“You’ll find people like that everywhere. Cruelty is in their bones.”

  Luos had felt so badly about destroying Dover’s hobo camp that he had offered to help build it back up. Dover had said he didn’t need help putting the tent back up, but if Luos wanted to help, he could gather some firewood and tinder. As things had turned out, Dover was just returning from Hill Hill himself when Chuff had cornered Luos.

  “Were you really going to fight him after that boor fight?” He recalled the punishment the man had taken in the ring. He wouldn’t be surprised if Dover’s skin was one big bruise under his armor.

  The man laughed. It made him seem especially human to Luos, a heartfelt laugh like that. He sat across the campfire from Luos. He had a mop of black hair, cropped on the back and sides. He was still in his leather cuirass, greaves, and boots, but he had taken off the armor from his arms. It had been a more involved process than Luos had expected, but they covered not only his forearms but his elbows and most of his biceps.

  “These are the driving force for your weapon,” he’d said, patting the muscle of his upper arm. “If a boor grabs you there and rends the meat, he’s done as good as sundering your blade and destroying your shield.”

  “You fight boors professionally?”

  The man thought before answering. “It’s a significant source of income for me,” he said finally, inflecting his words like he was humoring Luos.

  “But that’s not all you do,” Luos wheedled.

  When the man didn’t answer, choosing instead to poke at the fire with his sword, Luos did the same for the conversation.

  “So what are you doing out here in the wilderness? There’s rooms enough in town, I’m sure. And you got your winnings?”

  “Winnings? I got those.” He pointed to a nearby sack. “Those and a swift kick out the door at nightfall.”

  Luos couldn’t believe it. Hill Hill being inhospitable?

  The man continued, “So what are you doing out in the woods with that little creep?” Indicating Chuff.

  Luos decided to go transparent. “I spooked his goons when he tried to extort me.”

  “Fancy words for a tussle over some figs. How’d you spook them?” He grunted as he stretched his legs out, getting comfortable on the ground.

  The time for transparency was over, Luos guessed. Still, he could be mostly truthful.

  “I did a trick with my hawg they didn’t like,” he said. The man snorted in amusement, indicating that Luos had scored. “Say, you didn’t see which way it went did you?”

  Dover shrugged, then pointed in an arc. “Thatta way, I s’pose.” He indicated a full 45 degrees of direction.

  A rustle in the brush behind Luos – almost the complete opposite direction Dover had been pointing - yanked their attention from the supposed heading. Even as Luos was horror struck thinking that Chuff had returned to finish the job, Dover was on his feet, steel at the ready.

  “Speaking of the devil,” Dover said, relaxing his guard. Asmod’s small frame appeared, snouting his way through the undergrowth. He seemed defeated somehow, head low in embarrassment, his energy depleted.

  “And just where have you been?” Luos nagged. With the words out, he realized the daemon couldn’t reply, not with Dover around. No need to let the worms out of that can. “He’s always running off like this,” by way of explanation, “and we can’t afford another until this one grows up.” He scrambled towards Asmod, both to pretend to pet the coarse fur and to put hands on the cowardly daemon. He chuckled for effect.

  Dover gave a skeptical squint, still in his more relaxed pose but frozen in contemplation. “Uh-huh,” he grunted. Then, dismissing the topic, began to painfully recline on the ground again. It seemed to Luos he was fighting his aching body from collapsing all at once.

  Once again seated, he made a continuing gesture. “So, show me this trick you did with your hawg. The one that spooked those kids.”

  “What? Oh. I don’t think that would be a good idea.” Luos was trying to move Asmod closer to the fire, closer to where Luos had been sitting and wished to sit again. The hawg took much coaxing to move even one trotter. This piggy statue of stubbornness had its gaze fixed on Dover for whatever reason.

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  “I’ve seen some scary stuff, Luos. Or do you think I can’t handle it?”

  “Yes, actually,” Luos said, suddenly wary of this stranger. “What if you see it and you fly into a murderous rage? I wouldn’t have any recourse.” Why was Asmod doing this? He was vibrating in-… what? Anger? Fear?

  “Suit yourself,” the fighter said. He stoked the fire with the point of his sword. The ember-ridden logs sent up sparks.

  With Asmod in the grip of his strange mood, Luos was more on edge since encountering Dover than he had been all night. He was eager to take Asmod somewhere they could talk, and he could pick the daemon’s brain.

  “Well,” Luos started with a drawl, “I think it’s about time I get going. I wouldn’t want to keep you up all night after a day like yours.” But then he saw that his words fell on deaf ears. Dover had fallen asleep, laying on his side in front of the fire. The man had been grilling Luos one minute for details about his skirmish with the bully, and had zonked out the next.

  “He could still be awake,” Luos mused. This was mostly to let Asmod know not to start talking, but not to give anything away if the fighter was feigning sleep. “I guess we can go home now.”

  But before leaving, Luos quietly dimmed the fire to embers and covered him up with a blanket from the tent.

  When they were well away, Luos moving quickly through the dark woods and Asmod trotting quickly at his heels, he told the daemon, “Alright. Tell me what went on back there.”

  “I don’t trust that guy,” the hawg said. “I don’t think he was being honest with us.”

  “He saved me from Chuff. You too, probably.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s smarmy. I hope we don’t have to see him again.”

  ****

  While the real Luos prepared to sleep, Asmod curled up on the floor as if doing likewise. But Asmod the daemon did not need to sleep. The hawg vessel still needed it, though it could be pushed beyond the constraints with little negative impact to the riding daemon. Asmod retreated into the spirit realm to process the events of the day.

  Asmod was suddenly in his human body, looking like Luos from the real world, in the same idyllic scene as what Peezle would pull him into to chat, daemon to daemon. This one wasn’t Peezles, but Asmod’s copy. He didn’t yet have the experience to make it truly his own, but it worked for him now. He had been given access to a simple suite of tools, with the promise of gaining access to more complex ones when he and Luos had reached a milestone in their education.

  He pulled up the suite of simple tools. Before him sprang into existence a three dimensional space – the size of a puzzle box - gridded with lines, and with an x/y/z axis indicator in the back lower corner. It was like a screen, but a cube instead of a rectangle. Asmod could manipulate it to look into the block of space from any side. Toolbars hovered within, contained within the editing software program. They were called toolbars, despite them being yet more blocks inside this gridded space. When Asmod selected them, they each produced a menu. There were three of them, but more existed in the customizable interface.

  Luos had asked him why he reacted that way to Dover, but his answer had not been entirely truthful. He felt Dover was a fighter, as he had claimed, and that he had just gotten back to his camp. That Hill Hill had kicked him out before nightfall, too, he felt was true. Luos didn’t know it, but in his time with Peezlebub, Asmod had experienced second-hand what the villagers here were like to outsiders.

  Asmod perused the toolbars within, selected a block which bloomed into deeper and deeper options, and when he found what he was looking for, the menus all closed and a shape appeared in the center of the block of space. It was a grey solid made of three main lobes. The center lobe was shaped like a cigar, thick, cylindrical, and tapered on the ends. The other two lobes were flat surfaces, paper-like, with intricate line work done on the top and bottom in black, but solid grey in color. They sprouted out of the cigar lengthwise, mirroring each other, each about twenty degrees from the norm.

  No, what had rankled Asmod was Dover’s talk about Dover’s income. Boor-fighting was just some of it, sure. Asmod saw him kill the one in town, and he had had his winnings with him when he returned to his camp. But there was some evidence that it was only the most savory of what he did to make ends meet.

  He opened a window to the tome of insects Peezle had provided him. The page depicted in two dimensions a more highly developed depiction of the butterfly he had been constructing.

  The daemon inserted a featureless and similarly grey block alongside the model of the butterfly and began shaping it into a curled proboscis, a feature present in the flat image that was not yet present on the model.

  There was something about the man that Asmod didn’t like, and Luos couldn’t see it. The man’s sword – the one he had used to slay the boor - had glowed with an aura. It had whispered to Asmod while Luos and the fighter talked, and Asmod didn’t like what it had to say.

  He worked on his butterfly model for hours while Luos slept, keeping one eye on what the vessel was experiencing.

  Two hours before dawn, his uncle woke up and started to work, but when he checked, Luos was still asleep.

  He returned to his butterfly. He opened up the menu, chose an option on the first tier, and clicked it.

  The butterfly, still grey, began to slowly beat its wings. It would look lifelike while flying and gliding, but he had come to terms with the level of his own ability. He wouldn’t be able to make the creature land and drink from flowers or walk. But it would be pretty enough gliding in a cloud of its siblings, accentuating Peezle’s flowered shrubs.

  Asmod smirked, and then opened a color selector menu. Luos would be up a little past dawn, and by then Asmod would have some virtual butterfly clones to come back to the next night. The book called them tiger swallowtails and had a footnote he could explore later.

  Working on the little bug had almost put the encounter out of Asmod’s mind. But before he let it go entirely for the moment, the daemon made a mental note to ask Peezlebub why an enchanted sword would ask him to kill its bearer.