for supplies to upgrade the ships.
Dreamcatcher sails could grab at the magical ley lines flowing through the sky and defy the winds. Featherleaf-adorned oars could sweep the air and propel a ship along like a leaf on the winds. Wood from the trees growing further inland was lighter without giving up strength and channeled the flow of air magic more smoothly, helping boats maneuver more readily and smoothly when made into the spars, wingmasts, and extended rudders.
We harvested all that we could, the natives not caring in the slightest. The island was large enough to supply all we could take, and it would all regrow quickly, none of it would be missed.
That we left behind the vast majority of the yyota we found, not even keeping it as a possible trade good, amazed the natives completely, but not enough to get them to take any kind of action about it, even after a few of them had been calmly executed for attempting to foist yyota on us.
I did keep some of the plants, moving them into my personal sanctum. They were an alchemical resource, I wasn’t going to deny that, and the breed here was big and fast-growing compared to those normally found in the Delphan Empire. Me and my Sims had puh-lenty of time to run alchemical experiments on yyota and figure out some alchemical uses for it, including painkillers, pleasure drugs, hallucinogenics, anesthetics, and the core to some combat cocktails that could be enhanced to deadly effect… as well as some severely incapacitating antidotes to the addicition.
We’d have to see what this new breed could bring to the table…
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The Curse from outside was subtle when it activated, probably not even realizing I’d already preempted the effort with one of my own. I felt it go off as a the twist in Fate that it was, bringing in Doom to wrench and alter something normal and useful into something miserable and an impediment.
It started making all magically Created Food pop up as yyota.
Normally this wouldn’t be a huge deal, but we currently had no assurances of friendly ports, and a couple of the spells from the many lesser Clerics and Priests, at least one on every ship here, was an excellent way to stretch the duration of any vessel’s stores and ensure proper nutrition for the crews. A single Priest could feed anywhere from a handful to up to dozens of men a day with enough of the spells, although no ship’s Priest present was over Eight, save for me.
My spells could throw off the Curse and deny it, naturally enough, and I could generate massive quantities of the nominally bland stuff… except my Created Food normally manifested as Shaden curina, the normal food of the elves of my homeland. It wasn’t what a human would call flavorful, but it always had subtle differences in taste and texture as part of the mushroom bread-like stuff it was made of, definitely different than most of what was conjured, and consequently was enjoyed much more, even if the most frequent use of it was being added to a stew.
If we’d had more yyota scattered around the fleet, kept secretly by the crews, this messing with supplies could have turned into a real problem!
I didn’t like having to be a food source, and it humiliated the Priests when they realized they under a Curse by an enemy Immortal and couldn’t do anything about it. They naturally wanted to know who, and I was happy to tell them, which meant their informative prayers were going out to their own Patrons who weren’t going to be happy someone was messing with their Priests… at least, if such prayers could get through, which they weren’t, as proven by the fact the Curse wasn’t lifted by their own Patrons immediately.
We were in our own little bubble of Immortal influence, and the others concerned would only find out after the fact...
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The entire fleet headed off the ‘sea’ around the sky island and back into the void, eager to be on the way home thataway, Find the Path clearly showing our required course… but there was no way we could travel straight there.
As soon as the false sky faded behind us and was replaced with the skyworld’s true bands, it also displayed another incoming storm far in the distance, roiling end over end like a tornado the size of a nation as it came this way.
“Alright, everyone. Form up on lines. The ships with Cloud Vessel can tow the ships not retrofitted. We are racing that storm as we play hopscotch from island to island… in other words, from one Immortal test to the next.
“Harness those winds, let the sails blow. I can only moderate the storm somewhat and channel some of the winds, I can’t stop what is coming. The same magic affecting the winds here makes the weather very powerful, and immense in size. We’re going to be running between these storms from one skyland to the next!
“Let’s see what kind of captains you all are! First ship in each fleet to reach the next skyland gets a Heroes Feast from me!”
A cheer went up, as that was a meal fit for kings! Save for the stupid bastards who could barely stand while their stomach contents were jetting out both ends, the crews went right to work aiming for the next skyland far in the distance, visible through my Mask and our course displayed through my Panoply of the Heavens to all ships.
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Watching that monster of a storm, like a hurricane in three dimensions instead of two, tracking after us like a hungry monster waiting to pounce was nerve-wracking to many of the men, giving everyone great incentive to reach the next destination.
This was a larger island, and the sea surrounding it was nearly a hundred miles in radius. It was craggy and rocky, starkly beautiful in its own way, but looked to be made of mountains and valleys instead of gentle rolling hills and a couple mountains covered by verdant forests.
Moreover, the edges of the mountains loomed up out of the water in sheer cliffs, which didn’t promise much help.
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We made the sea hours ahead of the looming storm, driving twenty miles in as the fleet regrouped, the slowest ships towed ahead by the Scampering Wave and the other ships with PermanentCloud Vessel Cast upon them to make up ground, a number slowly increasing every day.
The Axe of the Sea, Foister’s Breaker, and the Valiant Whale were the victors in the impromptu races, but none of the celebratory captains were stupid enough to advance to the shores of the new island without me.
I did send the Axe’s squadron out to survey a path, and those ships bravely forged on ahead, looking for reefs and rocks and plotting out a course for the rest of us. A sheltered cove would have been nice, but the storm hit us as the masts were stepped and sails taken down, and it shoved the ships along remorselessly towards whatever the Immortals had planned.
Dread sniffed at the Immortal Power in the air behind these storms, and I just glowered at the clouds railroading us along. As before, the skies of the ocean looked fair and blue, stars twinkling, sun in the distance, and multiple moons beyond the bands adorning the night sky when the world spun over at its leisurely pace, looked like a forty-hour day here...