A Little Bit of Gardening

“Everyone, just stay quiet,” Beth pleaded, rising from her seat. “Last thing we need is my sister thinking something’s up.”

She accepted the call as she strode out of the room. “Hey, Sis,” she said, her voice dull.

John could just make out the sound of Beth’s sister on the other end, too distant to understand her words but enough to catch her slightly tired tone.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Beth replied to an unknown question, her voice growing more distant as she moved down the hallway. “Just getting my school stuff done.”

Whatever her sister’s response to her statement was, Beth let out a scoff. “Yeah, I'm doing my homework. Nothing much else for me to do.”

By now, she was too far away for John to make out her sister’s tone, though by the way Aeolia flinched, not far enough for her keen ears to catch.

“Bad?” John whispered to her, prompting a slight nod from his winged girlfriend.

“Yeah,” Aeolia muttered. “Sounds like an old argument coming to a head again.”

A door slammed, cutting off Beth’s now heated words, leaving the rest of the party in silence while she fought with her sister a few rooms away.

“I take it that things with her sister aren’t good,” Teri said quietly.

Vivian nodded. “Beth’s sister is overprotective of her. Very overprotective.”

“Ah,” Teri lightly exclaimed. “Going to venture a guess that she wouldn’t approve of us?”

“Yeah,” John answered. “Let’s just say Beth’s sister would rather she sits at home and doesn’t fight.”

“And Beth’s obviously not of the same mind,” Teri remarked. Her face twitched and lips curled into a frown. She opened her mouth to say something but closed it as footsteps came stomping back towards them. Beth stopped in the doorway, an uneasy expression on her face.

“Sorry about slamming the door,” she apologized to Vivian as she lingered outside, arms crossed under her chest.

“Everything alright?” the redhead asked.

Beth shrugged. “Things ain’t worse than they were this morning. Well, maybe a little bit. Lynn expects my grades to be a bit higher come exam time.”

John realized she was deflecting, a tactic he had employed himself to hide his bullied days from his mother.

“Well, if you need any help, my door’s open,” he offered, hoping the others would catch the drift and not dwell on Beth’s familial issues.

Beth’s lips quirked into a small smile and she dipped her head. “Think I’ll take you up on that offer. But let’s get back to what we were doing.”

“Right,” Vivian quickly said, head snapping towards her phone. “The ideal place for this should be somewhere with little traffic that isn’t too far away.”

“Yeah, we don’t want people to stumble onto it,” Aeolia added, turning to John. “Think your powers can add a password or something.”

“They might.” John shrugged. “You can set passwords for things like group PvE. You know, each player plugs in the same password and can join the host’s game.”

John cracked his neck. “Won’t know until we try. Can’t get skills or upgrades without giving it a go. Well, I could if we had a book that talked about Barrier security. Got three Reading Points saved up.”

John turned his attention to his phone, the map of the town having gone untouched due to Beth’s phone call. His eyes gravitated towards home, thinking it would be best to keep the eventual world tree close. Despite the allure, he put that idea aside. The convenience of it being close wasn’t worth the risk to his mother if their enemies came to attack. The same thing went for anywhere near the academy, as he didn’t want to deal with the Order stumbling over it.

He let out a sigh. “Be nice if we knew where the Order kept watch.”

“Can’t say for sure, but I think I heard that they’re mainly focused on the east side of town,” Aeolia supplied. “Maybe the south a bit too.”

“Lines up with where the academy is,” John muttered. “If I was running an organization, I’d make sure a place one of the high ranking members spent a good amount of time in was in a secure area. Not that it helped on Monday.”

He focused back on the map, eyes drifting north from the academy. The network of roads left it a poor choice for their purpose, but the less developed areas further east looked promising.

“How about this area?” he offered, zooming into the northeast of his map and showing the girls the spot he’d scouted near the bank of the river. “Not a lot of stuff going on up there.”

Vivian quickly scrolled her map to the same location, switching to satellite mode so she could assess the terrain.

“It looks promising,” she said after a moment of review. “Good amount of forest and the river should help.”

“Help with what?” Beth asked, her countenance less touched with negative emotions.

“I figure that being close to good sources of ambient earth and water mana can’t hurt,” the redhead said. “Natural Barriers form due to the intermixing of a Kingdom’s mana and Earth’s, so there’s a possibility that a good environment will impact the seed in some way.”

“I can see how that can help,” Teri remarked, nodding. “Good soil makes for good growing.”

“Are we going to plant it now, or later?” Beth inquired.

“Might as well start things now,” Senka replied coolly. “I don’t think we gain anything by waiting.”

Everyone was in agreement with the spirit and they pulled themselves up from their seats.

“Give me a minute to clear my Inventory,” John said, retreating to the room they were using as storage. Once the loot was divested, he made his way to the foyer, grabbing the seed box and jar before he rejoined the party.

“Let’s get planting,” he joked as they departed.

---

The trip to their prospective Kingdom location was an uneventful and quiet one, minus a short stop to acquire a shovel at a hardware store, and it didn’t take long before the party had ventured into the lightly forested area.

“We’ve seen a lot of woods in the last few days,” Aeolia remarked from her perch on John’s shoulder, her invisibility wavering slightly as she spoke.

“Yeah,” John sighed. “Maybe we can try something a little more urban.”

“I wouldn’t say no to that,” Vivian added. “But maybe something a little different than those constructs.”

“‘Constructs?’” Teri asked, from somewhere to John’s left, hidden from view thanks to the Glyph Sphere.

“Robots,” John said. “I do wonder what sort of other enemy types will show up with a ‘town’ setting.”

Shaking his head, John surveyed their surroundings. “How far from the road do you think we should go?”

“A fair amount,” Vivian answered. “The further we go, the less likely someone is to just stumble on this. Come to think of it, we should probably set up some detection wards. Even if you can protect the Barrier with a passcode, having something to let us know someone was poking about would be useful. And I think it shouldn’t be too hard to rework something I’m already close to finishing. Oh, right, I never got to tell you about that.”

“Well, now’s as good a time as ever,” John joked. “What’s the thing?”

“It’s an alert system in case one of us gets ambushed or pulled into a trap Barrier,” Vivian explained. “It sends a signal back to my place. As long as we’re within the city limits, the arrays will work, and the strength of that signal will give the rough location. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing. Think I can get the last bit done pretty easily.”

“That’s awesome,” John said, recalling the anxiety he’d felt after getting pulled into the trap at school. Knowing that if it happened again, there would be a cavalry coming was a great relief.

Vivian nodded, a satisfied smile on her face. “It’s not all that special. It’d be much better if it could function like an actual GPS, but that would require far more work. Like having to place relay points all around town. Not cheap and not exactly covert.”

“Sounds pretty good to me,” Beth chimed in. “Springfield’s not that big.”

“True,” the redhead said. “I would feel a bit better with a more accurate safety net but I shouldn’t get caught up focusing on an unattainable goal when a working solution is at hand.”

She shook her head. “Anyway, nearly done with that. Just need to finalize the receiving module and place the arrays on something to test.”

“Want me to try and place them on with Craft?” John asked. “Think I should try and level that.”

“Couldn’t hurt to try,” Vivian answered, then looked around. “I believe this is far enough out.”

“Seems far enough off the beaten path,” Aeolia said, her visage fluctuating as she spoke. “Let’s get this thing set up.”

John nodded and moved to cast Instant Barrier. Instead of the normal selection screen, John felt a warmth pulse from within him and a notification appeared.

The World Tree Seed seeks fertile soil to grow. Is this where it will take root and hold a Kingdom on its branches?

Yes/No

“Looks like some things hijack my powers,” John muttered. “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“I wonder if the seed would interact with someone opening a Barrier without an ability that affects them?” Teri pondered.

“That notification seems to point that way,” Vivian said.

Shaking off his minor discomfort, John brought his finger to the affirmative, leaving the digit floating above the choice.

“Ready for whatever this will do?” he asked the assembled party. After a few nods and murmurs of preparedness, John pressed the button.

Reality shifted and John felt like he was caught up in a wave. Up and down swapped and twisted around in a chaotic whirl and John felt bile rise into the back of his throat. Then, just as suddenly as it began, normality reasserted itself and John found himself lying on the ground, dirt crunching underneath him. His body tingled like he had been zapped by static electricity, leaving him unable to feel anything else.

An amused chuckle echoed in his head and the image of Senka coyly hiding her smile with a hand filtered into John’s imagination.

‘What’s so funny?’ he asked, his thoughts tinged with irritation.

‘It’s just that you’ve found yourself in quite the enviable position,’ the dark spirit answered.

Before John could press for more elaboration, feeling began to return to his body and he became aware of four distinct weights using his body as a pillow. He froze as his female companions began to move, obviously affected by the creation of the Barrier as he was.

“Ugh, let’s not do that again,” Aeolia grumbled from her spot over John’s eyes, her wings tickling his skin. “And I don’t think this is what people mean by facesitting.”

“Agreed,” Vivian muttered, marking her spot nestled into John’s left side, his arm lying casually over her hip.

"I could have gone without knowing what a sock feels like during a wash," Beth groaned to John's right, her back pinning his arm to the ground, the tips of his fingers a few centimeters short of touching the top of her ass.

"That was worse than when Gryit convinced me to drink Glkey's brew," Teri complained, her body lying on John's torso, plump breasts squished into his ribs.

John felt his pants tighten as he lived out a dream he'd had many times before: smothered under attractive women. Of course the situation was far from ideal, given that he was only in a relationship with two of them, one he did not want to ruin in its infancy.

"You guys alright?" he asked as a courtesy, fairly sure beyond nausea and numbness, they were as fine as he was.

"Doing alright," Beth snidely replied. "Well, my pillow could have been a little more comfortable but that's not too big of a negative.”

“Sorry I’m not rated for sleep,” John glibly retorted.

“I think Vi and I would argue against that,” Aeolia said, carefully standing, her talons lightly pressing into John’s face for a second before she glided off him.

Vivian didn’t verbalize her answer, but nodded, loose strands of her hair brushing against John’s neck as she pulled herself to her feet. Beth too remained quiet as she stood up, eyes downcast and firmly away from everyone.

“Sorry about landing on you,” Teri said and John craned his neck to see her flushed face as she began to roll off him.

He smiled at her. “It’s not a big deal. I’m not even sure you guys actually fell on me. Think we all just popped in like this.”

“I wonder if that’s a sign of something?” Senka pondered as she manifested besides John, causing his thoughts to turn to their surroundings. They stood in the middle of an expanse of rust colored dirt; a dull wasteland under a cloud covered sky. The air was still and the lack of ambient sound was somehow more disturbing than the other unpopulated Barriers they had been in.

“Man, it’s quiet in here,” Beth remarked.

Her stating of the obvious broke the sudden tension that had fallen on them and John pulled the seed box from his Inventory. He placed it down at his feet then repeated the process with the Endless Jar.

“Figure this is as good as any place to plant this,” he said, pulling on the shovel and sticking it into the ground. “Any idea how deep we should dig?”

“Not more than a dozen or so centimeters. And we should probably make it a meter or so wide, since I doubt the tree will be super skinny, ” Vivian said, phone in hand as she read from some agricultural website. “Do you think we should have brought some water?”

“Nah. The jar makes the soil rather moist,” John answered. “But we can bring some water when we check in later.”

Taking the shovel, John began to dig the shallow hole, the loose dirt making the task rather easy. Once the hole was dug, John poured some of the enriched soil in before placing the seed box in, adding more soil atop it until the hole was completely filled, a dark moist spot amongst the faint red.

“Time to jumpstart this thing,” John said, extending his arm over the fresh soil. “The description said other people can add mana. Shall we go all in on this?”

The girls nodded and mirrored John’s stance.

“Any idea how this works?” Aeolia asked.

“Not a clue,” John replied with an awkward smile.

“I think the best way to do this would be for you to count down before casting, and we release our mana with you,” Vivian proposed.

John nodded, activating Arcane Sense before saying, “On three then. One, two, three!”

John cast the Evocation, 101 mana flowing from his downward facing palm into the buried box. He felt the box take in his mana, giving him the slightly uneasy impression of standing at the rim of a great, endless pit. He felt the others’ mana follow after his, all it disappearing into that pit.

New Quest: A New-Land
A World Tree has been planted. As it develops, the Barrier that hosts it will develop with it. But a watched plant never grows. This Quest will update as changes occur. Auto Accepted.

“Is that supposed to be some kind of pun on your last name?” Aeolia asked.

“Looks that way,” John said, dismissing the display. “Kind of wish there was a bit more.”

“It was a bit anticlimactic,” Teri agreed.

“It is a tree,” John said, shaking his head. “Even if our magic is accelerating its growth, it might take some time. Which puts us in a bit of a bind. What are we going to do about the elder problem?”

The goblin girl frowned, a hand idly reaching up to scratch Kitai’s head. “I think I can delay them a bit. Vrexty can’t push too hard, so him making a fuss about us not making progress today won’t go over too well. I can spin it that you need a few days to get everything together. They should buy that.”

“Then that’s it for today I presume?” Senka asked.

“I think we’ve done enough work today,” Vivian answered. “We’re all pretty drained. I say we head back and just relax a bit.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Senka remarked. “Actually, if you don’t mind me making a suggestion, perhaps we could take in a movie?”

Teri’s ears perked up at the spirit’s suggestion, and John didn’t need her talents in emotion reading to know she was excited about the prospect of getting to watch a film.

“I think that’s a good idea,” he threw in his two cents.

Beth shrugged. “I’m down for that.”

“I could go for some popcorn,” Aeolia quipped.

Vivian smiled. “A film sounds lovely. What shall we watch?”

John shot Teri a smile, “I think I’ve got just the thing to watch.”

Thanks again for reading this little story. If you liked the chapter, please hit that thumbs up, and if you want to support my writing, check out my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/ScrapCrow. Get access to my chapters before they’re published here and join my private Discord.