First Friend

The train shook, jolting me awake. I rushed to the cab and pulled the throttle, still half-asleep, and in my ‘conductor pyjamas’. For these past four days, the same giant centipede that’d attacked me on my first day had been stalking me.

I rubbed the bags under my eyes and checked the rear-view mirror.

Sure enough, there it was, in all its purple glory, chasing after the empty cargo cart at the back. Its mandibles twitched hungrily, and its eyes glinted with malice.

“Go find something else to eat!” I opened the locomotive window and shouted at it.

I wasn’t sure if it’d heard me, but soon enough it vanished in a train of thin sand. I sped away, back into the field of parallel dunes.

This had become a routine. Whenever I took a stop, to try and look for people, to scavenge for supplies in the houses partially buried in the sand, or to chase after puppy-sized mites to grind for EXP, the centipede would always catch up to me. It didn’t help that aimlessly wandering was all I could do with no way of permanently marking the landscape and delimiting its potential territory in some way.

I sighed, and was about to go get some breakfast - rice crackers with peanut butter - when a pillar of green light broke the uniform yellow horizon line. It was quite far ahead, 50 or so kilometres if I were to just estimate.

People!

I hastily changed the direction of the train towards the pillar of light. It looked like a flare, and it was quickly followed by two short vertical bursts of green light, and then one long burst that remained in the sky for several minutes.

People for sure!

In full throttle, it took me almost an hour to reach where the flare had come from. It’d vanished from the skies, making it extremely hard to navigate. When I got into the correct area, I slowed down my train. I drove very slowly, hoping it’d be sent out again.

When I realised it wasn’t going to happen, I stopped the train. Before leaving, I filled my pocket with potions and some supplies.

A perfect way to get robbed if whoever’s out here isn’t nice…

I shook my head. That was a possibility, but I couldn’t leave someone I suspected needed help in that situation, and even if it were a person with bad intent -

I have this!

< Combat gauntlet. >

My conductor glove changed shape to become like the gauntlet of a plate armour. Except it was larger and heavier-looking, with vaguely geometric motifs flowing through the metal itself. It was the perfect weapon against all these nasty giant insects with their tough carapaces, and I had spent some time over the past days acquiring minor resistances and buffs for it.

“Hello!” I yelled, hopping out of the locomotive.

My shoes had changed into the boots from the armour from the other day. They were just as light as any shoes, and reached up to my knees, preventing any sand from getting in. They left deep footprints that’d take several days for the winds to erase, which led from the train to the crest of the tallest dune.

“Hello?” I yelled again, at the top of my lungs.

I hadn’t realised it, but I had entered a new region. The dunes here were like wavy lines, from crescent dunes colliding with each other. They were quite tall and made of thinner sand. By the time I’d yelled out a third time, sand had already accumulated over my feet, and I had started sliding down.

With no better solution in mind, I walked along the crest.

My train fit quite nicely in the wavy valley between this dune and the one on the right. On my left, there were more of these irregular dunes, and it was hard to see anything from in between them.

Is that - earth?

I slid down the slope on my left and picked up a chunk of brown earth. It was smaller than my fist, and its brown colour and rich smell contrasted with the sand around me. It was dry, but held together by tiny dead roots.

I frantically glanced around and saw more. They were scattered as if dropped from somewhere.

But where did it come from in the first place?

That was when I heard a very faint metal clang. I held my breath. Another came a few moments later. I listened for a few more. They were a bit irregular, but to someone who’d grown up in an earthquake risk area, they sounded like someone tapping - a knife on a plate or something like that - for help.

“I can hear you, I’m coming!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

A gust of wind picked up, drowning out the tapping, but it’d come from the same direction as the chunks of soil.

I ran over a dune, then over another, and almost rolled down its side.

“Hey, hey!” I called out.

The sand here had been completely blasted away, and in its place was a large crater, over four meters deep. The smell here was horrid; it was like that of rotting fish and bits of vegetables forgotten in the sink over a holiday. The bits of black carapace scattered around made it easy to deduce what’d happened.

A person lay to the side of the centre of the crater. They had a dagger in one hand and had been tapping with it over a large bow that’d been planted into the ground. Judging by the drag marks, just that had taken them a lot of effort to get to.

“I’m here, I can -” I was about to say help, but that was when I finally came close enough to notice that the person had four arms and horns poking through light-orange braided hair.

Is she a monster? Will she, too, try to eat me?

No, that was a silly train of thought.

I could see her grip on the dagger tighten, as she was probably having the same thoughts as me. This was a first contact situation, and I needed to be on my best behaviour.

“I’m going to flip you over, and then I have a potion against the paralysis, yeah? Okay …” I wasn’t sure who I was trying to reassure at that point, the monster girl or myself.

I knelt by her, remembering the first aid training I took for extra credit last spring break. At first, I wasn’t sure which of her arms to move first; the top or the bottom set, but eventually I figured it out.

There was a long, awkward moment of mutual weary stares when we made eye contact. Uneven orange bangs fell across her blue, iris-less eyes. Horns about five centimetres in length grew from her forehead and almost looked like those you’d wear for a Halloween costume. Her skin was a dark sandy tone, and was the most human thing about her. She was wearing a bloodied tube top and a long flowy skirt -

Blood?!

I snapped out this mutual exchange of scared looks and hastily reached for the anti-venom potion.

It took a second for it to work, but the girl eventually coughed and pushed herself away from me, pressing her hand over a deep wound just under her collarbone where sand had clumped up over blood.

“Here,” I handed her a potion which the god had labelled as ‘all-purpose healing’.

Still catching her breath, she glanced up and clumsily took the potion with her lower right arm.

“So you killed one of those giant scorpions, huh?” I tried to start the conversation.

I could have asked her how she was doing, but I could clearly see that she wasn’t okay. I could have also asked her about her appearance, and if humans like me existed in this world, but that would have been rude.

She examined the vial, sniffed the red liquid inside it, and then drank it. She winced as the wound on her chest started to close.

“Three,” She turned towards me with a grin.

“Huh?”

“I killed three,” She put two arms over her hips, and rubbed her nose in a wannabe humble manner. With her top right arm, she wiped the last of the sand off her wound.

I wasn't sure which of her arms to follow, and an awkward pause formed again. “I'm Medina, Medina Stalla,” the girl introduced herself. “Thanks for helping me out. I was starting to lose hope that anyone would come, and I was saving my last charge for the night.”

Medina tapped a wide bracelet on one of her wrists. It was made of gold, with space for three gems in it. Two of the spaces were empty, and a large emerald filled the third.

Then she looked at me curiously and extended a hand. Then another. Then two more.

Hah, good one!

“Chiyo Hara,” I picked one at random to shake. “And you're welcome. I got stung by one of those atrocities a few days back. I know how much it sucks.”

“Heh,” Medina smirked. “I like you, Chiyo, you're nice for a human.”

So there are other humans around here!

“Well, if there is one thing my grandmothers taught me, it's how to hand-make sweet chilli paste and manners,” I grinned in return.

“Wise women,” Medina replied. “That’s two things, though,” She winked.

She pushed herself up in the direction of her bow. It looked like she was about to collect her weapon and leave.

“Wait-”

Medina wobbled and almost lost balance. I jumped up just in time for her to catch herself onto me with both right arms.

“Couldn't go anywhere even if I wanted to,” she said. She had a smile on her lips, but she sounded very beaten.

I helped her back down, and we made small talk about the weather and the desert. She didn’t seem well enough for me to bombard her with questions, and even if that hadn’t been the case, I wouldn’t have known where to start.

After twenty minutes or so, she got up again.

I watched her collect her weapons and what turned out to be parts of her armour scattered around the crater as I thought over the idea of inviting her to my train. I never got to make a decision.

“Here,” she said, tossing to me three yellow gems in quick succession.

I glanced at the penny-sized rough-cut yellow quartz.

“What's this?”

“A little thank you for the potions,” Medina winked.

She looked quite pretty with her shoulder pads and forearm grips on. The setting sun shining through loose strands of hair gave her a magical aura. If it’d had my camera, this would have made for an excellent shot.

“Ah, thanks?” I wasn't sure what to do with these. And my face did a poor job of concealing that.

“Sell them to the Merchant's guild, silly,” Medina grinned. “Or embed them into your gauntlets, that'll look quite pretty,” she added.

Then she jogged out of the crater, sliding on the edge where sand had encroached onto the earth, and regaining her balance again.

“Wait!” I called out.

“What is it?”

“Will you be alright?” I couldn't help but worry. It was getting dark, and she'd barely recovered, not even a few minutes ago.

The girl chuckled. It was surprising how genuine she sounded.

“Yes, yes, don't you worry your pretty human head over me. I have a home to get back to.”

Her eyes narrowed as she said those words, as if expecting some reply from me. But all I could think to ask, before she'd run off for good, was:

“Do you know which way the nearest village is?”

Her eyes widened in surprise, and she muttered something about lost girls before extending an arm to the left.

“About a day's travel that way, you'll find Mitterberg. A day and a half south is Grimcroen,” she gestured behind her with another arm, “and Arkkon is your best bet after that, four days or so down west. If you get back on the road, it will be safe, there aren't any more monsters in the area, thanks to yours truly,” she bragged again.

“You were unconscious in a crater!” I retorted. I'd known her for about half an hour, but something told me she would get into this kind of situation again.

“Bye, Chiyo Hara,” she yelled, before sliding down the other edge of the crater and out of sight. “I'll remember you,” she added, only quietly enough for her to hear.