Chapter 24: Chapter 23 - The Second Hands-on: Nym

“In the early days, fire Magetools were by far the most efficient.” Nym nodded, absently listening to Cliff’s ramble as she scanned the surroundings for anything on their list of foraging requests. She often found her focus waning, but they had quite a while to secure the materials, so she wasn’t particularly worried. “My family’s tractor uses an ignition-based engine, you know? In every way except for efficiency, they’re worse off,” he continued, “they’re louder, more dangerous, less forgiving to damage, and, in many ways, more difficult to repair. This trail trolley, it uses a much simpler setup for its engine: rather than relying on ignition for propulsion, it’s cut out a step, and uses an actual propulsion magetool, you understand?”

“Yeah,” she lied, “but, Cliff, do I really need to know all of this to be able to drive the trolley?” He couldn’t imagine Loria taking any interest in the kinds of things Cliff had been rambling about, but she seemed more than able to drive the trail trolley without issue.

“Do you need to know it? No.” He grinned at her. “Should you want to know it? I certainly think so, though you might disagree with me.” She sighed, and he let out a little bark of laughter. “Fine, Nym, I suppose you’re not as interested in magetools as I am.”

“I’m not sure anyone is,” she muttered.

“That’s true enough,” he agreed with a nod. They sat for a moment before he glanced at her. “But what about you, then? What keeps you sane?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Cliff said, “a hobby, or an interest – what do you do when you’ve got free time? I’ve got my magetools, Thalos has his mysteries, and Loria – well, I’m not sure that girl would forgive herself if she took a moment to relax, so let’s not even start to talk about her hobbies.”

Nym laughed, tilting her head as she thought about the comment. “Well, recently, I’ve been having the craving to cook.”

“Oh?” Cliff asked, “you fancy yourself a chef?”

She shook her head. “Nothing like that. It’s just – when I was a kid, my parents were often too busy to prepare dinner. My dad – well, nine times out of ten he was out on some job somewhere, so he was hardly at home at all. When I was too young to go with him, that meant I was stuck at home.”

“What about your momma?”

She shrugged. “Even when the Couriers were more numerous, administrative jobs like hers were never popular. Most Couriers work in the field until they retire.” Or are killed on the job, or give up the life for something more peaceful. “These days in Marifond, there are fewer Couriers than ever, and so the Alliance runs short staffed.”

“In other words, she’s busy,” Cliff summarized.

Nym nodded. “When I was really young, I had a nanny, but after I turned eight my parents started trusting me to keep myself alive – my mom taught me a few recipes, and it sort of became tradition for me to cook for her when she inevitably worked late. And then, when I was old enough to travel with my dad on some of his jobs, I picked up the habit with him, too.” She shrugged. “Honestly, I hadn’t really thought about it until just now.” It was hard to, when she’d been so stressed. Since coming to the Academy, she’d been wrapped up in trying to get her Gift to work properly. Her free moments were spent spinning the problem every which way in her brain, and even when she had nothing going on, she was too stressed to even think about spending her time on something fun. But now – well, now she could properly draw a circle, and she had a little more time for hobbies. “Maybe I should ask to use the kitchen in the dorm.” Her parents were planning on visiting for the harvest festival, and it might be nice to surprise them with some of her cooking.

“You know any good recipes for trail rations?” Cliff asked hopefully. They’d only had one meal on the trail so far, and it had been met with overwhelming dissatisfaction.

She shook her head. “Unfortunately, I’m not a miracle worker.”

***

Loria’s hand shot up from in front of them, calling the trolley to a halt. Nym shared a look with Cliff as the trolley rumbled to a stop, and they jumped down from the cabin, joining Loria, Thalos close behind them. Their commander pointed a finger off to the side of the trail. “Furrows in the rocks down there, I think it’s a Stone Swimmer.” She spoke in a low voice, probably wanting to avoid scaring off the monsters. It was likely useless, as Stone Swimmers would feel their approach long before they could hear it, especially with the trail trolley lumbering along the forest floor.

“Not one,” Nym specified, crouching next to the rock, “three. Look – there are three tracks scraped through the stone here, of three different widths.”

Loria nodded. “Three, then. I read the monster list, but you’ll know better, Nym – what do we need to know?”

She thought for a moment, scraping her brain for any information about the monsters. “Full grown, they’re about the size of a large cat, though they’ll keep themselves low to the ground. They’ve got big, thick tails plated in stone-like scales – it’s their primary defense as well as the most valuable part of their body. Get in too close, and they’ll use their tail like a club. Keep our distance and we should be safe, though they have been known to throw rock shrapnel by smashing their tails against the ground.”

“Weaknesses?”

Nym tilted her head as she remembered. “The plating on their head, back, and tail is quite thick, but their sides and especially stomach are thin by comparison. If you can get in close, there should also be unarmored gaps between the plates that are vulnerable.”

“Alright,” Loria said, pinching at her chin as she devised a strategy. “We’ll go in with a standard approach, then. When we see one, Nym, immobilize it with your gift; Thalos, Cliff, take shots at its side until it’s incapacitated, and I’ll go in to execute it.”

“What if we run into more than one?” Thalos asked.

Loria hummed a moment, turning to Nym. “Can you hold down more than one at a time?”

Nym hissed a breath through her teeth as she thought, finally shaking her head. “I can hold one down easily enough, but Stone Swimmers have some weak earth magic under their control, and as soon as I release my Gift, they’ll break free.”

“Is there any threat of it overpowering your Gift?”

“There shouldn’t be while I keep my focus,” Nym said, “they have magic, yeah, but it’s weak.” Somewhere, some part of her wanted to be offended at the question, but she knew that Loria was asking it for tactical reasons, not because she doubted Nym’s skill.

Loria turned her attention to the other members of the team. “Cliff, do you have anything in your bag of tricks that could immobilize one?”

Cliff clicked his tongue. “Maybe? It’s probably just as likely to scare the monster off as keep it held in one place.”

Loria’s eyes narrowed. “Details, Cliff.” He was being insistent on keeping his PMT’s functions secret, but now that there was an actual combat scenario, it seemed like Loria had tired of his secrecy.

The tall boy sighed. “Fine,” he said, “it’s a sound cannon – I point it towards something and it should be all shaken up.”

“Should be?”

Cliff’s tone turned defensive. “It’s sound. I launched it at one of the Academy’s dummies, but I couldn’t exactly see if it was working. And Lieutenant Ulster wouldn’t let me test it on anyone – but it should work.”

Loria glared at him for a moment, irritation at his imprecision obvious on her face, but after a moment she shook her head. “Fine. If we encounter more than one, Nym immobilize one, and Cliff, use your – ah – sound cannon to keep the others off us. We’ll take them one by one. Thalos, keep your focus on taking shots from a distance. Are we clear?”

There were grunts all around, and after a moment more or preparation, they were off, tracking the Stone Swimmers off the trail.

***

The knife found purchase, slotting itself easily between the scales and the flesh, and she carefully scraped, popping the little rocky plates off one by one and piling them in the airtight container in front of her. It was tedious, somewhat gruesome work, but it was the reality of harvesting materials from monsters.

“So we can’t eat this meat?” Cliff asked as he worked his way down the tail of his own Stone Swimmer. He claimed it was his first time harvesting materials from a monster, but he’d taken to it so quickly that she figured his Gift had to be playing a part in There had, indeed, been three, and they’d dispatched him with ease. Cliff’s noise cannon had turned out to be extremely effective at incapacitating the lizard-like monsters, much to his excitement. “It seems kind of a waste.”

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“It’s probably not toxic,” Nym explained, “but I imagine it would not taste good, by any metric.” Taste was half the reason most food was prepared from mundane animals – the other half being that monsters had magic in their bodies, and eating them was similar to walking through high pressure areas. If your diet was all-monster, it would eventually result in the Sickness.

“Don’t worry about the waste,” Thalos said, “we don’t need the meat to survive, and it’ll be eaten by something, so there’s no point concerning yourself with it.” He’d taken to the work, as he did with most things, rather apathetically, though the way he used the knife suggested to Nym that it wasn’t his first time harvesting from monsters.

Loria was watching from the side, her face scrunched squeamishly around a frown. Surprisingly, she’d been the most put off by their grisly work. She’d been fine killing the monsters, but as soon as they started peeling them apart, she’d turned a shade of green, confessing that she’d never actually done any of the harvesting. “What do they even use the scales for?”she asked. Nym frowned. She had no idea.

“They’re a common component in a lot of earth-based magetools,” Cliff explained. He held the scale up in front of him, rubbing it between his fingers with a thoughtful frown on his face. “Mostly for mining and quarrying, I think, though I believe some versions of the common earth node use Stone Swimmer scales as a base instead of Scuttlebug chitin. They’re a lot less common, but the magic is about twice as potent.”

“Scuttlebugs have magic in them?” Nym asked, surprised. As far as she knew, the oversized beetles weren’t capable of any kind of magic – unless being disgusting and abundant was a type of magic.

“I mean – every monster has some kind of magic in it, it’s what makes them, well, monsters,” Cliff said, “right, Thalos?”

Cliff’s roommate nodded, not looking up from his work. “That’s how we fundamentally distinguish them. Well, more accurately, everything has some magic in it these days, but we classify monsters as creatures with enough magic to change their form.”

“Say,” Cliff said, “how come humans don’t – I don’t know, grow stony scales on our arms from magic? We get Gifts, sure, but most monsters seem somehow physically affected by it.” He flipped one of the scales in his hand, pressing it to his arm to demonstrate his point.

Peeling off the last few scales, Thalos sighed, wiping his knife on a cloth and tossing the now-clean tail into the pile with the rest of the Stone Swimmers’ carcasses. “The question you just asked is one of the most hotly debated in history.” He frowned, sheathing the knife and rolling it in his hands. “I will spare you a thousand years of debate, but suffice to say, the only satisfactory answer we have right now is a religiously informed one. The church of Gaeon posits that the human soul prevents morphing of the human form. As animals do not have souls, they are not protected in the same way. Thus-” He pointed the sheathed knife at the pile of dead Stone Swimmers. “Monsters.” He shrugged his shoulders. “My grandfather was never satisfied with that answer, but it’s the best one we have.”

“You know a lot about the theoretical side of magic, don’t you?” Nym said, looking at Thalos with new respect.

He scratched his neck, the corners of his mouth tugging upward. “Spend your childhood wandering with an expert researcher and you learn a few things – go figure.”

“Not to interrupt the discussion,” Loria said, cutting in, “but everyone seems done with their – ah – work, and we have a schedule to keep, so if you want to talk more, let’s do it on the trail.”

***

A headache was just spreading in the back of Nym’s eyes as she traced a finger along the map, doing calculations on another sheet of paper. The trolley’s odometer told her how far they’d traveled in the day, but she had to convert the trail distance – which included all the dips and curves of the trail – to the distance on the map. It was estimation and guesswork, mostly, though it didn’t really matter as long as they made it to the bridge by the end of the next day.

“Exposure numbers seem good,” Cliff called from where he was sitting on the ground, doing his own end-of-the-day work. He’d already gone under the trolley, swapping the prime stone for a full one and sticking the used one in a feedback loop rig to recharge overnight off the ambient magic.

“Get to work on setting up the tents, then,” Loria said. She was helping Thalos properly catalog the materials they’d gathered that day. In retrospect, they should have probably counted everything as they gathered it, but, well, this was training for a reason, after all.

Cliff lay back, propping his arms under his head as he stared into the night sky. “A little snoozing under the stars never hurt anyone.”

Loria glared at him. “The tents, Cliff, or get to clearing a fire pit and gathering wood. I won’t have anyone getting sick because you decided we should sleep exposed to the elements.” Nym looked up at the sky. From what she could see, there wasn’t rain on the horizon, but the wind could always change. Besides, autumn was in full swing, and the nights were starting to get quite cold – Cliff might not mind the cold, but she certainly did.

“I’ll help you when I’m done here,” she offered, hoping to diffuse any argument before it started. Loria and Cliff had gotten along well enough recently, but the absolute last thing she wanted to deal with over the next four days was nonstop bickering.

“Thanks, Nym,” Loria said, “Thalos and I will get to work on the fire, then, when we’re finished here.”

A short burst of work later and they were seated as a group around a little fire. It didn’t provide much in the way of light, but it was warm, and they’d set up lamps around their tents either way.

“I’d reckon that was a successful first day on the trail,” Cliff said as he picked his way through the trail ration. Nym had scarfed hers as quickly as possible, wanting to get it over with. The minced pork was way over-salted, and she’d nearly choked on the too-dry bread, but she was full, and that was enough when you were traveling through the wilderness.

“We haven’t forgotten that you spent the morning passed out with a hangover,” Thalos said. Loria made a noise of agreement, and Nym frowned as she recalled Cliff’s moans of discomfort until he finally retched over the side of the cart. Thankfully, that had been the end of it, but it hadn’t been a pretty sight.

“I mean, I got the work done, didn’t I?” Cliff protested. “Besides, it was Percy’s Momma’s fault – she kept on pouring me drinks.”

“That’s only because you kept on pouring her drinks,” Loria replied, shaking her head. “Honestly, I think Percy nearly died from embarrassment watching you two stomp around the room.”

“Are all farmers like that?” Nym had never really talked to any farmers before she met Cliff and Percy. Very occasionally, her father would take contracts to sweep through the countryside and help them out, but she never went along with him. It just didn’t seem particularly interesting – though, if the night before was any indicator, the people, at least, were not boring.

Cliff grinned. “Only the fun ones.” They ate in silence for a moment before Cliff hesitantly spoke again. “You all want to know something interesting? This is the first time I’ve ever spent a night in the wilderness.”

Nym’s eyes widened. “Really?” She’d spent dozens, maybe even hundreds on the trail. Cliff was a farmer, sure, but he didn’t exactly strike her as the indoors type. “You’ve never spent a night outside?”

“Outdoors, sure,” Cliff said, “nights in the fields or sleeping on a hill, looking at the stars – some little camping trips with my brothers and sisters, yeah. But this is the first time I’ve spent a night outside of civilization.”

Nym nodded slowly. He’d said, before, that he’d only ever been to Minton, Westholden, and now Clearspring, but travel between those cities could be done in a day, so she supposed it made sense that he’d never had a night anywhere else. It was still a foreign concept to her, though. “How does it feel?”

“Quiet,” he said, “a little dangerous, like-” He gestured in front of him. “-like a fire compared to a lamp. It’s more natural and raw, but with the barest threat, that something could go out of control.”

“You get used to it,” Thalos said, finishing off his rations and packing the garbage compactly into their waste bin.

Nym studied the boy for a moment before speaking. “You always talk as if you traveled a lot with your granddad, Thalos, but how much time were you spending on the road?”

Wrapping his arms around his knees, Thalos stared into the fire. “Honestly, I’ve probably spent more nights on the road than in cities.”

Concern painted Loria’s face as she looked over at him. “That seems dangerous, unless you strictly kept to low pressure areas.”

Thalos chuckled darkly. “Well, my grandfather did die of the Sickness, after all, but – well, we stayed in low-pressure areas for the most part, yeah.”

Cliff was lying on his side, picking at his teeth as as he stared at his roommate. “You do a lot of hunting, then?” The question was innocent enough, but there was an oddness to his tone, like there was some deeper meaning that Nym was missing.

Shrugging, Thalos looked up towards Cliff. “My grandfather did most of the hunting, but I did most of the preparation of the food.”

Nym nodded. “I thought you seemed experienced with harvesting materials earlier.” She’d almost felt jealous of how natural the movements had seemed to Thalos, though it massaged her pride a bit to know that he’d spent much of his life dealing with trailside chores.

Thalos smiled – it was a somewhat sad expression on his face. “Yeah, today was a bit nostalgic for me, I guess.”

A little tune filled the air, hummed by Cliff as he looked around the fire at them. “You know,” he eventually said, “I’m a bit jealous of you all – Thalos has his life on the road, Nym her Courier parents, and Loria – well, whatever childhood you had, I’m sure it was a mite more interesting than life on the farm.”

Grabbing a stick from the pile, Loria poked at the embers. “It was… Well, fine, mostly.” She tossed the stick into the fire, picking up a few more branches and loosely piling them on top. “I was never bored, at least, and my parents gave me everything I could really want.”

“Your father’s some sort of army hotshot, right?” Cliff asked. Nym snickered to herself, though Cliff probably did not realize that he had just made a rather clever pun. Loria’s father was the Fireshell General, and, as the name implied, his abilities were, indeed, quite hot.

“More or less, yes,” Loria said. She was still unwilling to talk about her family too much, though Nym couldn’t blame her. Nym’s father was notable for a courier, yes, but Loria’s was basically a national hero. The girl had already told Nym, in no uncertain terms, that she didn’t want any kind of different treatment because of her father’s status. So, she understood why Loria was being secretive, even now.

“How’d he take it, when you signed up for the Couriers?” Cliff pressed. He had a sly grin on his face. “I’d reckon he was pretty upset that his model daughter decided not to follow in his footsteps.”

Nym frowned, worried he’d gone too far. “Cliff, that’s-”

“It’s alright, Nym,” Loria said, shaking her head, “I know he’s not trying to make me mad.” She turned to Cliff. “He was fine with it – encouraged it really.” She paused for an instant before continuing. “But it’s getting late, and we have another long day on the trail tomorrow, so I think I’ll retire for the night.” She rose to her feet, command returning to her voice. “The pressure is low enough here that we don’t need a night watch. We’ll pack up at sundown and leave after breakfast. Good night.”

They watched her go, remaining silent until she’d closed herself inside her tent. Cliff turned, looking at Nym. “Did I manage to poke the hornets’ nest?”

She sighed, propping her chin on her hand as she looked at Cliff. “Maybe. She’s cagey, even to me. Let’s just be glad you didn’t make her mad.”

“Here, here,” Cliff muttered, frowning towards the girls’ tent.