NOVEL FROG Ch. 14: Experiments in Survival
Cass poked at her fire, already glad for the barrier against the encroaching night.
Her head hurt. A glance at her Focus showed it wasn’t magic-related. Was it just good old-fashioned dehydration? Had she drunk anything since arriving?
Cass cupped her hands and summoned a ball of water in them. Her hands were stained with dirt and worse, but so were the clothes she would have wiped them on.
The water was cold. Like from the fridge at home. Was that because it was summoned from some world of ice and snow or was it because that was what she had wanted?
Was this cleaner than the creek? She could still hear it burbling over the cliffside. Waterfalls were supposed to be clean, weren’t they? She thought she’d heard that somewhere, though she couldn’t imagine why the process of falling any distance would make a difference.
Then again, was summoning from an alien dimension better?
Was that even how it worked? Was she manifesting it from nothing? Would it disperse on its own given enough time?
She licked her parched lips. This wasn’t the time to worry about it. She brought her cupped hands to her lips and sipped it cautiously. It was barely a thimble full, but it was like divinity dripping down her throat. It was gone before she knew it and she summoned a second handful.
Elemental Manipulation has increased to level 2!
Her headache didn’t immediately lessen, but this had to be the issue. It was only a matter of time until that got better.
She summoned a third handful for good measure. This handful was fuller. Had she gotten more for her effort because she’d gotten a level up in the skill?
She’d take it. How many more would she need before it would be an effective attack? Right now, unless her opponent was a lit candle it wasn’t going to be much use.
In the meantime, she should eat. She finagled the nearest potato out of the fire ring with the help of a spare stick and poked it experimentally with a finger. It was soft, if molten hot.
With some juggling between her hands as it cooled she managed to take a bite. It was just as bitter as it had been before but somehow managed to turn what had been an acrid forefront into just a prominent background note.
That is to say, it was still awful, but at least it no longer required her to chew it for several minutes before she could swallow the thing.
She turned out her pockets. There had to be something easier to eat. A couple of handfuls of sorrel, several more of the aster, a dozen dreamweed berries and another clump of leaves, and a winding loop of vineroot stem and leaves met her.
Not exactly a filling-looking bounty from a day of foraging the wilds.
Cass activated Foraging again, to double-check that they really were edible. All of her haul remained in color and focus as the rest of the world phased out.
Everything seemed in order.
Cass started with the aster leaves and dried flower buds.
While she’d collected them, she had intended to boil them and make them into a tea. There was just one problem with that. She had no vessel to heat water to make tea in.
She munched on a potato, ignoring the flavor to the best of her ability, while she thought.
She couldn’t just float a ball of water over the fire with Elemental Manipulation. Not for the amount of time it would take for the water to boil and then steep. And even if she could, then what? Let it pool in her hands and drink the scalding liquid like she had been drinking her summoned water? No, thank you. She was not about to burn her hands in an entirely avoidable way.
If only she had a pot.
But pots were made of metal and needed significant equipment to forge. Her skill set wasn’t going to make her a pot any time soon.
If she had Metal Manipulation instead of Elemental…
She stopped chewing. Wait. Was metal an element? It wasn’t in classical Greek philosophy. But it was in the Chinese one, wasn’t it? And if it was, couldn’t she summon and shape it?
It was worth a try.
She held her hand out and focused on what she wanted. An orb of metal. Metal. Metal!
Nothing happened.
It was not the empty feeling of the skill missing a target, like she’d felt the first time she’d attempted Elemental Manipulation or when she had attempted to Identify elements of the System windows. Rather it felt like she was pressing against a wall. If she had the strength, perhaps she could push through it, one day, in the future. But right now, summoning metal was beyond her.
But, did her pot need to be made out of metal? It just needed to be made out of something fire-resistant, right?
What about a stone pot?
She tapped a stone sitting at the edge of her campsite. Could she use Elemental Manipulation on stone?
She held a hand over the stone and engaged Elemental Manipulation. She could feel her control settling over the rock. She willed it to change shape, pushing down on the center and pulling up around the edges.
Elemental Manipulation has increased to level 3
She exhaled as she lost control of the spell a moment later. It fizzled out, having consumed 42 MP, leaving an uneven bowl where the irregularly shaped stone had been sitting.
Cass grinned and picked up the bowl. It was maybe four inches tall, with a depression in the center barely 2 inches deep. It was roughly the same irregular rock shape rather than round and the walls varied in thickness anywhere from half an inch thick to three inches thick in one spot.
It was a very ugly bowl. It had consumed nearly a quarter of her Focus.
But it was a start, and she had time to make it better.
Cass spent the next hour working on her cooking pot. By the time she was done, she had effectively gone through her Focus twice and she had a mildly ugly pot to show for it.
It was finally mostly round with a fairly even lip and roughly even wall thickness. It had grown to six inches tall and five inches deep, though it had lost some radius in return.
It was now sitting on a bed of coals in her fire ring, a handful of aster and dreamweed steeping in the magically filled water. Cass was watching it boil again gnawing on a potato.
While she waited for her tea, she started working on a teacup. It was just as ugly by the time she was done, with no real handle, just a knob on one side she could hold onto while she scooped the body of the cup through the boiling tea. Still, it was infinitely better than drinking out of her hands.
Cass settled up next to her fire, magic tea in one hand, gross potato in the other.
The tea was sweet, the sweetness of the dreamweed covering the bitter of the aster, but earthy. She liked it. She liked that it was hot. She liked the floaty feeling that rose in her chest as she took another sip. It even made her potato taste better.
Maybe, things would be okay?
Cass nodded to herself. The night was dark and cold, but she had magic and tea, and really what else did a person need?
She chuckled to herself.
Foraging has increased to level 2!
Cass raised an eyebrow at that. Why had she gotten that now? Was it because she had finally eaten what she’d foraged? Did it not count if she only collected it? That made a kind of sense, she supposed. It was just picking wildflowers if she didn’t eat them.
Should she try to level this skill further? She was hesitant. All her concerns floated uselessly around the back of her head. She didn’t want to become something or someone else because of them. But, her very survival depended on these System-granted skills. She’d be starving tonight without Foraging, after all.
Cass took a deep breath. She didn’t have to think about this now. Either way, she should try everything she’d collected and if that leveled up Foraging, so be it.
Resolved, she lifted one of the pink dreamweed berries to her nose. It smelled faintly of sugar. Like someone had carried freshly baked sugar cookies through the room an hour or two ago.
She popped it in her mouth. The skin broke and sweet juices spilled across her tongue. It was sickeningly sweet. Sweeter than any dessert Cass had ever had. There was a tingling across her tongue, like a numbing spice, like Szechuan peppers, but without the heat.
But mostly, it was just unbearably sweet. Sweeter than those pure sugar lollipops on the plastic sticks they sold at amusement parks. Sweeter than straight sugar.
Cass could feel her eyelids drooping as she swallowed the berry. Oh, right. The leaves could be made into a sleeping drug. The berry must have similar chemicals.
She could feel herself swaying, her exhaustion and the berry mixing into an irresistible urge to sleep. She leaned back into the bolder behind her, away from the fire, her eyes flickering closed as she tried to resist anyway.
The flavor coated her tongue. It covered every surface of her mouth. Sticky on her teeth. Like drowning in taffy.
Like suffocating in cotton candy.
Like she really couldn’t breathe.
Cass gasped, clutching her throat. She could barely keep her eyes open. Her thoughts had slowed to a crawl.
But she couldn’t breathe.
She was going to die.
Adrenaline and drug-enforced lethargy warred in her heart. It pounded loudly in her ears. Her lungs weren’t moving. How did one inhale again?
She couldn’t breathe.
This must be a poison. A paralytic toxin?
She had to do something.
The Thunder Sorrel. It was supposed to have toxin-neutralizing properties or something right? Would it counter this poison? There wasn’t time to debate. She shoved the leaves in her mouth.
Was it enough?
Their sour flavor cut through the sticky sweetness in her mouth. It sliced through the numbness.
She shoved another handful down her throat.
She was losing her grip on consciousness. Would she wake up again? Would the poison freeze her lungs, leaving her to suffocate? Would some monster wander past her camp and devour her whole while she lay passed out? Would she just fall face-first into the fire and burn to death?
But there wasn’t anything else Cass could do. A moment later, she was asleep, collapsed in her nest of leaves, but again breathing shallowly.