Totem 22: The Trickster (Patreon)

"Wait, before we leave, I need to check something," I said, and then walked over to the roadrunner. It had been dead for forty-five minutes, tops. But it already stank as if it had been dead for days. I think it had something to do with the fact that it was a corrupted beast. Emphasis on corrupted.

Either way, I wasn't going to find out what roadrunner tasted like tonight. Pity.

"What is it?" Annika came to join me, but stopped a few paces away, one long sleeve coming up to cover her nose. She wasn't a squeamish girl at all, but the wind changed, bringing a big whiff.

And hey, she was part coyote, now. Maybe she was starting to get the nose of one.

Wincing to myself, I pushed back some of the black speckled breast feathers. It was a shame that this thing was corrupted to the point that I didn't trust it.

Actually… The feathers themselves seemed to be in pretty good condition.

I eyed them for a moment, wondering what kind of price they’d fetch in the city.

Nah, it would probably start a zombie plague.

I sighed and dug in past the feathers to the spot that Ash had opened with his puma claw technique. Thankfully, there wasn't a lot of blood, seeing as the creature was already dead. Ignoring the feeling of being grossed out, I reached in deep and searched around.

Sure enough, I came back with a handful of tiny hard rocks. I opened my fingers and looked down: Cores.

"Ash left some cores behind," I said, then frowned. "Annika, do you have a water skin on you or something?"

I looked around, but there wasn't a river or other source of water in sight.

She looked doubtful but nodded and went to Russell's pack, which was nearby the kid. He was laying flat on his back, looking like he was just trying to control the pain, and didn't object when she went through his things. She came back soon with a pig bladder, and I rinsed off the cores.

Sure enough, then I saw what I feared.

Many of the left-over cores looked like a warped yin-yang, all patterned black and white in a way that told me they were corrupted.

"I think Ash took all the pure ones," I said. "These are more messed up than usual."

"Is there any value from them at all?" Annika asked, then flicked her gaze over to her brother.

I shook my head. "If he tries to take these, especially as a beginner… He could probably deform himself."

I had been really lucky as a toddler when I took what I thought were pills. They could have easily been corrupted, and I could have seriously screwed myself over.

Annika shook her head. "No, I can feel that these wouldn't be good to take, even if it did promise me power. It’s just…" Again, her eyes flicked over to Russell, and then back to me. Her lips pressed into a thin line. "I don't know if his arm is going to recover," she said, quietly, so that her brother wouldn't hear. “An elbow is not a shoulder. When it dislocates, it does not easily slide back into place.”

Ah, fuck.

Russell growing up with a wrecked arm, would be worse off than Annika with her messed up face. There was real emphasis on being manly men in our society, and somebody with a bum arm was going to have a hard time.

Russell was going to need all the help that he could get.

"He can't use these," I said again, but then added, "but we don't know what's in the city. Maybe we can sell them for some good healing."

Just because my tiny Podunk village didn't have decent healing magic didn't mean that it wasn't possible at all.

Who knew. There might even be enough to help Annika, too.

I frowned down at the cores again.

"I wonder why Ash left these behind?"

"Why would he want pills that might make someone deformed?"

“To see what we’d do with them?” I guessed. “Maybe this is a test.”

She was quiet for a moment. "I think it's very like him to test you, his student," Annika said, and though I couldn't really see her face through the veil, I got the impression the look she was giving me wasn't all that impressed. "And I think that you may have failed."

"Me?" I asked. “How?”

Another look. "You lost your temper with him."

"Why shouldn’t I call him out? Ash is taking advantage of us. He's using us to get cores," I said, then stopped. I was certain, deep down, that Ash was screwing us over.

But... That was exactly the type of thing that would happen on Earth. A big mentor type comes around, promises you the moon and the sun… If only you would do some favors for them, maybe run some risky deliveries that end up being drugs, give them some information, be a lookout for a teeny tiny little job, that sort of thing.

But… we weren’t on Earth, were we?

This was… Well, this place didn't really have a name, but it was certainly different. The whole society could be ass-backwards at times, but also… oddly kind.

Could Annika have a point? Maybe I should let some of my assumptions go. But on the other hand, I had gotten through my life — both of my lives — by relying on my gut, and my gut was telling me that I had to be wary of Ash.

I shook my head.

"So, do you have any ideas about how to create this technique thing?" I asked.

And that was another reason to be annoyed. What the hell did Ash even mean by techniques? I was certain that my little fire tricks I'd invented while fighting the last few monsters could be considered a technique. In fact, I was kind of proud of them. Apparently, Ash wasn't.

"No," Annika said, "I was hoping that you would."

Right, because she had literally just connected with her totem, which meant that I was the one with the most experience here.

Joy.

I let out a long sigh. "Yeah, I do have a couple of ideas, but they're all real dumb."

She put her hand on my arm. "They can't be that dumb. You have wisdom, Seth. Tell me.”

"Well, every time I've had a breakthrough with power, it was when I was right on the edge of either pulling something out of my ass, or dying. So, I think we're going to have to face that third monster. Right now."

She dropped her hand.

"Let's… consider that as a back-up option."

Yep. She thought it was dumb.

I couldn't blame her. She simply hadn't had the benefit of from my education — i.e., anime, manga, and other fantasies where the hero breaks through at the right moment.

Russell moaned in pain, and Annika went back to check on him. Poor kid. It was a pity there wasn't anything like morphine here, or even aspirin. Well, there was willow bark tea, which I think was either the same thing as aspirin, or very close to it.

I wasn’t exactly a big nature guy back in my old life.

I let her work over her brother. Meanwhile, I tried to think of what to do next.

Russell was going to have to get up sooner than later. It wasn’t like his legs had been dislocated, but I'd give him a couple of minutes.

I looked at Annika, hoping to change the subject. "So, coyote, huh?"

"Yes," she said, with a little bit of quiet pride in her voice. "I think that my mother would've wanted something more beautiful, but this… This fits me."

"Of course it does. It's your soul," I said, and sourly added, "and your mom sucks even worse than Ash does."

In any other time, this would have been the moment for a huge celebration. Annika was now an adult. She knew what her soul was.

But there wasn't any time for celebration. Now we had to face off against a monster, and we were running on fumes.

Her shoulders slumped a little bit, and she nodded again.

I was crap at making people feel better, but then an old memory came back to me.

"You know, turns out there’s more to you than I ever thought there was."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Well, coyotes are tricksters, right?"

She turned her head towards me. "I've never heard that."

Oh… Right. That was ancient Earth stuff. “Yeah, my mom used to tell me kinds of stories," I wildly invented, "Coyote stealing fire for humans and tricking evil people. Actually,” I added with a half laugh, “He was kind of a jerk and sometimes tricked good people too."

"What an odd story for an alligator woman to tell," Annika seemed to be teasing me more than challenging me. That was another thing about people in this world that a lifetime growing up here hadn't really gotten me used to: no cynicism. People pretty much expected that you were telling the truth unless 1) you were a child, in which case every adult thought that you were full of shit 100% of the time, or 2) there was super hard incontrovertible evidence that you were lying. It was a matter of honor.

Which brought me back to Ash. Was Annika right? Was him turning into a hardass some sort of test?

… No, I think he was still a jerk.

But, I might need him. You didn't have to agree with every member of the flock, but when you are powering your way through the air, you all still took turns being the arrow point to break the wind.

… Wait, where had that come from?

"A trick," Annika said.

I jerked, surprised.

"What?"

Smooth, Seth, I told myself.

"We must kill this last monster," she said, "But did Ash require that we use a technique?"

"Well… He highly suggested it. Why? You got something else up your sleeve?” Like a gun? That would be useful.

Annika's head turned away from me, and toward the forest which was muddy and wet and gross. I had no idea what she was looking at, but she stood up. "I believe that I do."

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