Lillene

Enjoy!

Becca left work at the Adventurer’s Guild at three that afternoon. She was happy to be working the early shift; the evening shift was usually when the entitled delvers came out, the ones who thought the rules should be bent because they had money. They didn’t understand that the regular delvers often had more money than they did and were happy to spend it at the Guild. She was happy to leave the annoying ones to Legion.

Carl drove her home. He’d gotten back from his latest delve a couple hours earlier and waited for her in the new social area Kerr had decided to add. She wanted the delvers to mix and get to know each other; if they knew each other, they could work together and possibly even mix and match teams if they needed to. That would help if they ever needed to respond to something like a dungeon break or more invasion portals.

When they reached their house, there was a box sitting in front of the door. Carl grabbed it to bring inside while Becca got the door. Becca hoped it was the package she’d been waiting on; it was a day or two early, but getting it now would mean she could wear the new clothes and push off doing laundry until the weekend.

Becca dumped her purse on a chair then locked the door. When she looked back, Carl was opening the box. “Is it my new jeans?”

A bright light shone from the top of the box. Becca couldn’t see anything at all for a long moment; the light was just too bright. She heard Carl yell “Fuck!” followed by a loud cracking noise and more swearing from Carl. When she was finally able to see again, Carl was dripping green blood from three gashes in his upper left arm and a ring of gouges near his elbow while he held something that looked an awful lot like an adolescent badger with surprisingly long wiry gray fur and a cute pair of black horns by the scruff of its neck with his right hand. 

The badger was struggling, but it didn’t seem to be able to get at Carl as long as he held it well away from himself. No matter how it moved, it just couldn’t twist far enough to reach him with its mouth or its claws. Carl didn’t seem like he wanted to put it down, either; Becca couldn’t blame him. Those slashes looked deep and painful and the bite marks were probably worse.

“I didn’t know badgers had loose skin there so they could be carried like kittens.” Those were not words Becca had ever expected to say, but they still somehow spilled out of her mouth before she ran for the first aid supplies in the bathroom. She wasn’t set up for serious injury at home, but she could at least grab something to stop the bleeding until she could get him to a hospital. Or maybe an urgent care would be better? They didn’t look like something that needed a hospital; cleaning the wounds and maybe some stitches was urgent care, right?

What would they do with the badger while she ran Carl to the urgent care? Why was there a badger in the box anyway? Should she be calling animal control or something?

A loud knock at the door made Becca spill some of the rubbing alcohol she was using to try to clean Carl’s scrapes. She knew they’d just get disinfected again, but she still didn’t really want to cover them without rinsing them; bites were supposed to be really nasty, weren’t they? She couldn’t just cover it in a towel to keep it from dripping while they hurried to the urgent care the way he suggested, could she?

“Get the door,” Carl muttered through gritted teeth when another set of knocks echoed through the house.

Becca dashed the three steps to the front door and looked out the peephole. Was that a uniform? It kind of looked like one. She pulled the door open reluctantly just before the person she could now see was definitely a cop knocked again.

“Ah,” the lady cop on the other side of the door seemed startled by something. Becca followed her gaze to the open bottle of rubbing alcohol in Becca’s left hand. “Is everything all right in there?”

“Uh, Carl, the badger…” Becca wasn’t handling this well. Who would, really?

“Do you happen to have an animal cage?” Carl asked from a ways behind Becca. “I don’t want to kill the monster until we know what it is and where it came from, but I don’t have anywhere good to put it.”

“M-monster?” Becca thought it was just an odd looking badger!

The lady cop’s hand went to her gun for a moment as she looked past Becca, but she relaxed a little when she saw the creature Carl held. “That’s smaller than the others. I’ll … figure out where to get a cage. Can you hang on to it for a bit?”

“Depends on how long a bit is,” Carl grinned at the cop. How was he staying so put together? He was the injured one!

Becca couldn’t do anything about the badger, so she focused on what she could do something about. Carl’s injuries. She’d ignore the cop; she couldn’t do anything about that anyway.

She grabbed a new cotton ball, poured rubbing alcohol on it, then patted it over one of the scrapes. It came away green, so she grabbed another ball for the next line. When she was done with each of them, she tossed them into the kitchen trash. Once she’d at least sort of disinfected his arm, she opened a set of the large cotton pads and taped it to his arm, followed by another and then a third. Between the three of them, his injuries were more or less covered. “I still think you need stitches.”

“Or a healer,” Carl said with a grin. “I need to deal with this thing first, though. Since no one’s sure where to get a cage, Legion’s on his way from the Guild with one.”

“And a healer?” Becca couldn’t help but hope that Carl had it all handled by now. She was more than ready for this nightmare to be over.

Carl shook his head. “We’ll head to the urgent care as soon as we hand off the monster.”

As it turned out, the police didn’t just want the monster; they also wanted complete details on everything that happened and the box. Becca was just as happy to have it gone.

Berinath was unusual, with its lack of a natural atmosphere and domes managed by the massive trees instead of by technology or the more common enchantments and long-term, repeated rituals. Even that wasn’t common; planets that could support life were common enough that there was really no need to settle in more difficult locations. 

At least, that was what Serenity assumed was the reason. Why would you move to a difficult location when there were easier ones available? Yes, you had to afford to go through a portal, but that was almost certainly far cheaper and easier than reaching a moon, at least for the average person. Now that Berinath was settled, there were portals there. Serenity doubted they were there before there were people.

Serenity wondered about the moon before he reached it, but none of it went through Serenity’s head when he stepped through the portal onto Berinath. Instead, he saw past the magic of the barrier and into the desolation of the unsettled area. In the distance a planet hung large in the sky. It was damaged; Serenity could see deep gouges and pock marks where battle had happened. The little life he could see looked damaged, even from a distance. None of that was as important as the fact that Serenity knew the planet. “Why didn’t you just say that Berinath orbits Tzintkra?”

“I doubt they know.” The voice was quiet yet unmissable; it came, not from the man Serenity could see approaching out of the corner of his eye but from the moon itself. It was the first time Serenity had ever had a world speak to him as if it were simply another person in the same room as him, but somehow Berinath made it seem normal. That wasn’t the only thing odd about it; the other worlds he’d interacted with usually paid little attention to the inhabitants unless they did something that affected the world or the world core. 

“I do not know why my larger sister trusts you, but she does. For her sake, I will give you some advice. The dryads do not care for their connection to the World of Death to be known. They fear what others might assume and they still hate the ones who drove them from their home. The Forest has calmed and adapted, but the dryads have not.” Berinath paused long enough to chuckle warmly. “I can tell who and what you are; do not speak of your connection to the planet below us. I do not want a war on my surface.”

“You need to come with me.” The man standing near the portal didn’t wait for Serenity to stop staring at Tzintkra in the distance. “Are you all together? All of you, then.”

Serenity turned towards the insistent man. He appeared mostly human, but his green hair and eyes spoke of another heritage. It wasn’t the jadelike green of Legion; instead, it was a glossy green that reminded Serenity of a healthy leaf. His clothing was a deeper green and seemed to actually be made of leaves, where another culture would have used cloth or leather. His hand rested casually on a long knife with a wooden hilt. Serenity didn’t know if the blade was metal or wood, but if it was enchanted the difference was less important than the skill of the enchanter.

Serenity glanced over at the others. They were better at dealing with people than he was, and he wasn’t certain what the right reaction was. He wasn’t happy at being escorted away from the portal by someone he was fairly confident was the local guard, but he also didn’t think it was time to try to fight. Not yet.

No one looked happy, but they also didn’t offer any better options. Serenity turned back to the guardsman. “Lead the way.”

The guard took a couple of steps, then looked back as if to make certain they were all following. When he saw that they were, he picked up the pace a little. 

Serenity paused for a moment as he finally saw the inhabited dome they stood in. Calling it a domed habitat was true but misleading; the tallest trees towered over them, creating a canopy that made the dome seem more tree than magic. Serenity couldn’t tell how tall they were, but they made the largest trees on Earth look small, whether that was the great Sequoias or the new trees in Serenity Settlement. 

That was what surprised him the most, probably; he’d expected this to look like Serenity Settlement, with trees large enough to serve as pathways and homes set high in the trees. That wasn’t what he saw at all; instead of the relatively open area between the trees that Serenity Settlement boasted, everything was covered in green. Some of it was vines, but there were two or maybe even three more layers of plants between the green ceiling and the moon’s surface. There was no movement visible on the great trees; instead, the lower growth had people everywhere. 

More than that, the buildings weren’t built on the trees; they were formed out of the trees. The very plant life that seemed so rich and diverse was also the structure of the dome’s settlement.

Serenity had to admit that Rissa was right when she said he didn’t have any idea how impressive and beautiful Berinath was without seeing it.

Blaze set his hand on Serenity’s shoulder and whispered to him, “We need to keep moving; he’s already on edge. Let’s not give him an excuse.”

Lillene

Any guesses as to why the guardsman pulled the group aside? They didn’t do that when Rissa came through the first time.