Tales of Midbar: Secret Priest

“Art thou him?” asked the young nibey, staring at me with a look of anger and hatred.

“Who, whom, thou?” I asked.

“The anav mollusk Dwendra leftest me for!”

“Keepeth calm and let him speaketh!” said the older nibey.

“I knoweth not what Dwendra done hath,” I said, realizing Dwendra didn’t use that grammatical construction, it was from a different period.

The young nibey looked at me, clearly confused.

“Last we didst heareth,” said Mountain, “Miss Bedri wert planning forto marry a priest. We doth not knoweth what transpired when she arrived here. We hath discovered something important that may changeth her plans.”

“She weret very angry and said she didst needeth to marry an anav!” spat the young nibey.

“She didst maketh it clear she needed the anav to beeth a priest,” said the older nibey.

“Art thou a Yohoist priest?” the young nibey asked me.

“No.”

“Canst thou tell us her present location?” asked Mountain. “All we wisheth is to giveth her our new information and, if she wishes, discusseth its significance.”

“It wast her the Nuharas didst see passeth through the time warp,” said the older nibey, “not Nuhar Zorg. She doth belieth she mayest useth it again to travel unto the future and that wast her plans when she departed from us.”

“We do not knoweth how she doth plan to infiltrate Zorg’s palace and useth the time warp,” said the young nibey. He looked at Beauty and said, “I suppose thou art a Winemaker?”

“Yes,” said Beauty.

The young nibey snorted in disgust.

“I suggesteth thou findeth a nibeyah Holy Woman,” said Beauty. “I art sure thou hath many.”

“We shalt investigateth this time warp,” said Mountain.

The next morning was weird. I’d had a long day in what should have been the night. After leaving the temple, we’d visited a junk heap, salvaged a number of devices and hidden them in the desert. Then we’d returned to our time, retrieved the devices and taken them to the Vineyard. I’d made quite a lot of money from this, even after paying Mountain back. However, I had been told to avoid making a habit of this, there were other ways for anavim to make money that didn’t require time travel, such as transporting small items from sephirot where they were common to sephirot where they were rare.

I still hadn’t found Dwendra or had sex.

I came downstairs to find Yoldasia using a device to talk to somebody. She seemed rather cross. She finished the conversation and put the device away. “If you have a problem, come to us!” she snapped at me. “Don’t go crying to Haprihagfen!”

“All right,” I said. Attan wasn’t in ear shot so I added. “Only anavot seem willing to have sex with me but almost all of them belong to Haprihagfen and are only allowed to marry other Haprihagfen and only have sex within marriage. What are you going to do about it?”

“You could have had Miandri but you fornicated that up!” she screamed.

“She’s still alive. Is she upstairs? She’ll miss school.”

“No! You’ve missed your chance now you fornicating moron!”

“This isn’t solving my problem.”

“You fornicating sort it out! You can’t go through life expecting us to fornicating do everything for you!”

“You caused the problem!”

“It’s not my fault if you can’t fornicate a horny teenager!”

“Actually, you’ve only given me one chance, didn’t explain the situation to me beforehand, and then Narblo fornicated it up for me.”

“We’ve only got your word for that!”

“They got the blood type from the seamen that was in her, I’m sure they could check DNA. Oh, it’s sports day isn’t it? I’m going out!” I started heading for the front door.

There weren’t any lessons on sports day and attendance was optional. As I wasn’t in any of the sports and wasn’t interested in watching, I didn’t bother showing up.

“Where?” asked Mum.

“To try to solve my own problems if you’re not going to!”

“No, you can’t!” said Mum.

“Which is it? I solve my own problems or you’re going to do something?”

“Yoldasia!” said Mum.

“What the fornication do you expect me to do?”

“Well ...” said Mum, flapping her arms as if she was trying to fly.

“What’s he going to do anyway. He’s a fornicating wimp, he hasn’t got the testicles to actually do anything. He’s not going to actually fornicate anybody!”

First thing to try, teleport forward in time two days (so I wouldn’t get into a mess with my last bit of time travel), visit every doghouse in the various Midbar sephirot and see if anybody knew anything about Dwendra. I found Egrindreth and Vrenloa having lunch with some other young anavim in the dog house of Beit Asher. This Beit was unusual in that it consisted of a number of boats and floating platforms moored as part of a floating city on the Small Sea of sephir Midbar-Teradriel. The slegim were eating on the deck of a large but rather old looking boat.

Perhaps I should say Egrindreth didn’t live in Hecrin, as a slegmet she was wandering round the various Midbar sephirot until she joined a clan or helped found one.

“I’m not allowed to help you!” she said.

“You can help Dwendra by telling me where she is. When she is? Don’t tell me something I might want to change!”

“Last I heard she was trying to get Tom to help her leave Midbar,” said Vrenloa.

“What?”

“He’s this sleg who’s obsessed with getting off the planet,” said Vrenloa, “but I don’t think any sephir has spaceships that are easy for humans to use, at least not humans who aren’t from that sephir.”

“This fish has an interesting taste,” said Egrindreth.

“Can you give me an actual location?”

“Sephir Ceralargan,” said Vrenloa, “Sorry that’s the best I can do but I think Tom’s in astronaut school, that should narrow it down.”

“Ceralargan, which one’s that?”

“My home sephir,” said Vrenloa and a weird, transparent bird, or perhaps a flutter, appeared on her shoulder. I’d seem some similar things during my teleportation training and I remembered they were a type of magic found in one sephir.

“The one where they use this weird magic for everything and most people look kind of like bennis,” said Egrindreth.