"Hello? Okay, I think I got this thing working. Hi! I'm Danny, Danny Jones! Adventurer extrodinare!" The three foot tall elf and goblin hybrid starred into the camera of the cell phone she was reocrding herself on, looking more than a little awkward and feeling kind of dumb, but it had been a boring three days and nights piloting Big Red through the desert and Danny had been struck by inspiration! Why not make a video journal?

"Right, so about me, I'm a gelf which means my mom was an elf and my dad was a goblin, please don't ask how that works because I have literally no idea. But low and behold some nineteen years ago I was born! oh right the uh year is...I think it's twenty forty nine? I've sorta...started to lose track of time, that happens when nobody makes calendars and you really only need to worry about what season it is."

Danny looks directly at the lens as she speaks, her bright yellow eyes gleaming in the light put out by the camera. "I was born on an old army base called Fort Wayne in the state of Indiana, about six years after the system hit the world. Lets see...what should I tell you about?" The quetion hangs in the air as Danny looks away from the camera, her large ears twitching as she gets lost in thought.

"Oh, I know! My favorite band is Mystery Skulls, and I love chicken and bacon sandwhiches! I worship Charity who is like, the best Goddess ever. With just two ranks of [Divine Blessings] I can get enough food and water every day to survive. Talk about points well spent am I right?" Danny's eyes unfocus and her eyes flick from side to side as if reading something before she resumes starring into the camera.

"If you're watching this you probably know more about the system than I do at this point. But for posterities sake, my build is on a spreadsheet in the same folder this video will be in. I'm just an arcanist by the way its nothing fancy. My favorite schools of magic are transmutation and summoning though." Danny says as she reaches out to grab the camera and the view is blocked by her fingers before her hand moves to reveal the camera is now pointed at a hulking red golem. " This is my buddy Big Red, I use summoning magic to keep him in tip top shape, he doesn't go through parts too quickly but this big lug does still tend to hog all of my mana crystals." The camera stays on the golem for several seconds before Danny turns it back to point at herself.

"What? No way! That hardly counts big guy, I used one mana crystal, count them now, one! and that was to build a solar charger for the laptop and phone so i could make a journal! that hardly counts." Huffing Danny reaches out for the phone and begins to fiddle wiht it, the view shaking and quickly covered by her hands.

"Well that's all for now. See you later!"

Shutting the phone off Danny snorts and glares playfully up at Big Red, you gonna try and call me out like that everytime I'm on camera big guy?" The wind picks up and dust from the desert sand seems to blow around Big Red in responce, which Danny interprets as him thinking someone needs to hold her accountable. To which Danny just sighs and begins packing up the lap top and the cell phone, the two fitting into her travel pack with little room to spare.

"I swear you're like a grumpy old geezer." She mutters to herself before clambering up into Big Reds cockpit and pulling the shat shut behind her, shivvering slightly from the extended time outside. "Damn, the nights really do get cold. Maybe I'll do the next entry during the day."

Electing not to flick on her small electric heater but instead to curl up in her pilot seat with an old army surplus blanket Danny yawned and resolved herself to stay awake until the sun came up. Bravely, heroicly even, easily with the heart of a champion Danny stayed awake through the remainder of the night, not letting her eyes do more than flutter closed before snapping htem open again. That is until finally dawn came and she could let herself sleep.

Big Red clearly thought her sleeping habits were a little bit silly, Danny was perfectly safe inside the wards she had set up, let alone inside Big Red himself. But as Big Red was want to do he continued to indulge her excentric behavior.

When Danny next opened her eyes it was once more a windblown afternoon in the Arizona desert. Only her wards had caught a herd of tumble weeds, which if you've never seen one is a two foot round sphere of lightweight roots that travels across the desert following the winds in order to spread and pollenate. Or at least they used to be before the apocolypse, tumbleweeds in twenty forty nine were of a different breed. Instead of just being a bit of an avoidable hazard they tended to latch on to any living creatures they tumbled across and squeeze the life out of them.

Presumably because meat was delicious, or something. Look Danny wasn't a plant expert all she knew is she was glad the wards had held and she wasn't going to have to spend the next hour prying them off of Big Red. Luckily this was why she had put up wards, though the plants didn't seem to be able to tell the difference between meat and magic, Danny was able to rev up Big Reds mana core and simple walk him out the other side of the barriers, the magic shattering and leaving the tumbleweeds...to tumble about.

Half an hour of skirting a veritable horde of root balls later, Danny and Red were past the deadly menace of the tumbleweeds and on their way once more. Though it took a little bit of backtracking to find the remains of the highway they had been following. Danny used that time to pay to Charity and nab herself some hot food and a drink from ehr faovirte goddess.

"You know big guy, It's pretty quiet out here." She said between mouthfuls of burrito. "Maybe it's cause we are so freakin far from water sources but damn me if I didn't expect more monsters. Maybe some Bulettes or those graboid things from that Tremors movie. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for some peace and quiet but..." She let herself trail off, knowing that Big Red understood, quiet and peaceful moments were rare, and three days where the worst thing they faced together was tumbleweeds? Utterly unheard of. But as always the big guy's silence spoke volumes.

"Yeah, I get it. Enjoy it while it lasts, but keep my head on a swivel. Shouldn't have expected anything less from Mister practical."

--

Once they were back on the road, Danny checked her map, and figured they were some forty miles out from where she wanted to turn off and start heading north. With time to kill she dragged out her sketchbook and flipped on a Mystery Skull song. " Okay, so today we are going to try and finalize some ritual designs. Big guy, I'm thinking of an illusionary array, so if or when we decide to settle down we can sort of do it in plain sight. You win one hundred percent of the fights you avoid right?"

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Danny asked without waiting for a response and began to sketch with an old pencil. Illusions were tricky for a number of reasons, not least of which was that you had to consider every sense. Sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. You could fool them all with magic, the real problem was setting up a bunch of if, then statements, like if the breeze is blowing from the north which direction should the dust in your illusion blow? Even then it wouldn't be perfect, anything that crossed through the boundary of the illusion would be able to see through it, or at least look really weird to anything watching. For instance a tumbleweed rolling through would effectively seem to hit a line in the dirt and be invisible past that line, at least from the point of view of anything watching.

That's ok, the illusion didn't need to be fool proof, just ninety five percent of the way there. Which meant Danny needed a pretty dang complicated arcane structure to hold the mana of her spell. Lucky for Danny she had plenty of free time, so she whittled away the hours draped across her cockpits seat, doodling in her note book, until finally they came across the road Danny had been looking for.

"Alright big guy we are making a right here." Danny informed her golem companion even as she turned him north, having to shift in her seat so she could reach the pedals, and grab his controls to steer him. "god you need to lose weight, you turn like a tugboat!" Big Reds casing creaked in protest at such insults, he wasn't overweight, he was heavily armored! HIs chassis was more than capable of carrying an even larger load!

Ignoring Big Red's protests about whether or not his bulk was acceptable, Danny reopened her map and checked the distance to the next turn off. "Okay, looks like this road leads us to a cliff in about twenty miles, Looks like there is a service road that zig zags up the cliff and then we can keep heading north. So lets do those last twenty miles and we can stop for the night yeah?"

Big Red's creaking and groaning came to an end, so Danny could only assume he found the plan acceptable. They were going to be on the road a bit longer than she would have liked, but some days were like that. As she was grabbing her drinking hose to have another couple mouthfuls of water, Danny noticed a blip on her [Locate Creature] radar.

"Huh, looks like we've got an undead nearby big guy." Danny said as she tapped on the radar. "looks like It's just down the road from us, about half a mile northeast of here." Danny wasn't too pleased by the revelation of undead. They tended to infect anything they could get their claws into with undeath, which generally meant animals but she'd come across a very zombie-like oak tree before and wasn't looking forward to seeing what happened to a herd of tumbleweeds that had been zombified.

"Let's go see if it's something we can clear out really quickly, yeah? In and out, twenty minute adventure." Big Red's mana core rumbled approvingly as she spun it up to fifty percent output and began sending power to his [Ablative Force Shield]. "well as long as your all for it I guess we have no choice."

Feet shifting on the pedals, Danny turned Big Red toward the undead on her radar and brought the rifle up to bare, flicking off the safety as she did. "Well we don't have any [Holy Light] spells, but I figure fire will do the trick." Quickly removing the magazine from Red's Cannon and cycling the remaining round out of the barrel, Danny guided Red through the process of refilling the mag with its missing round and tucking the magazine into its holster.

Focusing now, Danny gathered her mana into the spell form for [Summon Specific Object]. Back before the system arrived in the world, there was a type of ammo called dragon's breath. They were made of primarily magnesium pellets, and used in shotguns. Not exactly the right caliber for her seventy millimeter cannon, but the nice thing was she could summon a bullet designed to do what she wanted. And what she wanted were hundred foot long gouts of flame and the equivalent of buckshot coming out of the end of her cannon.

When Danny finished casting her spell a magazine filled with ten rounds of Dragon's breath buckshot fell into Big Reds waiting hand. and she went through the process of slapping the magazine in and chambering the first round. They weren't really using a shotgun, or shotgun shells, but it was close enough for government work. She'd shoved way worse down that barrel before.

No, the problem for Danny was that keeping those things as real tangible objects without summoning them as a ritual meant that she had to lock away about ten percent of her mana to make them persist. It left her feeling tired, and more sluggish than she would like but it would be a waste to use mana crystals to summon something as temporary as ammo.

Rumbling in a comforting manner Big Red continued to march forward, cannon now prepped and ready to deal with undead. It was strange how such a beautiful moonlit night could lead to violence Danny thought, it always took her by surprise just how indifferent the world at large was to things people would consider dangerous or of ill tidings. Like how it never seemed to rain at funerals unless the movie you were watching was especially corny.

The stars twinkled overhead, and the sky was bereft of clouds when Danny and Red eventually came across the undead her radar had picked up on.

"The fuck?" It seemed an apt question to Danny, who couldn't believe what she was seeing. From beyond the safety and comfort of her cockpit she looked upon something even she couldn't have expected. The fossilized remains of a stegosaurus were trying and failing to climb out of a sandy pit in the middle of the desert. Strangely the undead didn't even acknowledge Big Red when she had driven him up to the edge of the pit, and had continued to struggle futilely in an attempt to climb up the northern ridge of the pit.

Now Danny might be an uncultured swine compared to a movie buff from before the apocalypse but even she had seen Jurassic Park. This was a freakin dinosaur! That...raised so many questions!

"Well...shit. Do we kill it? It's sort of endangered isn't it?" Big Red of course offered no response, he left the hard decisions to Danny, as always. "I think we...have to kill it? It's not a danger....right now, but if it gets out of the pit it could infect things. And, again, I really don't want to see what an undead herd of tumbleweeds look like." Danny ran her hands through her hair, tugging on the curly black locks as she tried to think this through, her ears flicking up and down in mild agitation.

"Okay, I'm gonna kill it." Working with Big Red they leveled the cannon at the ancient collection of bones that was the undead dinosaur and with a round of thunderous cracks fired into the pit, using all ten rounds in the magazine, metal pellets and sparks flying as the bones cracked and broke apart under the onslaught of firepower. Honestly it had stopped moving after the fifth shot, but since she was just using summoned ammunition, she figured it was worth it to fire all ten rounds. Better safe, than sorry.

--

The summoned ammo dispenced with, Danny released the Persistent effect she had been holding which allowed her mana to start refilling that last ten percent. "Man [Persistent Effect] Is super useful but I absolutely do not like how it feels Big Red! Like I cut off a portion of myself, and am holding it at arms reach."

Big Red took Danny's complaints in stoic silence as she turned him away fromt he pit the unhead had been laboring in and began to march northward once more. It was about time to set up camp but she didn't want to sleep next to a monster corpse, even if it was technically a very old one.