The White King

Your Best Friend

Blinking her eyes open, Octanus is greeted with the sight of the sun peeking in the sky.

It was a horrible sight to come across when you wake up.

Clasping her hands over her eyes in pain, Octanus riles around enough to alert whoever was there with her.

Cat? her hazy mind conjures for her. It wasn't the same person, and you'd be stupid to call him such, but she wasn't exactly wrong.

"Hello," a voice greets her. "Welcome to the land of the living."

It takes a moment, but his words cycle through her brain eventually.

"I... I died?" she asks, confused by his statement. That would certainly be the conclusion to draw.

Fortunately, his next words clear that up.

"Honestly, I have no idea if you died. All I do know is that you're not dead now, and I'm responsible," the unseen voice states in apology.

Or... Not.

"Regardless, I'm definitely picking up a lot of strays here recently. Are you gonna stay as well?" he asks, sound simultaneously annoyed and enthusiastic. How that works is beyond my ability to describe.

Octanus finally opens her eyes again, this time not facing directly up, and comes face to face with a rather rugged fellow.

You might know him as Nacah.

"Hello," Octanus greets him in return, although he feels the need to repeat that back to her as well.

Speaking of which: "Hello."

Actually, that wasn't the white furred man she'd just now met, but rather a cat who had barely entered her field of view by then.

"How many others are there?" Octanus asks, eager to get introductions out all at once.

"Currently, it's me and four guests, yourself included," the only obvious adult in the room responds. "I'll go get the other two."

You do that, she thinks, sitting up from the uncomfortable mat she was placed upon. She didn't feel hurt, which was odd, but healing magic was a kind of spell. Unfortunately, the only one she could think of that would heal a cracked skull would be nature magic.

Unlike the well documented and classified elemental magics, natural magic had a wide variety of very vague uses. The one used for healing was actually well known, but very difficult to do. Essentially, all it did was burn through a targets energy to accelerate the natural healing process.

The question then became more specific to her.

Where did the energy come from?

Her technique, the one she'd used to defeat the Eva'Der, was almost a nature technique, but the difference comes from the goal.

Magic is a form of energy, much like heat, except it is almost infinitely more flexible than that.

Unfortunately, the original theory of magic- that it was created by the calories of the food we eat- couldn't hold up after the discovery of the Law of Conservation of Energy.

So, some deep study revealed that it was similar, but not the same. Rather than creating magic, the burned calories were absorbing it from the world around you.

While not unique to her, but rather known only to members of the Desert Wind Magic College, Siphon allows the user to melt away their body mass for an acceleration of the previous natural process.

That fiery glow is just that, fire, though one born from the rapid movement of magic and the expulsion of heat.

The problem was pretty obvious when you think about it. Her species simply wasn't fit for it, resulting in a knockout once it ended.

Of course, the results were usually more than worth it.

She'd won, after all.

"Who healed me?" she asks the cat pan, the only person in the room for the moment.

He takes a moment to think about that, but answers readily enough.

"The man in here earlier and his... Student? Anyway, they did it. If you want the details, you'll have to ask them," he says, glancing towards where the other man walked off to. "I wouldn't know; I was more interested in his magic."

Octanus raises an eyebrow at that, but her next question is halted by the arrival of three new people.

A dog pan with white tipped ears and tail, a bright orange fox pan who seems unusually thin for a survivalist, and the man from earlier who Octanus can now recognize as a white tiger pan.

Combined with the orange/black chimera and a giant tropical sloth, they made quite the arrangement of unusual species.

Well, besides the canine one. Those were pretty common in this region.

"Alright, I'll start things off," began the white tiger pan. "My name is Nacah Nacoh- very creative parents, I know- and I am a soul mage."

Octanus looks him over again, noticing the subtle musculature required for that kind of fighting style. Soul magic was incredibly hard to use, though not quite as difficult as psychic, and actually required an athletic body to use properly.

He certainly had that in spades, and the soft glow he was permanently emitting spoke leagues about his power.

Normally, soul magic was only active when you wanted it to be, but if your potency reached certain levels, well...

It was kind of like having a giant reserve of magic, actually; some of it just leaks out on its own.

"Nice to meet you, Nacah," Octanus replies eventually. "I'm Octanus Clair, a general purpose magic researcher."

Her occupation needed a lot less explanation. All she did was try and discover new techniques while researching the properties of magic.

The next one was even easier.

"Hello, again," the chimera starts. "I'm Nua Maidin (My-den), and I am a combat wizard."

He fights using magic. Done.

"Do you specialize in anything, Nua?" Nacah questions, turning his head to do a quick once over.

Nua mulls that over for a moment, but he does reach an answer soon enough.

"I suppose you could call me a teleportation specialist, but... I just like blowing things up," he admits with a shrug.

The dog pan steps forward next, standing straight in a manner his unkempt form didn't seem to match with.

"My name is Schwarz (Sh-wars) Himmel, and I was only ever taught nature magic before entering the tutelage of Nacah, here," he says, gesturing towards the man in question.

"So you healed me with nature magic, then," Octanus says, more an assertion than a confirmation.

Schwarz nods regardless.

"Care to explain how you did that without killing me?"

Schwarz waves his hands in the air, as if trying to banish the very thought.

"That wouldn't be me, miss," he began. "Nacah was 'feeding' you with his magic, supplanting the need for food with his soul."

Confused, Octanus turns to Nacah. "You can do that?"

A simple nod in return.

"So... Do you need to eat?" she asks.

"I do," he says," but I don't need many of the secondary nutrients you do, like vitamins." Pounding his chest with one arm, he continues. "All I really need to survive is meat since it carries both protein and high quantities of calories, though I do like oranges."

To emphasize that last point, he pulls an orange from a pouch at his side, biting directly through the rind and into the juice sacs inside.

Not the most pleasant image, really, but nobody had that weak a stomach in the group.

"And you...?" Octanus prompts towards the fox pan.

"Ah, yes. My name is Donn Sionnach, and I am a... Well, a career thief that specializes in combining physical and elemental magic."

Without a direct example, there wasn't much Octanus could glean from that, but physical magic had to do with changing how something interacted with reality. For instance, she could make herself physically less effected by gravity instead of empowering her leaps, something that would get more expensive rather quickly.

The thing is, elemental magic is always spontaneous, so it doesn't... Wait...

Octanus leans over to her right, getting a look behind Donn.

He was tossing a sphere of water, one about a foot in diameter, up and down with his tail.

Surface tension may be a powerful force, but he was definitely casting something with that orange furry extremity.

Having never even thought of that before, Octanus is actually surprised. She didn't have a tail, so it wouldn't be of much use to her, but... Being able to use an entire extra limb, cast an entire extra spell...

That might just be the most bullshit advantage of all time.

"Okay..." Nua starts off, a slight hiss leaking into into the drawn out 'y' sound. "So, what are we gonna do?"

Nacah speaks first, stepping forward.

"Schwarz and Donn were staying with me while I taught Schwarz soul magic. There's not much else for me to do out here, after all," he says, gesturing towards the peaceful noontime forest around them. "I don't suppose you plan on doing the same?"

Octanus shakes her head. "Nah, I need to stay in Lleterof for a while."

Raising an eyebrow coyly, Nacah replies through a smile. "Where do you think you are?"

She raises an eyebrow, remembering how far away she would have been at the location of the fight.

"You carried me all the way there?" she asks in a complete deadpan. "You expect me to believe that? I was out what? A few hours, maybe?"

A tentative nod from Nacah.

"So... We're here? We skipped two days of travel?"

Her incredulous questions received unanimous nods, though Nua stops after just two to speak.

"No offense, but... You're kind of slow. Me and Nacah got you the remainder of the way in around two hours."

In a last attempt, she poses one final question: "so where's the town?"

Nacah gestures behind him with a thumb over his shoulder.

"It's about half a mile that way, but they don't have any open rooms. You're pretty much stuck with us," he says, placing his arms on Donn and Schwarz's shoulders.

Falling back onto the ground in defeat, Octanus lets out an exasperated sigh.

"So, what...? We're all friends now?"

Nua smirks, the one corner of his mouth uncomfortably revealing a set of fangs.

"The best of friends."