Chapter 6 #2
Screaming, Joshua buckles to his knees, leaving me face-to-face with the harpy.
The creature’s eyeballs are entirely red, even the sclera.
They glow with rage, searing my face. The harpy moves to bite me with her sharp, blood-stained teeth, but another of Sylvia’s arrows strikes the beast, this time in her temple.
The harpy’s eyes lose their glow, and she falls the few feet she’d been hovering from.
Slumped on the ash, she doesn’t seem as large or terrifying anymore.
Death has taken the monstrosity out of her.
That, more than the attack, shakes me. I’ve only ever seen death once: when I came home from school to find my cat curled up under my bed.
This is different. This looks almost like a person.
For a split second, I see Mom’s face. I hear her soft whisper of my name. The illusion passes faster than I can register it, but now I’m consumed by one thought: this will be Mom soon.
I need to get out of this game.
“Ugh! Can someone cover her up?” Cait asks, sneering at the corpse. “I mean, why did the game designers have to give harpies such big breasts that they don’t even put a bra over? Tired of seeing their nipples all over the place.”
I stare at Cait in horror. “There are more of them?”
Will I see Mom’s face in each of theirs?
“Oh, yeah,” Cait answers. “There’s a whole quest line of ridding them from this series of islands called the Strophades. It’s such a snooze. I hate grinding.”
“Helps bump that XP way up, though,” Tara says, climbing down the ash dune.
“Where were you?” Cait asks.
Tara shrugs. “Hiding until you needed me for a sneak attack, like a rogue should.”
“Can our cleric make herself useful?” Joshua groans in pain. “Please?”
I shake myself out of my emotional turmoil and bend over the bard. “Sorry, still getting used to this. Let me see your injury.”
Joshua pulls up the tatters of his blood-soaked shirt, exposing deep claw marks in his chest. Everyone winces in unison.
“That looks like more than a minor wound,” Sylvia says, her voice soft with empathy.
I tap on my one spell, anyway.
“You must choose an appropriate target before you can cast Healing of Minor Wounds,” the disembodied voice says.
“But I chose a target!” I respond. “I thought it would at least help a little bit.”
Guy shakes his head. “That’s not how it works. If your spell doesn’t do exactly what the situation calls for, it doesn’t do anything at all. The right target would have a minor wound, and this is a major wound.”
“We need to get him to a temple,” Tara says. “Gonna be hard carrying him out of all this ash in his state, though.”
“Let me see if I can do something to at least stabilize him so we can get him out of here.” I rifle through my purse, finding the part of my torn shirt I didn’t use yesterday and pressing it to his wound.
“Didn’t you say you had aspirin?” Cait asks. “Give that to him, too.”
I shake my head. “That will inhibit clotting. That’s the last thing he needs.” I size Cait up and down. She’s built for cheerleading, not the life of a barbarian. Yet, she did one hell of a job with the harpy. “Does your class make you really strong?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Is it possible for you to carry him over the dune while I keep a firm press on his wound?”
Cait nods. “That shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Well, let’s get going, then. It’s going to take us at least half an hour to get to the temple since we’ll have to walk slowly.”
Guy’s lips form a grim flat line, making my heart sink.
He’s upset about his friend being hurt, and if I hadn’t been so quick to jump into this quest, maybe Joshua wouldn’t be in this state.
I hardly know this group, but it matters to me a lot that I make them happy. Especially Guy, for some reason.
C’mon, Lauren. You know it’s because he’s hot.
I promise myself that I’ll figure out how to acquire spells and be fully prepared before doing any more questing.
The walk to the temple goes through the village.
In any location from the world beyond, we probably would have drawn as much attention as a parade would receive.
Here, though, the NPCs are oblivious. Their wordless chatter acts as background noise for their cycle of activities.
They examine items at merchant stalls, walk in and out of buildings, and mill about aimlessly on the roads.
Two men even get into a fight that ends with them both on the ground before they right themselves and begin again.
It’s way too much for my social anxiety, which is almost comical. These aren’t people. They don’t even know I’m here. I would have to be the one to establish any interaction with them, and I’d control the whole thing.
Yet, I desperately wish I had my pink cat ear headphones, and I’m grateful when Tara insists we don’t stay long enough to shop there for my supplies. She says I need a long rest before making decisions like that.
When we get to the temple, none of the NPC priestesses even notice our entrance until Guy tells one by a back door that Joshua needs healing.