It’s just by chance that I spot the glowing red eyes hiding in the bush while I work on the bird. Stowing it and its feathers away, I stare intently at the eyes focusing on sensing its mana, which is a bit more than the electric goat. That tells me that I don’t need to be too worried, unless it has friends, like the elves. Still doesn’t tell me what it is though.
I wave at it to gauge its reaction, but it continues to stare intently, not even blinking. Guess I’ll just have to go up to it and greet it in person.
He sits there frozen as the monster waves at him. Panic sets in once the monster gets out of the bed and starts to walk over to him. No chance of getting away now, so he’ll just hope it’s not as cruel as some of the intelligent monsters can be.
Rising up and stepping out from the bush is scarier than most things he has done in a long while, including the time the otters slept outside his cave.
His fears feel justified as its loud buzzing voice causes him to flinch.
“WHY THE FUCK IS IT ALWAYS ELVES!”
His skin starts to prickle as the very air around them gets charged and the small sparkles that crept across the monster grow a lot in intensity, lashing out at anything nearby, except the bed. Despite the rising dread, he manages to keep calm enough to blurt out
“I’m a vampire, not an elf. They don’t like me any more than they probably like you.”
Before stepping a few steps back, finding his back collinging with a tree he hadn’t realized was there until this very moment.
Hearing the elf reject his elven nature has me halting my immediate reaction to think about it. He’s clearly terrified and trying to scramble to survive, doing anything from blabbering about the enemy of my enemy and other barely coherent sentences, and feeding mana into the tree he’s trapped up against in order to achieve something.
I calm down my electric aura before speaking in a threatening tone that I’m pretty sure I’ve never used before and probably wouldn’t have been capable of as a human.
“And why were you staring at me?”
He just stands there frozen for a moment while a semi translucent blob forms around his hand that is still clinging to the three behind him. The one hand I can see anyways.
The small lightning bolt that jumps between my hands is enough to refocus his attention on me, but I still have to raise the question again.
“This is my territory and I have to defend it from intruders.” is the explanation he manages to come up with, and it is reasonable enough.
Having heard enough, and made my point, which happens to be “I’m an order of magnitude more powerful than you”, I turn around and walk back to my bed, before sitting down. By the time I turn around, he’s still clamoring to the tree and trembling slightly.
“I don’t care for your territory as I’m just traveling through here.” I say with a voice slightly calmer than I feel inside.
Upon hearing this, he calms down a bit and stops clamoring to the tree behind him. Turns out he created blobs on both hands.
He cannot believe his luck. The monster is just traveling through his territory, not settling down and seems uninterested in killing him. That is on the assumption that it didn’t lie, but if it did, there isn’t much he can do about it.
The sap he extracted from the tree will definitely not be enough to win the fight, but may just be enough to escape, though diplomacy is probably his best bet at this point. This isn’t like the otters since they aren’t intelligent.
Looking through his inventory for something to appease the monster he discards most things since they are unlikely to be of interest to it. His best bet is either some tasty meat, or perhaps a mana rich crystal of some sort, maybe even one of each.
He sees the core of the lightning hawk he hunted and decides to offer its core and some of its meat. It had landed, and with all the luck in the world, he managed to cover its wings with sap, and tie it down by bending some branches causing them to stick to its wings. Then it was just waiting for it to tire itself out and finish it off with a magically enhanced wooden spear.
The deep blue spherical core filled with what appears to be roots growing out of it, appears in his sap covered hand alongside a prepared cut of meat. He regrets that he won’t be able to use the core for something, and missing out of the quite delicious bird meat, but surviving this encounter takes precedence.
After explaining what they are, he uses the sap to carry it over to the monster, which smiles a bit as it picks them up. Immediately the meat disappears and he can feel a large amount of mana entering the core.
Before his eyes, the tendril growths retreats back into the mana core, leaving it smooth and cleaner than he ever managed to get it.
Seeing the acceptance of the peace offering, he finally lets the tension in his muscles go away and sits down in front of the bush he originally hid behind. Care still needs to be taken to not antagonize the fox monster, but perhaps he can have a civil conversation for the first time in a while.
The blue crystal he offered me is interesting, It’s not attuned to lighting, but something adjacent. Don’t know what yet, but it’ll be interesting to find out. Apparently it came from a lightning hawk, which I don’t remember from the game, but sounds like a bird with lightning affinity, which is odd given the core is not pure lightning. Maybe storm or some combination of wind and lightning.
After I accepted it, he plopped himself down on the edge of the clearing, seemingly with the intent of carrying on a conversation, which I’m not entirely against, though I would sleep some tonight.
He introduced himself as Vergil and asked if I have a name, which is a slight problem. Should I introduce myself with my human name, which is Anna, or my character name, which is Anana. Yes, they are similar. Sue me.
Seeing me hesitate with my answer made the vampire a bit more nervous, but in the end I introduce myself as Anana, since that’s the name of this body.
We end up talking for a bit, with the first common topic surprisingly being our dislike of elves. They tried to kill him as soon as they found out that he turned into a vampire. I also got to surprise him with the fact that I’m not a vampire, which he thought I was.
In the end, I had to chase him away, telling him to come back in the morning, so that I could go to sleep.
Being indigenous, I'm surprised to see the use of Thunderbird in the story and hope that maybe a different name could be used if they are just magical birds with thunder attunement.
would you mind elaborating as I'm not aware of any particular connotation to thunderbird beyond "big lightning bird"
@Kamba in most Indigenous cultures across North America, Thunderbirds are a particular type of spirit that varies between each culture's telling of it. But even saying its name has cultural importance and through most of those cultures there is a consistency of its name bringing severe storms. I am aware of its use in a lot of media like other games and stories, but there are a lot of other variations of the name to use and other groups around the world that have a different name and story for similarly described birds of lightning
@MarbleMari I changed it to a lightning hawk now since that is a better description of the creature I envisioned.
I spotted this comment while rereading this story in preparation to continue it and I vaguely remember this topic. Not sure why I didn't change it at the time(probably got distracted and forgot), but this is the first time I touch this story since probably sometime in february.