“James?” Mina called again.
“Oh, I’m here,” James replied in a loud, clear voice. “Sorry, I was just watching you standing there, framed against the light. Looking like an angel.”
Mina stepped through the doorway, shaking her head, slightly flustered but smiling. James lay there, clearly wide awake, watching her.
I guess I don’t need to worry about waking him up, at least, she thought.
Mina stood with a hand on the doorsill, bracing herself against it. Was there a monster in here? Something had changed about the room, and she was slightly worried about walking into some sort of surprise. Perhaps something that James would have forgotten all about already.
Then it hit her what must have happened, improbable though it seemed.
“Did you rearrange the room?” she asked after a moment.
“Oh.” James chuckled. “I just moved the mirror.” He seemed to twitch his chin slightly—his body was clearly still mostly immobile—and Mina saw a small platform standing in front of the bed sink into the floor. Then the only object out of place was her full length mirror, which had been moved to the platform somehow.
So, he can at least use magic again. He has recovered a little, at least.
She had come to heal Zora, rather than James, but she wondered if he might give her permission to try Laying on Hands on him again. If she could help him recover even a little more quickly, the whole Kingdom would be more secure, and he could help heal Zora himself.
She wondered how to broach that subject.
“If you needed the room redecorated, you could have asked me, you know?” Mina said lightly. “You’re supposed to be resting!”
“I am,” James acknowledged. “And I have been. I was just rearranging my Status screen. I also needed to look at myself in the mirror for a bit.”
Mina raised an eyebrow at that and thought about questioning it, then shook her head again. He was just being vain, I guess?
“It’s easy to forget that before the System, you had almost as much clothing as me,” she said at last.
James shook his head. “That’s nothing to do with—what did you want to discuss, exactly?”
“A couple of things,” Mina said. “First, something about your son.”
“Oh, my son,” James said, grinning. “What sort of trouble is he causing, then?”
Mina couldn’t help but return the smile. Yes, that is what I mean by calling Junior your son…
“It’s not exactly trouble. It’s…” She searched for words. “Well, he started refusing the breast.”
James’s expression changed in an instant. “Is he sick? I haven’t blessed him yet. Maybe if you bring him over…”
“No, no blessings until you’re well!” Mina exclaimed. “He’s not sick, so don’t be worried. I should have led with that. At least I don’t think he’s sick. But you can’t be blessing people right now, skapi, you were just on death’s door!”
“Fine, fine,” James said, looking a little impatient. “What’s wrong with our son?”
“I thought it was strange that he wasn’t taking the nipple anymore, but I didn’t panic. He seemed okay. He was just holding his mouth shut, not interested in milk today. So, I asked Yulia if she noticed anything odd. She said that when she was watching him outside, she put him down, and Junior was playing in the soil. He’s been gripping things lately, you see, even though he’s just a couple of months old. It’s a little early, I think.”
James just nodded. Mina guessed that the conversation about developmental stages could wait for another day.
“So, he was digging,” she continued, “and he started pulling up earthworms. Yulia showed one to me, and its species was just, ‘Fisher Kingdom Earthworm.’ And apparently, our baby started eating these earthworms. Yulia saw it after a minute—she thinks she might have missed a few earthworms before she started to notice it—and she was naturally horrified. She tried to make him spit them out, or throw up but he didn’t—”
“Wait, what, so you’re telling me now he eats earthworms?” James asked, smiling.
Mina wanted to shake him. You’re supposed to be horrified! she thought. This is insane!
She forced herself to remain calm and restrained. “Skapi, babies do not eat earthworms. Newborns—like our son arguably still is—do not eat anything solid. They drink breast milk, or formula if the mother cannot produce enough breast milk—or some kind of substitute, maybe, in the ancient world, I don’t know—or they stave. Their stomachs are not adapted to eating meat or rice or any solid foods, let alone earthworms or bugs or something…” Mina let out a slow breath. She realized she was allowing herself to get a little worked up about this, as she had when Yulia first gave her the news.
“But our baby eats earthworms?” James said. He was not smiling as broadly before, but his lips were flirting with a smile.
Mina shook her head and pursed her lips—but finally smiled.
“Yes,” she acknowledged. “Our baby likes eating solid stuff now and doesn’t want milk anymore for some reason.”
“He’s not starving, then?” James asked.
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“No,” Mina said. “He’s not starving.”
“Cool. A lot certainly does happen when I’m not around.” He gave a very feeble, limp version of a shrug.
Mina was somewhere between pulling out her hair and bursting out laughing.
“He takes after his father,” she finally said.
James has eaten much stranger things than worms…
“Was there something else you wanted to talk about?” James asked, smiling beatifically now.
“Yes,” Mina said. “Two more things. First, I was interested in revisiting the question of who should be our first priority for healing—”
“My mother,” James said. “I’ve just been laying here observing the way my body has recovered and how my Health is behaving, and it’s healing very slowly. I think the System did something so that I will heal from my injuries supernaturally slowly in any case, sort of like a penalty for defying it. Whereas I can hear my Mom’s breathing and heartbeat, and she seems like she needs just another little burst of healing, and she’ll wake up. Please prioritize her. I’ll heal in my own time, and I’m in no danger in my present condition. I’ve just been improving my defenses.”
Whatever you say, skapi, she thought. I suppose you know best about this.
“Okay,” Mina said softly. “Sounds like you’ve thought of everything. The last thing was something specifically for me.”
“Go ahead,” James said. He looked completely unperturbed by her previous question, which only added a sense of finality to his answer.
Mina first walked over to the door and closed it, then sat down at the end of the bed by James’s feet, facing away from him, before she began to speak.
She felt strange about this conversation, and she did not want James to start reading into her facial expressions and forget about what she was asking him.
“I am at the point of Race Evolution,” she said. “Ever since the Dungeon, I’ve been ready. But we went straight from there into you sending the army out, and then the System tried to kill you… Before I evolve, I wanted your tips on what to do. I’ve asked a couple of other people, and I understand that for the Race Evolution, I will be temporarily transported to another plane of existence. I will not be able to return here and consult you about my options, so I wanted to know what you think about this in advance. You have already gone through it, and I picked my initial Class based on a discussion with you, after all. So, what are your thoughts?” She finished her question breathlessly and placed her hands on her knees, trying to contain her mixture of excitement and dread. The more she had thought about Race Evolution, the more she had anticipated it, but her feelings were not all positive.
She had heard disturbing stories from the few people she had asked about it. Hilda had mentioned someone she encountered who had suddenly evolved into an Elemental and tried to kill his former acquaintances. And Alice had visited the apartment to see Zora, during which Mina learned that someone in Alice’s Orientation had chosen to evolve into an Ogre. The change had made the man moodier, more aggressive, and volatile. Mina was less certain now that she would be given options she would find acceptable.
She had not just been waiting for James to wake up and give her advice; she had been stalling after a fashion, making an excuse to put off the dangerous choice.
James nodded thoughtfully and lay there thinking for a few seconds before he answered.
“I would pick something humanoid, please,” he said. “Ideally something that is not hideously ugly.” He smiled. “It’s hard to imagine you being anything other than cute, but please don’t pick Reptilian if it gets offered.”
“Reptilian?”
“It was a choice I was presented with. Would have made me like a human lizard. The other options I was given were Dhampir—that’s a half-vampire, half-human—Ogre, Wraith—”
“Like Sister Strange and her siblings,” Mina murmured.
What put that in his option set?
James grimaced. “Yeah. I’m glad I declined that one. You have to consume souls to live. Anyway, the last two options were Evolved Human and Evolver Human. I don’t recommend the former option, because it caps your potential. It’s okay if you pick something that isn’t actually human. Think about your growth before everything else. You’re just starting to catch up with me now.” His tone straddled the line between encouraging and teasing. “It would be a shame if you gave up the race.”
Mina chuckled and turned back to look at him. “Skapi, you’re so competitive.”
“Says the person who refuses to play board games because she can’t stand to lose at anything.”
“No, it was because you and your family are too intense! You play like it’s life or death.”
James gave another one of those strange shrugs that looked incredibly weak, almost boneless. “Get good or get out,” he said jokingly.
“Before we get completely distracted, did you have any other actual advice for me? I want to do the Race Evolution today. I haven’t been gaining additional levels, but I’m eager to take more opportunities to level up. I feel like I’ll be safer once my body isn’t as weak.”
“I wish I could actually see your options,” James said. “But as for generic advice, I just recommend staying relatively humanoid, and I would suggest thinking about what kinds of Stats you need for the type of fighter you want to be. You’re a Witch of Thessaly now, so even if you’re worried about being physically tough, a Race Evolution that doesn’t boost your Will or Intelligence probably doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, thank you for the advice,” Mina said doubtfully.
“There’s one more thing,” James added. “The process is painful. Physically painful. Like your body is being torn apart and rebuilt from the ground up. But it’s also necessary.” His voice turned tender. “I might not always be there to stand between you and danger, and if you’re on your own, you have to be able to protect yourself and the baby. If you don’t evolve, you’re just going to fall behind all the people who do.”
Hilda had mentioned the pain, but Mina had already glossed over it in her mind.
“I pushed a child out of me, you know,” she said, repeating her internal thought process on the subject.
“That’s true,” James replied with a wink. “I wasn’t there, but it’s famously the most painful thing a person can endure, right? I don’t know why I doubted you. You’ve got this.”
“All right,” Mina said, nodding resolutely, suddenly feeling very confident. “I’ll go and do it.”
She rose from the bed, but James’s voice held her for a moment longer.
“Wait,” he said. “Why not do it here?”
“Oh. I guess I had it in my head that I would get comfortable first, but you’re right. That’s kind of silly. I won’t be here, per se, will I?” Mina said.
“That’s right,” James agreed. “Do it in here, please? I’d like to see you—to be the first one to see you—when you come back.”
Mina’s mouth stretched in a big smile, and she walked over to the head of the bed, next to James. Then she bent down and kissed him tenderly on the lips.
“You made me feel a lot better about this, you know?” she said.
“It’s what I do,” James said, with a cheeky grin.
Mina straightened up and shook her head slightly.
Then she pulled up her last System alert with a thought.
[A Race Evolution is available. Review? Y/N]
Mina selected Y before she could think any further about it, and the world around her instantly faded to black.
But it was not the same sensation as being in a room with the lights turned out. There was a feeling of vast emptiness all around her.
And Mina realized that she did not know where her body was. She could not feel her hands and feet. Something about the place—maybe the fact that it was a void-like space, vast and empty—made her want to shiver, but she did not even know for certain whether she was cold or warm.
So, this must be the place…