Wicker Valley, episode 37: Bugs

We were a bit injured after the centipede fight. I don't what Adam and Elizabeth were up to as they attempted to heal each other, but there seemed to be some kind of argument involved. I ignored them, and called on my magic to heal Eddie.

It wasn't long after we convinced the centipede to leave that Michael showed up. I'm not entirely sure how, but I'm pretty sure he was holding a magic flower and wearing a chainmail shirt he definitely didn't have before. Apparently someone thought it was more important for him to show up to help us in the darkness than to keep him out of it. And now we were sure that the way the darkness siphoned power was at least partly through hurting people. We were going to have to protect as many of the villagers as we could.

The darkness was bigger than it had been on the previous incident, and was covering more of the town than we were expecting. We got into Vanessa and towed the floodlight into the middle of the village to try to lure the creatures away from the people with the lights. Then we had to go into the houses.

We couldn't rescue them all. Some of them were already dead. But some we managed to get to in time, and kill the creatures threatening them before getting them out of the mass of sticky web. I had Elizabeth enchant my claws before we went in and I'm glad she did.

Then Adam and Elizabeth came up with an idea. We were fighting giant bugs, which were attracted by light. Could we make a giant bug zapper?

Eddie, Elizabeth and me took Vanessa to the allotments and got out a lot of copper wire that Adam had in there for some reason. We set up a circle, connected it to the metal fence around the allotments, and began the ritual. Elizabeth acted as the focus, channelling her lightning magic into the fence, while I added my own power and Eddie balanced the flows. Once again nobody caught fire. At least, nobody we didn't want to catch fire. Once the bugs realised what we were doing, they attempted to disrupt things, but Eddie and me fought them off so that Elizabeth could hold her focus.

At last it was coming to an end, and instead of darkness above us we began to see stars. Michael and Adam came back from where they'd been continuing the rescue effort. I had to concentrate on helping Eddie recover from some nasty injuries, so it took me a while to notice that Michael was a bit subdued after the fight. When I did, I then spotted the hole in his chainmail where one of the centipede's stingers must have got through. Even as I was watching, a few more links disintegrated. I managed to convince him to lift up the shirt and let us have a look, and then called on my magic once again to purge the poison out of him. I'd seen some nasty things that day, but that had to be the worst.

Not the worst thing for Elizabeth though.That would be when Alabaster showed up and thanked us for dealing with some of his competition. He didn't stick around long, but it was long enough for Elizabeth to yell at him for killing her. Which Eddie didn't know about, I then realised, and I explained that that's why I keep calling her a lich.

So now we were going to end up having to deal with Alabaster as well as with Uncle Dwyer. We gave Eddie the brief run-down on Alabaster, since that had all happened in a different timeline. The funny thing is, looking back, Alabaster was actually a good influence on me. He really helped me work through some things. This timeline's version of him seems to have taken a different path though. I think we might actually have to kill him.