Interlude: And Now For Something Completely Different

Darya heaved a sigh as she put down the missive from Lord Brighton. It spoke to his, and by extension his branch of the Order of the Golden Rose’s, credit that he sent a personal letter of condolences over this. One penned in his own hand rather than by an aide no less, judging by the similarity between the handwriting of the letter and that of his signature on the original contract.

That didn’t soften the blow of the contents to any meaningful degree though. Melanie had been a good apprentice, smart, talented, diligent and easy to get along with. That she had spent her last minutes, after it became clear that the field trauma center’s defenses would be overrun, documenting what was happening, and ensuring the safety of said documentation, spoke volumes about her character.

That documentation had been enclosed with the message, and would provide ample proof to have the Emerald Order blacklisted. Meager, as far as avenging the girl went, but it was better than nothing.

Being on the Apothecary blacklist meant that the guild, as well as any known members acting personally, was barred from purchasing any Apothecary services, medical or otherwise. Additionally, the Apothecaries’ neutrality principles didn’t apply to blacklisted guilds, though outright attacking the Emerald Order in retaliation was unlikely.

The bottom left drawer in Darya’s desk held a bottle of expensive vodka and a few tumblers, in addition to the more predictable office supplies. She poured herself a glass and moved to the adjoining room, which Melanie used for office. Had used for office, rather.

“Zemlya pukhom”

Melanie hadn’t had a single drop of Slavic blood in her veins, but the funeral toast from Darya’s homeland still felt like the right choice. She drained the glass and returned to her own office.

There was work to be done, and she didn’t live in a world where someone could afford much time to mourn. Especially not someone with something to accomplish. First order of business was informing Melanie’s father and only living relative.

After a moment of consideration, Darya decided to send a copy of Lord Brighton’s letter along with her own. With a few details redacted out that she suspected weren’t meant for the eyes of others.

Next would be dealing with the fallout within the Apothecaries. Or rather, doing what she could to get ahead of that problem. Losing an apprentice was a blow to her reputation, losing one while she was fulfilling a service contract Darya had negotiated was doubly so.

That the service was rendered to a reputable guild with a history of safe service contracts, that Darya had insisted on additional safety measures and more distance from expected combat zones than the neutrality principle required, and that the trauma center had been targeted despite clearly displayed Apothecarial sigils were all things that would matter fairly little when it came to her reputation. Or rather, it wouldn’t matter at all unless she made it matter.

At least her patient roster didn’t require constant attention at the moment, and she was between time sensitive research projects as well. Small blessings.

‘Eureka!’

Working out how to sneak into the barrier without tripping up the alarms that the blasted GRO-ies had set up took entirely too long. At least this one was probably the one that things had gone down in. Why else would this particular one have gotten an alarm upgrade since this morning while the other raided barriers had gone untouched?

The inside of the barrier was pleasantly unlit. Unlike the weather outside, the sky in the barrier was overcast. With the sun having set nearly 2 hours ago and there being no artificial light sources, the ambient light was only a step above the bowels of a cave. Getting out of the humans’ headache-inducing light pollution was a welcome change.

What he found inside proved to be more of a mixed bag. On one hand, it had barely been picked over by scavengers before the GRO-ies came back and put up more security, so there were plenty of items of true substance amidst the barrier goods.

Obviously, the knights had taken the most interesting and valuable stuff, but there was a lot of stuff that was neither ‘evil’ nor valuable enough for them to care. In fact, if he had been a salvager first and foremost, he would’ve pretty much hit the jackpot with this.

As it stood… well, he still grabbed some things, of course. No self respecting goblin didn’t scavenge a bit on the side when an opportunity arose. It was chump change compared to the prize he was really after, though.

In that area, things were less stellar. Finding out where she had clashed with his rat ogre was trivial. Even if the GRO-ies hadn’t put up a bucketload of cardboard evidence markers, the scent of burnt knockout gas and burnt rat fur would have given it away clearly.

The human corpses smelling of old embalming fluid and fresh incense gave a solid hint as to why the brute got close enough for a fight to happen at all, instead of her just being spooked off, and it following her scent back to her nest.

The problem was that even finding the dead rat ogre didn’t tell him anything about where that nest was located. His only clue was a sack filled with sawdust and bits of wood, all of which seemed completely mundane. He could think of no reason why she would bother with something like that at all, let alone bring it with her when going scavenging. He’d taken a bit with him anyways, in case there was some hidden alchemical significance to be found back in his workshop, but that was about as likely as him beating a minotaur at armwrestling.

Really, the only thing he had learned was that he had underestimated how much she deviated from normal kobold instincts. Not only was she a loner, evidently she would stand and fight despite having neither numbers nor home field advantage on her side.

At this rate, she might turn out to hate sex despite her tribe heritage too. Oh well, nothing the right **** couldn’t fix before selling her if necessary, and he would turn a nice profit either way.

The sound of an air raid siren jerked Marisa awake. Moving on instinct and habit alone, she was halfway dressed by the time her conscious mind caught up to the situation. The siren had, of course, been coming from her phone and not an actual air raid siren. She had it as the custom sound for messages from Golden Rose dispatch.

The message was just a location, which meant she’d be briefed on site. Smart money was on it being related to the Emerald Order. After the thrashing the Goldies gave them two days ago, Marisa had hoped things would be quiet for a while. After an active undead alarm on one of the raided barriers was tripped, she should have known that wasn’t happening.

Granted, word among her fellow contract mages was that it was because one of the cleanup crews had missed some zombies in storage that a barrier scavenger had then dug up. At least, one of the cleanup teams had gotten a personal chewing out from Big Wig Brighton himself.

But the Emeralds had managed to steal mundane corpses, and kidnap the occasional transient, for necromancy experiments from out under the Goldies’ nose for nearly two decades before getting caught. Probably safer to expect shenanigans in that case.

Once she was dressed and had checked that the pocket space had all of the gear that would raise too many eyebrows among mundanes, she went downstairs. Casting a glance at her kitchen, she thought about shotgunning an energy drink before heading out.

Then again, for having gotten a bit more than 4 hours of sleep, she was surprisingly well rested. Maybe not so surprisingly given how she ended her evening. The thought put a smirk on her face and a pleasant heat in her core, but she pushed it away. Now wasn’t the time for distractions, or for dragging her feet. Either of those could cost lives.

The barrier was practically unrecognizable as a copy of the deep Amazon jungle, despite still having the appearance of untamed wilderness. The answer was in the greenery, most of which had died long ago. Even the trees that remained were adorned by more fungal growths than they were with scattered, sickly leaves. The ground was covered in a spongy, blackish-brown mass of plant detritus in the early stages of turning into peat.

At the center of it all and covering more than two thirds of the barrier lay a lake. The real version of it was connected to streams that eventually reached the Amazon River, but the one inside the barrier was isolated. The surface of the still, fetid water was covered in a thick, slimy film of dead algae. Once, the microscopic plants had gorged on the fruits of decay and grown out of control, but now they as well had died and become food for bacterial agents of rot.

The barrier had laid undisturbed for decades, Abyssal beasts avoiding it on instinct and locals considering the mere mention of it an ill omen. Nonetheless, something now stirred in the depths of the dead lake. Heralded first by ripples beneath the layer of bacterial ooze, something broke the surface and moved languidly onto the brink.

The creature was a scaled behemoth over 40 meters long. Even discounting the 8 meters of whip-like extension at the end of the tail, it dwarfed the largest mundane beasts alive. With rough, black scales covering its reptilian form, four thick legs ending in claws that could each crush a car, a head that would look crocodilian if not for the horns that rose from the back of the skull and curved forward into points running parallel with the snout, and great wings on its back forming a wingspan as wide as the beast was long, it was easily recognized as a dragon.

If not for the movement, it would be easily taken for a corpse. The wings were almost entirely skeletal, with nothing but remnant scraps of membrane between the bones. The rest of the body had asymmetrical spots, both large and small, where chunks of flesh appeared to be missing, many deep enough to expose bone on the skull, ribcage, spine and legs. The soft tissue was not exposed even there though, as it was covered, both in those holes and between the scales, in a mottled layer of mold, in varying, pallid shades of green, red and purple.

Despite all of this, the wyrm moved freely, hindered only by a lingering lethargy. She opened her maw wide in a great yawn, then exhaled a puff of spores and sickly green from her nostrils. The cloud enveloped one of the trees that clung to its last vestiges of life, causing it to wither and rot at supernatural speed, being reduced to moldy mulch in a few seconds.

Shaking off the last remnants of sleep with a tremor traveling from snout to tail, she then inhaled deeply through the nose, sniffing the air but also sensing on a deeper, more mystical level.

‘Multiple abscesses have festered and grown ripe for harvest while I slept. I wonder how long it’s been.’

A proper look at the stars of the clear night sky would settle that, she just had to find one of a handful of ‘speedy’ stars to compare to the location of its neighbors.

‘Ah, a century or so then. As the mortals grow numerous, my naps shrink.’

A rumbling chuckle loud enough to set tremors upon the filthy surface of the lake preceded her rising on her hind legs, towering into the night sky. Then, she shrunk and transformed.

The woman she turned into was diminutive compared to the form she inhabited before, but standing nearly 2 meters tall, she was still towering by the standards of human women. If her height should prove unable to turn heads for some reason, her figure certainly could.

Full breasts the size of small watermelons that sagged only so very slightly under their weight were balanced by wide hips, meaty thighs and a big bubble butt. For all the enticing padding, she had a narrow waist and flat midriff to tie the hourglass together. Her face was one of pleasant and graceful symmetry with a whiff of an aristocratic air to it.

All of this was formed in a light chocolate skin color, as was found in the lighter end of the latina complexion range, and framed in a cascade of platinum blonde hair that reached all the way to her knees.

She was clad in an outfit made to reveal and accentuate more than it hid. Her skirt had wide cutouts at the sides that almost turned it into a loincloth when seen from the front, showing off her legs and the slight thigh squish created by her sheer stockings.

The top was two-layered and cropped high. The inner part was black and hugged her skin so closely it almost might as well be painted on. It started just below her bosom and enveloped her torso up to the neck, but with a large cutout that made it frame, rather than cover, the top third of each breast as well as her ample cleavage.

The second layer was beige like the skirt. It covered the ‘cup’ around her breasts, from which it trailed triangular strips of fabric all the way down to the hem of the skirt. Thus, the two pieces of her outfit effectively framed her navel and a good bit of her midriff. The top had no attached sleeves. Instead, flared half-sleeves were fastened above the elbow by ribbon.

All of it was embroidered with vaguely flame or leaf like patterns in gold thread and adorned with golden jewelry set with purple gemstones. Two accessories broke that pattern; a set of green jade earrings, and a hairpin with a skull mask motif carved from ivory.

On its own merits, the tastefulness of the ensemble could be validly criticized. On her, however, her effortless, regal countenance imbued a sense of elevated grace and splendor upon the attire, where it would have easily seemed slutty and ostentatious on a lesser woman.

With a dismissive gesture, she collapsed the barrier. The unusual gesture was by far the lesser irregularity, however. Instead of the contents of the barrier fading away as the wider reality asserted itself, what had been in the barrier outright replaced what had been there in reality, thoroughly confusing and scaring a few hundred critters, some of which had been sitting in the tree that she had accidentally destroyed earlier.

While she started on her leisurely stroll north, she quietly wondered if this little seed of bogland would grow into a fully fledged biome or if the surrounding jungle would snuff it out.