The first thing Emma did after her potion kicked in was go outside, and find something really heavy. There was a great deal of choice, but sadly most of it belonged to other people. She skipped those picks over, suspecting that whatever she used in her little test would be somewhat the worse for wear afterwards.
A boulder ended up satisfying her needs, maybe half a metre across and vaguely semi-spherical in shape. Emma squatted down beside it, dug her fingers around its base, and lifted with all she had. It wasn’t easy to lift the thing, especially at first with so much of it gripped by the dirt and dust, but Emma needed to strain herself only for a few moments before she tore it out of place and brought it up. To waist level, at first. Then higher. Higher. The boulder ended upon her shoulder, its weight pressing down on her for long moments before she finally let it fall.
It buried itself almost as deeply as its first position upon hitting the ground.
Around then, Aexilica hurried over to stare at Emma with wide eyes and a restless, silent mouth.
“W…What?” It was, Emma thought, the first time she’d left the woman truly speechless. She handled it with dignity, of course. Giggling and leaping a mere ten feet into the air in celebration.
“It worked!” Emma yelled, punching at the air. She wasn’t sure how much of her excitement was natural, and how much came from some side-effect of the potion. For the time being, she didn’t really care.
“You mean the other potion?” Aexilica’s eyes were locked on the rock now, her disbelief seeming to grow, not shrink, as the moments trickled by.
“I did. The sweat potion.” Emma shuddered again at the memory of drinking it. “The one you needed to bleed into.”
“And it did…This.” Aexilica’s awe seemed like it was bleeding fast into…Annoyance.
“Jealous?” Emma grinned. She’d seen Aexilica do things that would’ve been impossible for a powerlifter twice her size, but there were clearly limits to the woman too. Maybe she’d already exceeded one.
In answer, Aexilica stepped over to the rock and lifted it just as Emma had, making heavy eye-contact all the while. Okay, maybe not then. It actually snapped upon landing this time.
“You’re still annoyed.” Emma pointed out. “Angry that now I don’t need you anymore, that I can match your physical strength all by myself?” She flexed a bicep for emphasis, which remained, disappointingly, the same size as before. God, but she wanted to pick something else up. What was her limit?
“How long will it last?” Aexilica asked.
Emma paused. “An hour, right?”
The other potion had lasted for an hour, and, she thought, given similarly superhuman abilities. Sure, regeneration instead of strength but mostly fixing a broken shoulder in two hours was probably at a comparable level beyond her normal self than hefting that boulder had been. More than that, even. A lot more.
As it happened, though, Emma had been too optimistic. A good half hour passed before she felt the strength leave her, then it just…Did. All at once, like toothpaste squeezed from a tube. Her body felt deflated, limbs impossibly heavier bereft of the preternatural power they’d possessed mere moments before. Mood now sour, she headed into the house.
“Ah, wore off already?” Larry grinned.
“You knew this would happen.” She countered, in far too foul a mood to frame her knowledge as any sort of question.
“Well, I’m surprised you didn’t.” The head murmured, with that annoying manner he had when he knew his knowledge was unique. “Tell me, did you lift anything heavy over the last half hour or so?”
Emma actually didn’t want to tell him, getting the feeling that somehow it’d be walking into some sort of trap if she did. On the other hand, not telling him would be denying herself a source of information on her super powers. The choice was really no choice at all. Annoying.
“I lifted a big rock.” She shrugged.
“How big.”
She scowled. “I don’t know, this big, ish? It was a hemispher. Is this important?”
Larry whistled. “Kind of important.” He replied. “A tiny bit important. Did you happen to notice your spine snapping in half when you lifted it up?”
Ah, that made it sink in a lot better.
“So what, it made me more durable too?”
“And had to split its magic two ways as a result, thus the shorter time.” Larry confirmed. “Thirty minutes or so, I counted. I’ve gotten quite good at counting. Been practicing it a lot instead of running, or jumping, or anything like that. You know. Since you ripped my head off.”
She ignored his whining, focusing on the practical issues at her feet.Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
Thirty minutes of time wasn’t bad exactly, but it wasn’t awesome either. If she’d drunk a potion immediately as she and Aexilica had made visual contact with the Sculds, it would’ve still been affecting her as they began their flight.
On the other hand, if she’d drunk it as they saw the muki the day before then it would’ve worn off before they got jumped by the scouts.
“What caused this.” Emma frowned, question occurring to her at once like a sucker-punch.
“Why don’t you tell me?”
Larry had a way of speaking like some smug professor. Emma had had one of those once, an old, stuffy prick who’d refused to even sleep with her in exchange for a passing grade. She wasn’t any more fond of the tone now.
“Because I focused on combat power and physical survivability.” She growled back, guessing, but guessing confidently. Larry did that weird sort of shuffle that told her he was trying to nod.
“Very good. Making your magic go into durability as well. Which, granted, is probably a good thing. Because you ran out before I could warn you not to try and pick up anything five times your weight.”
“Seven times.” She muttered. “I’m…Petite.”
“Right.”
Emma disentangled herself from that conversation shortly, and got back to the delicate art of becoming better at blowing people up. Or rather, that’s what she aimed to do. Unfortunately Larry still had other ideas. Ideas he not only insisted upon, but had the gall to strong-arm Emma into humouring by making good points as to why she should. The bastard.
“Talismans are your best bet for longer-term defences.” He explained. “Though they’re actually harder to make than potions, they’re also more or less permanent.”
Permanent sounded good. Permanent sounded very good. Emma hid her excitement, not wanting to give him the satisfaction.
“So what, do I need to get a little doll of myself and wrap it in armour?”
Larry was not amused.
“It’s similar to potion-making.” He told her. “All about association, meaning. With the main limit being that you need to be more careful with size since, you know, this is all stuff you’re gonna wear.”
“Wait, wear all the time?”
“Yeah.”
That concerned her. Emma wasn’t exactly a big girl, strap ten kilos of weight to her and she’d lose races to a child. She took the problem to heart, giving it a great deal of thought before even suggesting her first idea.
“Another piece of Aexilica’s armour?” She murmured.
Larry looked unimpressed. “For a shield charm, it’s pretty uninspired, but yeah. Thing is; you need two elements for a Talisman. An actual body, that’ll be the thing dangling around your neck or whatever, and the bond, the thing it dangles from.”
Emma sighed. “And I’m guessing if either of them doesn’t have metaphysical significance, it stops the whole thing from working?”
“Yhup.” Larry didn’t even try to hide how much he was enjoying himself. “So you’ll need something to dangle your armour from, too.”
Emma spent an embarrassing length of time on the problem before she finally arrived at the obvious conclusion. She couldn’t simply use two pieces of armour, they were too closely related even if they were from different makes or suits. But there was more armour in the world than armour armour.
“Those scytheshells, would a piece of their carapace help?” She asked.
Larry grinned. “Only one way to find out.”
And so Emma departed for her next epic quest, to wander the dusty, miserable plains around town in search of a giant scorpion. Aexilica insisted on coming with her of course, the way she insisted on helping with anything she thought might get Emma killed.
“Don’t you have things to be doing back at town?” She’d snapped. A mistake, Aexilica’s gaze had hardened.
“Back at town, everyone is getting ready for Sculd raiders.” She spat the sentence out, as if it burned her tongue. “No, I don’t have anything to do there. If I went back and offered to help I’d probably just get accused—” She caught herself before saying whatever she’d been about to, stiffened. “Nevermind.” Aexilica snapped again.
Emma wanted to pry, but she got the feeling that would only earn her an explosion of anger. Hot, probably, but not terribly helpful. The thought also made her feel somewhat off. So she did what she did best and thought about the matter instead. It didn’t take that long.
Aexilica had a steel sword, the only one she’d seen in Aethiq. Outside of those used by Sculd invaders. The obvious conclusion was, in fact, obvious. She wasn’t just an outsider, she was an outsider descended from the nation’s most hated neighbours.
That went a long way to explaining her temper and hostility. And here Emma had been wondering whether she was doing something wrong, it was nice to have confirmation to the contrary. And it would’ve been a whole lot nicer to get it when she wasn’t hunting something bigger than god and angrier than satan.
As it turned out, though, it wasn’t really that big of an affair at all. Apparently Emma had made quite a bit of progress since first entering this illusion of hers. A single energy lance left the scytheshell wounded and slowed, the next had rendered it almost immobile. The third might have been excessive, and the following two definitely were. But it worked.
Emma and Aexilica headed back to Tepetlmoseua with their proud bounty: a few pounds of smelly, charred chitin that still had bits of gooey meat clinging to the inside. She would have been lying to say it felt like gold to her, but it did feel like it might turn into a personal forcefield. So she continued carrying it.
Larry walked Emma through the specifics of making Talismans once she got back, the trip taking almost no time at all now that she’d perfected her sledge. The actual making of the Talisman, though, was about as hard as he’d implied.
“It’s more limited than potions,” He explained, “Based around what you can already do with your own powers.”
“So why am I bothering to do it then?” She snapped.
“Because, dumbass, it means you don’t need to focus on doing that in combat, the Talisman just does it for you. You like being shielded? You like doing other shit while you’re shielded? Enjoy your Talisman.”
Emma grumbled a bit more at that, but got to work on the stupid thing all the same. Larry, as usual, had a point. The prick.
Fortunately, with the ingredients actually gathered the magical side of things was mostly done. The physical, less so. Emma spent the better part of an hour unravelling frayed cotton from Aexilica’s armour to form a makeshift string, then another making a big enough hole in the chitin to loop it through. It dangled from her neck like a big, smelly weight of something she’d ripped off a giant insect. On the other hand, she also felt its effects near-instantly.
Larry had been very particular about crafting everything herself, now Emma saw why. Her magic didn’t move as much as it was moved, tugging from her to wrap around her body as it hardened into a thin layer of energy that, she soon tested, flexed and yielded just enough to keep movement from being restricted.
Emma moved, shifted, felt it adjust without her needing to even think about it. Grinned.
“Alright.” Larry piped up. “Now you have some form of protection, what’s your next move?”
She thought about that. Grinned wider.
“I’m gonna go and throw myself off the roof.”