Buttopia
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Chapter 225: Once Around the Homestead
🕑 Added 2025-08-18 09:47:44 +0000 UTCMaud
Maud had been worried about the orca for a couple of months now. She had been so excited with all the animals at the time that it hadn’t fully settled in just what it meant for an orca to awaken as a primal mana beast without the rest of its pod. They must have been so lonely. She had planned to check on them the moment the gate was operational, but John needed to celebrate, and then a couple of crises had delayed her even more.
But now things were as settled as they could get, and she was determined to check on that orca. Dave had convinced her to take Alpha along for safety. Well, convincing was a strong word. In reality, she had been happy to have the company. Alpha was her favorite of the dungeon cores, not sure she’d ever tell the rest.
She knew a lot of the others saw Alpha as less aware, or even dumber than the other cores, but she had decided both were very unfair claims. The core just wasn’t as interested in the same things the others were. There were multiple times Maud had found Alpha carefully watching an animal from a distance, just seeming to enjoy the sight. Before winter had set in, she had once seen the core placing a bumblebee into a flower that had landed on the mallet’s handle.
“Where orca?” Alpha asked as the mallet floated beside Maud.
“Down there, I think, let’s take the long way instead of jumping this time,” Maud said as she pointed to the ocean shore at the bottom of the cliff.
The path wasn’t an easy one, and she doubted it was made by humans. Likely deer or something bigger, hopefully not another polar bear. Not that she was exactly afraid of one at this point in her life, but the idea of accidentally hurting it if she were forced to defend herself wasn’t a pleasant thought.
The feeling of the gravel shifting below her with every step was only mildly concerning. She wasn’t sure Alpha could channel Dave’s mana cores at this distance, but they could easily get someone there to heal her pretty quickly if needed. She didn’t expect it to be needed, though. She was pretty sure she could handle a fall from this height without hurting herself much these days, but she hadn’t tried it yet, and doing so this far away from the others didn’t strike her as the best idea, so slowly and carefully she went until her feet were safely on the ground below.
“Orca! I have no idea if this is how I call you! But if you can understand me: Hi, I’m Maud, we met briefly before!” Maud screamed as loud as she could as she walked toward the edge of the water.
The sea ice was jagged and broken up by large spots of calm blue water. Maud briefly considered going further out onto the ice, but as she didn’t know a lot about how to test where it was safe to step, she decided against it. She’d just have to hope that the orca heard her and was willing to show itself.
Ten minutes later, and she was debating if this hike had been a waste of a day. It was time for some animal biology books when she returned. She needed to look into what standard orca migrations were like. It hadn’t even occurred to her that it was possible the animal could have left the waters during winter until now.
“Look!” Alpha yelled, interrupting Maud’s rumination.
Far in the distance, past the ice, a large black and white animal broke through the surface of the water, followed by several more behind it. Maud could easily make out at least twenty of the beautiful animals. The largest one in the front started forward, the ice cracking apart in its path.
“Uh, hi. If you didn’t hear me earlier: I’m Maud. We met before, and I just wanted to check on you.” She stuttered slightly, her earlier calm having vanished now that she stood in front of the primal mana beast.
“I remember you,” a commanding voice rang out in the area all around Maud.
“Oh, you can talk now?” Maud asked, surprised.
“It is difficult. What do you want?” the voice asked.
“Um, sorry, it was just the last time I saw you, you were alone, and I had forgotten that orcas don’t do well alone. I saw a movie about that once. So I wanted to come check up on you, but I see you actually have a pod, so I guess I was wrong,” Maud answered, rambling off words rapidly.
“These are my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. I thank you for your caring, Maud. Please visit again in the summer. I have much to learn still. The fog is only starting to clear. As their mother, I must also teach my children,” the orca replied, as she started to withdraw from the shore.
“Oh, goodbye then. Good luck. I promise I’ll be back!” Maud called after them, now smiling. Even if the orca hadn’t needed to be checked on, she was still glad she had come. And the moment she got back, it was time for some orca research!
Connie
Connie was debating if perhaps opening a bard school had been a mistake. In theory, it had sounded great. Hell, Pryte had even backed her on it. What she hadn’t considered was just how terrible the average person was at any sort of performing art. Had she been just as bad as a kid? No, she knew she hadn’t.
She had plenty of memories of working with her grandfather, getting the rhythm down of all the weird instruments in his collection. By the time she was fifteen, she could play over a hundred of them decently, and a dozen at nearly an expert level. Perhaps it wasn’t fair to judge the others by the standards of her own youth.
Her grandfather had considered her a prodigy, and she had once heard him tell her parents that she was going to grow into someone far beyond his own skill. At the time, she had taken it as an amazing compliment, but she had later grown to somewhat resent it. She loved her family deeply, but the pressure they had put on her had made her childhood so much different from others.
She didn’t like to think about that topic, though. Doing so meant she had to confront the idea that Reggie ended up where he was because of the pressure of their family, and even if that was likely true, there was nothing she could do about it now. He had done far too many unforgivable things in the course of rebellion if that was all it was.
Forcing her thoughts out of the past, she pushed them back to the five Reltleon, four human, and single Cloudform children in front of her. “Alright, not bad, you are all improving. For next week’s lesson, I want you all to think about what instrument you actually want to learn first. You’ve had a sampling of several kinds, so now it’s time for you to focus,” she said, looking them over.
There were several excited murmurs. And as they all left the class, she could hear them discussing with each other what they wanted to try. At least they were excited about the idea.
She bit her lip as she considered the next phase of her plan. If she really wanted to call this a bard school, it had to expand beyond just the children in the city. That meant putting her name on it officially. And while she was sure plenty of people knew who she was related to by now, it would still attract a lot of attention.
“Dammit, Gramps, why did you have to go and be so famous anyway?” she muttered to herself as the door to the classroom closed.
She knew the answer to that question, though. He had never actually intended to be, nor had he wanted it. He, in fact, hated the celebrity status he managed to obtain throughout the Spiral, and that was part of the reason for his retirement so long ago. He hadn’t even met her grandmother until he had spent a couple of thousand years alone. And then it took him another thousand to even marry her.
Connie had heard this story dozens of times growing up. Her grandmother thought it was one of the most romantic things to ever happen. Gramps had spent nearly that entire time after their first meeting perfecting a single song for their wedding, and he had only played it once. He had called it a gift to the universe for allowing him a chance at happiness.
While she could see how some people would find it romantic, she just considered it sappy. She certainly wasn’t willing to spend that much energy on love. No, she needed to make sure Dave got this faction off the ground right, and then she needed to deal with her cousin. There was no time for romance in her agenda anywhere.
Cecile
The farm was finally starting to look how he had wanted it to from the get-go. He had field after field of crops growing strongly. Even if things had fallen out with the GPA now, they had managed to gather enough seeds to grow nearly every fruit and vegetable on Earth. He wasn’t anywhere near there with all the plant life yet, but he would be one day.
And now with the news that his own planet was going to be free, he’d have to do the same there. That was why he had started work on the new building recently. It was time to work on the planet’s native mushrooms. Cecile figured if he could get Earth’s down well enough, he should be able to replicate it with his own people’s crops.
The only problem he foresaw was how much of the planet focused primarily on different edible fungi as its main harvestable crop. Honestly, before he had come to Earth, he wouldn’t have believed that so many other species eat fruits and vegetables in the numbers they did. He understood now, of course, but in his heart, he missed a lot of the mushroom dishes of his home.
“Good job, everyone, this greenhouse is working at nearly two hundred percent of what I expected by this point. Couldn’t have done any of that without you,” Cecile said after checking the numbers on one of the earlier greenhouses.
He glanced at his brother and saw him holding a book in front of his face, deep in his own study, and decided not to interrupt. There was still plenty of field work to go over for the day, and there was no sense in bothering Elicec about it. Instead, he headed for the outermost field for one of his now-daily rituals.
He trudged through the snow right up to the mana field that lined the perimeter of all the plots that weren’t in the greenhouses. Out of habit, he gave it a once-over before stepping through into what felt like a nice summer heat. Everything was still working perfectly.
In the center of the crops was a small device that Karlinovo had managed to cobble together with some of the things the Reltleons had brought along. It was normally meant to keep a small house warm in the winter, but the man had managed to make it use a bit of the dungeon energy to supercharge the flow. While Cecile was a little worried about what that might mean for the plants long-term, he wasn’t sure it actually changed anything, given the planet was now inundated with the energies.
He walked down the rows carefully, collecting some of the more choice leafy greens and a few carrots. Then, on a whim added a couple of cucumbers as well. He walked all of his collected food over to a small hole at the inner edge of the mana field and gave a quiet whistle.
A couple of minutes passed in silence before a small furry head poked out of the hole, looked at Cecile, and made a strange chittering purring sound at the sight. The hoary marmot had arrived for his daily feeding. Cecile set the marmot’s meals in a large bowl nearby and let him eat in peace. He was glad to have found a peaceful solution with the little guy, as he had grown surprisingly fond of it since their first true meeting.
He wished his planet’s own primals hadn’t been killed long ago and their parts sold off. He would have liked to meet them. Like so many times before, he pushed those sadder thoughts away in favor of the work that still needed to be done. There would be time for addressing the state of his world once it was free.
Elicec
He was working harder than he ever had before. The idea of freedom for his people was now a real, tangible possibility. There was zero time for slacking off anymore. Elicec now spent every waking moment when not occupied with other duties in study and training.
While his brother worked the fields, he spent his time reading magical theory. He had given Quarilyn a specific list of topics he needed out of the archive as soon as possible, and she retrieved far more than he had expected. Specifically, he had wanted to get details on a training method Mel had once mentioned to him.
The concept was called reaction limiting, and the purpose of it was to force your body to do more with less mana. In theory, this would allow for stronger spells as he better controlled the exact placement of the mana into the casting. In practice, this had yet to be the case.
It required a level of focus he had trouble maintaining to mentally build a spell each time he wanted to cast it. Most people just relied on their mana orb to do the heavy lifting there. The only problem with that was that it was incredibly difficult to change up a spell once you learned it. The mana orb tended to force a host to stick with the spell as it was learned from fundamental forces, with only a few minor tweaks on casting.
Elicec didn’t want that. He wanted to infuse the mana into each part of the spell exactly as he chose to do each time he did it. This would make it near impossible for an opponent to predict what was coming next in his spell casting. But first, he still had to conquer the initial training.
By limiting his mana coming out of the reaction, he forced the mana orb to allow him to control the framework of the spell itself. Once he got the framework down, he could move on to different aspects of customizing them. He closed his eyes again and focused on the concept of a small cloud.
Clamping down on his soul-core reaction, he felt the mana in his body lessen. Gently, he pushed the mana through his elemental orb socket, assigning it piece by piece as the types he wanted, and brought it back up and out through his hand. Slowly, and methodically, he drew a cloud’s shape using his finger and a dark blue trail of mana. He felt the mana snap to itself, the lines having finished, and opened his eyes.
It had taken nearly two months, but for the first time, floating in front of him was a cloud. He had managed to keep the form solid, finally. The next step would be attempting to infuse the form with more mana and seeing if he could replicate his own spells this way. Once he did that, the sky was the limit on the combinations he could make.
Best of all, he had done this before a single transcendence. As far as he had read, he may have been the first to pull that feat off. And while he did doubt that claim, he still smiled at his own accomplishment.
The continent of mists is the least populated of the three main continents on Erkinmushave. Prior to our enslavement by the Wrenderling Dwarves, no Twinoge lived there, and only rarely did we make excursions due to the extreme dangers the continent presented. The first recorded journey was by the Twinoge brothers Krelm and Mlerk.
They were determined to explore parts of our world and learn what strange creatures lurked under the fog. At the time, the theories were that unconnected Twinoge groups still lived somewhere on the continent, and they wished to meet them. Despite this wish, they found no such lost villages.
Instead, they found a continent of monsters. Their journey was supposed to last only two months. They were gone for ten years. Their ship had been destroyed before they even reached the land, by something Krelm described as a fire-breathing snail. Ten of their crew survived the ship’s destruction. Only four of them would make the eventual journey back home.
There is far too much information from their discoveries than I’ll be able to cover in this book. Sadly, not every detail of the rich history can be safely mapped, but I will do my best to cover the important parts. I will still almost certainly fail to cover it all, as a decade’s worth of exploration is hard to condense.
Somehow, despite the monster’s constant assaults, they were able to find a place of relative safety deep within a cave. That was where they built their shelter for their first year. It was also where they unlocked the answer to one of their burning questions. How had this continent become so infused with the mists?
Inside the cavern, hanging roots poked out in every chamber they found. Even stranger, the more they were exposed to the lights of their fires, the more mist that poured from them. It seemed that the mists of the continent were a byproduct of some plant reacting to light.
Another answer to one of their questions came a few weeks after the first. They had spotted a small fly resting on one of the roots. After an hour of exposure, all of them were hard-pressed to call the fly small still. The mist, it seemed, was also responsible for the monsters.
The Book of the Twinoges by Twinoge Scribe #1 (Mila)
Comments
Ty
Firebreathing Snails? Mushrooms? Monster Mists? Erkinmushave is looking like its going to to be a favorite destination for brave human explorers to check out. And hopefully vice versa.
