Chapter 6 - Back to Square One

Figures.

It took everything in Holly’s willpower not to scowl at the grim discovery – her seed satchel was missing, meaning her potential fighting capabilities were reset back to zero. Well, back to four, as her head-mounted garden remained and she’d have her four shots refilled daily.

Four shots meant nothing against a smart opponent. She could play dirty and attack the Maestro directly; but as she found out against her first real opponents, all that did was piss them off and make their pursuit that much more dangerous if she didn’t end it lethally.

And a killer she was not. The idea of ending any encounter with someone dead made her stomach churn. Absolute last resort territory – if it came down to a choice between her life and someone else’s, well the choice wasn’t hard.

Holly shook her head. What a grim train of thought. With any luck, her pursuers would think her dead.

“Everything alright?” Natacha questioned, noting the sudden contemplation of the fruit bearer.

Playing up the waterworks, Holly spun around, her bottom lip quivering. “Miss Natacha it's awful! Those horrible people stole all my seeds! How will I survive without them?!” cried the zalavan.

The bird was taken aback by the sudden outpouring of emotion. “Are seeds really that important to your kind?” she asked.

Holly nodded. “Very very very important! Like the most important thing!” she exclaimed. “I dunno what I’m gonna do without them,” she quietly admitted, her head drooping.

Natacha chewed on that thought for a moment before speaking. “What kind of seeds do you need?”

Paydirt. The zalavan whipped her head up, her eyes sparkling with falsified hope. “Any kind! All kinds! Spicy seeds, Minty seeds, sweet seeds! Anything and everything! Mom says a good berry tree should have plenty of seeds in her pockets, and I’m a good little berry tree!” boasted the young woman.

The lightning bird couldn’t claim to understand the affairs of plants but recognized how important this was. “I’ll see what I can find around here, you just sit tight.”

“I will! Thank you, Miss Natacha!” Holly beamed. She made like an obedient little houseplant and returned to the comfort of the log cabin.

---

Holly couldn’t hazard a guess as to where she had ended up. She didn’t know what to expect when Natacha returned – what kind of flora was even available in this region?

She certainly didn’t expect a huge bundle of large brown fruits.

“Will this work to get you started?” asked Natacha, setting the leathery fruits on the table.

The zalavan rushed over and began to study them. Just a touch told her everything she needed to know. “Yes…” Her eyes widened. The massive bundle of rhythm stored inside told her she had hit the motherlode: lightning element. A very rare element to her people. “These must be cacao then,” Holly spoke, her red eyes scrutinizing them further.

“Oh? You can tell?” asked Natacha, arms folded across her chest as she watched the little Resonator appraise the haul.

“Yeah! They’re all tingly! Kinda like you are!” Holly giggled.
“Tingly? These things have rhythm?” questioned the bird.
“Mhm! Everything that lives has rhythm. Don’t you know that?”
“Well duh, I just didn’t think plants had elemental rhythm. I thought they were just uh plants.”

“I’m a plant and I have rhythm,” Holly pointed out.
“You’re a person who carries plants on your body,” Natacha countered.
“I’m a plant,” Holly repeated her assertion. She was tempted to add carnivorous for humorous effect but thought it too much for her outer image.

Natacha grunted and went back to tending to her ever-boiling pot of stew.

In the interim, Holly got to work. She could definitely strike it out on her own with this number of lightning spells to her name. Each fruit contained anywhere from thirty to fifty individual seeds. With five total fruits, that was a minimum of 150 uses of the most basic lightning magic. Plenty for her to head out and start collecting more varied elements. It was actually the best possible outcome. Nature magic came to plants the easiest – as long as she was in a forested area she essentially had infinite usage of nature magic. Theoretically, that was enough to take care of any non-fire elements that wanted to get uppity with her.

Meanwhile, with the abundance of nature magic all around her, any earth elements who were immune to lightning magic could be dealt with by the nature spells.

It wasn’t ideal; she wanted to figure out how to stock up on rice sooner rather than later, given rice provided water magic and had very tiny seeds. It would be much easier to carry a ton of rice seeds over any other magic type; a safety blanket against fire elements so to speak.

In their current state, the cacao seeds were bulkier than they needed to be. If she wanted to carry them properly, she needed to strip them of their meat. So Holly got to work. She sat at the little wood table with the five pods, studying them. They were ripe, fresh, and ready to go.

“Miss Natacha, may I please borrow a knife?” asked Holly.

The bird pulled a utility knife from her side and tossed it to the little zalavan. Poor Holly got a good jolt by having a sharp implement suddenly thrown at her, but she discovered it was a folding knife. She carefully flicked it out and got to work.

First was the outer pod; she expertly cut into the flesh of the pod and freed the large white fruit body from its container. Now began the real processing: with each individual fruit she used the knife to carefully carve the seed coat off of the brown bean and free it from its fruity container. She repeated this process methodically and meticulously, making a pile of white fruit flesh and her prize – a pile of dark brown beans that exuded a rich chocolatey scent.

Holly wished she had some music or something to listen to while she worked; Natacha lacked a record player or much else besides the bare essentials. Even so, she got into a good pace with it, quickly freeing her precious bullets from its organic packaging. In the span of a few hours, her ammunition had gone from a measly four shots to around forty times that in only one afternoon of work.

“All happy,” beamed the zalavan, taking pride in her craft.
“Huh, you’re pretty good at this,” Natacha noted, picking up one of the rescued beans and giving it a once over.
“Mhm, I had the best seed-sowing grades in school,” boasted the little nature element.
“Hm? Your people have schools?”

The zalavan tilted her head cutely. “Yeah, did you not go to school?” she asked.

Natacha chuckled hollowly. “Only the lucky ones get to go to school,” she said, her voice quiet. Before Holly could inquire further, Natacha left the log cabin, leaving the berry tree of a girl alone.

The cheerful façade faded from the girl’s face as she studied the door. “Hrm…”

She never considered it, but she had no real idea of how Resonators were treated in Riterran society. The books she read felt… utilitarian. She always assumed that was the quirk of writing a technical manual though.

Holly shook her head. The kidnapper and his Resonator seemed to be on good terms, maybe Natacha just had a bad experience and it soured her perspective on the subject. Something to look into later.

Turning her attention to her lightning-themed pile of beans, Holly smirked. “Even if their society is broken, I have my own weapons.”

---

Holly awoke to a shooting pain in her back. “Urgh…” she groaned as she sat up. As it turned out, a table did not make a good pillow and the zalavan anatomy protested a C-shaped spine.

“Been a while since I did that,” she mumbled, a satisfied smirk gracing her lips. Her sleeping position was informed by what lay on the table before her. Three satchels filled to the brim with cacao beans, ready for casting. She had three pockets in her jacket so she’d be armed with plenty of deadly lightning should she need it. Ideally, she’d pull most of her necessary seed craft from pick-ups around her.

The nature element furrowed her brow. “Pick up seed craft huh,” she muttered. While she ruminated, her gaze drifted around the cabin. It was dark, still the dead of night. Natacha was utilizing her bed, fast asleep as Holly had suspected.

Her words from earlier stuck in the zalavan’s mind. “The lucky ones…” Holly repeatedly softly.

It weighed on her, bothering the little plant girl greatly. “Uhg,” she breathed out. Grabbing a pouch of beans, she headed for the door. “I’ll be back,” she whispered to the sleeping bird.

The forest was cool, not cold, not hot, but just right. It was a lot like Inverna, except the big difference was the very slight breeze that rustled the trees every so often. The humidity that hung in the air was also somewhat appreciated for how different it felt to her.

These factors together really made her jaunt through the pitch-black woods all the more enjoyable. As she walked, she could sense the abundant rhythm around her. It did make her wonder if non-zalavan Resonators could behold the beauty of the forest as her people could. That line of thinking inspired another branch – why were her people confined to an underground cave?

Surely her mother would love walking amongst the trees like this? It felt… good.

The good times weren’t there to stay, however, as a new sensation hit the little berry tree. “What the heck..?” Holly’s breath hitched. There was this feeling in her chest – a tightness that gripped her. Anxiety? Yes, she was definitely anxious. But what was inspiring this feeling?

There was nothing around. The thick canopy of the forest above her didn’t help, with all moonlight blocked by the thick foliage. “Scherzando are silent. They don’t move the leaves,” she recited, her eyes glowing a vibrant yellow as she processed her situation logically.

Light, she needed light. Thankfully she had about fiftyish seeds that could aid her in her time of need. Pulling one of the beans out she drained it of its rhythm, channeling the lightning magic into her body.

“Aria Carcia, Presto.” She didn’t need to verbalize the spell to cast it, but hearing her own voice helped calm her nerves ever so slightly.

Her hands began to glow, light pouring from her palms. “Alright, where are you?” she breathed. One palm was used as a flashlight, casting luminance out into the dark woods. Her other hand remained gripped tightly around her precious satchel of beans.

All the knowledge in the world couldn’t have prepared her for what her light eventually revealed.

Living in Inverna all her life, Holly had never seen a Scherzando in person, and it was just as terrifying as the books had described. Her rhythm raced with a deep, primordial fear as soon as she laid eyes upon its form. It looked innocuous enough, even with its shadowy guise she could sense their element like any other Resonator. The quadruped radiated a spiritual humidity – did that mean it was a water element?

It took everything in what little willpower Holly had to not utter a cry. The same couldn’t be said for the quadruped that stared back. The most horrifying thing about the beast was how it was absolutely silent. No matter how much it crept through the underbrush it did not disturb the world with sound. It was dead quiet; it didn't even seem to breathe. She had always read in stories how scary Scherzando could be - their ruthlessness, their bloodlust, and it was plain to see why.

The stare-down was tense. Plant versus beast. In any other context, the beast would win without question, but Holly had thorns.

The Scherzando jumped, its powerful legs allowing it to easily clear the distance between itself and the little zalavan.

And she froze. For the mind she prided herself on, it returned nothing. The one time in her entire short life that she needed it – it failed her. The beast was constructed with shadows, but the shadows bore weight and she was taken to the ground, her shoulders crushed underfoot.

It went for the neck, shadowy fangs racing towards her windpipe with deadly efficiency.

“Corteccia Armatura!” she screamed. A two-berry cost spell, she used four. In that instant her body was covered in a thick bark, halting the beast’s attack. Only briefly. The instant wood armor she had donned began to crack, the horrible splintering reminding her she only had seconds to figure herself out. In all the chaos, in all the commotion, she managed to keep ahold of her precious precious beans. There was no time to deliberate.

“Corrente Elettrica, Fortissimo!” Four cacao beans offered themselves up in service of the zalavan. Right when the Scherzando broke through the wood shell, it met lightning. The bolt rend the beast in twain and its form evaporated in an instant, leaving its victim with her life.

Holly shook off the remaining bark armor and ran. She had no idea where she was going, but she ran. She had to stay on the move. She probably couldn’t outrun another Scherzando like that one, but her berries were gone and she had forty-five cacao to her name at the moment. If they kept coming at her like that first one did, that number would hit zero before not too long.

For her sanity’s sake, she was smarter than she gave herself credit for – the little log cabin was just in sight.

It was never that easy.

Her eyes bulged out as the wind rapidly evacuated her lungs. A pillar of ice straight to the gut swept her off her feet as she was thrown a distance away from the safety of the cabin. Her precious beans were knocked free from her grasp at the force of the impact.

Tears streamed down her cheeks as she sputtered and wheezed, struggling to regain her breath. Another scherzando approached, the same slender shape as the one she had defeated earlier. Four powerful legs, a long thin tail, and two triangular ears atop its deadly head; this was the beast that would be her unmaking.

This was the price of freedom.

Why then, in all the silence of the forest did the crackle of electricity grace the zalavan’s hearing?

CRACK BOOM!

The horrible noise bathed Holly in light.