Towering Trouble: A LitRPG Isekai, page 11
She stepped out onto the ice, toward a seething mass of furry white creatures that scurried out from underfoot. A nauseating stench filled the air. Some of the tiny fuzzballs had columns of even tinier chittering critters in tow, bringing to mind images of ducklings following their mothers. Others stood in clusters around mounds of dark…oh crap, they were feeding. The crimson stains across the ice told her they weren’t vegetarians, if the pointy teeth weren’t evidence enough.
She lost her nerve, and began to back away, thinking, Why haven’t they swarmed me already? Am I that scary, or are they already sated? Where’d they get all that meat anyhow?
And then the dark column at the centre of the lake flexed, and an ear-splitting screech echoed across the cavern.
That isn’t stone, she realised.
The head of the great worm flailed about, shaking the ice beneath her feet. For a moment, the mist parted, and she saw a writhing mass of tendrils reaching for the high ceiling, before drawing back inside its gaping maw.
The little fuzzballs, which she now dubbed adorribles, didn’t seem at all fazed by the gargantuan monster in their midst. But of course they wouldn’t, because it was trapped in the ice, and they were eating it.
Through the swirling fog, she watched as innumerable specks of white streamed into and out of great, gaping cavities in its thick hide, like ants feeding on a whale.
I guess that explains why they aren’t attacking me, she thought. And why there are so many of them. They’ve got the motherlode of meat here. I’m just not worth their time.
Still, she wasn’t going to stick around and give them a chance to prove her wrong. She high-tailed it up the slope and out of the cave, bounding on all fours to increase her speed.
That was quite enough dungeon-delving for today. She returned to her cave, shivering from more than just cold.
The next morning, she saw that the weather in the mountains had taken a turn for the bleak and miserable, and it was heading her way.
Guess I’ll be hunkering down in my cave for a while, she thought morosely.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t stay inside all day. Later, while out collecting water from the nearby stream, Saskia noticed a blue marker on her minimap heading down the mountainside. She’d never seen a blue marker before.
Warily, Saskia ducked behind a rock, watching the marker draw closer. Its movement seemed too purposeful to be a wandering animal. The unknown entity was taking the same route Saskia herself had walked when she first entered the valley.
Whoever approached was likely taking shelter from the fierce blizzard that howled up in the mountains. But what were they doing up there in the first place, on a day like today? This was not the weather for travelling.
A figure stumbled through the trees. Long raven-black hair flapped in the breeze, atop a grey, round face covered in cuts and bruises and a dusting of unmelted snow. It was a woman of indefinable age. A very short and stout woman in a torn smock, completely inappropriate for these conditions. A dwarf.
Saskia stepped out from behind the rock. The dwarf took one look at her, teetered for a moment, then pitched face-first into the snow.
Book 1, Chapter 8: Alchemy
There was a dwarf in her bed. Or rather, the pile of branches and leaves wrapped in animal pelts that she liked to think of as her bed.
This is not how I imagined my day would go, thought Saskia.
She was pretty sure the dwarf in her bed wasn’t just a human with dwarfism, but an actual dwarf; one of the demi-humans first seen in Germanic and Norse mythology, and later popularised by Snow White, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. This world had elves and trolls, so Saskia had been half-expecting dwarves to show up at some point. What kind of a fantasy world would have elves without dwarves? They went together like cats and dogs. Almost every elf-loving high fantasy setting had to include the brawny, bearded, bad-tempered little buffoons.
There was no beard on this dwarf, although she did sport some impressive sideburns. Apparently the dwarves of this world didn’t subscribe to Tolkien’s credo that all dwarves had to have beards—even the women.
The dwarf woman was in a bad state. In the short time since Saskia carried her up to the cave, she’d drifted in and out of a groggy semi-wakefulness, occasionally mumbling gibberish that may or may not have been real words. With her inability to speak any of the native languages, Saskia had no way of knowing for sure.
The dwarf’s face and body were a mass of deep cuts, bruises and scars. There was an ugly red tattoo on her cheek. It was obvious those were no accidental injuries. This woman had been tortured. Saskia felt ill just thinking about it. There would be a special place in hell reserved for whoever had done that to her.
These wounds were ghastly, but hypothermia was a more immediate concern. The woman’s skin felt cold as death.
This stirred up memories she’d sooner forget. Memories of her own ordeal, back on Earth. She too had suffered from severe hypothermia on top of the injuries sustained in the fall. Her body had already started to shut down by the time the rescue team had been able to extract her from the foot of the cliff. She hadn’t been conscious for that, but she remembered being told about it afterward.
If the same thing had happened to her here, she’d have had no chance. At least, not if she were still in her human body. Whatever minor miracles the surgeons and nurses had wrought to keep her alive were not possible out here in the wilderness of a strange world.
Here, her options for warming up a hypothermia victim were far more limited. Even sleeping bags and hot water bottles were beyond her meagre resources.
Saskia briefly considered the notion of climbing into bed with the dwarf and warming her up with direct skin-to-skin contact. Her friends Reiko and Ivan had sworn by the method, claiming it had once saved Reiko’s life. Of course, Ivan would relish any chance to jump into bed with Reiko.
But this was different. Thanks to this new body of hers, the ick-factor was multiplied by a factor of nope. Saskia didn’t want to give the poor dwarf a heart attack. Besides, there must be better options. She didn’t have hot water bottles, but she did have…
Stones!
After heating some rocks by the fire, she placed them in the bed with the dwarf. As the stones cooled, she replaced them with more warm ones.
While she was doing this, she noticed something…well not exactly strange—not after all she’d seen—but certainly new. Whenever she looked at the dwarf, she began to see faint shapes and colours overlaid across her body. It took a few minutes for the vague blurs to resolve into something recognisable, and then it became immediately obvious what she was seeing.
It was some kinda medical overlay, showing the dwarf’s skeletal system, and with all of her injuries marked out and colour coded, like in a medical sim.
What the hell is this? thought Saskia. Theme Hospitroll? Surgeon Simulatroll 2019? Okay, I’ll stop now.
Looking over the new overlay, it was somewhat of a relief to see that there were no broken bones. The frostbite and the multitude of cuts and bruises were already plainly obvious to her naked eyes. She didn’t need this interface pointing them out to her.
The most unexpected sight was the jagged shard of…something deep in the dwarf’s chest cavity, right next to her heart. Saskia had no idea what it was, but the foreign object glowed brighter than the surrounding bones and organs. It’s location meant there was no way she was going to even contemplate removing it.
After several rounds of stone-heating, the woman’s face had gone from deathly grey to a dark umber colour. At least, the parts that weren’t blotchy and swollen were umber; her bruises were colourful in different ways. She still wasn’t exactly coherent, but she was beginning to look at Saskia with a kind of drowsy bewilderment.
Saskia knew that look. She’d worn that look many times since she arrived on this world. It was the look of someone who wondered if she was still dreaming. Who wished she was still dreaming.
The best thing she could do right now was make herself scarce, and let the poor woman rest in peace—er…rest peacefully—while she set about her next task. More than anything else, the woman would need food. Hot food, and lots of calories.
Thanks to her recent efforts with pottery, Saskia had just the thing she could use for that. Saskia filled the cauldron with water from the stream, and set it over the fire. While it was heating, she headed back out into the valley and chased down a mountain goat, and tore out its throat with her teeth.
She’d kept practising with the bow from time to time, but she hadn’t yet reached the point where hunting with it was more efficient than simply running down her prey. In this relatively open mountainous terrain, she could outrun nearly everything. And today, she was in a hurry.
Just getting the heavy carcass up onto the ledge and into the cave would have given her pause if she’d still been in her human body. The cave entrance was at least three metres up the cliff face. But she was a troll. When she straightened her back a little, she could just reach out and place it on the ledge. Being a giant monster did have its perks.
Arriving back in the main cavern, she found the dwarf looking much more alert, but with a panicked expression on her bruised and swollen face. It occurred to Saskia that perhaps the woman thought she’d be going in the bubbling cook pot.
Well, that would’ve been one way to warm her up…
Chuckling to herself, Saskia set to work cooking a chunky soup with meat from the mountain goat and some of the hardy root vegetables that the horned pigs were so fond of digging up. It wasn’t fancy, but the smell wafting out of the cauldron brought to mind the delicious soups her mum had cooked for her in the cold winter months back on Earth.
Saskia scooped some of the soup into a bowl. Quickly, she realised the woman wouldn’t able to hold the bowl in her swollen fingers, so she sat cross-legged on the floor beside the bed, trying to look as non-threatening as a troll could look, and held the bowl for her. It was awkward, but the dwarf managed to get two bowlfuls down.
Despite being awake and with some food in her belly, the woman wasn’t out of the woods yet. Her hands and feet were still badly frostbitten. If Saskia couldn’t find some way to treat those horrific injuries, amputation might be their only option. Even back on Earth, with the help of the best medicine money could buy, the dwarf’s prospects would’ve been grim.
Medicine. Saskia turned the word over in her mind, inspecting it from different angles.
What was the closest thing most fantasy worlds had to modern medicine? The answer, of course was healing magic. Fat chance she could conjure that up on the spot. But for those who lacked the talent for spell-casting, there were usually other options, such as herbal remedies and potions. Alchemy.
The vials of liquid she took from the druid—could one of them be a healing potion? They could just as easily be poison, so she couldn’t just feed them to the dwarf, one by one. But maybe her patient might recognise them?
Each one she waved in front of the woman’s nose elicited a clear nope, ranging from distaste to outright fear. She got the sense that the dwarf did know what they were, and that they were not things a sane person would want to consume.
Okay, so that was a bust. But maybe there some way she could brew a healing potion herself? The problem was, even if alchemy really was a thing, she had no idea how to actually do it. In many games, it was just like cooking; mix a few ingredients together, and hey presto! Potion of Annihilation. But in other fiction, there was more to it than that. Often there were rituals or spells involved. Sometimes, like in Harry Potter, only someone with innate magical talent could do it; a witch or wizard. That would probably rule her out.
Then there was real world alchemy, which bore little resemblance to what was usually portrayed in fiction, and involved a bunch of complicated and time-consuming stuff like distillation and fermentation. But real world alchemy was mostly complete bunk anyhow, and probably no more useful than the average game as a guide for what she should do here on another world with different rules.
Hey, interface gods, she said silently. I could really use a hint right about now! And if you could dispense with the slow reveal this time, that’d be great. I’m in a bit of a hurry…
Nothing flashed up in front of her eyes. This wasn’t hugely surprising. Her interface was a fickle beast.
Then she saw that she was glowing.
No, not glowing. Highlighted. Just like her interface had done to ingredients used in pottery.
Uh…I think that means I’m an alchemy ingredient, thought Saskia.
Come to think of it, one common alchemy ingredient in other fantasy worlds was troll’s blood. Given that she could regenerate so fast, perhaps her blood would grant some of that ability to other creatures? It sounded more than a little creepy, but it was worth a shot.
Saskia opened up a deep cut along her palm with her claw, and let the blood run into a bowl. By the time the bowl was a quarter full, the wound had already stopped bleeding.
As she approached the bed with bloody bowl in hand, the dwarf gave her a look of disgust and said something that Saskia took to be the Dwarvish equivalent of, “You have got to be kidding me.”
Mercilessly, Saskia pressed the bowl to the dwarf’s lips until she finally relented, and began to choke down the dark liquid.
Moments later, the woman retched, and then coughed up a string of dark red phlegm.
So much for that idea, thought Saskia regretfully.
But that didn’t mean she should just give up. Her blood may still be a key ingredient. She might just needed some other ingredients as well—and perhaps some magical jiggery pokery—to activate its healing properties.
When she called up her map, her suspicions were confirmed. There were a number of new icons marked throughout the valley, adding to the growing list of natural resources shown. First it had been clays and other sources of minerals she could use for pottery, and dead branches, twigs and dung she could use to fuel the firepit. These new markers were plants, mostly. They could only mean one thing: alchemy ingredients.
No time to lose. She ran outside to scour the valley for the ingredients marked on her map.
The first icons she recognised on the map were plants with bright orange berries and myrtle green leaves. Saskia was all too familiar with those berries. They grew from small bushes down by the stream. Last time she ate them, they’d given her diarrhoea. She called them crapberries. Plucking a generous handful of the horrid things, she glanced back at her map.
Also easily recognisable were seed clusters and bark from the wannabe-pines that were so common in this valley. Their seed clusters weren’t exactly pinecones, but they were doing a pretty good job at pretending to be.
The other plants on the map were harder to identify. A lot of the leaf icons looked similar to each other, and didn’t exactly match the shrubs they represented. Fortunately, they weren’t just marked on her map. They were highlighted for her as well.
Rushing back to the cave with ingredients in hand, she couldn’t shake the feeling that if this actually worked, it would be suspiciously convenient. What were the odds that the exact plants she needed would all be found in this little valley? Unless it wasn’t actually specific plants that were needed, but rather certain kinds of ingredients, and her map just showed her the ones that were closest at hand.
Using a rock, she ground the leaves, berries, bark and seeds into a paste inside the cauldron. She followed this up with a generous portion of her blood, then added a bit of water, and swirled it all around.
As far as quantities were concerned, she was totally winging it. Games rarely gave quantities in grams or litres, instead using arbitrary units like ‘a handful of elderberries,’ ‘a bottle of water’ or ‘one manticore’s testicle.’ Here, she’d been given even less instructions than that. All she had were some basic ingredients, which may or may not all be meant for the same potion. If precise measurements were needed, or if ingredients had to be added at specific times, or in a specific order, then she’d have to figure it out through trial and error.
And that was only the beginning of her uncertainty. What was she supposed to do next? Chant something? Draw a pentagram at her feet? Sacrifice a chicken?
Let’s start with the basics, thought Saskia. Bring it to the boil. That’s pretty much a given, right?
So she placed the cauldron over the fire, and waited. As bubbles rose from deep within the cauldron, her spirits lifted with them. She could do this. She was an alchemist!
“Double, double toil and trouble,” she chanted, watching the potion begin to simmer and steam. “Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” She gave a little cackle and danced around the fire.
Then she turned to the dwarf, who was staring at her in horrified fascination.
“Stop looking at me like that!” said Saskia defensively. “I have every right to unhinge a little! Loneliness does that to a girl. Troll. Troll girl.”
There was a pop, and a huge gout of goopy liquid erupted from the big pot. The cauldron wobbled for a second, and then began to tip off its precarious perch over the fire.
Instinctively, Saskia reached out to steady it. Her hand began to sizzle. She screamed and yanked her fingers away from the scorched surface.
The cauldron rolled onto the ground, splashing its boiling contents all over her feet and ankles.
Howling in pain, she hopped around on her scalded toes, clutching her seared hand. Ow ow ow!
The worst of it was that her regeneration ability didn’t work on heat burns any more than it did on acid burns. She’d found that out weeks ago after some early cooking mishaps. Those scars still hadn’t healed, and now she’d have more to add to the collection.
Actually, no, that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that a woman might die or lose limbs because Saskia had crocked up the potion. A woman who right now was watching her with a mixture of disbelief and…amusement. The little wretch thought this was funny. Clearly, she had no idea that Saskia was doing this for her. That her life hung in the balance.
