829. Teaching science, 7
(Nokarlık)
The travel through the following deserts was a little harder on Wardah, but we made it through safely. We crossed the Nile river around the new volcanic delta, as if we crossed a series of different wild rivers.
Then we headed further inland, south west, telling her I’d rather leave the riverland develop on its own silts separately.
N - It won’t need my help to thrive over time.
W - You prefer a challenge.
N - I prefer to bring my dream and will where it will have a wider contrast.
Wardah is still a little concerned to see nothing but desert ahead.
W - There really is nothing...
N - You can’t see it? How much I’ve followed and helped with already, just below. It’s looking great, the roots have become stronger and widely spread. When the entire land will be ripe, it will blossom all over very rapidly.
W - Where do you live? Where should I?
N - I’m used having little more but a bag for only home. For you, it’s up to you? I’ll help you settle how you want to. You’re free.
She feels a little abandoned when I tell her she’s free to go wherever she pleases in this land. That’s not what she expected.
W - All you plan to do is scouring these lands, helping new things to grow?
N - Pretty much. I want to transform the core of this desert into an oasis, and then see it grow on its own. The main basement work is already done, so now I will mostly be fixing details for a while, travelling around.
W - ...
N - But first I will help you settle reliably where you would like?
Wardah still looks very annoyed at me. She’s puzzling me slightly.
I can tell there’s still some unresolved frustration unrelated to me, but also some blame against me now. What did I do wrong?
N - What is it? Something for me to do? Or something you would like to do?
W - W... I... Can I come with you for a while as you go on your missions?
N - Why of course sweety!
I hug her arm merrily. She blushes, not pushing me away immediately like Temee. Promising.
We scoop some water from a pond and rest there for a little while.
While she sleeps, I reconnect with the garden roots that continue to quietly thrive below.
I check where they progressed, and where they got stuck unable to progress for a while.
Here. There. The desalination pumping roots in the north sea are still working, but not greatly I notice. I’ll spend more time on them after a round trip across the domain. With Wardah along if that is what she wishes.
Things have grown well below, but we’re still some ways to go from a tree akin to the city of lights or what she called EL Dorado. I brush Wardah’s hair slightly. There’s time, and a new friend next to me.
~
Wardah is eating the roots biscuits I made for her. She’s not a picky eater.
N - Would you like to become my knight?
W - Your what?
N - An agent working for me, investigating or acting where I can’t be at the same time. That could be of use sometimes.
W - I don’t know...
N - Okay, well, we’ll see. How about my concubine then?
W - Your what?
I explain it to her. Her hair stands in dread all over her while I give too much details about what that would entail.
W - I knew you’re all the fucking same!
N - Really? Are we?
W - Blume was!
I think Rose was far more libidinous than Blume, but maybe something else happened that isn’t in my perspective on them.
W - I wouldn’t know to do either of these things...
N - What are you whispering?
I hand her one of the two long curved swords I hide along my back.
N - I can teach you, one thing or the other.
W - No! What about magic rather?
N - Magic? Oh... Well, we can try. But I don’t think it will be worth your while. And I can’t do much myself honestly.
Wardah is feeling frustrated again.
I’m willing to do a lot for her, to help her, but not so much I’d go out of my way only for her in such unreasonable amounts it would take there.
N - Unless... Maybe I start making you pay a price to learn my powers?
W - I fucking knew it...
N - Eh eh eh. I’m joking. The truth is, the handling of T.I. for natural humans is a lot like what you had become. A good way to decay rapidly in all sorts of ways. I’ll teach you the little tricks all you want, but I advise against attempting bigger spells on yourself.
W - Why did you give Temee an artefact then?
N - She can use it safely. Temee is not as human as you are, in more ways than one. Not just her face.
Wardah felt a cold shiver I saw, and surprised. They are about the same age but not the same race in a way.
I draw some spectrums in the sand, trying to explain it to her.
How the adaptive levels of organisms, at genetic level, mitochondrial and floral levels, then nervous and intellectual, phenotypic and with overimposed T.I. structure, they all differ.
They are the same species. But Wardah is more human in most aspects, and Temee more of a daiûa that can stay in contact with the other side and live on. Wardah would very likely just get sick again.
I don’t seem to convince Wardah very well unfortunately. Don’t feel too bad. It’s just reality.
~
We went through the closest bugging situation I could find, a few days of walk away nonetheless. Maybe Wardah will never become the wizard with the powers of beings-like-her she coveted, but she could still become my knight with a few magical tricks.
I have good hopes like that to recruit Temee as well if she returns someday.
I hope she will. And I hope she will accept. That offer of knighthood or another as well. We’ll see!
Meanwhile I’ll share with Wardah what I reliably can.
My kingdom isn’t much that meets the purely human eye yet. But there is already a fertility in the sands now brimming with promises.
Slow is steady. Steady is fast.
For morrow’s blossoms and forever after.
Wardah hears me talk about my vision and surely she grows into it as well. She’s hearing my optimism and making hers some of it.
She’s still uncertain about many a thing, but not against holding a place to call home around my kingdom. A place to live on safely and freely under my light shades isn’t sounding too bad, even for a normal human, right?
We reached the troubled place meanwhile. A place where the roots decay badly when they try to grow, and cut themselves before a disease spreads through them. They kept poking at this noxious place.
It’s in a corner of a dead city of a modern kind.
I open the way through the brightly coloured streets. We immediately some tentacular mushrooms like wall mangroves, receding and crawling away as the air is changing. Maybe they even saw us clearly.
Wardah cautiously stands behind me as we progress.
This monstrous lifeform that infests this place entirely is interesting to see, but not what concerns me.
N - Can you see or smell it now?
W - No.
I hand her one of my swords just in case. Because ahead, cutting the growth of my garden’s roots and polluting the ground, is a bona fide real monster.
We reach a balcony overlooking a sunken part of the city. An entire neighbourhood sank into a sudden level depression, falling maybe twenty to forty metres below. We head for a slope we noticed further, leading into this lower city where the smell becomes stronger.
Eventually she notices it as well.
The marks of dragging a huge rug or body along the ground and walls become noticeable. The smells are lingering. The air becoming heavier and its perfumes more sticky. The parts of mushrooms from above ripped appart, halfway eaten. Is it a picky eater oddly? Or the leftovers are parts too toxic for it.
We hear a rumble. It’s an animal reaction and yell.
The monster soon emerges, crawling over its aggregated leftovers of old humanoid shapes. Some ripped clothes remain like tattoos here or there on the surface of the spongy and soft colossus. Its overall shape loosely is evocative of a slug or snail, minus the mucus. The monster crawls quite rapidly toward us. It tell Wardah to run. She hesitates for half a second and then does run away.
I remove my dress swiftly as the monster is already closing in on me, obscuring the sight as it rises to fall over me.
~
Wardah probably saw. At least she must have heard.
Under my arms, the monster was crushed to scattered pulps. I didn’t take any chance.
It vomited under pressure on every side a stream of coalesced organs, bones and hundreds of litres of stale and rotten plasma. A mountain of crystallised blood residues it carried in its lower abdomen were left in the middle of this puddle.
Along these sharp crystals was now also a broken core nervous system. The central fusion of organisms or gametes giving birth to that monster was crushed. A sprout from the other side surely, and some leftovers of someone who died during the white day like every other, all those years ago.
These changes couldn’t be avoided, for humans like them...
Wardah wasn’t pleased to learn here what it could mean to become my knight or live in my growing kingdom. Not that elsewhere would be any better. These things just happen.
I was washing myself and my dress in the nearby pond, as some of these tentacular beasts or plants moved away from us. I was wringing out my dress that got caught in the flood.
N - It’s rare but it happens. Survivors of all sorts and kinds, like children as well.
W - Will you get rid of the remaining spoil?
N - What other spoil?
W - The toxic mist glued here. The abhorrent things crawling everywhere?
N - No... Why would I do that? This environment will slowly merge with the kingdom. These things aren’t monsters, so they’ll spread a little, and cross fertilize with other forms of life probably. But the more illogical stain that corroded everything else indiscriminately underground is now gone.
W - Where is the frontier between vermin you accept and some you don’t?
N - You sound like my mother... I’ll do my best to be fair, but cannot give you an easy and absolute answer.
I can tell Wardah is conflicted. I’m now finishing scrubbing and drying my forearms on another piece of cloth.
Some of the weird things around check on us carefully from a distant. They do look and smell repulsive, but they’re nothing more than another species currently.
I do hope they won’t become a destructive invasive species or vermin spoiling it all, but I can’t predict anything.
N - You know, if I were to dispose of every conceivable threat to my kingdom...
W - ...
N - It would be lonely for me. And less fun, don’t you think?
She had a shiver again. I’m smiling honestly.
I want friends, not enemies.
~
We ate some skewers of one of these things we caught on our way out. We cooked and camped on a cleaner and higher outskirt of the city. I didn’t start with the skewers however.
Wardah held back her vomit when she saw me eating raw some of the numerous livers I picked up after my fight. It’s possibly human flesh that had been left by the monster. Wardah is feeling sick but remains polite. There was so much left behind. I don’t like to waste.
N - I’m still one of them.
W - So long we’re friends...
I rub my shoulder against hers with an impish smile. Maybe even a little more than friends someday?
She rejects me, very clearly disgusted.
That makes me laugh loudly. She’s feeling all sorts of murky things while I’m laughing, so much I’m tearing up.
Eventually she’s cracking an amused smile as well.
She then sighs and look at the distant sky.
W - I hope Temee is okay...
I nod to that. I’m sure we all will be.
Today and tomorrow as well.
~
