The voice echoed through my head. “Can you hear me?” it had said. Or, not really. It was more of a feeling. Like an abstract concept that I happened to recognize as having the same meaning as the words “can you hear me”.
“What the fuck,” I stood and looked around. When I didn’t see anything, I glanced over at Erani. “Did you hear that?”
She nodded, standing scanning the area as well. “Who was that?”
The voice spoke again. “Me who is speaking. Sitting in front of you.”
I looked in front of me. It was the Dryad, sitting there and staring at us with a certain intensity in her pure-white eyes.
“Are you the one doing that?” I asked her.
“Cannot understand your language,” the voice echoed in my mind. “Speak to me using mind. Not hole in your face.”
I stared at her, wide-eyed.
“Holy shit,” Erani muttered. “She can talk to us. Why’d she wait so long?”
The Dryad just looked at us expectantly.“Right,” I blinked. “We need to talk to her in our minds. How do we do that?”
“Fuck if I know.”
I pursed my lips, trying to will my words to the Dryad. I was trying to say “can you hear me?” but it didn’t seem to be working. I also wasn’t sure how I could translate my thoughts into communication, in the first place. The Dryad wasn’t speaking in words, per se, but rather in abstract concepts that carried the same meaning as those words. It was weird, and I wasn’t totally sure how she was doing that.
The way she spoke was strange, too. Even if I had to translate the communication she was sending out back into words, the way things were communicated was just… odd. Like that term ‘hole in your face’ was a literal translation for what she said. Did she not know what a mouth was? How did she not have a concept for a mouth when she literally had one?
“The bad guys not near. Safe to close eyes.”
‘The bad guys’? She must’ve been talking about the Demons. I closed my eyes like she said, trying to enter into a similar type of meditative state I had to go into to make changes to my Status. But no matter how much I mentally searched around my head, I couldn’t find any one ‘thing’ that could allow me to telepathically pass messages to another person.
Normally it’d be easy to use a System-granted ability, but it seemed it was different when it came to things that didn’t come from your Status, but rather someone else's. Not to mention that it was a monster’s ability I was trying to use.
The Dryad seemed to sense my struggle. I felt the voice again, saying “Contact me through passage opened by my speech.”
…Huh.
“You’re hearing all this?” I asked Erani.
“Yeah,” she said. “Telling you how to talk to her, too?”
“Think it’s safe? Not sure I trust random instructions being beamed into my mind.”
“I guess we have no idea. I don’t see why she would betray us after all this time, though. Seems trustworthy enough.”
“Well, there’s no danger posed if I can never figure it out,” I laughed and focused inward again, trying to find this ‘passage’ the Dryad was talking about.
“Walk to my words,” the voice spoke again. I couldn’t exactly do that physically, so it had to be a mental thing. I could tell she was getting a bit antsy by our inability to talk back.
When the voice spoke into me, though, I did notice something. Like a tiny hole in my mind that hadn’t been there before – the message was coming through it. I mentally examined it, feeling similar to the way I always did whenever I tried casting a new Spell. Poking and prodding around with my Mana sense, I tried my best to figure it out. The ‘hole’ was clearly magical and seemed to slowly close off a few seconds after I received a message through it.
Just as the hole was closing this time, I made an effort to squeeze my consciousness inside. The hole widened easily with my effort, becoming much larger than it had ever been before. Instead of a tiny pinprick that I could barely sense through, it was now a hallway I could freely walk across, connecting me to something – or someone – else.
Finally, I tried saying something. I didn’t say it verbally, of course. I also didn’t think it like I would anything else. It wasn’t me just imagining an internal monologue that approximated speech, it was more like I willed a concept through the ‘hallway’, an abstract thing torn straight from my mind and put into the hole. I did it like the way the voice had spoken to me – not with language, but with direct mental contact.
“Can you hear me?” I said.
“Yay!” The voice responded. Or maybe it was ‘hooray’? Or ‘yippee’? Anyway, it was obviously some sort of expression of excitement. Seemed like my message got through.
“Um, you are the Dryad, right? Not something else?”
“What is ‘Dryad’? The person sitting in front of you is me.”
I opened my eyes, making an effort to keep the mental connection present as I did. It seemed like it was much easier to keep open than it was to open it up in the first place. The Dryad was still sitting on the ground, staring up at me. I willed another thought through the connection. “Uh… pat yourself on the head.”
It tilted its head to the side. “Why?”
“To prove it’s you. If I’m really speaking to the Dryad, she’ll be able to hear me, and will pat herself on the head.”
Hesitantly, the Dryad raised her hand and placed it on her head. She looked at me and I got another message, “Like that?”
“Holy shit, it’s really her,” I muttered aloud.
“Wait, are you talking to her?” Erani turned to me. “I still can’t figure this shit out.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Just, it’s like, there’s this hole in your head–”
“There’s a hole in my head?” Erani reached up and rubbed her forehead, alarmed.
“No, no,” I reassured her. I was still thrown off by this whole thing. The Dryad could fucking talk?! “Not a hole in your head. A passage in your mind. A little place that the voice is coming through. If you find it and open it up a bit more, you can send your own thoughts back through.”
“You are guiding your lover in how to contact me?” The Dryad’s voice passed into my head again, startling me.
“Uh, yeah, I guess. Just trying to figure things out. Also, we’re not really officially ‘lovers’–”
“Yay! Please hurry.”
“Hey, I think I got it,” Erani interrupted my mental communication. I looked over to see her brows furrowed over closed eyes. “It’s like a pit in the floor of my mind that I can drop a message through.”
There was a silence and the Dryad looked over to Erani, seemingly responding to whatever it was that Erani said. It didn’t seem I could hear what they were saying to each other, in the same way Erani couldn’t hear me when I spoke to the Dryad.
“Your lover has contacted me!” I received from the Dryad after a moment.
“Uh, yeah, seems like it. You can just call us by our names, though.”
“Do not know your names. What I call you?”
Oh, right. I’d forgotten she wouldn’t know that. “Well, my name is…”
I stopped. How could I say my name through this form of communication? Names couldn’t really be broken down into concepts – the entire point of them was that they were arbitrary sounds we made and assigned to each person. Effectively, the meaning of my name was just… me. It was circular.
“...What’s your name? I’m not really sure how to say mine.”
“I am–” what followed was something that couldn’t really be translated to my language – or any language, I suspected. It was more of an image than a sound. A tree – a small one – sprouting out of a hard boulder. It was covered in nicks and wounds that it was in the process of healing from, but seemed to be vibrantly growing nonetheless. Surrounding it was a field of wild, long grass, striped green and blue, but in the distance, the grass was beginning to turn a dark, shadowy black.
“...Uh, yeah, I don’t think I can pronounce that out loud,” I said. “I think we’re just gonna have to stick with ‘the Dryad’.”
“Still do not know what ‘Dryad’ is.”
“Oh, it’s your species. Like, I’m a Human, and you’re a Dryad.”
“...You are a you and I am a me?”
Yeah, there was clearly some sort of communication error going on between us. “We’ll get back to the name thing. For now, back on topic. You can talk to us? Since when?!”
“Communication just made available to me. A ‘Level up’ happened. New power. Communication.”
It was hard to decipher exactly what the Dryad was saying – not only was the translation difficult, but she generally seemed to think in a strange way. Still, I could get a basic understanding of what she meant. She’d apparently Leveled up, and as a Dryad, got the option to take a new ability to communicate telepathically with people.
“Why are bad guys attacking?” Another message came from her.
“Oh, uh… let me talk to, um, the other Human.” I still didn’t know how to say out names through that communication method, so I had to speak without saying them.
“Hey, Erani,” I said aloud. The Dryad still couldn’t understand our actual speech, so we could talk privately. “Are you talking with her right now?”
She jumped at my voice, startled out of the stupor of the telepathy. After she recovered, she said, “Yeah, I am.”
“What have you said to her?”
The Dryad looked back and forth between us. She looked a bit suspicious, but she’d just have to deal with it. We didn’t know much about her, despite our travels together, so I wanted to be safe with what we said.
“Nothing much. Just introductions, basically,” she said. “Still trying to figure out how to say stuff.”
I nodded. “She just asked me why the Demons have been invading the Overworld. Should I tell her the truth?”
“Ah. Yeah, that’s a hard one.” Erani glanced at the Dryad, who was eyeing us warily. “I’m thinking yes?”
“I mean, we could always say we have no idea.”
“Yeah, but if she ever finds out, she’ll know we were deliberately hiding something from her. That’s much more likely to make her hostile than us saying up front that they’re here because they’re hunting you. It’s not like you’ve done anything wrong, anyway.”
“But that’s only if we get caught. If we don’t let her know we lied, we’re in the clear. If we tell the truth here, we could very well still catch a whip to the face. Not something I’m very keen on happening.”
“She’ll almost certainly find out. With her new ability, she could talk to anyone without us knowing – maybe even the Demons. And when she does, knowing we lied to her will pretty much guarantee she’ll attack. Or at least ditch us. If we tell her, we can come off as truthful, we can ensure she doesn’t get the stream of lies and propaganda the Demons are probably spreading, and we can tell her in a controlled environment.”
I pursed my lips, thinking. After a moment, I sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” I turned back to the Dryad, and braced myself for an attack. “...To tell you the truth, they’re here because they want to kill me. If I was gone, they’d probably leave too. But I didn’t do anything wrong or–”
“Yes, I knowthat,” the Dryad said. I could sense impatience in her tone.
“Oh,” I blinked, surprised. “...How’d you find out?”
“Bad guys had bad emotions coming from them. Anger at you. Only you. Only reason they had anger at me because I in the way. Of getting to you.”
Ah, right, her empathy. She could sense the emotions of everyone near her. I hadn’t thought it was that specific. Still, it didn’t explain everything. “Why’d you stick with us, then? If you knew you were only being attacked because you were with me, wouldn’t it make sense to just leave?”
“I am for protecting forest creatures. You live in forest. You are forest creature. Bad guys do not live in forest. Unnatural. Not forest creatures. Bad guys. You kill bad guys, so I help you kill bad guys. Even if you are mean person.”
I struggled for a moment to translate what exactly the Dryad was saying. I supposed it made sense; I’d been out here for a while, and wasn’t doing anything to harm the environment. At least, I’d done nothing compared to the Demons’ clearing out of all monster wildlife, burning down forests, and destroying habitats. So, if the Demons were the ‘bad guys’ according to the Dryad, she wanted to help me take them down. I would be the one who’d most want them dead, after all.
One thing did stick out to me in her explanation, though. “Why are you calling me mean?’”
“You have bad emotions, like bad guys. Anger at me. Fear at me. When you first met me, you nice. Wanted to help. Now you not. You think I am below you. You think I like other things you kill. Something to use. You do not want to kill me. But you would not save me if I dying like you did before. If save me would hurt you, you would not do it.”
“Um… sorry.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. I had no idea her empathy was so strong. Even I wasn’t fully aware that my perspective of her had shifted so much. I’d been so focused on my own survival, maybe I’d stopped thinking about how my actions affected her and could shape her life. Sure, I felt like I had a good reason for that – I was pretty preoccupied with trying to survive – but if she was helping me, I could probably spare some thoughts to make sure I at least showed some kindness to her.
“It is okay. You practice self-preservation. Like lots of forest creatures. Your people, lots are mean. And your lover is nice. So it is okay.”
Still a bit unsure of how I could respond to what the Dryad was saying to me, I went ahead and explained our conversation to Erani – about how the Dryad had apparently known all along that the Demons were after me. Erani visibly relaxed at that.
I looked back at the Dryad and saw her glancing between us.
“So,” she said, “we are going where, this whole time?”