Cor destroys.
But he has a really good reason.
He destroys, and he moves.
Cor destroys.
But he has a really good reason.
He destroys, and he moves.
"I can! There's a couple of what looks like magic textbooks and then I dunno what the other one is."
"Mm..."
The stone floor sprouts a stone table so he can put two of the books down on it and open the third.
"Some guy's journal." He flips to the end. "'We can hear the fiends scratching at the door every night', wow, ominous much?"
"Very, and I perform a sort of magic that involves me chanting about fire and blood and destruction all the time."
He giggles.
"Okay..."
He spends a minute or so flipping through the journal, skimming the entries that catch his eye.
"...So, this guy's on a research project in the middle of nowhere, he complains a lot about how boring it is, he's got a crush on one of his coworkers - she sounds hot, I wonder if one of the skeletons was hers - and then the weather gets all fucked up, like, 'the last rainfall recorded on the continent was three months ago', and so now everybody's trying to figure that out... then there's fiends, and the research people hide away in their little mountain hidey hole and bar the door and spend what looks like another month or two getting really sick of each other, and then the last entry's about the fiends and I guess they got in because those skeletons were pretty fucked up."
"Could be. I don't see fiend skeletons, but maybe fiends don't have skeletons, or there weren't any in the places we've been before they starved."
"Yeah, or something. Anyway." He looks at the other two books and makes a face. "How likely is it that the magic textbooks are boring?"
"Eh, guess there's only one way to find out."
He puts down one book, picks up another, skims a bit.
"Could be worse, I guess. Looks like you do magic by painting." He turns the book around to show Cor an example diagram, neat lines and arcs drawn out carefully in coloured inks. "And you have to be really careful to get all the lines right or you'll fuck it up and maybe die or catch fire or something."
Cor gestures at himself. "It might require less exactitude but I do paint things and have to get them right. That having been said it would be irresponsible of me to take any unusual risks until I've gotten word home."
"Makes sense, I guess. It'd be too bad for your planet if you found this nice wasteland and then caught fire before you could tell everybody."
"Exactly. I mean, I told them what I was doing, but they won't consider it as promising to follow up on if I disappear."
"Ideally. I was planning, if I survived the landing, to pretty much immediately use my own blood to refresh the markings - can't be dry - since I don't have a way to bring significant cargo - and then go home. It's convenient I landed near you, since there are more opportunities afforded thereby."
"I'm pretty sure I could target where you came from, knowing now it exists. It might be a good place to park refugees temporarily to give scouts more time, even if it's not a good long-term plan, and I bet mages can help with your aliens problem if it's as described. Knowing what, generally, these books contain is helpful even if you don't feel like translating more; gives whoever else a head start. Plus you scanned a ways around and now I'm more confident than I was before that this planet is otherwise not inhabited."
"Uh, range of outcomes from 'I land somewhere random again' to 'I disappear'? Which is why I want to go home first."