M32

HI Patrons! In this chapter, Morgan does a little reflection about attribute points. Please let me know if it doesn't make sense!

-Plum Parrot

Ykleedra moved out of the room with surprising adroitness. She held her two wounded legs up and used the other four to move at a steady pace. Morgan noticed that she kept her tentacles held close to her torso, out of sight in her robe. “Ykleedra, why do some Yovashi wear robes and others not?”

“You would have a female roam naked like a savage?” She snorted like the notion was pure insanity.

“Oh, no, I suppose not. Are male Yovashi different from females? Other than the obvious differences, of course!” Ykleedre glanced back in the room, her eyes falling on the dead Yovashi before she spoke.

“Yes. Male Yovashi are consumed by insanity during their coming of age. They’re only allowed back at the clutch-home during the conjunction. I only know of my sire, though. Our males grow scarce.” She continued into the hall, and Morgan followed.

“What’s beyond that door?” Morgan asked, pointing to the door on the opposite wall.

“Our sleeping chambers and the clutch. The exit is down the hallway, past our den and kitchen, then up some stairs. Please let me go to the eggs now.” She spoke softly, her eyes downcast. Morgan was tempted to look through the rest of the dwelling, but he didn’t want to keep this tormented child hostage with his presence.

“Yeah, alright, you go that way, and I’ll work my way out of here. You’re sure there are no other Yovashi here? I don’t want to have to kill more of you.” Morgan let a little steel enter his voice at the last statement.

“No! There are no more! Just me. Everyone I know is dead.” For a moment, her voice exposed her despair, but by the time she finished speaking, she had grown quiet.

“Oh, god, why did I have to ask? How are you going to be able to take care of the eggs? Are you even well enough to get food?”

“I am not helpless. I will heal, and I can feed us. Soon I won’t be alone; my siblings will be here. I’m sorry I complained. I am grateful you didn’t kill me.” She was staring at the floor again. Despite being viscerally disturbed by the appearance of the Yovashi, Morgan found himself entertaining thoughts of moving her and the eggs to his tower.

“Are you sure, Ykleedra?”

“Yes! Please, may I go?” Her voice rose in pitch, pleading.

“Yes, yes. Alright, go to the eggs.” Ykleedra opened the door with her tentacles and then slipped through it. Morgan heard a bolt slide home on the other side of the door. He supposed he didn’t blame her; he’d just killed her family. Were they all family? He still wasn’t sure about the structure. One thing he knew was that he felt like he’d committed a crime. He wasn’t sure why he felt that way - they had been eating a dead human; every Yovashi he’d met had tried to kill and eat him. Were his actions unjustified? Was he being an idiot leaving one of them alive? Not only was he leaving her alive, but also some Yovashi eggs. He thought back to movies he’d watched and books he’d read where a young child saw a criminal murder their parents, and then they spent their whole lives growing strong so they could enact revenge. Was Morgan setting himself up for something like that? Was that just the movies? He supposed it didn’t matter; he wasn’t going to go through that door and kill that child.

He followed Ykleedra’s instructions and passed through the living area, a plain stone room with strangely carved bone figurines lined up along the walls on shelves. The figurines looked like animals and insects. Some of them were familiar to Morgan - shapes of wolves, rodents, wasps, birds. Some weren’t, looking more alien and varied from mammalian to serpentine. Morgan thought about scooping them up, but then he thought of Ykleedra and how he’d already stolen all the books in her home, and he left them.

He passed by the kitchen with only a glance - no way was he going to steal food from children, not to mention, he didn’t want to know what kind of meat they had stored away. The hallway made a turn, and then the stairs going up came into view. They were spaced a little oddly for his human legs, but he managed to climb them without much trouble. Soon, a large, round door came into view with a glass window fitted in its center. He stepped up to the door and peered out the glass. A smoothly sloping hillside fell away before him, covered in soft blue, feathery grass. A trail lined with smooth, round gravel led away from the door along the hillside to Morgan’s right. He couldn’t see anything moving outside, so he pushed the door open and stepped outside.

The air was crisp and warm, the natural sunlight a relief to his deprived eyes. He looked back at the Yovashi dwelling and was surprised to see that it was part of the hillside on which he stood. He could see the shape of the roof jutting out from parts of the hill, also covered in grass. Stone blocks made up some exterior walls, and one wall was lined with glass blocks along the top, cracked and broken. Morgan surmised that that wall led to the room where he’d fought the “matriarch.” The grassy hills extended beyond the dwelling into the distance, and Morgan felt an odd incongruity with the idyllic nature of the scene when juxtaposed with his ideas of how the Yovashi would live. He had imagined dark caves lined with thick spiderwebs or a murky, dense forest with hordes of Yovashi and giant spiders in the canopies.

He pondered what Ykleedra had said about male Yovashi going insane when they “came of age.” Perhaps that was why the ones Morgan had encountered had lived in veritable charnel pits. Still, the females here had been eating a human. Speaking of which, where had they gotten their hands on a human? Morgan reached out with Guardian’s Senses and could feel Bronwyn off to the northwest, maybe ten miles away. He concentrated on Issa and could still feel her, distantly to the southeast. Morgan looked in the direction where he felt Bronwyn and saw that the rolling, grassy hills fell away into a thickly forested slope. He figured that was probably the same forest that bordered the human colony. Could a human have wandered this far afield and run into one of the adult Yovashi that had lived in this dwelling? Or perhaps, even in his insanity, the male from the cave had been bringing them “food?” Morgan realized he wouldn’t find the answer unless he went in and interrogated Ykleedra some more, so he decided just to let the mystery go for now.

Before leaving, Morgan took off his breastplate and laid it on the ground, stomping on the metal to try to bend it into the correct curvature. He didn’t get it looking perfect, but he hoped it was close enough for the self-repair function to start to work. He put it back on and used some leather scraps to tie the straps he had cut back together. He wasn’t sure the leather would self-repair, but he figured he’d give it a chance.

Morgan began the trek toward the human colony, keeping a leisurely pace, using his backup spear as a walking stick. He marveled at how good he felt, physically; he hadn’t had a thing to eat or drink or any rest in many hours, but he felt just fine. Out of habit, he pulled a waterskin from his storage pouch and took a long drink. It felt good, but he didn’t think he needed it as much as he would have in his life pre-System. Being realistic, he knew he would have been exhausted and wrung out from the activities he’d been through in the last day. Morgan surmised it had to do with his increased store of Energy and his racial improvements. He looked and moved like a professional athlete these days.

Reflecting on how he had improved physically, Morgan started to think about his ability scores and how their improvement had changed him. He used his strength as a baseline for comparison because it seemed like an easy metric to gauge. When he’d first come to this world, the System had said he had a strength of six. Now his strength was forty. He was definitely stronger than before, but there was no way he was nearly seven times stronger. Before he gained any levels, he imagined that he could probably pick up something that weighed around a hundred pounds. There was no way he could pick up a 700-pound object now. He asked the UI for an explanation of strength again:

***Strength is the measure of your physical power relative to other Energy infused beings.***

Morgan realized the System used the attribute numbers as a measuring stick to compare all Energy users. He imagined that if you took a billion people and tried to rank their strength on a scale, you’d have someone with a strength of one and someone with a strength of one billion. That didn’t mean that person with the top rank was a billion times stronger than the lowest rank; it just meant he was stronger than everyone else. Morgan suddenly felt a lot less accomplished by his forty strength. He was probably the strongest human in the settlement, but that didn’t mean he could toss people around like ragdolls. Not yet, at least. Thinking about other stats, his understanding of the System’s attribute points made even more sense. His intelligence was his highest stat, but he didn’t feel like he could crack quantum mechanics theories in his head. Sure, ideas were coming to him more quickly, and he seemed to react better to situations, but he wasn’t four times smarter than he’d been; he’d just gotten smarter compared to other people.

Morgan was deep in the woods now. Every so often, he’d pause to get his bearing with Guardian’s Senses. He felt like he’d made it about halfway when the sun started to dip into the western horizon, and he debated whether he should push on in the darkness or make a camp. As far as Morgan knew, he’d only been gone from the settlement for a day, though he remembered how the teleportation seemed to be outside of time, and he didn’t really know if more time had passed. He decided to push on.

As the shadows lengthened, Morgan debated whether he should use the Lightstone that Olivia had given him. He could hear rustling sounds all around in the woods and the strange calls of birds and other little animal noises. Morgan knew he’d be more comfortable with a well-lit path, but he also knew he’d call a lot of attention to himself. He wasn’t sure if he should be worried about that, though; he’d only heard of Yeksa and boyii in these woods, other than the Yovashi he and Bronwyn had killed. He decided to just muddle on in the moonlight, even though the dense canopy made the going rather treacherous. He made good progress until the sun finally fully descended, and then he realized the moonlight wasn’t going to cut it in the forest; he tripped several times and thunderously rolled through a brittle row of shrubs.

Cursing and rolling to his feet, Morgan dusted himself off and then pulled the Lightstone from his pouch, hanging it on his neck and then channeling some Energy into it. Soft white light bloomed out from his position, casting the tree trunks in stark relief from the shadows that danced behind them as Morgan moved forward. He paused to get his bearing, once again, and realized he’d been heading a bit too far north. He turned westward, stomping around a tight copse of trees, and nearly fell into a massive hole. He skidded to a stop and looked around: ancient limestone structures were jutting out of the forest floor here, covered in undergrowth, lichen, and moss. On the other side of the pit, Morgan could see the crumbled walls and foundations of some sort of building.

Morgan lifted his Lightstone from his neck, wrapped it around the tip of his spear, and held it out over the pit, trying to illuminate its depths. He couldn’t see the bottom, but, about ten feet from the edge, he could see a broken limestone stairway leading down. Moss and lichen covered the steps, but they looked relatively sound. He didn’t see any apparent missing stones or cracks. Morgan debated leaving the ruins and continuing on his way, but something about finding ancient ruins on an alien planet in the middle of a forest grabbed his imagination and wouldn’t let him leave. He wanted to see what he could find down there. He dug in his pack for his coil of rope, tied it to a nearby tree, and then lowered himself to the top of the ancient stairs.