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Brewing Bad Ch. 56
🕑 Added 2024-05-20 14:00:03 +0000 UTCCh. 56 - Roughing It
That night, Lucas took the watch because he didn’t trust Adin to stay awake all night. They lit a low fire just inside the treeline, and they didn’t even put up the tarp because the weather was nice, and making camp in the dark was miserable.
Instead, they just suffered through it, and in the morning, Lucas took a two-hour power nap. Amidst his many other potions, he’d brought some violet esper sap, which was miserable, foul stuff, but it would have been enough to keep him awake all night.
Right now, though, he didn’t need that. He needed to think about his options. That was a task that was made very difficult to do with all the bitching and moaning of the noblewoman they were babysitting.
“I’m thirsty.”
“This bedroll is lumpy.”
“You can’t seriously expect me to eat this filth.”
“I need to use the privy.”
Everything was a complaint, and every solution was unacceptable. Lucas didn’t expect anything different, of course. He’d had a couple high maintenance girlfriends back when business was booming, before his first arrest on Earth. So, he tried to think of her as Margret and handle her with a sort of detached passive aggressiveness.
Even so it grated, and matters weren’t helped by much that Adin wasn’t a lot better. He didn’t complain about the bedding or the toilet at least, but they weren’t in the bush for even 24 hours before he started complaining about the food over lunch.
“What are you talking about, man,” Lucas sighed. “Rotisserie chicken last night, ham sandwiches today? We’re living like kings!”
“Yes, but what will we do when it runs out?” Adin asked, pointing his finger at him.
“Then we’ll get more, bitch,” he said a little too loudly as his exasperation left him feeling a little frayed. “Our friends will be bringing us food and news the day after tomorrow, and…”
Lucas saw Adin open his mouth, and before the man could ask the dumb question he knew was coming, Lucas continued, “And if they don’t show, then we’ll buy something, and if none of these little villages have any food for sale, then we’ll hunt something. It’s going to be fine.”
“You? Hunt? You can’t be serious,” Arissa said, laughing at both of them. She’d eaten, but only barely. Ever since Lucas had talked about how he could easily poison her, she seemed to be very leery of both food and water and only consumed the bare minimum to keep herself going. They hadn’t even been out here for two days, and already she looked thinner.
“Do you think her friends have already raided the manor yet?” Adin asked, changing the topic.
“Without doubt,” Arissa answered before Lucas could. “By now, your friends are dead, and your sister’s in chains. If you want to save her, then you’ll have to—”
“I told you I’m going to gag you if you keep that up,” Lucas interrupted. “Everything is fine. These people aren’t the type to go straight at any issue. By now, they know that our pretty pretty princess is missing, but—”
“I am not a princess!” Arissa blurted out. “I am the daughter of duke—”
“But they have no idea where she is,” he continued without missing a beat as he ignored her outburst. “They’re already looking, and we’re… well, I… I’m probably at the top of the list of suspects. They might have even gotten a mage to seek out Miss Tovin, but they won’t find her. That shit is very short range.”
“How can you possibly know that?” Adin asked.
“Because they were looking for me for weeks with it, and they didn’t find me until I fucked up,” Lucas nodded. “So as long as no one thinks to check for her in the Greenwood, mages are useless. Now the real question is when our little party kicks off.”
“Party?” Arissa asked. “What party?”
Lucas was tempted not to tell her. Spilling secrets wasn’t a good idea, generally speaking. He realized that in this case, though, he might be able to use that as leverage.
“Let me ask you a question,” Lucas said finally. “How much do you care about the other members of your little group? Are the other Back Alley Whisperers all little noble brats running around grabbing at the levers of power, or are they mostly just disposable henchmen and all that?”
“If you’re asking if they’ll come for me, then of course they will,” she retorted. “I—”
“No, that’s not at all what I'm asking,” Lucas answered, poking their campfire with a stick. “Try listening more and waiting for your turn to speak less, and you’ll get better results. Trust me, I know. I’m asking you how much you personally care about these assholes, like, if, say… I blew them up. Would you be sad about that?”
“You overestimate yourself, Mr. Parin,” she said with a smile. “If you think you can just walk into a secret headquarters with my wand and just start blasting until all your problems go away, I assure you. You are quite mistaken.”
“Oh?” Lucas said, meeting her hazel gaze. “Why’s that?”
“We operate on a complex system of cells, and no one knows any more than a couple of other people who…” she trailed off as she realized she was giving away far too much information with her smug bragging. “Anyway, you wouldn’t understand it.”
“On the contrary,” Lucas said finally, “I understand, and I feel much better. That means only a handful of people know who you are or where you might have gone. If they’re the ones to check out our next shipment of blue… well, all our problems are solved.”
Arissa was aghast as she put the pieces together. “What next shipment? What did you do?”
Lucas merely smiled and said, “If you behave, I’ll tell you later. For now, it's time we get moving. I want a proper camp before it gets dark. We could be there for a while.”
They took the next hour to pack up, and after that, they spent the next three or four hacking their way through the underbrush. It would have been faster to walk around the edge of the forest. That’s the way that their friends would come to get to them, but Lucas wanted to minimize their chances of being seen.
He’d agreed with Kar’gandin that they’d camp in sight of the lonely tower, which was a falling-down old structure that people used for navigating this side of the forest. There was nothing there anymore. It was a precarious old thing that had long ago been gutted by fire. Still, it, along with a few of the sturdier old outbuildings, still stood, and they would make camp in one of those. He’d feel a hell of a lot better with a sturdy stone wall against his back so nothing could sneak up on him in the dark.
Along the way, Lucas and Adin got into an argument about what they would rename the Greenwood, given that the goblins were all but extinct. Adin voted for the Royal Forest since it was so near to the seat of power in Lordanin. Lucas had scoffed at that, mostly because it sounded dumb. He thought that Murkwood was just about right because of the spiders, but that wasn’t a reference he could explain to anyone, so he’d gone with Greatwood but suggested Spider Groves as an alternative. The whole conversation only made their prisoner laugh.
“What, you think you can do better?” Adin asked.
“At least I know why this place is named the Greenwood,” she sneered.
“It’s not because of the goblins?” Lucas asked. “Okay, I’ll bite, why is it named the Greenwood?”
Arissa played coy for a few minutes but eventually traded the answer for some water and a rest break. She was not having a good time hiking through these gnarled roots in her fancy boots.
“The Greenwood has literally nothing to do with goblins or orcs or trolls or any other greenskin,” she sighed. “It has to do with the tree’s themselves, specifically those, right there.”
“But aren’t all trees green?” Adin asked.
Lucas said nothing. Instead, he studied the tree, bringing up the little pop up for its alchemical properties as he examined the leaves, nuts, and bark. None of it was particularly interesting, but the name was certainly evocative.
Wyrmsbane Bark (unprocessed): Poison 2, endurance 1.
Wyrmsbane Seeds (unprocessed): Poison 1, healing 1, dexterity -1
Wyrsbane Roots (unprocessed): Inert.
It wasn’t until he studied the leaves that he understood where she was probably going with this.
Wyrsbane Leaves (unprocessed): Poison 4, especially effective on reptiles.
“The Greenwood and other forests like it are what keep dragons from burning the whole place down like they do in the northern lands sometimes,” she said, obviously taking great joy in putting them in their place. “The dragons can’t stand the smoke they produce, so they stay well clear of the regions where these trees grow, and so the area stays green.”
Lucas nodded in approval at the bit of trivia. It had no obvious uses, but maybe it would react with some other ingredient in an interesting way. The experiments would have to wait until all this had blown over, though.
An hour later, when the shadows were starting to grow long, the reached the skeleton of a tower. It was a five-story middle finger pointing at the sky, so it wasn’t hard to spot, and even though it had stood for so long, Lucas made sure they chose something far enough away that it wouldn’t fall on them overnight.
By this point, their prisoner was so bored she started to pepper them with questions, but every time Adin tried to answer something, Lucas shut him down. “You want to trade information?” he asked, “because we can do that. If you just want us to give away our secrets so you can know how to hurt us after you escape, though, well… no thanks.”
“Oh, so you think I’m going to escape now,” she grinned.
“I think you’re going to try,” Lucas nodded. “Maybe don’t try too hard, though, because if you run into a giant spider, you’re going to have a bad time.”
“I’m not sure what your obsession with them is, but they aren’t nearly so common as you think they are, Mr. Blue,” she answered smugly.
Lucas flinched. He hated that name. It was literally the lamest super villain name in existence. It was so awful that it made some comic book villains seem interesting and believable.
“Is that so?” he asked, smiling. “Well have I got a little story for you.”
While he and Adin hung the tarp up, and he built a small fire, he told her the story or the time he and Hura’gh had nearly been devoured. Even after she started to look squeamish, he didn’t leave a single detail out. He told her about the way it was practically invisible until it struck, the way its purple ichor went everywhere. He even told her about how the poison was so strong it almost stopped Hura’gh’s heart.
By end of that she was well and truly grossed out, and he was much more confident that she wouldn’t try to run off in the dark. After all, the tower was easy to find, but they were there already, and she had no idea which way it was back to the city by this point. Even without predators, she might never make it out of the Greenwood alive without them.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that the forest got awfully loud at night once the sunset. This deep into it, there were more than just spiders, and Lucas wondered what it was they were eating now that the goblins were so scarce.
