Dean worked into the night to organize who would remain on Equinox, sending out various thought-to-text messages with detailed instructions. Sending the quasies--particularly the quasi-squirrels--their assignments proved to be a slight headache. He sent out two messages to the squirrels, one to those who would stay on Equinox and another to those who would proceed onto...Drift Jag.

Dean groaned internally at the name. Drift Jag? Lisa claimed it was a literal translation from the planet's verdora-given name. Just because it's a literal translation doesn't mean we have to use it. He could think of a million better names for a planet with jutting mountains and Earth-like deserts.

The problem with sending the squirrels messages was that the squirrels tried to respond back. Not through digital means--they had no way to send him messages over chip reader. Instead, the squirrels designated to stay on Equinox collaborated to track him down and accost him, demanding that they be sent along to Drift Jag.

Dean understood the logic behind the request: staying on Equinox while the others continued to other planets wasn't optimal. Were the situation reversed, he knew that he'd be disappointed.

At the same time, I'm fairly certain they're only protesting because if I go on ahead, they can't accumulate anymore Dean signatures.

While Dean didn't condone the use of his signatures (and signed photos) as currency, he didn't know how to stop the squirrels from collecting them. He could technically order them to stop--they'd listen to a direct order...probably--but Dean considered such a measure heavy-handed.

And so, while Dean toiled all night long to transmit messages and take stock of their food stores, (really, what was Bath thinking when he designed the quasi-bears to be so hungry?) Virigard patrolled the Spire's office. Dean had long since filtered out the light swooshing-sound of her body cavorting from the balcony to the office door and back. The squirrels almost made a game of it, tag-teaming Virigard from both office openings and trying to sneak in.

Unfortunately for them, Virigard obsessively liked games.

When morning came, Dean gave her a smug nod and stood from his office chair. He led her out of the Spire and outside, meeting with the rest of the assembled vanguard. He had told all those advancing onto Drift Jag to be ready at 8:00 UST, the arbitrary military time-zone that the vanguard was using. From his chip reader, Dean gleaned that the time read 8:32. If anybody wasn't ready to go by now, Dean felt no qualms leaving them behind. We have a lot of people as it is, he thought. A few more on Equinox versus Drift Jag won't make a difference.

"Viri," he said, glancing over at her sleek, gently-bouncing form.

Her tail twitched. "Yes Dean?"

"How many squirrels did you stop?"

Virigard hummed softly. "Maybe...three-hundred?"

Dean nodded, his lips quirking up into a smile. "Thirty rum cokes, when we get back to Earth," he promised.

---

Eyrin's hands lay over Clarissa's mane, barely touching the strands of meticulously-dyed hair.

"You're going to fall off," she grumbled.

Eyrin knew her heart wasn't really in the argument. "I'll be fine. If I fall, you'll catch me."

"You know, you verdora are weird," she sighed. "Last time I saw your brethren on horses, they all went crazy. Now, they're running alongside the horses like everyone else, and still..."

Eyrin smirked. "I know. They need to get out more." Most verdora were still too affected by any danger, such as moving at high speeds.

Clarissa shook her head, batting her wings against a draft of warm air. "They've been out plenty," she argued. "If you'd been around, you would have noticed that they went out into the jungle surrounding New Faajyun and interacted with nearby wildlife. Your protege and his two followers went as far as the sea to the city's southwest."

Eyrin scoffed. That sea is only filled with harmless, jelly-filled, lantern-shaped animals. "Like I said, they need to get out more."

"Where were you, then?" Clarissa asked. "I hear that Clanemic and the Delelens had quite an adventure."

I'll have to follow up on that later, Eyrin thought. "Mm...I went to the East," he replied. "I found a network of caves."

"Did you find anything dangerous there?" Clarissa asked, rolling her eyes.

Eyrin smiled. "The caves themselves were fairly perilous," he admitted. "I didn't find any truly dangerous organisms."

"Oh, really?" the devilbat asked.

"...If you don't count eyeless, thousand-toothed jumping fish and web-spinning glow stalkers."

Clarissa's mouth dropped. "What...you need to explain what those are."

Eyrin chuckled. "The jumping fish were small, not even the size of my hand," he said. "When I was crossing through some of the water-logged areas of the cave network, the fish would swarm."

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Sounds deadly," Clarissa sighed.

"Maybe two weeks ago," Eyrin admitted. "The web-spinners were these...stick-like, exoskeletal creatures with the propensity to create long, gooey strings of webbing across the ceilings of the cave. These strings had bits of phosphorescent glow studded within them, though for the most part were completely invisible in the lightless setting."

"Those don't sound deadly."

"The web-spinners are twenty-feet across," Eyrin added. "Their strands of webbing are thick enough to catch villin."

"Villin?"

"Mm...it's a large, horned animal on Illudis."

"So, like a bull," Clarissa said slowly.

Eyrin looked the English term up. "Sure." The similarity between a villin and a bull was uncanny; Eyrin had difficulty judging whether the main difference between the two was due to the six legs or the two maws. Everything else looked approximately the same, if one ignored differences in coloration.

"So, maybe deadly," the devilbat amended. "Did the web-spinner trap you and try to suck your blood?"

"No," Eyrin grinned. "I used the network of webbing to roll across the top of several connected caves."

Clarissa snorted. "Okay. No offense, but your adventure sounds way less cool than Clanemic's."

"Why?" Eyrin asked, curiosity piqued. He'd planned to simply ask Thaddeus for details later, but if Clarissa was willing to tell him now while they traveled to the exit gate...why not?

"So, Thaddeus house Clanemic and the two Delelens found an underwater cave at the bottom of a trench. A few verdora and humans went out to see for themselves, and found that the trench proceeded for thousands of feet."

Rods, Eyrin sighed internally. Rods are the universal standard. Why do these humans--and their quasi-sapient vassals--insist on using a backwater term of measure? "Was the cave in its entirety underwater?"

"No," the devilbat said, pulsing her wings upward into an approaching fog. "The underwater part of the cave led into pocket of air. At the end of the air-filled cavern, Clanemic and the Delelens fought off a giant, violent, female gurgle."

Eyrin blinked. "Gurgle?"

"You went to the beach before," Clarissa stated, "so you should remember seeing the, uh...large, squid-like creature on the beach."

Squid? Despite his ignorance of the word's meaning, Eyrin did recall a large creature on the shore surrounding the sea. Since this was the only creature bigger than a fist, he figured that this must be what Clarissa was referencing.

"I remember." He tightened his grip as Clarissa corkscrewed through a somewhat-violent tropical storm, the wind and rain beating against both of their bodies.

"Well, that thing is a gurgle."

"They fought a gurgle?" he said, voice incredulous. "What, do the docile creatures possess hidden scythes or lasers that turn them into a threat?"

"They didn't go into a secreted cavern just to fight any gurgle," Clarissa snorted. "The gurgles on the shore are all male. The gurgle in the cavern?"

"Female."

"Clanemic took a video recording of the fight," Clarissa said, beaming, her teeth glistening. "I'll share it with you later."

"Later" turned out to be in five minutes, as soon as the vanguard passed through the tropical storm. With only calm winds at her back, Clarissa could spare the concentration needed to manipulate her chip reader and share the video with Eyrin.

"That's a female gurgle?" he murmured, entranced by the footage. Clarissa was right: Thaddeus did have a better adventure than myself.

After the video finished, he let out a grunt of defeat. "Maybe some of the verdora did get out a bit and experience a little adventure. Did any of the others encounter anything similarly dangerous?"

"The others all stayed in the jungle, for the most part. The few that went later to investigate the underwater air-pocket don't count."

My protege is improving at such a breakneck pace, he thought. I can hardly wait for our return to Illudis, together.

---

"I'm glad that everyone's through the gate," Lisa said, sitting back in a dragonleaf chair. "How long for the city-seed to finish growing?"

Bath glanced over. "No longer than half an hour."

Lisa nodded. "Also, when we choose the path to the gate next time, we should probably try to avoid extreme weather."

Bath chuckled softly. "The verdora certainly had the time of their lives."

"Every time lightning struck, they all went a little crazy," she complained. "And then when we ran through that one stepped region of jungle, they started trying to slide with the mudslides."

Bath shrugged, looking out over the nascent city-seed. "They'll get better with time."

A few minutes later, Lisa asked, "So: after trying things both ways--putting the city-seed at the exit gate on Vast Desert, and at the entrance gate on Equinox--do you have a preference?"

"Well," he said, looking at her. "We've already started growing this city-seed at the entrance gate. I guess that works fine."

So, no preference, Lisa thought. "Who's in charge of growing this city-seed?" Lisa asked.

Bath gave her a guilty look. "Fartuun."

Blinking, Lisa adjusted her position on the hastily-constructed seat. "Oh. Because of...everything?"

"Yeah. But more than that, because I'm curious to see what she can do with a few extra PP per month." He looked back toward the city-seed, fixating on its infant Spire.

Lisa followed his gaze. The Spire looks like a snake winding its way into the air. "I get you. If she can continue to invest in the boon paths that have allowed her to oversee the development of technology, this will accentuate the capabilities of her V-Tap." What those capabilities were, Lisa wasn't entirely sure: while AI Ninety-Seven had told the two of them about the V-Tap and its processing capabilities, Lisa had a hard time visualizing what such a...massively powerful implant could do.

Half an hour passed. Lisa and Bath moved into the city, the two of them rejoining the kursi and verdora, respectively. Bath had created avatars of the two of them as stand-ins, allowing for them to meet away from the rest of the vanguard.

Bath simply led his copy of her out of the group of kursi and out of eyeshot, probably giving some excuse such as needing to go to the bathroom. Lisa simply met with the copy and returned back a minute later.

They didn't notice anything different between her and Bath's copy, enabling her to seamlessly slip back into the flow of a conversation the kursi had been arguing the whole way over.

It was a stupid argument, but the kursi had little else to do as they trekked overland to reach Drift Jag. They'd discussed pros and cons for much of the way, and were only now, as the first Drift Jag city-seed grew to completion, debating the two sides.

"I think we should definitely colonize empty worlds," Priscilla stated. "It's apparently a common practice throughout the universe. Besides, if COTD's life-prolonging stuff pans out, humans are going to rely on colonizing other worlds, just for space."

Ida, on the other hand, seemed uncertain. "But if so, what kind of planets should we colonize? The kinds that are like Vast Desert, or Mars, certainly." She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "But what about worlds like Equinox? The planet holds no it sapient life now, but, one day...it could, potentially.

Lisa listened to the debate; however, her attention also drifted to the cool, dry, environment on Drift Jag and its teal sky. Almost like White Sun, this city-seed ingrained itself onto the face of a mountain. However, in this case, the mountain was small enough to serve as only a section of the city, its sleet-ray form almost blending into the darker, ashier segments of dragonleaf.

"Lisa," a voice rang out. She refocused on the conversation.

"Hm?"

Zhou gave her a calm smile. "What's your opinion?"