Undermind

There was a dwarf in her bed. Or rather, the pile of branches and leaves wrapped in animal pelts that she liked to think of as her bed.

This is not how I imagined my day would go, thought Saskia.

She was pretty sure the dwarf in her bed wasn’t just a human with dwarfism, but an actual dwarf; one of the demi-humans first seen in Germanic and Norse mythology, and later popularised by Snow White, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. This world had elves and trolls, so Saskia had been half-expecting dwarves to show up at some point. What kind of a fantasy world would have elves without dwarves? They went together like cats and dogs. Almost every elf-loving high fantasy setting had to include the brawny, bearded, bad-tempered little buffoons.

There was no beard on this dwarf, although she did sport some impressive sideburns. Apparently the dwarves of this world didn’t subscribe to Tolkien’s credo that all dwarves had to have beards—even the women.

The dwarf woman was in a bad state. In the short time since Saskia carried her up to the cave, she’d drifted in and out of a groggy semi-wakefulness, occasionally mumbling gibberish that may or may not have been real words. With her inability to speak any of the native languages, Saskia had no way of knowing for sure.

The dwarf’s face and body were a mass of deep cuts, bruises and scars. There was an ugly red tattoo on her cheek. It was obvious those were no accidental injuries. This woman had been tortured. Saskia felt ill just thinking about it. There would be a special place in hell reserved for whoever had done that to her.

These wounds were ghastly, but hypothermia was a more immediate concern. The woman’s skin felt cold as death.

This stirred up memories she’d sooner forget. Memories of her own ordeal, back on Earth. She too had suffered from severe hypothermia on top of the injuries sustained in the fall. Her body had already started to shut down by the time the rescue team had been able to extract her from the foot of the cliff. She hadn’t been conscious for that, but she remembered being told about it afterward.

If the same thing had happened to her here, she’d have had no chance. At least, not if she were still in her human body. Whatever minor miracles the surgeons and nurses had wrought to keep her alive were not possible out here in the wilderness of a strange world.

Here, her options for warming up a hypothermia victim were far more limited. Even sleeping bags and hot water bottles were beyond her meagre resources.

Saskia briefly considered the notion of climbing into bed with the dwarf and warming her up with direct skin-to-skin contact. Her friends Reiko and Ivan had sworn by the method, claiming it had once saved Reiko’s life. Of course, Ivan would relish any chance to jump into bed with Reiko.

But this was different. Thanks to this new body of hers, the ick-factor was multiplied by a factor of nope. Saskia didn’t want to give the poor dwarf a heart attack. Besides, there must be better options. She didn’t have hot water bottles, but she did have…

Stones!

After heating some rocks by the fire, she placed them in the bed with the dwarf. As the stones cooled, she replaced them with more warm ones.

While she was doing this, she noticed something…well not exactly strange—not after all she’d seen—but certainly new. Whenever she looked at the dwarf, she began to see faint shapes and colours overlaid across her body. It took a few minutes for the vague blurs to resolve into something recognisable, and then it became immediately obvious what she was seeing.

It was some kinda medical overlay, showing the dwarf’s skeletal system, and with all of her injuries marked out and colour coded, like in a medical sim.

What the hell is this? thought Saskia. Theme Hospitroll? Surgeon Simulatroll 2019? Okay, I’ll stop now.

Looking over the new overlay, it was somewhat of a relief to see that there were no broken bones. The frostbite and the multitude of cuts and bruises were already plainly obvious to her naked eyes. She didn’t need this interface pointing them out to her.

The most unexpected sight was the jagged shard of…something deep in the dwarf’s chest cavity, right next to her heart. Saskia had no idea what it was, but the foreign object glowed brighter than the surrounding bones and organs. It’s location meant there was no way she was going to even contemplate removing it.

After several rounds of stone-heating, the woman’s face had gone from deathly grey to a dark umber colour. At least, the parts that weren’t blotchy and swollen were umber; her bruises were colourful in different ways. She still wasn’t exactly coherent, but she was beginning to look at Saskia with a kind of drowsy bewilderment.

Saskia knew that look. She’d worn that look many times since she arrived on this world. It was the look of someone who wondered if she was still dreaming. Who wished she was still dreaming.

The best thing she could do right now was make herself scarce, and let the poor woman rest in peace—er…rest peacefully—while she set about her next task. More than anything else, the woman would need food. Hot food, and lots of calories.

Thanks to her recent efforts with pottery, Saskia had just the thing she could use for that. Saskia filled the cauldron with water from the stream, and set it over the fire. While it was heating, she headed back out into the valley and chased down a mountain goat, and tore out its throat with her teeth.

She’d kept practising with the bow from time to time, but she hadn’t yet reached the point where hunting with it was more efficient than simply running down her prey. In this relatively open mountainous terrain, she could outrun nearly everything. And today, she was in a hurry.

Just getting the heavy carcass up onto the ledge and into the cave would have given her pause if she’d still been in her human body. The cave entrance was at least three metres up the cliff face. But she was a troll. When she straightened her back a little, she could just reach out and place it on the ledge. Being a giant monster did have its perks.

Arriving back in the main cavern, she found the dwarf looking much more alert, but with a panicked expression on her bruised and swollen face. It occurred to Saskia that perhaps the woman thought she’d be going in the bubbling cook pot.

Well, that would’ve been one way to warm her up…

Chuckling to herself, Saskia set to work cooking a chunky soup with meat from the mountain goat and some of the hardy root vegetables that the horned pigs were so fond of digging up. It wasn’t fancy, but the smell wafting out of the cauldron brought to mind the delicious soups her mum had cooked for her in the cold winter months back on Earth.

Saskia scooped some of the soup into a bowl. Quickly, she realised the woman wouldn’t able to hold the bowl in her swollen fingers, so she sat cross-legged on the floor beside the bed, trying to look as non-threatening as a troll could look, and held the bowl for her. It was awkward, but the dwarf managed to get two bowlfuls down.

Despite being awake and with some food in her belly, the woman wasn’t out of the woods yet. Her hands and feet were still badly frostbitten. If Saskia couldn’t find some way to treat those horrific injuries, amputation might be their only option. Even back on Earth, with the help of the best medicine money could buy, the dwarf’s prospects would’ve been grim.

Medicine. Saskia turned the word over in her mind, inspecting it from different angles.

What was the closest thing most fantasy worlds had to modern medicine? The answer, of course was healing magic. Fat chance she could conjure that up on the spot. But for those who lacked the talent for spell-casting, there were usually other options, such as herbal remedies and potions. Alchemy.

The vials of liquid she took from the druid—could one of them be a healing potion? They could just as easily be poison, so she couldn’t just feed them to the dwarf, one by one. But maybe her patient might recognise them?

Each one she waved in front of the woman’s nose elicited a clear nope, ranging from distaste to outright fear. She got the sense that the dwarf did know what they were, and that they were not things a sane person would want to consume.

Okay, so that was a bust. But maybe there some way she could brew a healing potion herself? The problem was, even if alchemy really was a thing, she had no idea how to actually do it. In many games, it was just like cooking; mix a few ingredients together, and hey presto! Potion of Annihilation. But in other fiction, there was more to it than that. Often there were rituals or spells involved. Sometimes, like in Harry Potter, only someone with innate magical talent could do it; a witch or wizard. That would probably rule her out.

Then there was real world alchemy, which bore little resemblance to what was usually portrayed in fiction, and involved a bunch of complicated and time-consuming stuff like distillation and fermentation. But real world alchemy was mostly complete bunk anyhow, and probably no more useful than the average game as a guide for what she should do here on another world with different rules.

Hey, interface gods, she said silently. I could really use a hint right about now! And if you could dispense with the slow reveal this time, that’d be great. I’m in a bit of a hurry…

Nothing flashed up in front of her eyes. This wasn’t hugely surprising. Her interface was a fickle beast.

Then she saw that she was glowing.

No, not glowing. Highlighted. Just like her interface had done to ingredients used in pottery.

Uh…I think that means I’m an alchemy ingredient, thought Saskia.

Come to think of it, one common alchemy ingredient in other fantasy worlds was troll’s blood. Given that she could regenerate so fast, perhaps her blood would grant some of that ability to other creatures? It sounded more than a little creepy, but it was worth a shot.

Saskia opened up a deep cut along her palm with her claw, and let the blood run into a bowl. By the time the bowl was a quarter full, the wound had already stopped bleeding.

As she approached the bed with bloody bowl in hand, the dwarf gave her a look of disgust and said something that Saskia took to be the Dwarvish equivalent of, “You have got to be kidding me.”

Mercilessly, Saskia pressed the bowl to the dwarf’s lips until she finally relented, and began to choke down the dark liquid.

Moments later, the woman retched, and then coughed up a string of dark red phlegm.

So much for that idea, thought Saskia regretfully.

But that didn’t mean she should just give up. Her blood may still be a key ingredient. She might just needed some other ingredients as well—and perhaps some magical jiggery pokery—to activate its healing properties.

When she called up her map, her suspicions were confirmed. There were a number of new icons marked throughout the valley, adding to the growing list of natural resources shown. First it had been clays and other sources of minerals she could use for pottery, and dead branches, twigs and dung she could use to fuel the firepit. These new markers were plants, mostly. They could only mean one thing: alchemy ingredients.

No time to lose. She ran outside to scour the valley for the ingredients marked on her map.

The first icons she recognised on the map were plants with bright orange berries and myrtle green leaves. Saskia was all too familiar with those berries. They grew from small bushes down by the stream. Last time she ate them, they’d given her diarrhoea. She called them crapberries. Plucking a generous handful of the horrid things, she glanced back at her map.

Also easily recognisable were seed clusters and bark from the wannabe-pines that were so common in this valley. Their seed clusters weren’t exactly pinecones, but they were doing a pretty good job at pretending to be.

The other plants on the map were harder to identify. A lot of the leaf icons looked similar to each other, and didn’t exactly match the shrubs they represented. Fortunately, they weren’t just marked on her map. They were highlighted for her as well.

Rushing back to the cave with ingredients in hand, she couldn’t shake the feeling that if this actually worked, it would be suspiciously convenient. What were the odds that the exact plants she needed would all be found in this little valley? Unless it wasn’t actually specific plants that were needed, but rather certain kinds of ingredients, and her map just showed her the ones that were closest at hand.

Using a rock, she ground the leaves, berries, bark and seeds into a paste inside the cauldron. She followed this up with a generous portion of her blood, then added a bit of water, and swirled it all around.

As far as quantities were concerned, she was totally winging it. Games rarely gave quantities in grams or litres, instead using arbitrary units like ‘a handful of elderberries,’ ‘a bottle of water’ or ‘one manticore’s testicle.’ Here, she’d been given even less instructions than that. All she had were some basic ingredients, which may or may not all be meant for the same potion. If precise measurements were needed, or if ingredients had to be added at specific times, or in a specific order, then she’d have to figure it out through trial and error.

And that was only the beginning of her uncertainty. What was she supposed to do next? Chant something? Draw a pentagram at her feet? Sacrifice a chicken?

Let’s start with the basics, thought Saskia. Bring it to the boil. That’s pretty much a given, right?

So she placed the cauldron over the fire, and waited. As bubbles rose from deep within the cauldron, her spirits lifted with them. She could do this. She was an alchemist!

“Double, double toil and trouble,” she chanted, watching the potion begin to simmer and steam. “Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” She gave a little cackle and danced around the fire.

Then she turned to the dwarf, who was staring at her in horrified fascination.

“Stop looking at me like that!” said Saskia defensively. “I have every right to unhinge a little! Loneliness does that to a girl. Troll. Troll girl.”

There was a pop, and a huge gout of goopy liquid erupted from the big pot. The cauldron wobbled for a second, and then began to tip off its precarious perch over the fire.

Instinctively, Saskia reached out to steady it. Her hand began to sizzle. She screamed and yanked her fingers away from the scorched surface.

The cauldron rolled onto the ground, splashing its boiling contents all over her feet and ankles.

Howling in pain, she hopped around on her scalded toes, clutching her seared hand. Ow ow ow!

The worst of it was that her regeneration ability didn’t work on heat burns any more than it did on acid burns. She’d found that out weeks ago after some early cooking mishaps. Those scars still hadn’t healed, and now she’d have more to add to the collection.

Actually, no, that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that a woman might die or lose limbs because Saskia had crocked up the potion. A woman who right now was watching her with a mixture of disbelief and…amusement. The little wretch thought this was funny. Clearly, she had no idea that Saskia was doing this for her. That her life hung in the balance.

Okay, calm down, Saskia told herself. It’s not that bad. All you have to do is go out there and gather some more ingredients, and try again. Her hands and feet aren’t gonna drop off right this instant.

This time, Saskia picked lots more leaves and berries and seeds and bark; enough for at least several more attempts at brewing the potion. There was apparently a bit more to the art of alchemy than simply throwing a bunch of ingredients in a pot and saying ‘abracadabra.’

Her next attempt she approached more cautiously, watching from a safe distance, in case the bubbling mixture went all ’splodey.

Oh it ’sploded alright. Even though the cauldron was half empty this time, the result was a miniature volcanic eruption, spurting scalding liquid over the fire and the surrounding cave floor.

“Frock!” she yelled, and kicked the pot over, adding another burn to her burn. “Ow, ow, ow!”

There was something extremely unstable about this concoction. But what?

Is it my blood that’s reacting so explosively? she wondered. I already know heat is my kryptonite…

Next time, she omitted her blood from the mixture. When it began to boil, a little hourglass appeared before her, spectral sand quickly flowing out of it.

Well this was promising. The timer hadn’t appeared for her earlier attempts.

Sure enough, this concoction was much more stable. Once the timer had expired, she peered into the cauldron, and saw that its contents had been reduced to a thick brown sludge. This was nothing like the deep crimson colour and watery consistency she’d expect from a potion of healing.

After she lifted the cauldron off the fire with a pair of sticks, a thermometer appeared in front of her. Its meaning was clear. She had to wait for the concoction to cool before adding the final ingredient—her blood.

Saskia poured the foul-looking brew into several jugs, and waited. When the mercury had dropped to the marked level, the ghostly thermometer vanished. It was time.

Trembling in anticipation, she tore open her wrist and let her blood dribble into the waiting jug. She stirred it all together with a wooden spoon.

Her nose wrinkled in disgust. This wasn’t right at all! Like oil and water, the two liquids didn’t mix.

What was she missing?

Absently, she tasted some of the syrupy goop that had risen to the top. She swirled it around in her mouth, as if sampling the finest vintage. Smooth like gushing arteries, with a zesty barnyard aroma, and a gravelly aftertaste.

Eh, she’d had worse. Her trollish tastebuds allowed her to stomach things that would have sent her human self into a frenzy of projectile vomiting. She took another sip.

Before she knew it, she’d finished off the whole jug, except for some her own blood, which had settled to the bottom. Failed potion it may be, but this stuff was…strangely addictive.

Another hourglass appeared.

What the hell?

At first she simply felt…odd. Like something was happening deep inside her. As the spectral sand continued to fall through the hourglass, the feeling progressed to queasy discomfort. Soon, that too passed, replaced by a crawling, itching sensation all over the surface of her body, but concentrated most heavily in her hand and feet. Resisting her urge to scratch them with her sharp claws, she inspected her burns. The red, peeling skin from her recent burns was beginning to flake off, and she could see a fresh layer of smooth blue-grey skin rising beneath it. Her older burn scars were also fading fast.

Wow, okay, this was unexpected! Somehow this concoction was allowing her to heal wounds that her natural regeneration couldn’t.

The last speck of sand fell, and the ghostly hourglass vanished. According to the timer, whatever had been happening inside her had run its course. And yet her burn scars continued to fade, so clearly it hadn’t.

Unless…

She opened her vein again, pouring forth a deep, rich scarlet liquid into an empty jug. The substance—she hesitated to call it blood, because it didn’t look the same as her blood normally looked—seemed alive with potential.

Oh wait…that was just her interface making it all sparkly, but still, it was different now. She could feel it. And she knew why.

What she’d just been doing wasn’t alchemy, at least not the mystical kind so often seen in games and fiction. That concoction she’d brewed wasn’t a potion. It was food, providing her body with special nutrients it needed to…

To change itself from within. The hourglass had been showing her the time needed to complete the transformation. Presumably, the changes would last only as long as the potent combination of nutrients remained in her system, but until then her blood was turbocharged.

This just might be enough for her blood to confer her spontaneous regeneration ability on others that drank it. Hopefully!

Saskia smiled at the dwarf and gave her the thumbs up. The woman returned her gaze with a bemused expression. When Saskia brought the jug to her bedside, that look changed to one of panic. Wrinkling her nose, the dwarf turned her head aside.

“Oh no, you do not get to refuse your medicine!” huffed Saskia. “Not after everything I went through to make it!”

To be fair, this was the second time she’d forced the dwarf to drink her blood, and the last time hadn’t gone so well. But this was different. This time it was going to work!

Finally, the woman relented, and took a swallow from the jug. She gagged and choked, and stared daggers at her.

But Saskia was not inclined to be merciful. She didn’t relent until the entire contents of the jug was inside her patient’s belly.

The dwarf said some things to her that would no doubt be best left untranslated.

Within minutes, the dwarf’s expression of indignant rage changed to one of surprise. Saskia watched in fascination as her blood worked its magic. It took a while for any visible changes to become apparent, but slowly, the dark splotches and jagged cuts across the woman’s face and arms began to fade. By the time the effect wore off, healthy flesh was beginning to show through. Her bruises and scars were still there—just much paler than before. Best of all, the swelling in her hands had noticeably diminished. They remained an unhealthy shade of crimson, but at least they looked like hands now, not purple balloons.

Feeling dizzy with relief, Saskia immediately poured another jug of delicious blood. This time, however, the dwarf woman seemed to be having a difficult time getting it down. Halfway through the jug, she threw up all over the cave floor.

Crap, okay, so there seems to be a limit to how much her body can metabolise, thought Saskia, frowning down at the mess. Guess we’ll have to take it slow.

She waited until the next day before trying again. Her body had returned to normal within a few hours, and the blood she’d harvested seemed to lose its potency just as quickly. So she had to repeat the whole process from the beginning—drinking another jug of the strange concoction, and then waiting for it to be absorbed into her system—before she could donate another pint of transformed blood. It was well worth the effort. Once again, her patient underwent a dramatic improvement.

The good news was that the dwarf’s injuries had healed enough for her to hobble a few steps and eat without assistance.

Saskia did her best to provide for her guest, cooking meals and cleaning up after her. Still, a palpable silence filled the air whenever Saskia was in the cave with the dwarf.

Ah awkward silence, thought Saskia. How I missed you so. It had been weeks since she’d had anyone to be awkward with.

Finally, the silence grew too loud even for her, so she approached the dwarf and tried to introduce herself. Pointing at herself, she said, “Saskia.” After repeating this several times, she pointed at the dwarf woman, who looked up at Saskia, uncertainty written across her bruised face.

Saskia sighed, and tried again, repeating her own name, and then attempting to get a response.

After a long pause, the woman said, “Ruhildi.”

“Ruhildi,” repeated Saskia, trying out the name. She wasn’t sure if Ruhildi was the name of the individual sitting in her bed, or the word for dwarves as a whole, or some other designation, but it was a name. She could work with that.

That was as much as she could get out of the dwarf today. Saskia’s halting attempts to break the ice weren’t going anywhere fast. Ruhildi wasn’t very talkative, and the language barrier seemed insurmountable. Simple gestures, body language and facial expressions didn’t allow for meaningful conversations. It was hard to tell if they even meant the same thing to the both of them. On Earth, a nod of the head usually meant yes and a shake of the head meant no, but there were some places where their meanings were completely reversed. How many more differences might there be for a different species on another world?

The next day, struck by sudden inspiration, Saskia found a large flat area on the cave floor, and with her claws sketched a scene of the valley outside. When she brought the dwarf over to see it, the woman looked astonished.

“What, you’ve never seen a troll draw before?” said Saskia, amused.

Here, Saskia was in her element. The drawing was simple, but she knew how to convey the essence of a scene with just a few well-placed lines.

Saskia quickly scratched objects into the scene. Tapping them with her claws, she voiced the English word for each one. Each time she spoke, Ruhildi would reply with what Saskia had to assume was the equivalent word in Dwarvish. Soon, they’d exchanged words for trees, rocks, mountains, rivers and countless other things. There was no way Saskia would remember even a quarter of those words, but it was a start. Finally they were getting somewhere!

One little titbit she learned was that the Dwarvish word for themselves sounded like dwarrow. And their word for troll? Trow. The words were too similar to the ones she knew for it to be mere coincidence.

When Saskia sketched an elf in the clay, Ruhildi grew sullen, and hissed out a word with such venom that Saskia would’ve suspected she’d just learned her first Dwarvish swear word, if it didn’t sound so similar to her own word for the race. Nodding in agreement, Saskia added a bow to the elf’s—the alvar’s—hands, then drew a likeness of herself with several arrows sticking out of her back. She winced and rubbed the area in remembered pain. Ruhildi snorted at that, and then gave her a grudging nod (which, it turned out, did mean the same to dwarves as it did to Saskia, though some other dwarven gestures were less recognisable). The message was clear: neither of them were fans of those xenophobic donkholes.

By the end of the day, her head ached, and they were still a long way off being able to have an actual conversation. Why can’t this be more like a proper video game? thought Saskia irritably as she drifted off to sleep. In a game—even one set on an alien world—everyone would just speak English, or at least have handy subtitles. A game world wouldn’t be much fun if the player couldn’t talk to its inhabitants, and no game would be so harsh as to force its players to learn an entirely new language.

Saskia awoke to the sound of heavy breathing, accompanied by a rasping clatter, like sticks being scraped across stones. There were innumerable faint voices whispering on the air. Were they real, or the echoes of a fading dream? Groggily, she looked over at Ruhildi, who stood in the far corner, head bowed. The dwarf’s chest rose and fell with deep, regular breaths. She’s sleepwalking, thought Saskia. Or at least sleep-standing.

Something slid out from behind the sleeping dwarf. Bones clacked as they scraped across the floor, dragged by tattered limbs stripped of all muscle and sinew.

“Flocking crickets on a pogo stick!” Saskia leapt to her feet and ran toward the dwarf. “Ruhildi, get away from that thing!”

Ruhildi jerked, and her eyes flew open. The whispering ceased. As if its strings were suddenly cut, the dead thing collapsed, its bones scattering across the floor.