Chapter 12: If a Horse Turns Into Pudding, What Kind of Pudding is That?
A carrot, a bat, a conegirl, a gingerbreadman and whatever ever Gheel was all stared at Eadam.
Now, it might seem a little odd, that while Waufronk was rather hastily accepted that Eadam would be questioned. It was however, because of concern! Well, that and a little bit of hope. Nobody was quite sure what had happened with Eadam, and it would be dreadfully inconvenient if he spontaneously exploded into fine horse sausages or a luxury stew in mid fight. On the other hand, if he was awaking to some magical food like powers…
Well, adventurers are never ones to reject power. An adventurer with many powers, a wide range of abilities is an adventurer that’ll live longer. It was part of why adventurers would form parties. The next best thing to having a bunch of powers is having somebody else with those powers on your side.
Taking the example of Ulex, who held miraculous magic of muscles, while he could fight alone, he was far stronger adding his strength to the strength of others, for when he did so, that person would become stronger than the two of them combined! Truly a buff mage! Ulex could do more than just buff the strength of others, but that was the simplest thing to do. Everything else gave him extremely strange feelings in his muscles. One buff he loathed forcing out from his muscles was anything related to speed, but to give the attacks of his comrades the power to slow things was something he despised. It always left his muscles feeling like they had been left behind for a few days.
“Well, he doesn’t look like he is about to turn into a bun” Waufronk mused.
“can a bum even become a bun?” Kepo complained.
“I’m not a bum! I’m not becoming a bun! Huh! See if your portion gets smaller next time Kepo!”
“noo, I didn’t mean it not really, well, I did, but for my food, I will even give you respect!”
Kepo almost tumbled out of Ulex’s currently overgrown leaves in regret.
This of course reminded Ulex that he needed to trim them.
“Can I trouble you for a dagger or two Gheel?” he asked, as Kepo continued to try and regain her portion size. Spongy Snaps would pointlessly interject now and then and Waufronk, seeing that the proceedings regarding Eadam had been derailed, took out the rhagular bones he was messing with before.
Gheel did not even reply to Ulex but eyes shining pulled a pair of daggers from his mouth. The daggers were rather plain, made of dark blue metal, their only interesting trait was that they were vaguely in the shape of chompers. The blades being the tails and the pommels being the head of course. Normally, Gheel used them for trimming his more furry, woolly or hairy chompers.
He did not stop with the knives. Indeed he pulled out a pair of chompers. The tails of these chompers were suspiciously leaf-like in shape, and their teeth, well, they seemed vaguely carrot like in shape. They were once dark green, but now they were taking on a orange hue.
Ulex paused as he held the daggers to his leaves.
“Do you have to feed them to your chompers” He asked, though the answer never changed.
“Do you have to use my daggers or my throat sac Mr. McHeft? These chompers are coming along nicely I could not bear to stop at this point in their development”
Sighing Ulex tossed his shorn leaves to the chompers which greedily devoured them.
“Right then, Eadam, Eadam! Kepo stop worrying about it, I’ve been feeling you’ve been getting heavier on my head, a bit less won’t do any harm”
Kepo gasped, scandalized but she kept silence turning her gasp into a humph and wishing a headache on Ulex. Waufronk suppressed a snigger.
“Now that I have your attention lad, what was it like on your end?” Ulex asked.
Eadam solemnly stared down at his hooves.
“I blanked out on top of Calleydron at first bro. Having to cook for so many people, so much stuff… I didn’t think I could do it. I felt though, I felt glad I was needed. So I had to do it, doing the cooking for you guys is all I have left. I felt a connection and next thing I knew, the stew was done. I just really wanted to do it, I wanted to meet that need, you know?”
Spongy, Gheel and Kepo didn’t know. They didn’t understand a desire to be needed. They were content with their focuses, Spongy and his fighting, Gheel and his chompers and Kepo with her often extremely vindictively petty theft. They weren’t too worried about other people or even themselves.
Ulex and Waufronk however… they got it, and both let out heavy sighs.
Waufronk was adrift ever since he was exiled, stripped of all authority, privileges and duties. He liked messing around with bones, but… he hadn’t expected that he’d miss looking after subjects so badly.
In Ulex’s case, well, Ulex had his dream. Perhaps it was less a desire to be needed and more a desire to fill a need.
“Sounds like a bit of a connection to the food dimension to me” Gheel said.
Waufronk nodded, “I’ve read a little bit, it is possible you might be able to summon food from that place!”
“that would be wonderful imagine all the lollipops he could summon” Kepo said.
“Reading really is an amazing magic” Ulex declared.
There is not an abundance of books in Elcon, and there are few who can even read. It doesn’t help matters that many Elconic books are written in a language that the writer made up, due to not knowing any formal words. Runes are the most common, but one needs strong magic to make or read runes. Otherwise the runes would just continue being nonsense. Consequently, to most denizens of Elcon, reading is an obscure magic.
“Boiled sweets please” Spongy requested.
“How do I do it?” Eadam asked.
Waufronk frowned. It was at that point he wished he had learnt how to read better. He had never liked the dusty library of the monk-bats of the Great Attic. Thus he had never learnt that much. Trying to read half-remembered words from his memory was a bit hard.
“I believe you need to try to remember what that connection felt like again” Waufronk said sagely, though inside he wasn’t so sure.
Eadam closed his eyes, not doubting Waufronk for a moment, and everyone watched tensely hoping that Eadam would not turn into pudding.