“Five,” Jeb said, holding up his fingers. The morphine was starting to wear off, and the pain in his legs was rapidly getting worse, but he couldn’t let this little bastard overcharge him.
Objectively, fifty M&Ms for the secrets of magic was probably an insanely good deal, but Jeb wasn’t the type to let someone set their own price.
“Foolish human, you have no leverage. Without this knowledge, you will die, and we will pick your corpse clean. The M&M’s are practically ours already.”
“Oh, really?” Jeb asked. “What if I did this?” Jeb tore the top of the bag off and slid a mouthful of M&Ms into his maw, crunching down on them with a satisfied groan.
“NOOO!” the Fairy squeaked with outrage. “You villain!”
“Carefull, I’m getting hungry. I might have to…” He made to tilt the bag into his mouth again.
“Fine! Thirty M&Ms, and not a single delicious morsel less.”
“Fifteen.”
The fairy boss’s lower lip trembled, and Jeb raised his brows, tilting the bag up toward his mouth.
“Fine! Fifteen M&M’s for the knowledge of Myst….But anything else costs extra!”
“Deal.” Jeb glanced at his leg. Damn, I wish I had thought of this before I charged out into the wilderness like a dumbass.
Eh, fuck it, how was I supposed to know a shot to the heart and a good spearing was a half-measure? I did as well as can be expected for a normal guy with a normal Body.
Jeb was lucky to be alive, foot or no foot.
Now that he knew exactly how bad off he was, he was going to take every advantage he could possibly muster.
***Jessica Stile***
“So, what did he do after we left? Any hidden stash or anything?” George asked as Jessica got back from observing the injured man. Her Nerve was higher than the others, enhancing her senses and mental processing power. It made her quite good as a scout.
“No, he just sat there, talking to himself and threatening to eat a bag of M&M’s.” Jessica said with a shrug. It was behavior that she’d never seen short of raving lunatics on the street corner.
“I knew it,” George said, nodding. “He’s one of those crazies that raised their Myst. Explains why he got wounded fighting those easy-ass boars.”
“Either that or a suicidal diabetic.” One of the team chimed in.
The rest of the team chuckled, but Jessica was unable to shake an odd sense of wrongness. Unlike a typical crazy person, his conversation had been entirely coherent, if only half of the puzzle.
Do you know how myst works?
And could you teach me how to use it?
Hmmm…
“Hey, which one of you took my knife?”
Chapter 2: Smarter, Not Harder
Luck favors the prepared.
-Louis Pasteur
***Jeb***
Draw the Myst in… Jeb visualized the Myst being drawn into a fiery core at the center of his being, the flames slowly being stoked as they were converted to…something else.
Draw was a measure of how quickly he could bring fuel into the tiny sun that he’d kindled at the core of his being, Storage was a hard limit on the size of the little sun, and output capacity was the speed at which he could pull magic out of it.
Of course, it wouldn’t do to draw too much out of that little sun just under his lungs, because if it went out, he’d have to start growing it again from scratch…and that had been a bitch.
Nearly a week spent meditating and trying to breathe in Myst before he’d settled on the image of burning it, rather than using it as sustenance, or bathing in it’s essence, or using it to lift his consciousness to a higher plane, or whatever the flowery language was at the time.
He was a twenty-first century boy, after all. Burning things for fuel appealed to him.
And so he wound up with this little star of golden light that was slowly growing inside him, rather than a root that joined heaven and earth, whatever the hell that meant.
Once he had the image down, it was just a matter of sucking the golden energy out with a straw. The straw represented his output. The size and how close it was to the star inside him were all factors.
After meditating with next to no blood for six days, eating nothing but MRE’s and bound up like a bear in winter, He finally did it.
He drew in Myst, burned it, and siphoned off a bit of that glowing orange energy, pushing it out into the real world, and knocking over his blade, which was leaning up against the tree.
Telekinesis, motherfucker!...Probably.
He was pretty sure the sword wouldn’t have fallen over by itself. Pretty sure.
Let’s try something lighter.
He grabbed a pebble off the ground, held it in his palm, and pushed the orange energy out, forming a small but dense platform underneath the rock.
The rock floated up into the air, buoyed by the magic beneath it, and Jeb felt like he could kiss someone. Anyone.
I have made fire! Look at what I have created! The scene in Cast Away where Tom Hanks pounded his chest, celebrating his accomplishment could not have done the sensation any more justice.
“Fuck yeah!” Jeb pumped his fist in victory, which made his shoddily crafted pegleg slip off his knee, jamming into his still-healing wound and dropping him into the dirt with a howl of pain.
“Worth it,” Jeb groaned into the dirt, before rolling over and checking his bandages. There was a little bit of seepage so he changed them out the bandage and continued. It hadn’t gotten infected, so there was a reasonable chance he could survive.
At least until the end of week two.
The loss of the Safe Zone was, for all intents and purposes, Game Over.
For now.
Rather
