By all accounts of her friends and family, Cas was an asshole.
The moniker was given in jest, most of the time, but Cas was the kind of asshole that liked to correct people when they were joking.
You see, it wasn't that Cas didn't feel emotions or care about other peoples' feelings, she just had a greater than usual commitment to truth than most people.
This was why, when Cas remembered Kari's bedraggled figure after she'd been saved from the desert, when she remembered the tears in the girl's eyes as she recounted her fears about how Cas had died, how she'd seen her get attacked by the vultures and thought she'd die alone -- Cas felt herself choking up as she inspected the plot holes in the story.
Not that she thought Kari was lying, mind.
It was just astounding because Kari had apparently seen the vultures attacking her... from ten miles away! At that distance the Oasis was barely visible and the spire looked like a pencil! How did that girl notice a bird sized object much less see the detail of Cas's fall?
Cas agonized over the question and her theorizing for days before she remembered she could just ask the girl.
"Hmm?" Kari looked up from her bowl of noodles, cheeks full with broth and strings of spaghetti dangling down her lips. She swallowed. "What do you mean? You were right up in the air, it wasn't like you were hidden. Besides, you are red, now, remember? It's not hard to see that color against the sky." Kari pointed out the obvious, and Cas dropped the issue, at least outwardly. Far too busy with overseeing the construction of the kilns, Cas didn't feel she had time to go chasing this mystery.
Though, she never expected that her busy schedule would bring the answer right to her doorstep.
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Kari had become a lot more clingy after her near-death experience for some reason. In particular, she'd become a lot more bold about asking personal questions to the slime, as she was doing now.
"Cas... Cas?" Kari poked the slime again, "are you ok? Can you not talk?"
The questions flew over the catatonic Slime who -- if she had a jaw -- would've been holding it slack as she stared at the kiln site.
What was more surreal to her was how, to everyone involved, it appeared to be a routine sight, seeing a man hefting half a ton of weight on his shoulders, his feet stamping imprints into the dirt as his body -- flexing like a steel spring -- easily carried the mass of clay and brickwork into a pile where the children stood to mash it all together, breaking bricks into dust with their bare hands and mixing it playfully into the the rock dough.
Off in the distance, Korivenna stood next to her eye-less slime. Touching it with glowing fingers, it produced a fine, handful of powder which she threw into the kiln and -- with a raised hand, a spark of static, and a magic word -- ignited the mixture with a roar. The kiln flickered orange as if hit by a light switch, and a wave of intense heat crossed the distance in an instant, hurting enough that Cas had to harden her skin against it!
Ohhh, right... Cas remembered. She was in a world of magic and monsters.
Due to the limited mobility of her slime form, Cas had not left the village center... ever during the course of her stay here. She'd never had a reason to go to the fields, and no one had a reason to take her there, so she'd literally never seen these people do anything other than shop and drink tea. And Kari -- Cas looked over at the girl, who'd gotten bored of poking her at this point -- the girl had been carrying her around for the better part of a year, now. Disgusted by her own obliviousness, it was only now that Cas thought it strange that a twelve year old girl had been able to carry around a thirty pound slime for hours at a time, for days on end, without suffering any fatigue.
All of these people were super humans. The answer came naturally, as did the realization: and that's why Kari kept beating her at tag... the cheating twerp!
Cas shook her head as another line of men came, each carrying tons of building material and other refuse that could be broken down for the project. Sin, Cas saw, led the back, noticeable for his large frame as well as the fact that he carried twice the weight of any man there, as well as the especially dark spots that marked the tips of his fox ears. The fact that several of the men called him 'bloody' gave Cas a hint as to what color those dark tips were.
Steam was literally billowing off his figure when Cas approached him, rock dust pummeling into the air to mix with the steam as he dropped his loads into messy piles. A cool wind ran through the work place, one which every person took a moment to enjoy. In the sudden, short pause of silence and wind, Cas interjected herself into the clockwork workflow. Sin, looking down from his enjoyment of the breeze, stooped to her level for a proper conversation, resting his arms on his knees.
Kari, hiding as much behind the slime as physically possible, peeked up at the large man with a shy gaze.
Sin, for his part, knew enough not to look directly back at the girl, instead focusing his attention on Cas and the coded conversation they engaged in, saying: "Our apothecary has a lot of complaints about the mold you sent her," he said with a slight laugh, his teeth shining in the moonlight. "I'll omit the unkind words, but she says the shape isn't a good one if you're looking to make thousands."
"It's just meant to give her an Idea," Cas answered, "tell her she can make the mold however she wants as long as it holds the same amount of sand. The important thing is that everyone collects the same amount of sand, and that they take the sand from the right place."
Sin smiled at that and answered with a people-pleasing voice she'd never expected from a man his size. "There's another thing, actually," he clapped his hands together, taking out the labelled parchment she'd given him. On it was depicted a three by three grid, essentially a tic-tac-toe board. In the center of each of the squares was a number, one through nine, written in the Nemorian numeral system. "About the labelling system for the cups."
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
"Yes?" Cas said sardonically. "What's there to talk about? Each guy gets nine cups for their space, they just have to collect the samples in the right order."
"Right," Sin nodded, "however, I worry that the men might get confused about some of the numbers..."
Cas looked blankly at him.
"You see," he continued, in explanation, "few people have actually touched those books you pulled those numbers from in years, and not everyone is intimately familiar with written numbers. So, I suggest, instead -- " Sin pulled out his own parchment. On it, was the same grid, but the numbers were replaced with pictures of various animals, plants, and other random symbols. Cas thought she noticed a snow flake and a mountain.
"And those are?" Cas asked.
"Constellations!" Sin answered cheerily. "Everyone should know them. Besides, if they start out in the central square for their space, then each of the symbols corresponds to the cardinal directions. They'll have no trouble taking sand from the right places."
Hmm... cas thought about it for all of one second before she nodded her crystal eye. "Very well. As long as the apothecary doesn't mind drawing the more complex symbols. I still need the first numbers on the bowls though. That's the only way I'll be able to tell which set of bowls came from which man."
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So it was, that Cas found herself counting sand grains from grid number 420.saggitarius.
At least, the Nemorian equivalent of the constellation.
Kari, sitting dutifully next to her, read out the number before dumping the contents of bowl onto the Sakkari's table-lap. From there, it was the same old process of letting the sand-grains sink into the slime table-top, while the floating mini-slimes were taken to account before being gobbled up by their hungry new environment.
The past week had been an intense frenzy of work, as various work groups rotated in shifts to keep the kilns fired as the women -- under the watchful eye of the Fari tribe apothecary -- expertly created clay bowls that could have come off a production-line, so uniform were they. The fires themselves were maintained by the apothecaries' and their slimes, who kept them alit with supernaturally consistent flames, able to be powered for a day on a mere handful of Juju-beet powder and a few magic words.
The apothecaries were some of the less replaceable members of the team, and as such got the least sleep. It was mainly for that reason that Cas had been able to forgive their snarly attitudes by the end of it. Honestly, she fairly respected their hard work, especially the Fari tribe apothecary, who'd gone far beyond expectations with the bowls, making ones that were supernaturally cold, like miniature sample refrigerators. Cas didn't even know you could do that!
Well, ignorant or no, she was very glad for the upgrade, because it was getting to be early morning, now, and the sands were heating, and Cas was still only half way through her count.
She'd been expecting to have some soiled samples due to heat losses, even in covered bowls, but the refrigeration worked excellently.
By the time noon came around, Kari had taken to cupping each new clay bowl and rubbing it against her cheek as Cas counted her 500th bowl of slimes.
It was easy work to Cas's eyes. The slimes appeared as literal glowing dots, even without her magnifying lense trick. Her crystal eye didn't experience eye strain, and she literally didn't have a back to tire.
The worst she could say about the task was that it was monotonous, and Cas had become thoroughly inoculated to monotony at this point. Watching grass grow in a cave for a year would do that to a person. Yes, she was still complaining about that.
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The count near the Oasis was easily collected. Being so near the village, everyone was avaliable to help, and the sample collection was spread amongst many more hands, and the data they got was... very exiciting.
Cas had been able to narrow the direction of the source from being "north east" into a 0.7 degree corridor lying slightly to the left of the spire. Taking measurements from the new stream of slimes on the other side of the spire would be able to yield... far more interesting results. Combining the two, she'd be able to get a very small search area indeed! Cas was giddy! She wanted to be able to go there now, now, now!
However, revealing her flight capabilities was a no-no, not that she expected to be able to do much even if she did rush over there on wing. She needed at least fourty pounds of mass to pull off the slime-table counting trick effectively, and even then there was the problem of logistics for the rest of them.
"Get on with it, you dogs!" Sin encouraged the men in his own gentle way, as they each prepared and pre-loaded sand-skiffs, each man carrying a leather jerkin filled to the brim with water, clay bowls, and nothing else.
Going ten miles out into the desert and coming back was an ordeal. So much so that they had to cut down the number of their sample collectors to a hundred of the most able bodied men.
Collecting sand near the Oasis had been almost a celebratory experience, with laughing children working alongside the adults to partake in the sample collection game. Going out to the deep desert, conversely, was a rough prospect for everyone involved.
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Cas, spreading her weight out across the sand, drawing skiff-like stilts out underneath her, and caterpillar crawling over the icy dunes... actually managed to keep pace with the trudging army of loaded men.
They could have travelled far faster, she knew, but it seemed they were unwilling to leave their sage behind in the wilderness. How sweet.
Arriving at midnight, they walked to the south side of the spire, escaping from the shadow of the spire into the full moon. The mass of slimes was densest here, and they sparkled with a silvery tinge in parody of the midnight sun. It was stunning, Cas thought as she looked at the spectacle. So many of them were out at night. Comparing the Oasis to this was like comparing a stream to the Ocean. "Kari," she whispered to the girl who was eternally by her side. "You really can't see this?"
Kari, grumbling with tired eyes, only blinked blearily at the vista. "See what?" she asked, letting her annoyed voice take over.
Cas laughed, and here the girl had been so excited to skip bed-time.
...
Cas let the girl sleep after the sample collection had been done, enlisting Sin's help with the count.
Work went faster with him at the helm. He was far more disciplined with his voice than the talkative Kari, and Cas lost count far less often.
Morning came, and Kari -- bed head spreading around her like a blonde halo -- trundled into Cas' tent where she attempting to calculate a heading. Unfortunately, the excel format of her stat sheet was more of a design choice, in this case -- and the number crunching had to be done manually in the sand. Cas was certain she was doing the long division correctly... yeah, probably would be fine, she hedged as Kari stepped closer to stand over the sand-board.
Outside the wind had picked up into a sand-storm, and -- peeking through the tent-flap as Kari walked in -- she could see the world outside had turned into a thick haze of brown so thick she couldn't even see her neighboring tent. It was a only a 'mild thing' Kari had assured Cas boredly as she went about brushing her hair, yawning as she turned away from the Sakkari. "So... what are you going to do about the blockage?" she asked, petting her hair with closed eyes.
Cas, hardly paying attention, answered without looking away. "I've got to find it first."
Kari, still nodding off. "Sin... I heard him say the wind's going to die down soon."
"Have you been eavesdropping again?" Cas chided calmly.
"No..." Kari replied indignantly, putting her hair back and throwing over her shawl, "I just heard him through his tent."
"Well, go and tell him I'm ready when the wind calms down," Cas said, looking at her diagram, and the thirty grid squares on it which marked the spot of her approaching future.