[Shrubley, the Monster Adventurer] Chapter 31 – Aggressive Testing

“Oh heckin’ bleck!” A creature cried, poking his furry head out from the walls of the training room.

Shrubley gasped, recognizing the creature from the Druid’s stories. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and in such a dismal place as this!

“You!” the Countess roared. The giant woman moved faster than thought, blurring with incredible speed. She launched herself at the wall, trying to catch the creature, who squealed in response.

Dust and debris flew everywhere with so much force it sent Slyrox and Cal tumbling into Smudge. Then the pile up collided with Shrubley and bowled the collective katamari-style ball into the opposite wall.

The Countess had claimed she wasn’t as powerful as she used to be in her starving state, but even weakened, the vampyr was still leagues above Shrubley and his group.

That oppa was in trouble, caught in her fist and squirming. Shrubley got to his feet in a moment and drew his shield and sword. He couldn’t stand for her to hurt an oppa.

And then he saw the oppa giggling and licking her hand affectionately as the Countess pulled it in for a hug.

Shame filled Shrubley from his roots to his crown. I was going to attack her, he thought bitterly. I thought… because she was a monster, she…. He hung his bushy head, finally understanding the uphill battle he would one day face to be accepted.

And still… in the back of the good peoples’ minds, they would be watching and waiting for him to reveal his true colors.

The Countess, completely unaware of what was going on behind her, turned and slipped the dusty oppa into her rather impressive pale cleavage. Oppas could make homes from just about anywhere, but judging by the size available to the creature, he could create a mansion.

“Sose here is–”

“An oppa!” Shrubley cried, his sword and shield put away. “They are magical creatures called soul aeder that rarely appear to even the purest and good-hearted of souls! As soul aeder, they are functionally indestructible and bond with a–”

“I’m a dark oppa!” Sose announced defiantly, thrashing his head and pointing a paw right at Shrubley. “Among the darkest of dark, in fact! I skulk about in the night and generally get up to no good. Don’t lump a disreputable rascal like me in with all those fairy tales.”

Shrubley tilted his head to the side. “I have never heard of a dark oppa.”

“That is because you are new to life and ignorant of things,” the Countess told him, petting the snickering face of an oppa. They were good at that, oppas. There were some cultures who had a hundred words for snow or sand, but oppas had a thousand little ways of snickering.

“That is true.”

“Before we were interrupted.” The Countess glared at the oppa in her cleavage. “We were going to have a pop quiz!”

A chorus of groans came from the ball of limbs and goo that was Smudge, Cal, and Slyrox.

The Countess flickered and appeared in front of Shrubley, lifting him up by his roots so he dangled upside down. “If I were to come at you with a Blue essence, what would you do?”

Shrubley yelped, looking upside down at the Lady’s torn and tattered silken clothes. He racked his brain for an answer.

The oppa’s whiskers twitched, squinting at Shrubley with no small amount of judginess in that ferret-like face.

“I would try to get around the defenses and prepare for something that would make it difficult for me to land a hit,” Shrubley said. Halfway through his answer, she dropped him.

Shrubley bounced on his springy body and rolled to his feet. He beamed at the faint smile on her lips as she looked at him.

“Good. Blue can create something akin to an attack, but it’ll likely be a feint or an attempt to get you to attack them. Just because it’s Blue doesn’t mean that it’s harmless. Some of their defenses have bite to them.”

She flung out a hand and seemed to slide across the room until her hand suddenly was filled with the vertebrae of Cal.

“Muh bones!” Cal cried in a high-pitched tone.

The oppa snickered at the skeleton.

“If you had any essence available to you and your goal was to be as fast as possible, what essence would you pick?”

Cal opened and shut his mouth a few times, stunned into silence.

She shook him, rattling his bones, so it sounded like some demented mariachi band was shaking their maracas for all they were worth. To make matters even more pressing, the oppa leapt into Cal’s ribcage and scampered noisily from one bone to the next.

“Green!” Cal shouted.

The Countess nodded and set him down. “I would have accepted Orange as well. Many dimensional abilities allow you to subvert normal travel and appear or disappear at will. They are rare, as powerful things tend to be.”

Satisfied as well, Sose leapt off Cal and returned to his mistress.

Slyrox yelped and fell heavily onto Smudge behind her when the Countess turned her head toward her.

The “pop quiz” went on in such an odd and aggressive manner, with the Countess quizzing them in new and inventive ways that made them struggle to recall even the most basic facts.

Sometimes, even Sose would ask them a question. You wouldn’t expect an oppa, which was a sort of magical ferret that even the godly Kindred respected and cherished, to be scholarly, but he seemed to know a great deal.

A lot more than any of them, in any case.

Not that it was a hard metric to beat.

Aside from Shrubley and Cal, who got most of the answers right, Smudge and Slyrox were at a severe disadvantage. From the way the Countess talked, Smudge was a very recently Awakened monster, which was a word that explained when a monster became more than just a monster.

Whereas Slyrox was raised and born on another world, with entirely different kinds of magic than this one.

In their cases, they were farther behind than either Cal or Shrubley who had been Awakened for a longer period of time. How long was anybody’s guess, including the skeleton and shrub. Neither of them could point to a moment they suddenly felt like themselves.

Shrubley had always been himself from the moment he could see the Druid’s kindly bearded face. But he had no idea how long that was.

Cal, on the other hand, had a more difficult time. He had been unalive for a long time, dozens of years at the least, by his reckoning. But he was forced to go along with the Rattle Rousers for so long he wasn’t sure when it became his own idea and when it was simply his “monster programming” as he put it.

He knew for a while he was different from the rest of the Rattle Rousers. They rarely questioned anything and couldn’t fathom doing something as simple as going out during the day rather than the night.

“I don’t remember the Rattle Rousers,” the Countess said. “So it couldn’t have been that long,” she told him later. “My husband tends to the immediate area around the Haalften lands. If they were causing enough trouble, I imagine he would have told me.”

From that statement alone, Shrubley suspected that the Countess was the stronger of the two vampyrs. Judging from the speed the Countess was casually wielding during the quiz, that further solidified that suspicion into belief.

“They sent a contract to the Guild,” Cal pointed out. “It was how I met Shrubley! He trounced the Rattle Rousers, the whole gang! All by himself.”

The Countess, who could smell weakness like a shark smelled blood in the water, turned on him. “And what did you do while he was doing this?”

“He tried to burn me to ash,” Shrubley said with a surprisingly chipper attitude.

“I am sorry about that,” Cal told him. “I was just trying to help my gang!”

Shrubley wrapped a branch around his bony shoulders. “I have long since forgiven you. It is not your fault you fell in with a bad crowd.”

Amazing, the Countess thought, watching them. He makes them want to be better, like him, just by being who he is. He doesn’t even seem aware he’s doing it. Forgiveness instead of rancor? That is not the monster way. Even an old Awakened like myself… I struggle at times to remember I am more than a bloodthirsty creature of the night.

Who was this shrub that could stir even her cold and dead heart?

Like many people, when faced with their own weakness and questions they would rather never see the light of day, the Countess lashed out at them. She barked an order for the group to line up.

He might have the makings of a hero, but he wasn’t going to be saving anybody if he was stuck at Mundane Rank.

“Since you’ve got enough of an understanding of essences to not kill yourself or each other, we’re going to go over the essences for those of you that have them, and we’ll begin your training.”

A black-painted fingernail pointed at Shrubley like a sword. “What essences do you have?”

Shrubley stood up proudly and proclaimed, “Curiosity and Nature. Black and Green!”

Her finger slid to Cal.

“Just Red, ma’am!”

She glared. The oppa did too.

“I mean, my Lady!”

That was better.

Slyrox tilted her head to the side, her floppy green ears shifted slightly as she did. “Braver essence. Is Black.”

Smudge just made funny noises with his mouth until he caught the quivering rage that rolled off the Countess at being ignored. He shrank down a little more than was necessary and announced, “None!”

Slyrox reached out and gave the slime a comforting pat.

“Amazing,” she told them, walking up and down their assembled line. “Not a full set among you three, though Shrubley is surprisingly close. No surprise, he seems the most experienced, and that’s not saying much.”

Shrubley felt that was uncalled for, but he had been raised right and he respected his teacher, even if she didn’t seem to respect him.

“Even a little stinker like me has a full set of essences!” Sose said smugly.

“Smudge, we’ll give you a different training regimen. Go sit over there.” The Countess looked over the remaining three. A feral smile spread across her beautiful pale features. “The rest of you are going to learn how to use your essence abilities, even if it kills you.”

The oppa snickered once again, rubbing his paws together mischievously. His beady eyes fumed with darkness.