Monroe

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Kharvic stared at the massive figures that had appeared.

One of them had spoken Lovar, shouted, really, and had the form of a Lovar, albeit the ashen wings weren't normal, although it might have been part of their armor.

The other was a truly gargantuan feline, easily half again the size of the other figure, which was itself twice the size of a Lovar. It sat primly as it calmly licked its paw clean.

He stepped forward to speak but then stepped back as more figures appeared, all abnormally large.

One of them, wielding a shield and a mace, moved in front of the others, taking up a defensive stance, while another conjured a massive canine creature, and the last raised a staff, a dark green glow sheathing the top of the weapon.

The last raised a staff of its own, and a brilliant yellow light flashed out, filling the room.

Kharvic blinked, turning his head to look behind him as the cries of the wounded had been silenced. He turned around fully to stare as it appeared that every single injury had been healed.

"Bob," he heard one of the giants say from behind him. "Are those..."

"Adorable anthropomorphic cat people?" Another voice replied. "Yeah, I think they are."

Kharvic turned back around in time to see the giant's weapons disappear, followed by their armor, leaving them clad in shirts and slacks.

More importantly, he could now see their faces, and while they had slightly deformed ears, they otherwise appeared to be Lovar, if oversized.

He cleared his throat before speaking, which drew their attention. "Greetings," he began, inclining his head and clasping his hands in front of his chest. "I am Kharvic, captain of the Husrtall'kalwin. On behalf of the Lovar and the Dharlings aboard our ship I thank you for coming to our aid."

The man who had been the first to appear nodded. "I'm Bob," he said, then began to gesture to the others. "This is Monroe," he stroked the feline, who began to purr, an action that vibrated the deck beneath their feet. "Mike," He pointed to the man just ahead of him, "Amanda and her summons, Auruffra," he gestured to the woman a few feet to his left with the huge canine. "Dave," he pointed to the man on his other side before turning and holding out a hand to the blonde-haired woman behind him, guiding her to stand beside him, "and Jessica."

"We're adventurers," Bob continued with a smile. "And we're here to help."

Lilalyaslywain looked up at their saviors, carefully inspecting them.

They had a Lovar shape, but their features were broader, and their ears were rounded. They weren't proper ears, but nicer to look at than the sharp pointy ears of the Lovar. Each of them were stunningly good looking, if you were into that sort of thing. She wasn't interested in that sort of thing, but she knew more than a few Shallihs who were.

What truly drew her attention was the massive feline. He was magnificent. The oldest of legends said that they were descended from great cats who had long ago left their world and that, over the course of thousands of generations, they had changed, becoming something different. If ever there was an example of feline perfection, here it stood, right before her. His coat was perfect, voluminous, and clean, without a hair out of place. His claws and teeth were impeccable.

She could sense that while he was likely smart, he wasn't sapient. His eyes held the wisdom of a canny hunter and the cunning of an apex predator, but they lacked that spark.

Stepping forward, her ears perked forward, and her tail swishing slightly, she stood next to Kharvic.

"My name is Lilalyaslywain, although the Lovar have trouble with that, so you may call me as they do, Lily," She tilted her head slightly, in the way of the Shallihs, showing respect for their strength without surrendering to their authority. "I greet you in the name of Nurrihs. On behalf of the Shallihs aboard the Hurstall'kalwin, I welcome you. May your prey be foolish and your hunts successful."

"You're welcome," Bob replied.

If these people had been like Lovar, she would have said that he sounded awkward.

"How will you be transporting us away from here?" She asked. "Your ship is quite small, considering how many of us there are. Or will you be moving the Hurstall'kalwin?" She glanced over and up and Kharvic. "I know the captain would prefer to move the entire ship." Her tail swished. "Honestly, we wouldn't mind either. It saved us, after all."

Kharvic coughed. "I'm sure they have a way to move the ship, Lily," he said.

"Oh fuck no," Bob interjected. "This thing is huge. The biggest portal I can open is just over a hundred and sixty feet in diameter."

"I have seen that spell," Lilalyaslywain nodded. "Is that how you will move us?"

Bob nodded. "My friend Kellan has room on his planet, and I'm sure he will help us out, at least until we can get you your own, which," he sighed, "will probably take a little while. How many of you are there? Is this everyone?" He peered at the group.

Lily snorted. "There are one million eight hundred thousand Lovar, and eight hundred and seventy-five thousand Shallihs aboard the Hurstall'kalwin."

Bob blinked.

"That's a lot of people," he muttered.

Jessica patted his arm reassuringly.

A new message appeared on his armband, courtesy of Trebor transcribing what Kharvic and Lily had said through their armbands.

'It doesn't look like they're starving, assuming these guys are indicative of their people, so getting them off this tub shouldn't be manically urgent' - Mike.

Bob nodded. He took a deep breath. "OK, so we've introduced ourselves, and you know we are here to help you. What we need to know is how desperate things are and what your immediate needs are. There are more of you than I expected, so I'll need to make sure I have a place to bring you before we start evacuating."

"You had quite a few wounded from that fight, yeah?" Jessica added. "If you've got wounded, I can heal them right up."

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"As Bob likely demonstrated, we can clear out monsters quickly and easily, especially low-tier, low-level ones like these," Mike continued. "Amanda and Bob can summon out a bunch of their own monsters to patrol the ship and deal with any that pop up. I'd say you probably have it handled, given how many of you there are, but I'm pretty good with logistics, specifically the logistics of relocating millions of people through a magic portal," he finished with a smile.

"You don't seem to have any strong monsters, so I'm not the most useful person," Dave shrugged. "I'll mostly be of use helping Amanda and Bob."

Bob looked at Kharvic. Lilalyaslywain seemed to be the leader of the cat people, but Kharvic was the leader of the rest, and they were apparently the ones in charge of the ship.

"What will you ask for your aid?" Kharvic asked.

Bob blinked. "Well," he began, "I didn't know there were so many of you." He sighed and shook his head before continuing. "Even if I had, the System didn't give me any time to prepare, so I don't have enough mana crystals to portal everyone off the ship," he admitted. "You'll probably have to help with the crystals to get everyone out of here, although I suppose I might be able to pull some support from the Endless and the Old Guard," he finished thoughtfully.

Kharvic's eyes narrowed. "There are many of us, yes, but what will you demand in return?"

Bob felt Jessica slip her arm under his as she spoke.

"Nothing," Jessica said firmly. "We are Adventurers, and we are here to help."

Kharvic fought back a frown.

He knew that he was in danger of souring the Lovar's first encounter with a more powerful species, but he was having a hard time reconciling their words against what he knew to be true. Nothing was free. When they fled the Empire, they took the lessons of corruption and greed with them, creating their rudimentary government with stringent checks and balances to prevent the inevitable decay that would set in as people tasted power, however limited. Throughout their twenty years of education, children had been taught the dangers of a corrupt government. Power corrupts, and the longer someone held power, the greater the risk. Likewise, the greater the power someone held, the more dangerous that corruption was. 𝖋𝔯𝔢𝔢𝖜𝖊𝖇𝖓𝔬𝔳𝖊𝔩.𝖈𝖔𝖒

He had little criteria on which to judge these people, but what he had seen indicated that they were powerful.

"My apologies," he began. If they were going to pretend that they didn't want anything, he would follow along. "We will happily accept any help you can give us. If possible, I'd like to start at the infirmary," he continued. "There are hundreds of Lovar and Dharlings who are waiting to be healed."

Kharvic shook his head. "They are comfortable, and normally, they would recover with the aid of our medicine, but the constant assault of the incursions have stretched us to our limits. Those who have chosen to become healers have, for the most part, chosen AnimaBlast, as it offers an immediate remedy to grievous wounds." It was his turn to sigh. "There aren't enough of them, though, and we have many casualties waiting for one of our few healers who have taken Regeneration."

The one named Jessica nodded. "I can sort that out for you," she said. "How many injured do you have?"

"We have opened forty-six infirmaries, each holding around five hundred patients," Kharvic replied.

Jessica's eyes widened for a moment. "Right, so that's a lot of people to cover."

She looked up at Bob. "I cast more quickly, but..."

Bob nodded. "We can all cast regeneration; it's just slower without the System," he agreed.

Jessica took a deep breath. "We'll need guides to the infirmaries, one for each of us. Dave, Amanda, Mike, and Bob should be shown to the one furthest away, while someone should put together a path for me that leads from one to the another and so on."

Kharvic employed all of his considerable self-discipline to restrain his curiosity but ultimately wasn't able to contain himself. "Are you able to cast the Regeneration spell without having chosen it with your skill points?" He asked.

"Yes," Bob replied distractedly as he looked at the screen projected from some sort of bracer.

"Can you teach us?" Kharvic asked, his heart pounding.

"Sure," Bob agreed. "It takes time, and you'll want a real healer around to fix you when you blow yourself up, but anyone can do it with enough practice."

He looked up from the screen. "Get those guides together. I'll need a bit to get my summons out. To be clear, there isn't anyone on the ship besides the Lovar and the Shallihs?"

"Aside from yourselves, no," Kharvic replied.

Bob nodded, then stilled as his staff appeared in his hands.

Kharvic's attention was drawn to Amanda as her staff reappeared as well, and with a gesture, nearly a hundred small canines appeared. The creatures immediately rushed past the Lovar and the Dharlings, spreading out into the hallway beyond before they disappeared.

"The Ruff's will spread out and sweep and clear out to a mile and a half," Amanda said. "I'll get a notification if one of them dies, giving me the direction and the distance."

"Any chance the ship has sensors that will detect the monsters when they spawn?" Mike asked.

"There were video recorders in nearly every space, but those failed a long time ago, and our ancestors didn't judge them to be crucial to the operation of the ship," Kharvic sighed. "They had left to establish an agrarian society, and while we haven't neglected the Hurry's systems, we didn't have any spare parts for them, nor did we have the ability to manufacture replacements."

"How old is this ship?" Dave asked.

"Almost three thousand years," Kharvic replied.

Jessica let out a whistle. "Strewth, that's a fair stretch, yeah?"

"She was built to carry the hope of the Lovar to new worlds," Kharvic said. "Before the Empire weighed down our branches, our trunks were strong, and we reached for the stars."

Suddenly, the room was filled with the cacophony of dozens of furious honks as new creatures appeared.

These were some sort of avians, although rather than beaks, they had muzzles filled with rows of curved, wickedly sharp teeth, clearly meant to rend flesh. As if that wasn't enough, they had winged arms equipped with claws, and their feet had talons, three of them, the middle one being exceptionally long, slightly curved, and judging from the scratches they were leaving on the deck, razor sharp.

Kharvic noticed something else. Unlike the canine creatures, which all appeared to be perfect copies of one another, these creatures were individuals, with each one having slight variations in color or shape.

He turned his attention to Bob, who seemed to have been the person most likely to have brought these creatures into being.

Bob was smiling. Kharvic knew that it was foolish to judge the expressions of these aliens against those of his own people, but in that moment, he would have said there was something different about this smile, especially when compared to the one he'd worn before. This one seemed to hold the shadow of an almost unholy glee.

"Do not harm the Lovar or the Shallihs," Bob ordered quietly, his voice managing to carry regardless. "Now go. Purge."

Kharvic shuddered as the creatures obeyed, darting out of the room, sparing the Lovar and Dharlings that they passed speculative glances. He could almost feel the hunger and the malice radiating from those eyes. Those glances seemed loaded with unspoken meaning. 'We can't eat you, yet,' they seemed to say.

"That should take of the monsters," Bob's voice was filled with satisfaction. "Probably have to vent the atmosphere of the ship when you come back for it, though; the second and maybe the third generations should be ok, but after that, they'll revert, and people will be back on the menu."

"Bob," Mike began, slowly. "Did you just pull a Jurassic Park?"

"I did," Bob said, nodding happily.

"Aren't you, you know, not supposed to summon real dinosaurs that can have more real dinosaurs?" Jessica asked.

"Well, not on Earth or Thayland," Bob replied. "But this is a perfect opportunity to study them in a controlled environment! We have only the vaguest of guesses as to how quickly they reproduce, how long it takes them to mature, or how long they live."

"More to the point, how are you controlling them? They're real." Mike stressed the last word.

"I've got a skill for that," Bob shook his head. "Assuming each of the females lays a dozen eggs and that they don't experience any significant losses, I can handle two more iterations before I'm no longer able to control the offspring." He paused thoughtfully. "I suppose that when I reach the limit, I can just order them not to reproduce, but as we all know, Life finds a way."

"Are you sure that's the best way to do this?" Amanda asked.

Bob shrugged. "They're level five, so they can handle the monsters, and they'll hunt them down to sustain themselves."

Jessica reached up tapped Bob's nose lightly. "And you can order them out of an airlock if things go sideways, yeah?"

"I can," Bob agreed grudgingly.

It was at this moment that Kharvic wondered if maybe these people weren't already drunk on their own power.