Chapter 16: Isekai Life & Goblin Montage

“Dammit, watch what you’re doing!”

“Sorry!” I grimaced and shifted my grip on the needle. It turns out, gnomes were smaller than humans in ever dimension- even in skin thickness.

We were gathering ourselves in the early dawn. Moruca and Calliope busied themselves with turning the bonfire into a proper pyre for all the goblins and wargs, while it was left for me to tend to the wounded.

“Why aren’t you healing us, anyway?” Voss asked, examining his own set of fresh stitches that lined one arm, “Didn’t we take you on because we needed a cleric?”

Raszil glowered at Voss through his one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. “I don’t normally go finding trouble like this,” he explained bitterly, “If you asked me to purify a drink so you don’t get the shits, or protection against how hellishly hot it gets sometimes in summer, aye, I’d be able to help you out. But I can’t come up with fresh miracles on the spot- I’ll need to pray for divine interventions fresh after we’ve rested.”

As good an explanation as any as to how spell slots worked, I suppose.

“So, how is what you do different from what Calliope and Theodore do?” Voss asked in reply, “That sounds almost exactly like their kind of magic.”

The knowledge came to me, unbidden, but at this point I was more or less used to the senesation of remembering things I was never really “present” for when “I” learned them. “Clerics can only hold so much of their patron diety’s divine power at once,” I explained, “They request miracles through prayer, and their god or gods infuse some of their divine power into them. For us wizards, it’s the energy that courses through us when a spell cast that blasts the knowledge of that spell from our minds. Through focused study it’s possible to retain a spell for multiple castings, but that simply delays the inevitable.”

I tapped Raszil on the shoulder. “You’re done, switch with Yua,” and then chided him, “And be careful, I don’t want to have to kneel between your spread legs and sew up your thigh again.” To Voss, I continued, “I know to a layman it might seem like a really subtle difference, and I don’t have a complete understanding of it myself, but you can tell the difference in some of the subtleties. There exist arcane spells whose purpose is to help you memorize additional, weaker spells, but clerics can’t do that. Clerics can combine their powers to beseech the gods for more powerful miracles, but mages can’t do that. To say nothing of how clerics are capable of miraculous healing, and wizards cannot.”

In 2nd edition AD&D, bards couldn’t use Cure Light Wounds. It was the god way or the highway. Or, the healing proficiency, I suppose, but that would be dramatically less efficient.

While Voss pondered over my impromptu lesson (or just tuned me out entirely, which was certainly possible), Yua came over and took her seat on the stump in front of me. I asked her, in her own tongue, to show me her injuries, and she showed off a few shallow cuts in her side where her scale shirt was riding up.

I took a double take. Just a little while ago she seemed to be really badly injured, and I had seen those goblins crawling all over her, trying to drive their daggers under her armour. But now ... her worst injuries seemed to amount to no more than scratches, and some places there was only unmarred flesh where she’d clearly been bleeding on the inside of her armour. I had to stitch closed a couple of the worst wounds, but that is all.

Judging by her expression, Yua was getting increasingly uncomfortable with my poking and prodding at her while I puzzled away, so I stopped and sat back.

“How are you alright?” I asked, “You were hurt a lot worse before.”

She didn’t respond at first, taking the time instead to adjust her armour, and, I assume, collect herself. “It is nothing, my lord,” she said, after a long moment, “Do not worry yourself about it.”

I honestly didn’t know where to take my inquiry from there. I knew nothing about what Dragonborn (I assume that’s what she’s supposed to be) were supposed to be like in 2nd edition. They were an invention of 4th edition, a response to the common criticism that there were often few dragons in “Dungeons and Dragons”, and were never a part of AD&D. I don’t know what kind of bizarre house rules Corgiel had come up with for the race in this setting. Did they have regeneration? Did they have a Constitution bonus high enough to give Yua natural regeneration? I hadn’t seen her deploy a breath weapon yet...

Yua got fed up with me trying to figure it out, and just readjusted her armour and got up.

“What was that about?” Voss inquired after she was out of earshot, helping Calliope with the pyre.

“I’m not at all certain...” I trailed off with a sigh. “I’m losing my touch, Voss. I have no idea what to say to Calliope or what’s going on with Yua.”

“My heart goes out to you,” my knight said, dryly.

I frowned at him for that, and he raised his hands defensively. “Come on, what do you want me to say? That I’m so sad your third wife is upset with you, and your next piece of ass is being terse?”

“She’s not my next piece of ass, nor yours,” I said, feeling a little cross, “I guess ... I’m just now realizing how little we know about Yua. I’m beginning to understand her language, but she does a lot that we don’t understand. Have you noticed how quickly she recovers from injuries? It’s uncanny.”

It was Voss’ turn to frown and turn to examine Yua. “You know she prays at night, right? I wouldn’t be surprised if you missed it, given how deep you tend to sleep.”

“She does?” I had no idea, of course.

“Something like that, at least. She sits cross-legged and mutters to herself. I noticed it a few times getting up to make water, or just when I had a hard time sleeping.”

I guess we really didn’t have any idea what Yua was about. “Well, considering how she was when we first met her, I doubt she means us harm...”

“Theodore, don’t mistake meaning us no harm with being a good person. Mariska didn’t mean us harm, either, until we got in her way.”

While I could debate as to whether “summoning the god of destruction” is “intended harm” or not, Voss’ words did cause me to recall one thing- how, despite being party members, Mariska, Gogol and Ricard were completely different people with vastly different goals and circumstances. I’ve mulled over, in idle moments, what might have happened had Ricard bought Gogol’s loyalty first, or even if Gogol was just a decent enough guy to tell Ricard about Mariska...

“When she seems more patient, I’ll try to talk to her, figure out what’s going on,” I promised Voss.

Voss nodded, and clapped me on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s just get back to Rhymer’s Cross so I can get all this damn thread of yours out of me.”

With everyone focusing on feeding the pyre, cleaning up after our battle didn’t take long. Well, almost everyone- Raszil was content to sit on his pony and complain about not pulling his stitches.

The trip back to Rhymer’s Cross was much less dramatic than our journey out. We stopped here and there, partly to give our injuries team members time to rest and partially to check other homesteads for supplies. By the time we returned to the town, we were laden with sacks of flour and cornmeal, bags of fresh vegetables, and strings of smoked sausage and jerky.

When we arrived, it was still the early morning. I would like to say we were treated like returning heroes, but that wasn’t the case. The people of Rhymer’s Cross were simply too depressed to rejoice at our return, even when we started unloading the food we captured into the warehouse where the rations were kept.

Estrid kept up her end of the bargain, sending the old cleric to tend to our wounded while she nodded with approval over our contributions. “I honestly didn’t think you were going to pull through,” she said, her voice only a few degrees warmer than when we first met, “This won’t be enough to extend our rations for more than a day, but it’s something.”