Book 6. Chapter 39: Time's ticking
Turns out convincing a talking bird into finding a giant machine was a lot easier than expected. We’d been chatting with Kres for a good half hour now, which wasn’t a lot of time for any first contact situation - but there was still a clock to deal with.
Murdershrimp was out there, and the longer he had free roam to plot and scheme, the more time he had to break every bit of mite tech in range. Once I got things moving to recruitment and getting Kres’s help, he was rather amicable to that idea.
But there was a catch. “All right, so you help us with our machine problem, and we eliminate the animals around here?”
Kres squawked and took a quick hop to one side. I think that meant yes in bird, or Odin, but after a half hour of watching that bird move in every direction possible, I had stopped trying to guess. The squat little creature had been constantly twitching, flicking his feathers, tapping on the ground with his beak, turning his head in every single direction - It’s like the Odin could not sit still unless strapped down to a chair. Or their version of a chair. Which might be a branch? Perch?
We probably looked more like statues to him, completely unmoving in comparison.
“The animals that attacked you, they were not wild animals.” Kres finally said. “They were diseased. We need you to eliminate the infestation itself.”
“... so it was a disease then. Tell us more details?” Drakonis asked. “Were they also sentient like you, only turned mad?”
The bird did bird things, not sure if those were normal bird things since I wasn’t an Undersider and birds didn’t exist on the surface besides reasonable normal flightless chickens.
“The Icon called it a fungal infection.” Kres said. “It rots the mind, makes any intelligent animal grow delusional, paranoid, aggressive to anyone around. They hear whispers in their minds, and grow to trust those above all other voices. Wild animals do not retain even that, becoming only aggressive. We’ve attempted to study it, at great cost.”