Turns out that walking in a circular arc is harder than you would think. People naturally tend to veer instead of walking in a straight line, but keeping the veer consistent is. . .difficult. So that's why we ended up walking in a rough hexagon for a week, our boredom punctuated by brief panic attacks and much shorter scouting distances.
We walked slowly, scanning the horizon for anything interesting, and May would grab samples of plants that weren't boring grass when we passed them. Everyone else kept an eye out for rabbits and pumagators, eager to score more meat for the cooking pot, but mostly just happy that there was something besides walking to do.
Will, our rear-scout, and I had it worst off, I think. While the rest of them were in a group and mostly guaranteed to be fine if an attack happened, we were out and exposed like bait. When the pumagators and rabbits decided that we were distracted enough, they would do their best to get a taste of our blood. Then, once we were screaming in pain, dodging out way back to the safety of the group, we held on long enough for Doctor Lewis to patch us up.
We're thinking of forming an itch support-group after healing some of the more deadly wounds. Going through that process, eating through a canteen of stew, and finishing the patrol is making me seriously miss the feel of old-school instant-regeneration-via-bright-light healers that were common in the past. The rest of the raid group agreed that itch-based healing was uncomfortable, but none of them were in a position to fully experience the horror. Besides our close calls, the only person gravely injured was Baron, and he bled out from a missing throat before Doctor Lewis could get to him.
Baron was never the greatest at combat, but I have the sneaking suspicion that he just wanted to get around to unlocking his first respawn reward when he heroically charged out to save me from a pumagator that was on my tail. It was the wink as he collapsed back from the beast, spear poking through its torso, that gave it away. I get not wanting to go on patrols anymore, but waiting for a respawn sounds worse to me. At least out here I get the adrenaline rush of almost dying a few times a day.
Still, daily patrol is the most boring part of the day. The things going on around camp in the past week are much more interesting. A large part of the interesting comes from the fact that more and more people are coming back from the dead with their superpowers. People spawning with magical guitars, microphones, the ability to manifest floating paint, and classical illusions is bound to spice up any gathering. Every night is practically a concert, at least now that there's a sound barrier on the cathedral entrance so people can sleep while the night-life goes on inside. The acoustics in there are amazing, though I hear that respawning into a giant concert takes some getting used to.
In a less fun style of interesting, people have started to care about actual fortification of the area. Our patrols are part of that, but some of the more talented control and conjuration wizard people have started building walls and real buildings outside. The people who were supposed to be architects for the colony ship took charge of that sort of thing, making the place look more and more like a blend of fantastical elven architecture with trees growing up over stone foundations, and modern sensibilities with rain gutters, a parody coffee shop, and quite a few apartment buildings. There's even a jail that the guilds all got together to build, though it doesn't have many occupants.
Still, it wasn't the people who respawned for the first time that changed things around the camp the most. While everybody who hadn't died yet was contemplating some dangerous exploring of their own to get a superpower, the people who came back the second time made almost everyone much more risk-prone.
There wasn't any more rewards for respawning, at least not that anyone had reported, but there was a bid advantage to getting back into your soul bubble, apparently. I almost couldn't not hear about what was going on with that with how much people talked about it at the campfires over food. It turns out that when you're doing things in the outside world, you build up credits of some sort back in your soul bubble. Supposedly, those credits could upgrade rewards, modify and grow a soul bubble, or even obtain new skills and items. At least, that's what the speculation is. Most of the people didn't have enough credits for more than a few minor tweaks, but since all the reports on exactly what was on people's lists for purchase were different, people were interested in what exactly was available for them personally.
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I would have suicided on the spot myself, but I was both squeamish and paying attention to the fact that the one thing people kept saying was that they had barely any points to spend. If it was a time-based system of reward or a merit based one, I really had nothing to show for my time besides a few rabbit and pumagator kills and by now, a bit more than a week spent alive. Maybe it would count the imp's achievements as mine if it were achievement based, but I wasn't going to rely on that. The world was dangerous enough without trying to get killed off.
Speaking of the imp, I wasn't getting any more visions in my dreams. Communication between here and the soul bubble where he probably was was cut off. Since I hadn't been dreaming in visions when he snuck out ahead of me after we first met, it was probably true no matter who was inside the soul bubble and who wasn't. The link between us was broken right now. I even had the second opinion of Doctor Weiss when I ran into him one evening. He had been researching all the super powers people had obtained, cataloging them in his head, and making theories about certain patterns.
Most of his findings didn't apply to me, he said, and he was holding off on any public reveals yet before he had a more complete picture, but he did say that the silver line coming from my chest was missing at the moment. That lead to a storm of questions on his part, some "Iiiiiiinterestinggggg"s on his part, and a late dinner for me.
Supposedly other people who had string-like connections coming out of them either hadn't died, or the item disappeared with them when they did. None of the items were alive, and none of them had been broken, so it really didn't make anything clearer about my own link/bond thing.
Doesn't matter to much to me anyway. I have at least a few more days before the imp manages to respawn if he's been building up energy in the soul bubble at the same rate that I did. When he does, I'm aiming to be completely out of his ball-kicking way, possibly pulling off a stuffed-pumagator prank on someone with Magnifica and Buffy. We hadn't pulled anything too amusing off lately, mostly because the camp had become increasingly not-boring as the days passed by, but sooner or later Hera would be sleeping and we would have another stuffed pumagator ready to be unleashed. The new one was taking longer because Magnifica insisted on giving it three heads, convincing the triplets to enchant it for durability, and filling it with fluffy bunny fur. Naturally, this was taking longer than a day or two, especially with the triplet's backlog of things to work on.
After they and everyone else failed at breaking into the downstairs section of the cathedral, they had commissioned a workshop and started making various weapons, tools, and gadgets for people who were nice enough to bring them materials. My sword quickly joined by bone lances, bows, clubs, and other swords of similar caliber. They also helped make pipes for plumbing in the area. That was rather important.
Hygiene in general took a leap forward with more people crafting and working on buildings and infrastructure. A man-made bathhouse was in the works, and you could bribe some of the magically inclined to drop water on you if you needed a shower. One of the more timid people in camp had solved our problem with low encounter rate on patrol by using some sort of deodorant ability on us. We rubbed some grass on ourselves before heading out and ran into way more animals after that. Needless to say, between all the groups heading out to explore, he was eating only the primest of steaks at meal times.
Can I just take a moment to say that a barter-based economy is a weird? People are literally buying things and services with steaks. I mean, there are lots of service for service trades, but the primary exchange item in the camp has been well cooked food. I love food as much as the next guy, but it's just. . .it sounds like some sort of comedy routine.
Tomorrow, we're going to start making thinner yet longer pie-slice shaped patrols around the camp. There are more groups heading out now that people are becoming less cautious, and quite a few of the farther exploring groups haven't come back yet. It might just be larger packs of pumagators, but those groups weren't idiots and had people who could use area of effect abilities, so I bet that whatever killed them was something new. Maybe it's a geographic danger, like poisonous plants or treacherous terrain. It could be some sort of monster like a dragon. Maybe they aren't even dead and they just don't want to come back because they discovered something awesome.
Either way, we're going to start multiple day patrols farther out and let the big groups hunt up food closer to home. Hopefully we find something cool tomorrow.