Infinite Farmer

Though they grew faster, the briars weren't as happy as they had been on their native turf, but these were fair enough conditions that Tulland didn't have to worry about them until he had the means and security to try and improve them.

"So how long until there's more fruit?" the woman asked.

"Well, right now, sort of." Tulland husked some more seeds out of the flesh of the fruit, and handed a bit over to the woman. "Hopefully that's enough for now. I have to hold some back as fertilizer. But there should be some as soon as tomorrow morning. Maybe tomorrow afternoon at the latest."

"That soon?" The woman took the food out his hand without hesitation and popped it into her mouth before continuing speaking while she was still chewing. "Don't plants… take a while?"

"They do, normally. At least they did on my world. But these briars grow pretty fast, and I make them grow even faster." Tulland dumped a bit more magical power out as he spoke. He would be trying to wake up as often as he could during the night to do the same thing now that he had two mouths to feed. "And the monster meat I'm feeding them is pretty good stuff, I hope. It should speed it up a little too."

"Monster meat helps? I can keep bringing back meat, here and there. Not all the time, but often enough," the woman offered.

"Too heavy to carry?" Tulland asked.

"No. It's just that I have to kill as many things as possible. That wolf you got is probably the last you'll see for a few days, because I've been hunting in this area so much. I need several a day to keep up on my experience goals."

"Huh. You don't get capped?"

"Capped? Sure I do. But that would take forever. Months."

"Huh."

Tulland wasn't surprised to see that warriors once again had a softer life in this place than he did. He hadn't expected the difference to be that stark. He probably had another two or three wolves before he topped out on what they could do for him. The way this woman was talking, it seemed like she'd need hundreds of them.

"So will that do it?" The big woman finished turning the soil for the secondary growing area using her sword, and had done a pretty good job of it. Tulland walked over, grabbed the Farmer's Tool, turned it into a hoe, and started working the soil himself a bit more. "Not so good, then?"

"No, it's fine. It's just that it needs to be a little finer than this, and I want to make sure the mucky soil from the swamp side of things gets mixed in. That doesn't take much strength, and I can't hardly ask you to do work I can do just as well by myself."

The woman nodded, then turned to look at the swamp trees growing nearby. She had mentioned sleeping in one that Tulland was reasonably sure she was just looking for a bed. Finding a likely one, she went up to the tree, laid her hand on the bark, looked up for closer inspection, and nodded.

"Well, time to go back to my regular size, I guess."

The woman cracked her neck, then held still as she began to shrink. Before Tulland's very eyes, she dropped down from being a good foot taller than him and maybe half again as wide across the shoulders to being small enough that Tulland almost thought of her as dainty. She seemed to notice the sudden silence as his hoe stopped tilling soil and he stood there slack jawed like a fool.

"What?" The woman glanced down at her body. "Do I have a monster on me?"

"No, it's… I mean, you just shrank. You were bigger before."

"Ha!" The girl laughed, "You mean you thought I was that big all the time? That's my battle form. It's part of my class, so I can fight."

"You can't fight like you are? I mean just the size you normally are? Why not?"

"I can, but being big is like a stat all by itself. I'm a heavy armor class, which means I need a lot of reach and leverage to keep things off of me. It wouldn't be fair if I had to fight at this size all the time." She waved her still-muscular but much smaller arms generally over her body. "I'm tiny. No reach."

"Ah." Tulland nodded like he understood what the girl was saying. He probably did, to some extent. But the idea that she would just be able to shift sizes from normal-girl-about-his-age to a huge, battle-ready giant of a woman had thrown him for enough of a loop that he'd have to process some of this later on. "Got it. Sorry."

"You really don't know much about this place, do you?" The girl jumped up, got her hands around a tree branch, and started hauling herself up with smooth, enhanced-strength ease. "Back on my home world, coming to The Infinite was the big dream."

"You seem young to have made it."

"That's what I'm saying. I'm not. I trained in a temple for a long time. I know hundreds of classes. I know thousands of skills and every bit of intelligence our System could smuggle out of this place. You don't even know that small people with heavy classes get to adjust themselves to make things fair. It's like your world didn't send people at all."

"I don't think they did." Tulland sighed, stowed his tool, and went to find a tree for himself. Soon, hopefully tomorrow, he would be able to start building out a much bigger hedge around his farm that would let him sleep on flat ground. Today, he would just have to copy whatever the woman seemed to be doing. "At least I never heard a story about anyone coming here on purpose. Maybe it was because my world's System was defeated. I don't honestly know."

"We aren't going to figure it out tonight anyway." The woman was up in the branches now, laying in the gap between two particularly large branches growing from a central fork. Her feet were pressed up against the bark of the trunk, and she looked relatively secure there, like a human bird crammed into the branches. Tulland tried to accomplish the same thing and was much less successful, circling the trunk several times before finding a similar if much less secure position to settle down into.

It was easy to get sleepy after that. As the last of the light leeched out of the air around them, Tulland groggily wondered why it stayed so warm here. Not that it always would, he thought, but at least in the last two zones the idea of being chilly wasn't really a thing he had to consider.

"Hey, you." The woman rustled in her branch a bit, now invisible through the darkness and leaves. "I have a question."

"Me too. Maybe we can trade?"

"Sure."

"Then go ahead." Tulland adjusted in his branch. "I'm all ears."

"You never asked for my name. Even after you saw I wasn't a huge battle-monster of a woman. Most men would have, by now. Why haven't you?"

"Oh. That." Tulland turned a little red in his tree. He wasn't usually afraid to talk to women, and that was true here too. But the blunt grouping of him with most men in that way put a new angle on things. "I don't know you, and I don't know the world you are from. And, frankly, you could take me in a fight if you wanted to. I didn't want to poke at a hornet's nest before I understood things better."

"I don't think our worlds are that different really. At least from how you act. And it's normal to ask for someone's name back on my world. I'm guessing it's the same way as your home." He heard her shift a bit more in her branch. "I'm Necia, by the way. Necia, the champion of Iroth."

"Impressive."

"Nope. There's a new champion every year. It just means I beat out the other local kids in a mock fight. I thought I was pretty tough stuff. Now yours," Necia said.

"My question? I'm…"

"No, damn you. Your name. I can't keep calling you 'you, over there' the entire time if we are going to be working together."

"Right. It's Tulland. Tulland Lowstreet."

"Lowstreet?"

"It meant something once. I guess there was a city with two main streets, and ours was the one by the river. Back when that city existed, and the family was important." Tulland yawned. "These days, there's a lot of Lowstreets. I never met one that mattered much."

Necia laughed over in her tree.

"What?" Tulland asked.

"Tulland, from what you've told me, I'm guessing that your whole world hangs in the balance based on what you do here. If you could figure out a way to make sure your System spends your accomplishments the way most Systems do, you might end up sending back enough benefit to change everything for everyone."

"If I live long enough."

"It's the same for all of us. If we live long enough," Necia said solemnly.

Tulland thought about that for a while. It raised a lot of questions in and of itself, but none that he let supplant the one he had planned.

"So, what hurt you out there?" Tulland kept his volume medium and his voice level. "Because it can't have been the wolves."

"No? Why do you say so?" Necia asked.

"Because I can fight with the wolves. Barely. And you are a battle class who is coming to this floor for the second time, right? There's no way they are a serious problem for you."

"Maybe there was more than one of them."

"Solitary hunters, The Infinite said. They don't hunt in packs."

"Well, okay. Fine. It's a bit embarrassing, though."

Tulland laughed a bitter, salty laugh. "Yeah, I bet it is. You are talking to the guy who has to garden things to fight for him."

"Point taken. If you must know, I fell into a Badland Ant pit."

"Ants? Ants did this?"

"Ants the size of a small child did this. A dozen or more ants the size of a small child within arm's reach." Necia's voice carried a hint of frustration Tulland thought might have been aimed at him, the ants, herself, or any combination of the above. "When they're hitting you from every side at once, there's not much you can do. At least there wasn't much I could do."

"How did they even get you surrounded in the first place? Are they that fast?"

"Nope. Good endurance, and can chase you forever, but not that fast. I made a mistake. I went down in one of their pits."

"They have pits?" Tulland asked. "I don't know why, but a monster with its own pit sounds even more terrifying."

"Unless it's a peach, yeah. But yes, they have little pits, about twice as wide as you are tall, and I figured I'd go down into one instead of waiting for all of the ants to come out of it. I thought I was being very smart and that I'd save myself a lot of time."

"Ouch. And that didn't happen at all."

"No. But hopefully, we'll make it back. You weren't lying about those fruits, right? We should have some tomorrow?" Necia asked.

"Yes. Although I'd appreciate it if you left the seeds for me. I'd like to grow as much as I possibly can. And please do bring back wolf meat if you can. And dead ants, if you can get it safely," Tulland said.

"No problem. You give me the food, and I'll get you the fertilizer. Seems like a good enough deal."