Born a Monster

Not surprising, but I woke with that headache still raging.

[Serious Mental Wound: Brain Damage (rapid healing)]

[Serious Mental Wound: Damaged Pineal (rapid healing)]

What the hell had that curse been doing? Was the damage from the curse, or from its removal?

My empty stomach reminded me that breakfast wouldn’t get cooked properly without me.

The young women were cutting swordswoman practice to take a spa day while we were flush with coin. Gamilla was catching up on her rumor mill and trade informants. So, all I needed to do was cook for twenty people...

There were over thirty in the common room.

“Are all of these people in the crew, now?”

.....

“Of course not.” The inkeeper’s boy told me. “These are paying customers. Most of them want omelets.”

I almost bit him. “Who told them I would make them these omelets?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, ask mom or dad.”

“Where are they?”

“They went shopping; there were a lot of special requests for ingredients we didn’t have on hand.”

Fine. I slotted the generic Cook title I had for being a level 1 Cook. “Make sure you know who wants what kind of omelet. I guess the crew is getting scrambled eggs with whatever ingredients we have the most of.”

Go ahead, try cooking omelets when neither you nor your assistant can remember the names of all the ingredients. Or when the spoiled girl throws her omelet at you because she demanded blueberries coated in sugar, not just plain blueberries. (It had twelve nutrition per serving, just like the omelet I had to make for her.)

There are reasons why I hadn’t gone into cooking as a profession; I was reminded of most of them that morning. Also, if there was such a thing as Pink Peppermint mana, I had no clue where to tap it.

In any event, two hours later, breakfast was done.

“What are you doing?” I asked, as the boy was laying out slices of meat and leaves of lettuce.

“Preparing for lunch rush.” He said.

“I hope your parents are here by then; that’s more than I ever agreed to.”

“What? You can’t just leave me here alone!”

“That is exactly the position your parents have put us in. I have mana to gather.”

A word about gathering Sun mana while not happy because of a headache? It’s like catching butterflies; be patient and let it come to you.

Okay, so this was the first time anything had hurt my pineal gland, which was the core of my Telepath abilities.

Of which I had absolutely none.

The free ability of Telepath was Thought Speech, something I’d had unlocked pretty much since birth. How DID that work? I’d never found anything that listed the stuff that had been unlocked for me in my System.

Where had those development points come from? I mean, pregnant mothers never talked about imbuing their child, or activating their Systems... although they DID sing and talk to their children. Was it possible to gain experience while still in the womb (or the egg, in my case)?

I hadn’t DONE anything other than normal regimen. Some five months or so of regimen, but...

I purchased two defensive abilities, Know Myself and Nerves of Steel. I couldn’t remember ever taking Neural damage, but even low-ranked protection was better than none. I didn’t get them immediately; turns out that your timer doesn’t even start when your Pineal Gland was damaged.

But whatever. I had started down the path of Telepath, most of which was centered around bringing two minds closer together, with options for doing some pretty nasty things. Yeah, I probably didn’t have enough defense.

But rather than focus on my mind, which was needed to generate psi points, I was concentrating on the environment. The weather started clear, but there were storm clouds rolling in from the south. Each flash of lightning seemed to ignite something inside the back of my head, so I called it an early day and headed back to the inn.

“We need your help.” The innkeeper’s wife screamed to me. Odd how my help looked a lot like me taking over the cooking while she retreated to the back. To be fair, I’d want to get the grains and groceries inside before the rains hit, too.

“Sir, we’ve a man who wants a slice of ham cooked in buttered flour.”

“Do we have the ham?” I asked. “If so, get me a slice, if not then please explain that to the man.”

“Uh, sir... It’s not a man, and I think he wants a large slice.”

It was my first time seeing a Crocodilios, the reptilian people of the Numerian Empire. He was clad in overlapping bronze plates over mail and gambeson.

It was just a terrible disguise, but I kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t do better.

“I’ll talk to the man. Here, you imbue the butter and flour.”

So, I went to talk to the ‘man’, verifying with a glance of Mystic Vision what I had suspected.

“Sir, I am told we don’t have any ham in stock.”

“Of course, you do.” He replied. “In the northwestern corner of the larder, hidden behind those vile goat sausages. It is quite desiccated, but getting water back into it shouldn’t be a problem for you, will it?”

“Not if the ham is where you say. Please be patient, and I’ll get that for you.”

It was an entire hock of ham, and not quite so bad as I feared. It was easy to get off the bone, even if infusing all the meat with River mana emptied my reserves.

The boy was hopeless at infusing, as I myself had been once upon a time. I wasn’t able to get much nutrition into each serving, but the sheer bulk of the thing made for fifteen servings, for a whopping total of 135 nutrition, which he swallowed with a single gulp.

“Come see me at the river.” He said, “We need to talk.”

Ever wonder WHY only the devout become priests? Because walking through a tropical storm, being literally thrown around by wind and wave just to go down to a river raging over its banks is just not something we normal folks think of as reasonable.

He had swapped out forms for a normal crocodile.

He complained.

I asked.

I slapped on my Truthspeaker title.

It was a monster of metal, building-like in scale, massive metal fixtures like sails affixed to either side, forcing itself through the air at rates that made sound waves large enough to do Concussion damage. Just looking at the horrible thing made me lose Sanity. I called it an Iron Dragon, but that title didn’t do the thing justice.

It was a massive spirit, beyond the ken of anything I’d deal with on my own.

It pulled four stone tablets from its storage.

They were inscribed in the older Numerian language, the one that the elder pharaohs used. Each of them took up two slots in my System inventory, which meant I had to expand it to the 3×3 and then 3×4, as they couldn’t just go in sideways.

And they were gone, leaving me to flail my way back to safety.