“So that’s all the basics you need to know to set up camp.” Eleniah gestured around at the tent, fire pit, and basic latrine she’d made while Kay watched and helped a little. “You remember it all?”
“I think so. Basics we need, things we sometimes won’t do and when we won’t, and things to watch out for. Pretty sure I remember it all.”
“Good, we’ll go over everything together a few more nights before I start leaving you to it.” She wandered over to the rocks they’d commandeered for seating. “Now, we’re going to talk about your training.”
“You waited a while before bringing it up.” Kay sat across from her.
“We needed the right environment for it.” She glanced up into the tall trees. “You got taken in broad daylight in the middle of an at least somewhat busy street.” She waved off what he was about to say, “I’ve lectured; you’ve apologized and promised to do better; I’m just saying this as a fact.”
Kay nodded and shut his mouth.
“We’re going to be doing the training out here in the forest where it’ll be harder for you. If you learn to deal with ambushes and sneak attacks here, in places like cities and towns, it’ll be a lot easier.”
He glanced around at the shadows made by trees of various heights in the light of the moon, the tangles of undergrowth and root, and the way trunk after trunk seemed to line everything he could see until it formed a massive wall of bark to his vision. “I understand.”
“Good. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be vanishing on you.”
Kay gave her a worried look.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to tear off on my own or anything; I’ll just be trying to hide while I follow you. If you notice me ‘escaping’, then I’ll stay until I try again. When you lose me, I’ll follow along slightly behind or ahead and try and ambush you. Your job is to detect me coming before I hit you. If you don’t manage to do that, I’ll attack. If I get you with a ‘fatal’ attack or manage to ‘capture’ you, you lose. Then we’ll go over what you did wrong and what you need to improve on, then keep going.”
“What happens if I lose?”
“Well, I’m going to smack you around to simulate a real fight as best I can without actually hurting you too much, and your face is going to get ground in the dirt when I ‘capture’ you.” She glanced around the camp. “As for an actual punishment? I’ll think of something annoying but not terrible to try and motivate you.”
“That’s what I thought.”
She shrugged. “It’s motivational.” She smirked at him. “You’ll get much better at it, eventually. And then you won’t have to worry about the punishment.”
“What do I do when you vanish?”
“What? You try and find me and not get ambushed; I just said that.”
“No, I mean like outside of the ambushing. Do we have a goal we’re after, a place we’re heading to? What are we doing?”
“Oh, right.” Eleniah straightened out her posture and looked directly at him with a severe expression.
Kay instinctively mirrored her.
“Congratulations!” She burst out with a cheesy smile and some jazz hands. “You’re now in charge of our two-man expedition into the wilds!”
Kay stared at her. “What?”
“You’re in charge. Go wherever you want to. See something cool, and you want to check it out, do it. Randomly decide to change directions? It’ll be your call.”
He shook his head. “Why am I suddenly in charge? I don’t know anything about what’s out here!”
“I don’t either, and since I’m literally going to be following you around trying to get the jump on you, it only makes sense for you to pick where we go.”
He scrubbed at his face with his hands. “Alright, so I just go?”
“Pretty much.” She pulled out a pot from her travel bag and started sorting small pouches. “We’re out there looking for adventure, and we’ll find some eventually.”
“What do I do if we run into enemies?”
“When you run into something that wants to fight, deal with it however you think is best in the moment. I’ll always be close by, so I’ll jump in as necessary. But if you don’t need my help, I’m not going to join in. So act like you’re alone when you’re making decisions.”
He took a deep breath, then let it go. “Alright. It’s more of a safety net than I had back when I was running jobs by myself.”
Eleniah grimaced. “Yeah, like I said, I wasn’t the best teacher I could have been. Anyway, once I think you’re getting better at situational awareness, I’ll start traveling with you like a regular person instead of acting like some kind of creepy stalker, and we’ll start getting you used to be in charge of more than one person.”
“Why?” Kay moved a little on his rock to get a sharp point out of him. “When will I ever be in charge of people?”
She gave him a serious look, “With your title? It’s basically guaranteed.” She held up a finger to stop his reply. “You are going to be powerful enough, both in personal strength and influence, to lead people. The only situations where you aren’t going to be the person in charge are if you’re alone, if you’ve been captured and made to serve your captors, or you willingly subordinate yourself to someone else.” She waved him off again. “The first one might happen, but I’m hoping and assuming we’re going to stick together, so that’s out. Getting captured and bent to service is something we want to prevent, and there aren’t a lot of people that both of us would be alright with bending the knee to, so I’m saying that’s unlikely to happen.”
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“Wait, why aren’t you in charge if it’s just the two of us, you’re way more experienced!” Kay complained.
“Because I don’t want to be,” Eleniah smirked at him. “And,” She continued with a more serious look, “I’m pretty bad at it. I can identify the things a person needs to be a good leader and teach someone to be a leader, but when it comes to leading? I’m just not that good at it. If it was just the two of us, it’d probably be fine. But we’re likely to gather more people as time goes on.”
Kay frowned. Why does she say that so much? Wait, had he ever actually asked her? “Why do you say that? It’s not the first time you’ve mentioned it.”
“Because people are going to want to learn from you.” She pointed at him with the cooking spoon in her hand. “You’re going to be the teacher for Blood Manipulation, as well as anything else you discover and are willing to teach people. You will be the only place they can learn those Skills without randomly trying things and stumbling onto the Skill. Which is possible but doesn’t happen much. You already had that healer from Tumbling Rapids asking to be taught Blood Transfusion. You’re going to have students unless you never teach anyone anything, which I don’t recommend. So you’re going to be in charge of your students because you’ll be teaching them. So, that alone is a reason to learn how to lead. Then there’s the fact that there will probably be an organization that springs up around you, in one form or another.”
“What?”
“Like the Rune Master. They started as just a hermit on an island, experimenting with what they discovered. Then they got a student, then more students. All the students needed places to live and food and such, and a town popped up. The town grew into a city and then a city-state that controls that entire island. Unless you go the hermit route and only take one or two students at a time, or never teach anyone, which again, I don’t recommend, you’re going to be in charge of a small group of people at minimum.” She shrugged. “It’s better to start now and learn how to do it, so you’re ready when the time comes.”
Kay looked at her with a furrowed brow and a frown. “I don’t know if I like that idea.”
She shrugged again. “Then be a hermit with only a couple of students, or teach no one. I’m not going to command you to take one path over another. I’m just going to teach you the skills you’ll need for the most likely outcome, then the ones for the successively less likely outcomes. What you do with what I teach you is up to you.”
“That’s…” He sighed. “I want to complain because I don’t really want to be in charge of a bunch of people, but that’s an excellent approach to teaching.”
“Thanks,” She chuckled, “I actually am good at it.”
After a dinner of soup made from dried meat and preprepared spices, Kay sat cross-legged in the tent staring at the dimensional bag from the Nelamians when a thought suddenly hit him. “Hey, how are we protected from attacks right now?”
“Huh?” Eleniah glanced up from the stitching she was doing on a blanket. “Oh, I put up a barrier when you were scrubbing the dishes.” She opened the tent and pointed at a glowing purple stone in the middle of the fire. “See that? It makes a barrier that makes it harder to detect us and prevents people from getting inside. Anything that wants to get at us would have to destroy the barrier, and if that happens, the stone screams loud enough to wake the dead.” She closed the tent flap. “We’ll practice camping without barriers or other helpful enchanted items later. In the wilderness with no real idea of what’s around us, I want to use every protection we have. Once we have a good place to set up a base for a while and get to know the local threats, we’ll work on things like that.”
“We’re going to set up a base?” Kay asked. “And why is it in the fire?
“Eventually, yeah,” Eleniah replied, “Even if it’s just to practice things like that. We can wander around forever if that’s what ends up getting decided, but we’ll need to stop for a time here and there to teach you things. And it charges from the heat of the fire. If we ever camp without a fire, we’ll need to keep it in direct sunlight for a while to make sure it can still run. ” She looked back down and went back to repaired the blanket. “When did this tear like this?” She grumbled to herself.
Kay, in turn, went back to looking at the dimensional bag. “What do you think is in here?”
“Who knows? Bags like that react to you thinking about what you want. If it’s not in there, it won’t give you anything.”
“So if you get a dimensional bag, you just have to guess whether it’s empty or has stuff?” Kay turned the bag over and shook it. Nothing came out.
“No, you can empty the whole thing at once. We’re just not going to do that right now because we have to idea what’s in there. It could be a bunch of poison that kills us, or we get crushed by million of copper coins. That’s one of the things we can do when we have a safe base established for a time.”
Kay slowly put his hand in the bag. “Can I try and pull things?”
“Uh… sure? Just don’t think of anything dangerous.”
Kay’s mind drifted to the tiny, trapped dragon currently hibernating in Eleniah’s regular pack. Murunel had reconfirmed her decision to sleep the time away instead of interacting with the world in the limited way she was forced into having. Only being able to pantomime and not affect the world around you in any way really wore at the dragon’s spirit. Kay put his hand all the way in the bag and thought of an item that breaks enchantments.
His hand closed around something.
Slowly, with a look of surprise on his face, Kay pulled out a metal wand with a large blue stone halfway down its length. The metal of the wand wrapped around the stone like a spider web, leaving only bits of the glowing blue color visible.
Eleniah stared at the wand. “What did you think of?”
“Something to break Murunel free.”
Eleniah blinked a few times, then reached into her bag and pulled out Murunel’s ball after a few moments of digging. Silently she held out her hand for the wand.
Kay scooted closer and gave it to her.
She stared at it for a second. “Touch to the magic you want dispelled. Easy enough.” With Murunel in the ball in one palm, Eleniah slowly lowered the tip of the metal wand to touch the glass ball.
Clink!
They stared at it for a moment before deflating as nothing happened.
“Well, it was worth a shot,” Eleniah muttered. “Maybe this,” She held the wand out point up, “Isn’t powerful enough to dispel the enchantment trapping her in there.”
“Oh, is that what you guys were trying?” A voice Kay had never heard asked. “That sucks. But hey, you guys are the first people to even try and free me, so I’m not going to cry over the first try not working.”
The voice was female and kind of young-sounding. It also seemed to emanate from the small glass ball in Eleniah’s hand.
Kay and Eleniah stared down at the dragon.
“Oh, they aren’t putting me away.” A sigh. “I’ll just go back to sleep.”
“Murunel?” Kay took the ball and held it up to his face.
“Yes, Kay?” The tiny dragon bent her flexible neck to look at him.
“Is that you talking?”
“Is that…” Murunel froze, so still, she looked like a statue. “You… you can hear me?”
Eleniah leaned in close. “It looks like the wand wasn’t enough to free you, but it removed the magic preventing us from hearing you.” She looked at the wand again. “Can it be used more than once? Oh, recharge time of… oof. That’s a long time.” She held up the wand in front of the ball. “We might be able to use this again to get rid of the rest of the magic trapping you, but it recharges slowly from ambient magic in the local area. If we can find someplace with a lot of ambient magic, it’ll go faster, but as it is right now, it’ll take a few months.”
In the ball, Murunel stared at the wand, then slowly turned to look between Kay and Eleniah. “You can hear me. You managed to break the magic at least that much.”
“Yes, we can,” Kay replied.
“And you have a real possibility to free me that will take a few months at the longest.”
“Right.”
She stared at them for a moment, then burst into sobs.