Vraxious—Hope's End

  Vrax staggered slightly as he crept down the darkened streets, nearly dropping his bottle of wine. Jonathan and Torvald’s attempts at stealth behind him were even worse. Torvald clipped one of the gently strobing rainbow-colored planter boxes that folks had kept after Vrax’s last bender and sent it crashing into the street.

  Vrax and Jonathan both looked at a very guilty Torvald, highlighted slightly magnificently by the flowers he had just murdered. “Sorry...” He offered weakly.

  Vrax sighed and kept sneaking forward. They were almost at the church; he just needed to make it into his old room and grab the right abomination to mash together with a carrot. Why was he sneaking? Because his dad would be...less than thrilled to see him scurry off into the night slightly tipsy with an abomination in hand after the last few times.

  “Stay here,” Vrax whispered a bit harshly and pointed at the stablemaster’s picket fence. There were some rugs draped out that they could at least crouch behind. Vrax blinked hard a few times to get his vision to cooperate and then scurried forward through the shadows, bottle sloshing gently in hand.

  He clambered up the stairs and quietly eased the door open before padding through the darkness down the hall and straight into his room. The familiar shelves of plants from the Forsaken Lands greeted him, and he ducked under a few hanging pots that became much more lively the moment he drew near.

  Hmm, alright… Well, what would go well with a carrot...tentacles? Well, those go good with anything… wings? Meh… Burrowing could be funny… hmm

  Vrax slowly started examining plants in the room one by one. He paused at one of his favorites. It was short, round, and stubby, covered in gently gyrating quills, and the whole thing had a slight dusting of purple sap seeping from the same pores as the quills. A Sniper fern was its real name.

  Vrax had been calling them touch and ducks for years. If you got any of that purple sap on yourself, they would start firing quills at you like mad with disconcerting accuracy and power. He had used them a few times as traps, but honestly the quills weren’t quite powerful enough for even fending off most real predators.

  But…now… Hmm, no, no, that’s stupid. Moving on.

  Vrax slinked from one side of the room to the other, racking his brain over what would be the perfect ambush predator when paired with a carrot…or at least funny. He sighed; nothing seemed to fit the bill. His eyes fell on a single very brave snail chewing on the edges of a plant that was doing its darndest to grab it but just couldn’t quite reach.

  Huh… I mean, it would also be pretty funny if his garden tried to eat itself…

  Vrax shrugged mightily and carefully plucked the snail off of the leaf before rushing out back to his friends. They darted down the streets in a sort of quiet clamor towards Samuel’s cottage on the edge of town.

  The cottage was a neat log affair right by the town water tower and was set against the low walls. It had a much larger yard than average that was filled with beautifully maintained planter boxes in neat rows. They practically overflowed with lush beets, carrots, and even cabbage. If you didn’t know that brawler lived here, you would probably assume it was the abode of a druid.

  There was even a generous greenhouse set right against the house made from a milky glass. Everyone crouched low between his fence and an alleyway. Torvald crowded close, almost knocking Vrax through the damned fence, trying to get a look at what he had chosen for the Graft.

  “Uhh, Vrax, is that just a snail...?” He said a bit unsteadily.

  “Yes, now hold the snail; I need to go grab a carrot without waking the beast.” Vrax carefully handed off the snail to Torvald. Jonathan furrowed his brows in confusion, but at this point he was so drunk. Vrax didn’t even know how he was still tagging along. Perfect for if they had to run, though; they could leave his staggering ass behind as a sacrifice for Sam’s ire.

  Vrax dived over the fence in a less than graceful arc straight into one of the flowerbeds. The lettuce reached up to cushion his roll, and he gently slid into a tomato stalk.

  Oops, shit...thank you, talent...that would have been an embarrassing one.

  Vrax slid silently to the next flowerbed, his movements obscured by the helpful produce. He nervously glanced towards the house, but all was silent for now; the only movement was the gently wavering smoke rising from the chimney.

  Vrax searched for his quarry; with a malicious smile, he grabbed the biggest carrot he could and scurried silently back to the others. They huddled in a rough circle a few strides farther from the fence, whispering among themselves.

  Torvald handed Vrax the snail. “Do the thing!”

  “Hold the fuck on gotta change the snail first.” Vrax slurred back before taking a healthy pull off the bottle and handing Torvald the impressively large carrot.

  Vrax’s eyes lit slightly with malevolent green light, his deranged smile slightly highlighted by the unearthly green glow dancing from his fingers into the snail.

  “Give it a fucking stinger!” Jonathan suggested with a wobble.

  “Wings—everything is better with wings!” Torvald added before looking disappointedly into his empty stein.

  “Shhh, shush, you fucks, I need to concentrate,” Vrax admonished before focusing back onto the slightly squirming snail. It grew and grew in his grasp until it was nearly the size of a hound, and he had to set it down. Torvald held it in place while he continued adapting it.

  Its eyestalks languidly waved around in confusion as mucusy wings burst forth from its shell and a pair of wicked curved stingers slid free from its tail. The snail made an almost curious gurgling sound as its eyestalk looked at its new wings.

  “Eyes, it needs more eyeballs!” Jonathan said in excitement before just giving up the battle with gravity and sitting down in the alley.

  Vrax’s smile grew as more eyestalks sprouted along the creature at uneven intervals, each independently, curiously looking around.

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  Everyone froze as a sense of pervading danger cast itself over them. Vrax slowly looked up towards a figure less than a stride away that had been standing there for gods know how long. A pair of slitted, slightly reflective vampiric eyes stared straight at him with curious bemusement.

  “Vraxxxxx….what…are you doing?” Mr. Abernathy’s dry, sand-like voice scratched out barely above a whisper.

  Vrax met the eyes with exaggerated slowness; Jonathan had frozen up and just kept drunkenly mumbling, ‘Is that a fucking vampire?’. Torvald was slowly edging away from Vrax.

  “I, uh, wee…well…snail…carrot…” He said with far more slur than he would have liked and gestured from the carrot held in Torvalds’s hands down to the eldritch snail whose eyes nearly reached his chest.

  The vampire made a long wheezing sigh that sounded like a punctured lung and went on for far, far too long. “Keep it away from my hedges…” He said threateningly and then was simply gone; not a single one of them even saw him move. The pall of death that arrived with his presence slowly faded with his blessed absence.

  Vrax let out a breath and gestured for Torvald to hand him the damned carrot.

  Jonathan sputtered from his drunken heap on the ground, “What? What the fuck was that? Was that a fucking true vampire? What the shit, guys!?”

  “Shhhh! Yeah, that’s Abernathy; don’t fuck with his hedges.” Vrax said curtly, trying to figure out how to hold the carrot so the snail wouldn’t snag it.

  “Yep, pretty solid math teacher. Don’t fuck with the hedges.” Torvald agreed.

  “Im, Im not going to go near his anything! “That’s a fucking vampire, a real-life goddamned killing machine. I thought they were fucking myths, all dusted in the last age of fucking strife,” Jonathan stuttered out, absolutely horrified.

  “Yeah, Mr. Abernathy doesn’t like to talk about his dark years; he says it makes him want to drink.” Torvald said sadly.

  “Drink what!?”

  Vrax turned away from the panicking form of Jonathan and back to his work. There was a dull flash of green light that slowly grew as mana coursed from Vrax. The Carrot dematerialized into a green mist as mana fled from Vrax and passed down into the snail. Its form rolled and bubbled as violent changes happened.

  [Mana 40/306]

  Geeezzee, my drunk ass didn’t wait long enough. I nearly knocked myself out with a goddamn carrot shoulda waited longer for my mana to regenerate.

  The Snailcrot sat completed next to the three stunned friends. It…was very…orange. The wings had turned into layered green carrot leaves, and the shell looked like it was carved from the flesh of a plant. Overall, its shape hadn’t even changed much; it just took on the colors and fleshy characteristics of a carrot…but with way too many eyes and leaf wings.

  “Huh…” Torvald gave it a cautious pet.

  Vrax looked at it with a cocked head. “Dunno what I was expecting, but...well, honestly, this should have been it.”

  “ Jonathan slurred up from where he had laid down fully in the alley, “So what now?”

  “I guess we just? Put it in the planter box?” Vrax shrugged and heaved the snail up with a small grunt; even with his enhanced strength, this thing was damned heavy. The snail flailed weakly, dripping a viscous orange sap-like slime all over Vrax as he staggered back into Sam’s yard.

  Vrax heavily set the Snailcrot on top of a patch of lettuce with far more of a grunt and thud than he meant to. Almost instantly the sound of fast movement and a door latch could be heard. Vrax flung himself as far as he could into a thick patch of cabbage along the fence line, rolling deeper and praying as his talent caused it to wrap almost protectively around him.

  He could hear the other two curse and the sounds of Torvald dragging Jonathan slightly deeper into the alley. Vrax held his breath as the door was thrown open with a horrific amount of force. And the house's absurd occupant flashed out into the yard, fists balled, wearing nothing other than a pair of unfortunately tight undergarments.

  Sam was the counterpart to Torvalds, tall and gratuitously muscled. The man was noticeably short, and his musculature was so freakishly lean it was practically shredded sinew. He dashed in a slight haze of mana as fast as an arrow from a bow straight from his door to the snail in less than a heartbeat. His hand crackled with energy as he brought it down in a devastating chop that stopped at the last second as his sleep-addled mind finally caught up with what was currently slowly rummaging around in his planter box.

  “What, the what? What in the seven hells are you? Did you wander out of the damn woods?” The Snailcrot’s panicked eyes whipped around for a moment looking for escape before it did something unexpected. Even Vrax was stunned.

  It just closed its eyes and extended roots down into the planter box, roughly settling in with the other carrots in a terrified quiver. Sam’s fierce features softened a bit. “Daw, sorry, lil…whatever the fuck you are, I didn’t mean to scare you so bad… you just looking for a snack?” He gave it a probably too hard friendly pat that nearly uprooted it before grabbing a small bushel from a nearby planter box that was slightly overflowing.

  “Hey, you like chives? I got way more of these than I know what to do with.” The Snailcrot curiously opened an eye as Sam waved the bushel by its mouth. More and more of its eyes cautiously opened before it took a tentative bite of the chives. Its eyes widened in sheer happiness.

  “Ho ho! You like those, eh?” Sam said with a chuckle and grabbed a bigger handful.

  The Snailcrot flung itself excitedly into the air, fluttering unevenly on its planty wings. “Ha, cmere”” Sam started letting the snail chase him around the yard for the chives, turning it into a bizarre game of sorts.

  Vrax’s features drooped deeper and deeper into disbelief as he watched the very scary brawler frolic with a snail in his underwear in the middle of the night. What the actual FUCK am I watching?

  Samuel handed the Snailcrot a slightly rotten tomato, which it snatched with relish. “You know… I have always wanted a dog. But well, normal ones are kind of hard to keep alive out here… You seem close enough…and well, fucking weird enough to at least be sort of durable.”

  Sam lured the snail into his house with another bushel of chives, and the last thing Vrax heard before the door closed was, “Aight, don’t have a bed for ya yet, but hmm…lemme stick a pillow in the big pot. I bet you’d fit!”

  Vrax crawled back to the edge of the alley, where the others were standing, their faces also stricken with a ‘What the fuck was that?’ expression.

  Vrax broke the silence. “None of us were ever here.”

  “Yup.” Jonathan choked out

  Torvald just looked harder at the house as the Snailcrot fluttered happily into the windowsill before sticking to the actual window itself. “Did…did we just make him a fucking pet?”

  Vrax looked at Torvald with a deadly serious expression. “WE, WERE, NEVER, HERE.”

  The next morning Vrax, Torvald, and Jonathan hunched over their table like illness-stricken plague rats. Each of them nursing a tankard with more than a little bit of healing potion added to it.

  Jonathan gagged quietly and picked at his eggs. Vrax held out a hand. “Hey, can you give me whatever you grabbed from the church?”

  “Allegedly grabbed,” Jonathan grumbled before rooting through his pack and dumping an armful of completely random papers on the table. There were letters, notebooks, and even a few scroll cases.

  Vrax looked at the mess. “Really, man?”

  Jonathan shrugged and gave a weak smile. “I’m, uh, not exactly literate, Vrax. I’m a fucking farmer…”

  Vrax started to say something quippy and stopped himself. “Fair…” he said instead and started riffling through the papers one by one. Looking for something useful. Specifically, he was hoping to find where they were planning to take the townsfolk he had saved in the north. There were a few maps that had some promising notation on them. But nothing as blatant as he hoped for, at least at first glance.

  “I’m going to have to give these to Stereos to look over; he’s great at this kind of thing. On that note, where is he, or Edward… And where the seven hells is Red?” Vrax looked around; there weren’t many in the hog’s trough at this hour. The only one of note was Martha, who was walking in the front doors, a basket of steaming confections in hand.

  Jonathan looked where Vrax was staring at her confections and stiffened. “Holy shit! Is that the goddamned bloodsoaked weaver? Vrax, man, look, she’s famous! God’s she was one of my idols when I would beg adventurers for stories as a lad!”

  Vrax chuckled. “Yeah, Martha’s pretty badass; she’s been teaching me a bit about fighting now and then when I pass through.”

  Jonathan looked utterly aghast. “How are you not better!?” Torvald choked on his ale.

  Vrax set his cup down slightly offended. “Oh, shut the fuck up.”

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