32 – Fruit Visions

  Andy didn’t have to worry about oversleeping the next day; the noise in the cavern took care of that. A few kids were already awake, which meant their parents were up, too—talking softly, cooking, trying not to disturb the rest. The low hum of voices and movement finally got the better of him, and his eyes opened. For someone who’d slept only a few hours on cold stone with nothing but a thin mat and his bag for padding, he felt surprisingly good. Yawning and stretching, he looked around.

  Lucy was still buried in her bag, but lots of people were moving about. Nearby, some adults were shushing kids and shooing them to the far corner of the cavern. Smiling, he rubbed his bleary eyes and sat up. That was when he saw the two packages beside his spear. Immediately, he knew they were from the System. It was the silk packaging that gave them away—unwrinkled, bright yellow and green, secured with bows of the same material.

  He picked up the first one, a fist-sized, hard, round object that immediately had his mind guessing it was an apple or some similar fruit. He wasn’t wrong; when he untied the ribbon and the silk fell away, he found himself holding a yellow-gold fruit. A little card had dropped with the silk. He picked it up and read it: Pear of Insight – as the name implies, those who consume this rare fruit are often inspired to think about things differently; you might find breakthroughs of understanding with one or more abilities.

  He lifted the fruit to his nose and sniffed, and, finding the sweet aroma almost intoxicating, he carefully wrapped it back inside the silky cloth. Setting it aside for the moment, he picked up the other package. This one was shaped like a thick, hardcover book, and Andy immediately began to hope he’d been given another Codex entry. Perhaps the thought had been a jinx, or maybe he just wasn’t that lucky; when he unwrapped the package, he found a finely crafted little box, not a book.

  It was made of polished wood, red in tone, with little, seemingly hand-carved, designs all over it—tiny people doing things, for the most part. There were little people killing a big bull-like creature with spears, other figures crouched around a campfire, a line of people climbed a snow-capped mountain, and a dozen other similar scenes carved into the wood with painstaking detail. The hinges were polished bronze, and so was the clasp.

  Before he opened it, he looked for a card with a description, but nothing else was in the silk wrapping. Holding his breath, he carefully flipped the little clasp and then lifted the lid. He smiled at the contents, the adventurous boy of his youth waking up for a brief moment at the sight—all manner of survival tools. He saw a flint and steel; fishing hooks and line; several little knives, one with a serrated saw blade; waxy balls of kindling; and a handful of little vials with different-colored fluids inside. Everything was neatly labeled with lettering etched into the wood.

  Peering closely, reading the labels, he guessed the vials were medicines and antidotes—one was called “snakebite,” and another, “cough.” Each object was secured in the box with brass-buttoned leather straps. It was a very cool little kit, though Andy didn’t know how useful it would be when he and his friends had so much magic available to them. “Maybe for one of the kids…”

  “What’s that?” Lucy asked sleepily.

  He looked over at her and saw she was watching him from the mouth of her sleeping bag. “My reward for the quest.”

  Lucy sat bolt upright, looking around, and Andy did, too. They both saw the colorful packages on the other side of her sleeping bag at the same time. “Hey!” she exclaimed, suddenly wide awake.

  Andy put his box down and watched her, suddenly feeling a strange, incongruous festiveness there in their dim corner of the cavern. It was like an unexpected Christmas morning. Lucy’s eyes were bright, cheeks flushed as she picked up her first silk-wrapped reward. It was long and just the right shape, so Andy blurted, “A bow?”

  Lucy looked at him, but her hands kept exploring the object, and she nodded quickly. “Yes! I love my bow, though. If it’s not—” Her words caught in her throat as she pulled the yellow silk aside, revealing the most beautifully polished wooden recurve bow Andy had ever seen. Unstrung, it looked almost like a staff, but as she turned it, he saw the layers of wood and other materials glinting under the light, polished to a high sheen.

  “Not a compound bow,” he observed.

  “Recurve,” she muttered, eyes alight as she examined every millimeter. After a minute, she set it on her lap and picked up the wound bowstring and a little card. “Heartseeker.” She turned the card, shrugging. “That’s all it says.”

  “Can you shoot it?”

  She nodded. “Oh yes. I learned on a bow like this—not such a big one, but yeah.”

  Andy pointed to the other package, also wrapped in yellow—he’d found no rhyme or reason to the colors the System used. “What about that one?”

  Lucy was reluctant to stop staring at her new bow, but she left it across her lap for a moment and picked up the other package. It was much smaller, and she immediately said, “Feels like an apple.”

  “I think I know what it is. Let me see that bow real quick while you open it.”

  Lucy passed him the bow, then she unwrapped her package. While she explored her fruit, Andy used his Evaluate Material ability:

  Material: *insufficient skill*

  Enchantment potential: *insufficient skill*

  Enchantment capacity: *insufficient skill*

  “Huh…”

  “It’s a Pear of Insight,” Lucy whispered, her eyes wide as she looked up at him.

  Andy smiled. “I got one, too. Just a minute, though. Trying to evaluate this bow, but…” He trailed off as he looked at his status sheet. His Evaluate Material was only at rank one, but he really didn’t want to spend a point on something so… non-critical was the best way he could describe how he felt. Even so, curiosity was eating at him, so he put a point into the ability. Focusing on the bow, he used it again:

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  Material: composite layers of various heartwoods and alchemically treated silver

  Enchantment potential: magical-moderate

  Enchantment capacity: *insufficient skill*

  “Damn,” Andy hissed, both impressed and annoyed.

  “What? Is it bad?”

  “No, it’s cool—various heartwoods and magical silver, but I can’t see its enchantment capacity yet. I need to improve my ability again, but…” Again, he trailed off as he stared at his status. He was down to four Improvement Points, and he’d thought he might want to spend some on his Brimstone Stalker abilities.

  If he ever wanted to enchant Lucy’s bow, though, he sort of needed to understand its capacity. Along those same lines, who was to say what kinds of materials they might start running into? What it all boiled down to was whether he was going to take his Glyphwright class seriously, or just use it to earn extra Improvement Points and mana.

  “Screw it,” he muttered, putting another point into the ability.

  This time, when he tried to evaluate the bow, he was rewarded with the whole picture:

  Material: composite layers of various heartwoods and alchemically treated silver

  Enchantment potential: magical-moderate

  Enchantment capacity: 100/200

  “Oh shit, it’s already magical.”

  “Is it?” Lucy stared, and from the way her hand crept toward him, Andy could tell she wanted the bow back.

  He chuckled and passed it over to her. “Yeah, but I don’t know what spell. Maybe I’ll figure it out once I improve my evaluation skill… I’m sure you’ll find out from a little trial and error, though. Anyway, it has room for more enchantments if we want to try—”

  “Let me figure out what it does first.”

  “I was gonna say, it’ll be easier if I don’t add something else to the mix.”

  “Isn’t it beautiful, though, Andy?” she asked, running her fingers over the length of the bow’s polished wood. “I’m going to string it. Did you eat your fruit?”

  “No, and I’m actually pretty damn hungry. Think I should?”

  She nodded. “Why not? It might help with the dungeon.”

  “Yeah.” Ever since he’d smelled it, he’d wanted to bite into the pear, but he’d held off—as usual—trying to be restrained, just in case. It was a mantra he’d heard ten thousand times from his mom, especially after his dad died, and they’d struggled with some of the bills—ones she hadn’t even known about because Andy’s dad had been the one to handle all that stuff. As the memory drifted through his mind, he thought of his Improvement Points and how nervous it made him not to have a pool to draw from. “They’re not money, you dummy.”

  “Hmm?” Lucy was standing, one end of the bow braced against her foot as she bent it into a curve.

  “Nothing.” Andy picked up the fruit and bit into it almost defiantly. Sugary juice coated his tongue; flavors reminiscent of maple and lime awakened sleepy taste buds, and Andy’s mind erupted with endorphins. His eyes closed as he took another bite, crunching the soft fruit with unadulterated pleasure. His mouth pulled into a reflexive smile, and juice ran off his chin. A soft groan escaped him as he took his third bite, and then, even as he continued to chew, his consciousness departed, floating down corridors of introspection.

  The pear sent Andy on a very strange mental journey, one where he thought about all manner of things—mostly problems—and saw solutions that had previously eluded him. He thought about his troubles at school, at home, and with past girlfriends. He thought about the System, the apocalypse, and all the weird puzzles involving mana, attributes, spells, and skills. He focused on particular abilities and thought about how they worked—how he might make them better. In every case, he came up with solutions.

  The only problem was that when the fruit’s intoxicating effect left him, he couldn’t remember any of it. All of his genius ideas were dashed from his mind, but, thankfully, the System had recognized at least one of them. He knew, because there was a bright yellow-text message waiting for him when he blinked his dumbfounded eyes.

  ***Congratulations, Andy! You’ve had an epiphany about the nature of smoke and ash. In your brief period of enlightenment, you gained insight into a new spell:

  Smoke Drift – Bound: By channeling mana attuned to smoke and ash, you can infuse your body with those elements, gliding as effortlessly as smoke on the wind when you run or leap. Mana Cost: 30 per minute.***

  “What happened?” Lucy asked, and when Andy looked at her, he saw she was once again sitting down, her now-strung bow on the blanket before her.

  “How long was I out?”

  “You were out?”

  “Wait, what? It felt like I was gone for a while…”

  “I just sat down…”

  Andy shrugged. “I guess that’s magic for you. Anyway, I got a new spell when I ate the pear. It’s a really weird sensation.”

  “Should I eat mine?” She looked around the cavern—still quiet, and people still waking up.

  “Why not? The same thing applies to you: it might come in handy for the dungeon.”

  Lucy nodded, sniffed the pear deeply, and bit into it. Andy watched her for a few seconds before someone behind him cleared their throat, and he turned to see Lydia. “Oh, hey,” he said. “I’ve got some notes for you. I was doing some enchanting last night.” He started rifling through his pile of belongings while Lydia stepped closer.

  “I was going to ask if you needed that knife back yet. I didn’t get a chance to do squat with it yesterday. Did you go down toward the waterfall? That storm is intense!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. It’s a damn good thing about that channel you put up by the hatch. We still had to stack buckets wall to wall in that room. We’ve got the kids dumping ’em out the waterfall tunnel—it slopes down toward the opening.”

  “Thought they built a wall and door—”

  “Yeah, a ramshackle one, but it’s gone—winds took it when the storm first hit.”

  Andy found the notebook he’d been using and handed it over. “I didn’t copy every glyph I found, but I did most of them. Gave me something to do while I was waiting for mana.”

  “Thanks, Andy. I’ll add what I learn to this for you and make a copy for myself.” She looked at Lucy, chuckling softly. “She okay?”

  Andy followed her gaze and huffed a soft laugh when he saw the drool escaping Lucy’s half-open mouth. “She’s all right; it’s this fruit she ate—from the System.”

  Just then, Lucy jerked upright, her eyes open wide as she inhaled deeply. “Whoa! I get what you mean, Andy! How long was I out?”

  “Just about a minute. Did you learn anything?”

  “Yeah, hang on.”

  “Anything about what?” Lydia asked.

  While Andy waited for Lucy to respond, he filled Lydia in about how the fruit worked. The Forgemaster nodded, rubbing her chin. “Wow, that’s interesting. Makes me think twice about skipping out on exploring or quests. You folks are really going into that dungeon today, huh?”

  Andy stood with a grunt, grimacing—his bladder was uncomfortably full. “Yeah, we are. Um, I’d invite you, but the System said it would be harder with more than five.”

  “Oh no. I was just musing—not ready to go jumping into any dark holes just yet.”

  “Anyway, my bladder’s about to burst. Gonna go check out that waterfall tunnel.” Not only did the tunnel serve as their outlet for rainwater, but it doubled as a latrine—five-gallon buckets they could dump and rinse beneath the waterfall’s constant sheet.

  Suddenly, Lucy spoke up. “I learned a new spell called Double Arrow; it makes a magical copy of my arrow when I shoot it—both will hit the target.”

  Andy turned back to her, grinning. “Badass!”

  Lydia laughed, clicking her tongue. “That’s some real cartoon shit there, Missy.”