Chương 396: (389) 6.3. What’s With the Look?

They found Pluck standing at the edge of the main cloud, his arms crossed in the manner that allowed the avisul to wrap their leathery wings around themselves. He was so busy looking down at something, he didn't even notice their approach until Telin hopped up and batted the younger avisul on the head with his own wings.

"Pluck, we have guests!" the elder wheezed, causing Pluck to jump.

"What, more of them?" Pluck asked, too distracted to even bother pretending like the old avisul's blows hit harder than an errant feather. But the moment his eyes landed on them, he smiled.

"Vin! It is good to see you again! Same to the rest of you."

"Hey, Pluck," Vin said, giving the avisul a gentle wave. Like many of the different races scattered across Edregon, the avisul weren't really ones to shake hands. They preferred waving and flapping their wings at one another, and seeing as Vin didn't have wings of his own, that left him with only one option.

"Is everything alright? We're here to hopefully take a human off your hands."

"Well thank the winds for that," Pluck snorted, turning to look off the edge of the main cloud once more.

"He's right there. Help yourself." Curious, Vin walked over to the edge of the main cloud, proud of the fact that his heart only skipped a slight beat as he looked down. Roughly a hundred or so feet down and to the east was a trailing cloud only a fraction of the size of the main cloud. This one seemed to be filled with those tiny ponds that the avisul grew what Vin had been informed was called skyweed out of, which was a plant they both consumed and turned into their own clothing somehow.

And standing in the center of all the ponds was a man brandishing a large knife, shouting angrily up at the scattered avisul lazily flapping around in the sky as they watched the show down below. Based on how the man wavered and how hoarse his throat was, it wasn't hard to guess how long he'd kept this up for.

"Has he been shouting like this since yesterday?" Vin asked.

"Yep. Scared a few of our Farmers half to death when he appeared out of nowhere, and then he nearly gutted one when they tried to calm him down," Pluck said, frowning down at the still-screaming Earther.

"None of us can understand him, and he clearly can't understand us, so we evacuated that farm cloud and have been monitoring him ever since. I'm glad you showed up because we were in the middle of another harvest, and it's not good to let the skyweed soak for too long once it's finished growing."

"Sorry. It's hard to explain, but this guy doesn't actually know that other races of beings exist beyond humans," Vin said, thankful at the very least that none of the avisul had gotten hurt.

"Give me a minute to try and explain everything to him and then we'll get him out of your hair."

"You're welcome to stay for lunch if you would like!" Telin offered, giving them a large smile.

"The eternal stew pot has been bubbling ever since you left!"

"The eternal stew pot is always bubbling," Pluck added, shaking his head.

"That's sort of the point. It's eternal, you know."

"If you're going to lead the avisul one day, you need to learn hospitality!" Telin wheezed, hopping up and down as he weakly battered his great-grandson with his wings.

"I was trying to be welcoming!"

"Why do we need hospitality? These guys are literally the only guests we've ever had!" Pluck argued, sighing as he decided it wasn't worth it.

"And I told you before, old man, I'm pretty certain I'm going to die of old age before you do."

"Nonsense! My time is drawing near. I can sense it," Telin remarked, closing his eyes and taking a shuddering breath as he turned to face the sun.

"Soon I shall join my loving wife among the clouds!"

"He's been saying that for literally forty years, according to my dad," Pluck muttered to Vin as he shook his head.

"But yeah, you're all welcome to stay as long as you want. Not like the man down there is going anywhere without any wings."

"We might take you up on that offer," Vin said, glancing at his friends and getting two indifferent shrugs in return, along with an eager nod from Lumel which made him chuckle. It was easy to forget just how much Lumel enjoyed experiencing the different cultures across Edregon and discovering new things. She had received the Mage of Discovery class upon hitting her second prestige, so that wasn't all that surprising.

"Yeah, we'll stay long enough for a bite. You guys are welcome to start eating. Seeing how violently this guy reacted to the avisul, I should probably keep this human-to-human for the moment, until I can finish explaining."

"Want any help?" Lumel asked, causing him to blink as her skin rippled and her lavender face became a completely normal, human skin tone to match his own as she utilized her Adaptive Camouflage passive. Other than their usually translucent skin, pulmon did actually look pretty much identical to humans. They breathed through their gel-like skin, so they didn't even have gills despite being a purely aquatic race.

"I can't say I like pretending to be human because it feels disingenuous, but I'm always happy to lend a hand."

"I think I'm good, but I still appreciate the offer," Vin smiled.

"Keep a bowl warm for me!" If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. As his friends went to grab some grub, Vin turned and stepped off the main cloud without a moment's hesitation. But rather than plummet to his death down in the darkened depths, he began cloud stepping. It was a remarkably useful technique he'd developed after learning Create Cloud from the very same Cloud Whisperers living up among the avisul on another one of the trailing clouds.

By putting just enough mana into the clouds he conjured beneath his feet to keep the drain minimal, he was able to functionally walk through the air as he cast the spell again and again. The tiny clouds vanished a split second after he left them behind, creating what he'd been told was a rather impressive sight. Impressive enough to cause the screaming Earther to finally stop in his tirade, the man's eyes going wide as he spotted a human walking down through the air toward him after all this time.

"Hey there!" Vin called out, smiling as he hopped down onto the lower cloud.

"I'm Vin, an Explorer with Project Ark. I'm here to take you to the others."

"Oh thank God!" the man said, falling to his knees and dropping his large pocket knife as he all but bowed in Vin's direction. He had long, dirty hair and dark stubble across his face, and looked to be in his mid-thirties.

"I thought I was in hell!"

"If anything, wouldn't this be heaven?" Vin asked, looking around at the warm sun drifting overhead and the literal clouds they were walking on.

"Are you kidding? Do you see those demons?" the man asked, scowling as he sat back up and narrowed his eyes at the flying avisul.

"Look at those things! They're demons in every sense of the word!" Oh boy, please don't turn into some sort of human-supremacist. Vin knew he was getting ahead of himself, but he couldn't help it. While it was perfectly understandable for someone who'd never seen another sentient race and didn't understand their language to be scared of them and fear for their safety, he couldn't shake the feeling that this man went a step beyond that.

Waving a knife around and screaming was one thing, but Vin could tell there was what looked like anger in his eyes, as though the man was furious that the avisul dare not be human in the first place. If this was how he reacted to the avisul, Vin was genuinely worried the man would try to gut the very first infernal he ended up running into.

"They're not demons, they're called avisul," Vin said calmly, silently casting Mage Hand and snatching up the man's fallen knife from where it lay on the cloud. It was obvious by the almost reverence the man showed him from practically prostrating himself at his feet that the man viewed him as some sort of savior, or at least an authority figure, and Vin decided it couldn't hurt to lean into that with a few more blatant displays of magic.

The man's personal feelings didn't matter, so long as he followed the rules and didn't try to hurt anybody. It seemed his idea had some merit, as the man's eyes widened at the sight of his knife floating through the air and landing in Vin's hand, and his jaw actually dropped when Vin cast Dimensional Sheath and made the knife vanish entirely.

"This world is about as different from Earth as it could possibly get," Vin said, deciding he'd shown off enough.

"Humans are only one of the sentient races on Edregon. Beyond the avisul, there are elves, dwarves, infernals, pulmons… I could literally stand here and list a good two dozen different races, but I imagine you get the gist. What's important is that, just because you don't understand their language, you don't try to harm anyone. Understand?"

"I understand," the man said, his eyes still shining as he all but hung off Vin's every word.

"Great. Now, before we start heading back to Terra and the rest of Project Ark, why don't we start with your name and the class you picked?"

"Of course! Sorry, seeing you descend from up above like that startled me," the man chuckled, giving a small bow of his head.

"I'm Grant, and I chose the Hunter class. I was a hunter back on Earth, so it was an easy pick."

"That's good. With how large the town is getting, we can always use more food," Vin admitted. One of the nice things about Edregon was that the fragments seemed to constantly replenish the resources people took from them over time. That meant they would never run out of deer or critters running throughout their fragment, though they still needed people to actually go out and bring that food home.

That same trait also meant that their fragment would never run out of monsters either, but that was a small price to pay for magic in Vin's opinion.

"Can all the other people from Project Ark do what you do?" Grant asked, his eyes still shining as the man looked at him.

"You know, walk through the air or make things float?"

"No, I'm a bit different in that regard," Vin admitted, casting Dimensional Sheath again and tossing Grant back his knife. While he wasn't the largest fan of the new look in Grant's eyes that reminded him just a little too much like how the Bands tended to look at the statue of rebirth that they all worshiped, at the very least, the anger had bled out of the missing Earther. He didn't think the man was going to try to stab anyone anymore.

While Grant stared at his knife in awe, Vin turned and glanced up at Pluck, giving a thumbs up to the waiting avisul. Then noting Pluck's confused face, Vin rolled his eyes, shaking his head at his own stupidity. It was easy to forget that different people and cultures meant different symbols. Casting Whispering Wind instead, he made Pluck jump as he spoke directly into his ear.

"The situation is handled, he shouldn't be a threat anymore. Once we finish eating, we'll head back to our fragment."

"Gah, I always hate when the Cloud Whisperers use that spell!" Pluck grumbled, turning and waving a hand at him over his back.

"Anyway, thanks for dealing with that so quickly. I'll go let the Farmers know it's safe to go back down. You guys need a lift back up to the main cloud?" It took Vin all of two seconds to decide letting an avisul grab Grant's arms and fly them up to the main cloud probably wasn't the best idea, and he decided he could show off one last time.

"No, we should be good," he whispered through his spell.

"So long as Grant can handle falling into the sky for a hot second."