It had been two days since the battle of Ebolt.

Corvayne felt his bike bucking and shaking under him, as it had the entire ride back. He was shocked that it was flyable at all, given how many parts were melted on the exterior. Spears looked like someone had been blowing bubbles in her, the combined bike wobbling and sometimes blasting out little sparks. A pack of Drakes chasing them managed to catch a few wires on Spears's ride in the ensuing fight. Between his own melted anti-gravity and her impulse getting shredded, Corvayne had to hitch them together to fly at all, using Gravity to help try to smooth out the strained anti-gravity unit when it got sketchy. The bumpy ride and slow pace reminded Corvanye of numerous times limping back to The Watchers.

He swore the bike coughed when he let it finally drop the last three feet to the ground.

Looking at Camp, he could see that there was a divided super-tent with lots of flaps, reinforced with what looked like red metal chains. There were some of the people he had brought across the gap wearing new clothes or cleaned imperial uniforms. All of them slowed as Corvayne made his way up to the truck. They started saluting, either to him or Bell. Perhaps it was her tattered gear, a bandage on her forehead where a chip of wall hit her, or the blood on her from holding the bridge. If it was him, well, they had the wrong idea. Corvayne had first gotten into this to protect the stupid black rock, no matter the reason he had now for sticking to it.

He was no hero.

At the truck entrance, he saw Hari come up and hug him, and he returned it half-heartedly. “I'm back.”

“What happened? How did they catch you?” She fussed over places where the different levels of light and heat had burned his clothes or alternatively bleached them white. Even his chain mail was slowly recoloring itself from getting seared white. A little detail of the magic that made Corvayne wonder what the hell the crystal weapon The Raven had used really was.

Corvayne looked to Bell, Spears, then at the imperial soldiers and civilians. “He had a pretty strong magic weapon. Shields too. Won't be easy to take him out, not without losing people.” A trade he wasn't willing to make.

Hari nodded, then glanced back at the truck. “We should speak, at your camp... later...”

“What's wrong?”

The elf woman shook her head. “Anastasia has been... busy. I mean, she's working on the spell book, we've been trying to understand the system better with my Master... and now learning about The Raven and what happened to Osteria she's coming up with time tables with the soldiers about how we can squeeze in those quests and what backup we can call... I might have to go for a few days, you know, home to make a shrine to Gygax, but if we are worker bees we....”

Corvayne felt himself getting... angry at Hari. “Hari, you've told me everything but why you and Wick are acting weird. Anastasia... she's started using her old name, and her telling me to not come near her...”

“You... I...” Hari looked torn, glancing between Corvayne and the Truck. No doubt Wick was cooped up in what had been his room. Corvayne took a step towards the door, and she barred him. Was he BANNED from the truck? Her face turned desperate. “Corvayne please!”

He took a step back. Was she... scared? He took a deep breath and turned around, feeling so tired and frustrated that he was starting to feel sick to his stomach. Part of him wanted to just hike back to Cascadia.

“Fine. Good to see you too, after nearly being burnt to ashes.”

He hooked a hand under the wires tying the Hover-Bikes together and once more called on his Gravity power to help lift it, dragging it off across the sand. He did look back and saw that Hari seemed to be still fidgeting, looking like a rabbit about to bolt. Everything in the air when he had walked up to the Truck made him feel that this was all the first hot winds of a sandstorm, about to grind him to the bone.

Back by his tent, he dropped the cycles in the dirt and dropped onto a rock, holding his head between his knees for a moment. He'd have to go back to the truck, and go inside to grab wire. He thought about the past, when he had run for miles and miles with a broken ankle, every step on the shifting desert punishing him, his arms burning from pushing sand with his spear to try to keep weight off his foot. Corvayne wanted to walk back to the truck right now as much as he'd like to do a repeat of that run. The downside of [[Understanding]] was he was starting to notice things that he did not think about, and how many times he nearly died in the past was up there for sure.

He felt his body lighten and looked up to see that Spears brought Brines with her, as well as a big spool of new looking copper wire. Corvayne's former warehouse boss was fairly jovial, talking about all sorts of exciting things that were happening around camp as he sat and started spooling new A-gravs with Corvayne and Spears.

“-And we've been doing work with those Towers! It's become a lot more organized with goals and I feel like Undine has been a boon.... she's got Wick doing more organization stuff... oh sorry I know things are tender with you two, but take it from me, I've gotten more than my fair share of lumps dating. You're fit, good looking, and smart! Not to mention rich, with your take of the gold... though I imagine if there's dungeons on Cascadia, is gold even worth anything anymore?”

Corvayne finished spooling his anti-gravity device. “Probably not... unless the floors are smaller than we think.” He stood up to go replace the burned out unit in his bike.

The athletic man shook his head, momentarily distracted from spooling and using a hand to help give what he was saying weight. “Everybody at -the- inn says they are as good as infinite. Supposedly there was a thousand year expedition that went as far as they could on an easy floor, then tried to come back. I think of myself as pretty learned, you know, graduated from the most prestigious university on Cascadia, but the jargon about how they proved it, I worry that if I have wine it will react with the sleeping effect of the lecture and I'll go into a coma, it's so-”

“Brines, I totally get it. I have the same thing when I try to skip ahead on my summoning book. What did they learn?”

“Oh! Oh, well Corvayne, you see, every floor is at least millions of miles long each way. Then again, some other fine scholar said once wasn't enough to just take someone else's word for it. A little extreme, don't you think? Well, other floors had it too.”

Corvayne finished with putting the anti-gravity device into his bike. They still needed one for Spear's ride. He thought about what Brines had said. “So my point stands. You have a never-ending source of something, you tank it's price. In the desert, you valued every ounce of water. On Cascadia you would kill to be dry for more than five minutes at a time.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Brines frowned. “It wasn't that bad!”

“I was trying to be funny.” Corvayne shrugged. He didn't feel it, but Brines was clearly trying to help buoy him, possibly looking over his shoulder back to camp for when a heavy hitter like Mister I or Grunt would come sauntering up. It wasn't really fair to Brines, as he usually got pushed around by everyone else. Corvanye cleared his throat. “Thanks Brines. Glad to have you helping.”

Brines beamed. “Why of course! A little upper body work out, spooling these things!” He rolled up his stretchy workout outfit then flexed.

Spears smiled. “Oh, you boys are so lucky. It's really hard for girls to stay in shape.” She then oozed into a puddle with one hand kept intact to keep her project off the ground.

Corvayne gave her a poker face until she started cackling at her own joke, which cheered him up a little.

Bell came back to camp later in the afternoon, looking better kept and a little less shell shocked. She had killed a lot of men on the bridge and been very quiet the entire ride back. Corvayne had worried a little about a concussion but she didn't have any signs, so he guessed it was just she hadn't actually killed anyone before this.

When Brines left with a bounty of newly made hover-bike parts, night was falling and so Corvayne started a camp fire. He didn't feel like working anymore. He also pretended to not notice Spears looking at him, instead focusing on the fire. Watching it's little whirls, how logs shifted in embers, the taste and smell when a faint breeze brought smoke to him, stinging his eyes, then rubbing them clear to look at the burnt orange and dusky purple sky. They should be laughing, having a drink, talking about the next adventure.

As he was thinking, he caught a whiff of something cooked moments before he heard then saw Hari coming to their camp, carrying a basket full of food.

“Sorry, I keep having things to do to get ready for the trip to see the shapers! I'm here!”

Corvayne nodded. “It's all right. Sorry I-”

He felt something not-quite-hard hit his ribs, and he saw Spears frowning at him. What?

The watery woman stood up, and folded her arms. The look on her face was, even rendered in liquid form, deeply familiar to Corvayne. How often had Spears looked at him with the same acidic expression, like he was a bug who just crawled out of her salad? He felt a little bit of embarrassment then because he was hit with nostalgia about being treated horribly.

Spears spit. “Hari, you can't just keep giving him trite bullshit. Wick can get away with it because she's legitimately nuts.”

Hari had a vein on her forhead appear, her normally graceful voice squeaking. “She's NOT nuts. That's the problem!”

“Then she is terrible. She's doing this for some sort of plan? What's the point here?”

Corvayne could see Hari pushing her bottom lip into her top lip to literally clamp her own mouth shut. He recalled when he had been worried she was too young, and even though he knew she was adult the entire thing was so childish that it rekindled the annoyance he felt yesterday.

Spears must have been thinking the same thing as she then said, “You know what? It doesn't matter why. I'm annoyed with you, Hari. Tell me why you and Wick are grinding away at Corvayne. What did you and Wick do? Tell me a lie, even. Corvayne, do you just let them give you pig swill and tell you it's fine wine? You should be standing up for yourself!”

Hari snapped her head up. “I was ready to give my mind up to save him, get that through your piss-soaked soggy brain! I LOVE him.”

Spears stepped up. “Then WHERE the FUCK are you when he rides out to fight? Worse, you're here, he comes back, you act like he's a nuisance! Tell you what, drop the food and go eat kick rocks until you get your grit back and figure out if you care about Corvayne at all or about Wick's stupid secret more. Where's Lady Blood Claw when you really need her? Have you asked Corvayne about what he saw? How he's doing?”

Corvanye took a deep breath in. What the hell was going on? “Spears. Enough. Hari... let's eat. It's been a long day, I did miss you, and I know whenever I get the whole picture, it will make sense.” He felt it was more diplomatic than genuine, but it seemed to work.

Hari sat next to him and after a few sharp looks at Spears she got on with dishing out food, steaming loaves of bread stuffed with cubes of seasoned monster meat. Sesame seeds were sprinkled onto it, along with a sort of aquatic cabbage that grew inside a watery Tower. He wouldn't have been surprised if the grain had been tower grown too.

Hari spoke a little about a few tower runs she had done over the last two days. The elf stated she had stopped sleeping outside the instance to try to squeeze extra time for delving. He felt a little tired as he noticed she had started talking a lot about things they found, always back to treasure, and that she was looking at him to try to gauge... something.

Bell was clearly not listening, staring at the fire and swirling a wine flask, blinking a lot. Spears was blowing bubbles of herself, again.

Corvayne went to his tent after he finished his meal, and Hari followed him in. He was about to turn and try asking her what was going on, again, when she pressed herself against him, somehow too hot despite the air around them being near freezing. She pushed her mouth against his and jabbed her tongue into his mouth, trying to grab his hands and press them into her breasts under her coat and over her living dress, forcing him to feel her up. It was so weird and out of place for her that Corvayne wasn't aroused at all, just confused. It extended to when she was pulled the straps of her dress down. It didn't seem real to him. The spell broke a little when she started tugging his gear off.

“Hari, what the hell-”

“Just grab me. Come on.” Hari huffed, clutching at Corvayne's strawberry pants which he had not let her take off, then pushing her mouth against his again and rubbing her bare chest on his... but it was too hot and stuffy in the tent and something about how she was acting made him nervous.

“Hari.” She pressed herself into him again and he grabbed her shoulders. “Hari. Stop doing this.”

“Corvayne, please, if you're angry at me...”

“I am angry at you!” He said with more heat than he had wanted. He felt a little sick with everything that had been happening, and something about seeing her topless, with her weird fleshy dress hanging off her... what had once always worked for him suddenly made Hari look fragile, and it didn't help that she looked hurt. He turned away, and she hugged him.

“Please don't hate me.”

His shoulders drooped as he felt her crying on his back. Two different girls in one week was too much for him. “I don't hate you Hari, never. But I feel like you're putting on a weird show, and when we have some madman killing burning towns and butchering farmers for no reason, it's another thing I don't need.”

“I just wanted to... make it simple. You're angry with me, so... work it out.”

Corvayne sighed. “I don't need sex, I need people to talk to me. I used to read books, you know? Instead of getting mocked and excluded, I would go off and borrow a book, and read it, and in these books there were so many stories where if someone had just stated something they knew, it would deflate the entire problem, and it made me mad to read it, and now that I'm living it it's worse than any-” He reached into his pants and pulled a shard of black glass out of his nuts with a short burst of searing pain that reminded him to use [Vitality], shifting his stance and holding up the black crystal shard and waving it in front of Hari. He sighed and tossed it off to the corner of the tent.

“If not you, then I need to ask Wick, and I see the look on your face and it's going to be the same-”

“Corvayne please.” Hari had shut her eyes, pulling her hands from her breasts to cover her ears. “Just pretend it's okay for a night. Please.”

He sighed, and held her while feeling nothing but tired as they laid down together. What was wrong with him? With her? With Wick?

He woke up in the middle of the night when she had woken to leave the tent, letting a whisper of freezing air in, and when she came back and was like a block of ice in his sleeping bag and tried to spoon, and he really wanted to toss her into Spear's spare bedding. Instead he let her get on top of him until she worked herself up into a frenzy, and Corvayne tried to get into it but just ended up grunting like it had felt great then rolling to sleep when she tired herself out and it was warm enough in the sleeping bag.

She somehow woke before him and left in the morning, leaving him cold, naked, and feeling numb to everything. Then again, he had hover-bikes, guns, and shadow powers to test out. He started putting his gear back on.