"You're able to use gate now?" Sonya squealed. "Finally!"

Both girls embraced and were jumping around. Finley patted Gigi, avoiding the pygmy goat's tiny horns.

"Someday my goat... ahem girl, this whole place will all be yours. And someday we'll understand what the heck they're talking about and how fast they can advance. Because this is just ridiculous," he said.

If there was a sound that a goat could make to impress upon those around it that it was both in agreement and utterly flabbergasted? It would have been the bleating that followed. The goats were as over their skills of the chosen as he was.

"It's just like their parents handed them something except their parents are the gods of this world. And I understand that the the Goat Lord wants to end this zombie calamity. I really get it. I really do. But just seeing how far these guys are away from the regular guy like me and you?"

Gigi bleated.

"Even the two Orcs that are with us? I'm absolutely certain that they are baffled by these humans. I can't wait for them to meet an actual human from our worlds at some point in time. The contrast will just be so..."

Gig bleated again.

"Delicious. Yes, delicious is the word."

She gave him a light headbutt. He assumed it was a sign of affection as they had a pretty good rapport so far. It had been weird when she started talking to him about her feelings about being patted on the head. That had only been in a top ten weirdest things that happened to him the last year or so.

He reluctantly agreed to abide by her requests to not pat her head when she was in dwarf form. But if there was any dwarf it looked like she needed headpats, it was Gigi when she was wild shaped back into her normal dwarf form.

He drifted back into their conversation.

"Now we can do two supply runs on the same day," Sonya said. "Wait. We had to do a bunch of testing to see how many gates you can do at once. And if you can do the thing while you gate to my anchor locations. Because you know the thing about the boat is that it doesn't sit still."

"That is one of the worst things about the boat and I really hope that it would change at some point in time, but I'm liable to be voted down," Finley said. "We could split up a party? Have half go on the away missions. Then the rest of us say back pet the goats and ride the horses and do all the things that don't involve us getting into a tussle with zombies?"

"We don't split the party," Zan said.

"Yeah! Never split the party. That's just tempting Murphy for no reason in telling him not to smash any of the vases you'll have to have for him, conveniently next to a baseball bat."

"This is just going to give us more options. A girl likes more options," Zan said. "Plus, if there were any goats here that could possibly learn this spell then that would make things extra better for them. They could come back here and and eat grass all they wanted and they could even use the workshop."

Several goats turned their heads at this. They had been listening. All the goats that had come with them so far had been from this little Port City. Finley was absolutely certain that they would love to take a residence next to where they once lived.

Of course there was still the teenage weensy little problem of there still being some zombies left inside of town.

"Are you telling me that they can clean up their own town and then portal back to us on their own time? Once they figure out how to use Gates?" Finley said.

"As you say that, it has a certain appeal. And aside from that one town that was completely cleared out, we don't have a place that we can fall back on as well as this promontory over the Port City," Zan said. "We can use this spot as the beginning of the counter attack. There was a plague and now there has to be a purge."

In that moment, it felt to Finley like every single goat was looking at her. They were all staring. She could have sold them all broken down wagons for double the price of a new one at that point in time. He was damn certain of it.

"You're offering these goats a future that they're interested in. Be careful what you're talking about because they might get too attached," Finley said.

Several goats moved in to nuzzle against Sonya and Zan. A sea of goat was what he would have called it as the waves passed by them.

Even the horses looked up to see what was going on because it was so odd for all the goats to congregate in such a small area. Zan was busy trying to do her best to stem the rising tide of happy customers.

Sonya took it all in stride. Perhaps it was her affinity to the earth elemental that made her more suited to the task.

He let the girls get adored for a little bit longer until he could see that. Even they were just kind of flustered at the idea of sticking around.

"All right goats. Let the ladies free," he said. "I can't use animal handling on you guys because you're all dwarves on the inside. But I can make the horses come by and lick you all. You all have a very important job to do and need to eat. If you're done eating then maybe we can test out Zan's new spell."

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Finley found out that day that he could lead a goat to food but he could not make it eat. He sighed, thinking about how much more hay he was going to have to find for them. These goats ate a lot everyday, not to mention the horses who also were eating him out of ship and wagon.

----------------------------------------

Anthony was stumped. Stella had done her best work and it still wasn't able to unlock the large card case. Sophie had also given it a try. Chris, the other guy who had chosen a rogue class and regularly stuck to the warriors as ranged support couldn't crack it, either. The case itself was about the size of a briefcase and had a magical weight to it.

It was hard to pick up. Or rather was more awkward to pick up. It was like the difference between picking up a forty five pound dumbbell and a child of equivalent weight. One just went up easily and the other one was a little bit more wiggly. The case felt more wiggly by far. Like its internals had a soul.

Whoever had made this had correctly assumed that someone was going to want to steal it. They could also correctly assumed that whoever it was would need to have some sort of Epic skill to open it.

Otherwise, he would have had it open already. The damn thing just sat there taunting him.

He hadn't wanted to get the captain's cabin, taking the main berthing that was on the top deck. It was forced upon him to hold meetings there and everyone used it as a common area. It did open up onto the decks and that was convenient. He just didn't want the rest of the group to think that he was better than them for any reason.

Bob had given it a good chance as well. He didn't have a rogue class. He had a ranger class.

Back on Earth, his work opened doors that would otherwise be closed. Here, he had no such luck.

That would have been nice for him to be able to contribute on this, but he did a lot for the Caravan. Anthony, as both the caravan commander and its main healer had to think about where they were going next.

In a very short time, all the goats and horses were going to be back into the lower decks and he could prepare them for their next movement. He had really wanted to find a town or a village or an encampment that they could raid. Based off of what he had heard from Borgan's home, most of the Orcs lived in tribal communities that moved from place to place. This meant that perhaps the Orc zombies would not be stuck inside of the houses. They might have a set of tents and then the Orcs themselves could have drifted off from that starting point.

Orchish zombies were harder to kill than regular zombies due to their large stature and tough skin. They were still able to be killed and if anyone could do it, it would be the Caravan but he did not want to face a horde of them.

That was exactly why Bob and Anthony had chosen to use some of the monks to scout out the area from the sky. With their new found air bending abilities and their speed, it was something that they were uniquely suited for. They hadn't been able to fly before and Anthony didn't want to paint a target they had several days ago before they could reach the southern coast of.

After that was done, they would head on to the Southern Ocean and beyond. Hopefully they are helpful to be waiting for them. If not? They would have to charge right back knowing that they did their best, eh. They would be able to find some help at the very least from the Irumian foreign legion.

If that was true, they might be able to start gaining ground instead of just fleeing it. There was nobody powerful backing them. The gods were limited in their ability to directly intervene. Although they did meddle... They couldn't much more effectively if they were very powerful but unable to use that power.

Once again, he looked at the map that Valerie had updated upon their arrival. Now that they were on the southern coast. They didn't have an easy return place to anything that they had already cleared. If they wanted to get back to some place safe, they would have to portal back. Doing so would cause them to lose the ship. He did not want to lose the ship.

He looked on the map for Valerie's best guess as to where the river was.

Once most of the repairs were done, they would try to find it and use that as a guideline to get to the Southern Ocean. It was going to be another half a day until they felt confident. But he wanted everyone to get a full two days of rest. That did mean that it was forcing them to do so. It meant that he was not telling them to do anything. Everyone had their own rituals for getting ready. He needed to not get in the way. Some of them were able to rest while they were traveling so he was going to have to make a schedule for when they were

It was very unclear how deep that river was. Gigi had said that it was deep enough, but also that she hadn't traveled through that way before.

She'd heard this from sailors who knew.

Anthony knew that many of those sailors were trying to get with her. So some of the information might be might be suspect as they were trying to oppress her.

Gigi didn't think so. Valerie did.

Valerie had given a very thorough description of how they had to use their feminine wiles to get their way. The academy hadn't told them to do sex work per se, but to lean on their attributes. A little customer service voice as Anthony would say.

Valerie was in her corner still reading her novels. He had shared it with Sonya. They'd read it together which led to them taking the whole afternoon off. His general happiness with the current state of affairs grew.

They did not want to tell Valerie what had happened. She would become unsettled by the results. But it was good that she had something that she could keep mine off of. Two months of trialing with them had made her sleep more regular.

He knew that she had gone through so much so far. If his sons had gone through that same thing he didn't know if he would be able to take it. Adopting her in spirit was the closest thing he could do to bridge the gap. He had many speeches prepared from how to drive a car to how to to ride a bike. None had come to fruition given the total lack of cars and bikes on this planet. But if you spent long enough here, he might be able to get that bike thing up and going.

He heard the sounds of two pairs of feet landing on the deck above them.

"Hey Valerie, it sounds like our guys are back from scouting."

He was super glad that there wasn't any accompanying screaming. That would be his cue that something was off.

The two monks came in and walked over to the map. The table, was at least the size of a queen size bed. And the map on top of it almost the same distance. By the way, scuttled in. She used her card ability to create a map of the local region, and overlay that they could. The monks went right to where they best judged that the ship had landed.

"We are right here," Michael said, pointing right next next to the large river. "What do you think? Five miles to the river?"

"At most ten miles," Juan said.

Valerie and Bob looked up from the table. The late afternoon sun poured through as the shadow lengthened.

"Do you both think that we can move the ship and still work on it?" Anthony said.

Valerie hadn't quite promoted to the head of engineering, research and development. She had become the liaison between engineering and operations. Anthony was systematizing the fuck out of the Caravan as he'd gotten bored.

He wasn't going to have a scrum meeting anytime soon but Valerie has been on him to have more regular meetings. He would be fucked to waste peoples time on meetings unless there was a real need to do so. Unfortunately, there was no email so he couldn't do the thing he wanted to.

Could he brute force email? Come back to a medieval time and create an email service?

He was going to have to talk to Andrew and Finley.