"...So I wanted to honor those dwarves that we lost here. I'm really sure how to do it," Gigi said.
"I lost my entire tribe. I'm still reeling," Finley said. "I understand."
The two of them stared down as the group from the Caravan did their best to secure the airship to the ground. At the same time, their view of the port city was the best one that they ever had, despite being on a rocky overlook that rich dwarves had chosen specifically for the view.
Perhaps it was the fresh air on that breeze that just didn't seem to exist on the promontory. Either way, Gigi only had a few minutes to talk before for wild shape would run out of the day.
"What do you want to do to memorialize them?"
"I wasn't a follower of the Goat Lord before, but I am given to understand that you are or were. His guidance would be great in this time."
She looked so young at that moment. According to her, her wild shaped form was a shade removed from how she had looked before. She had blond salt and pepper hair, the same as her goat form.
"I don't know if some of the guys in the pantheon are more direct with their approach, but the Goat Lord is more of a very flimsy outlines kind of guy. Or girl? Not really sure."
"Go on."
Gigi and Finley double checked the top end of the ropes. He was scared of the boat, and they had a spare rope which they tossed in to see if they could help the four humans down there.
"There are few things that the Goat Lord really wants us to do. A lot of that is turning their bodies into plant food. Or turning them to plants. He specifically likes sunflowers and daisies, but he understands that this unnatural phenomenon is not going to be so easily dealt with. Sonya and I had a talk about what we're going to do when this was all over and we would have to go through every single town that has been affected by this, which is hundreds of them on this continent, then we would have to spend all day turning the corpses of these zombies into dirt and..."
"That sounds like a lot."
"It is a lot to ask someone with a limited lifespan like these humans, but I've got a long life ahead of me. I may make the time when this is all done."
"I don't even know how long pygmy goats live. But I'm here for this for as long as I can. Someone has to write down what happened here so that it can never happen again."
Finley tried heaving a rope back up slowly, but trying it was testing the bounds of what was possible. He wasn't strong enough to pull the rope.
He was going to need to go some way to return it.
He imagined a giant field that could reel again, thinking about firefighting horse. A chance encounter with a fire brigade by a river had shown him exactly how those worked. The massive workhorses hauled things well.
"Do you think that we could build a little crank right here?" Finley said.
The entire airship rocked for a second. Finley looked up, hoping beyond hope that it wasn't the canvas that had broken. He breathed a sigh of relief when it was just the regular movement of the air.
"Do you think that the air travel is going to be a bit like that?" He said. "I know that sea travel can be kind of unpredictable, but we're not even- We haven't even left the port and I'm already rethinking bringing bring my wagons with us."
"I didn't know that they were your wagons."
"They're mine until someone else says otherwise. I'm the Tinker King."
"Where's your kingdom exactly" she said teasing him.
He knew that she had heard him talk about how it worked before and she was just a little sentimental about Gloucester. Living there for years made her reticent to leave.
He dearly wanted to say something, but he wasn't going to say anything about that. It wasn't his place.
She was going through something, he had been through something and they were going to have to all work together in the end.
"I would like to go to wherever that is," She said quietly.
"We are going to get there soon. I promise you" He said, meaning that with every fiber of his being. Though it was more of a metaphorical allegory, he knew that they would eventually be heading home.
The humans asked them to move the rope once again and with some difficulty he was able detach the ship's rigging line to the surface.
Then they finally looked like they were happy for the first time.
In stark and vivid contrast to the humans, every single goat on board that ship looked miserable. The few that were poking their heads up from the storage area below deck did.
None of them could speak. All of them gave the clear message that they would rather be anywhere else, but here. Besides their goat stares, all of the stamping and whinnying was getting on his nerves.
Finley could not blame either group.
He had to regulate their emotions as well as his own. If the horses didn't like being cooped up, it bled into how he felt. The goats, he could do even less about.
Though he did not like the water, the safety was far less. If their ship broke in the water, he would just have to swim.
The majority of the inside of the airship was taken up by the horses who tended to agree with the goats.
He could not wait to let them run free where they would not be eaten by zombies. He had a thought that perhaps that that might happen where they were, but the world had conspired to keep them together still.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
All he wanted was his bay mares and his wagon.
If he had those two things, he would be happy.
They would have to tear him kicking and screaming off of the southern continent.
He smiled inwardly, thinking about a place where he could set down his load for a night without worrying about zombies. Wherever that place was, that would be his home soon.
"What do you want to do about this memorial? Most Tinker memorials involve flowers and a stop at a way station, I'm curious to know what dwarves would do."
"I expect there's going to be an even split between the dwarves that want to be buried at sea in a fire and those that would want to be buried here, understanding that we might have to cremate them. If we take their bodies and turn them into plants, that might suffice. Because I don't know what they would have wanted. But I know that turning into a plant is probably the best thing that I could ask for if it was me."
"If it were you, that's what you would have wanted? Consciously? You would have chose that?" Finley said.
"I think that I would have. The whole thing about the group of you coming back from the dead as goats was just so unexpected."
"Just making a stone memorial will satisfy most dwarves. But taking a step further and thinking about the funeral at sea for as many as we can? That will satisfy the rest. Then we can make the stone monument look like what happened to the boats out there."
Finley nodded. It all started with them killing even more undead.
"Finley- While I'm in dwarf form, I have a favor to ask," she said, moving closer.
"Sure, whatever you need. How can I help?"
"Can you hold me?" She whispered. "It's just been so long and the time before was so-"
His arms were around her before she could finish her sentence. It felt like they could make it when they were together.
---
Sonya had finally worked out a way to get the damn anchor in place. It had taken all of her will to make it, but now when she looked at her world line, she was clearly able to distinguish where the place was.
In her minds eye, there was a spot in the academy where she could just easily open up a portal in a doorway, as well as the specific warehouse that was now covered in a meter of snow. This helped her pinpoint the next one, the workshop where they had decided to keep some of the caravans. After all, working in a flying ship was going to be quite conspicuous. Everything that they could store in the workshop, to include one of their wagons, had been placed in there.
Her hat trick however was figuring out a way for them to quickly bail out of the ship.
One of the walls had an iron outline and she had been able to use it intermittently to transport things in and out. The problem that she was trying to solve was to save several steps using portals. Three of their wagons had made it into the hold where the horses and goats loafed about. Two were of the tinker variety, loud and colorful with the requisite accouterments.
One was the specially designed wagon for the orcs. Everything that they needed in terms of food and water had been loaded and cleansed into one side of the hold. Everything that they could offload into the workshop had been loaded into the wagon that they were leaving.
At some point in time, they would be back on the ground and the caravan would ride again, but on that day, the caravan would fly.
It already had the smell of a farm on a hot day.
Now all she needed to do was make sure that whoever was in the rotation for the cleanse card got to spent a good amount of time that afternoon working on it.
She definitely would prefer the smell of a horny teenager who thought that tonight was the night that they were going to lose their virginity. The male goats in particular had a smell that she just wasn't fond of. Not that she was complaining. Each goat here was worth their weight in cards and was a symbol of everything that they were trying to achieve.
Taking a new look at the goats around her, they were all just doing their best.
She was just doing her best, thinking with portals. Together with portals, she could do it.
----------------------------------------
"The portal is stable?" Anthony said.
"For a brief time yes. I can do about thirty seconds or so, but don't count on it," Sonya said.
"Every day you get hotter, you know what?"
He drew her in for a long kiss, oblivious to the people loading crates around them.
"Sorry about the smell," she said, when he finally released her.
They still stood there holding each other. In that moment, she wasn't the super powerful warlock that was brute forcing her way through a war. She was just a girl in her thirties holding a man of about the same age, both aching from exertion. His back hurt, but he had convinced himself that he could take it.
"We did it in record time," he said. "Thanks to you. You're really like the captain of the team."
"And you're what, the team manager?"
"Like I could take credit. I'm more like the CEO of some great organization that runs itself so efficiently that I'm looking for ways to not hurt it."
"You keep talking business like this and I might have a sale for you."
"Oh... don't tempt me. I'll sell you a bridge, lady."
The two of them finally parted, Anthony sad that the moment had to end, but tired and happy after all of their work.
"I think everything is ready," she said.
There hadn't been that much left for them to do. But there was always lunch.
----------------------------------------
Bob, the player manager for team Mork, was making a signature cake. One of his favorite sheet cake recipes was being put to the test. It was a mix that had seen him through some hard times. Valerie and Sonya helped raid the kitchens in the academy.
The results were in.
He was happy to see that both the cake and the cake pan had survived the oven. He didn't expect much from the dwarven design.
Someone had splurged on it probably another dwarf with more money than sense. The only thing that he didn't have was a watch. This meant that they had to mark time by some other way.
Stella had the bright idea to bring out a book and read a few pages aloud. They had both laugh at the idea initially, but it proved to be the most responsible thing that they could do.
Finley had told them that there was a card power somewhere that might help them keep time.
All the cards that he had about his fingertips he wasn't going to go store through them. Not when there was so much that they needed to take care of. A stew didn't need to be coached with precise times.
When it was done, you just kind of knew. And you didn't burn the pot because you kept moving it around
A cake took a long, interminable time.
Every cake had a time which it was under cooked or over baked. Bob knew a few of these times like the back of his head. There have been several recipes that they use consistently throughout this entire career that had a specific time between twelve and fifteen minutes that he came back to over and over again.
So when Stella started reading, she got about three pages in and they chose said to be a minute or so. Then, they realize that she was reading a smut book and she started reading a sex scene and that sort of cascaded into a few things and suffice to say, the first cake was burnt.
The pan wasn't.
Bob, with only an apron on, had to pull out the first sheet cake and dump it. He wasn't mad, because who didn't want a little thing that wasn't expected.
He was mad that he would have to use his backup pan and his backup mix. Here we just failed squeeze that enough cake for everybody around to enjoy. And this being his first proper bake since they arrived on Novaria, he really wanted to impress them. Of the people that knew that he was a reality TV star, a few of them have it on him about making something for them.
The second cake though, it was a beauty. He grabbed a toothpicks and it went in flawlessly, of course that was about the time that Stella was telling him to take his damn pants off again. All he needed really was an apron, and oh isn't it too bad that the dwarven aprons were so short on him.
She called on him to return.
Bob was a simple man, and liked to listen when women told him what to do, especially in this situation.
He complied.
Later on, when everyone was remarking about how good the cake actually was, Bob could see Borgan crying. The orc nearly broke down for how sweetly made the cakes were.
Bob and Stella had a tacit agreement to not let them know that their cake timer had been a romp in the room next door. No one would ever need to know that.
But they both got a little thrill from it.