Joe had already figured out that trying to set up a rudder wouldn’t work. The front of their ‘boat’ was an enormous fan of branches, not a pointed keel. They would need a massive plank to alter their direction.
A better idea would be to add drag to change their direction. He moved a bit further out on the big limb they had climbed out of the water onto. Joe studied the shape of the tree to figure out what kind of leeway they had and how it was moved in the water.
As he clambered out, the weight shift caused the tree to spin a little.
“Whoa! What are you doing?” his gnomish comrade squawked.
“Hold on. Let me see how much give we have here.” Joe moved a bit further and higher, causing the trunk to turn a bit more. He climbed back, and the trunk rolled back to the position it had been in before.
“You look like you have an idea.” Kaid asserted, popping back up to his feet. “Hit me. What ya got?” The small sneak was balancing lightly between two of the tree’s limbs, clearly having warmed up enough to move with his customary agility once again.
“I’m mostly sure that the limbs below us are gone. That means we have the top stuff and two big wings of branches. I think I know how to get us across. I’m going to tip us again, even more than before. I want you to go to where the branches come out of the water and hack off as much of the small stuff as we can, like anything less than an inch thick. We leave the west side alone.”
“Why?”
“The side we leave alone will have more drag than the striped side. It will pull us in that direction.”
Kaid looked at Joe, puzzled. “And … How does that help us?”
“Ok. Picture a canoe, Kaid,” Joe began to explain. “On each side of the canoe, there are an equal number of paddles in the water.” Joe hooked an arm around a branch, then held out his hands with his fingers together, pointing downward. “If we lift the paddles on the right side,” he said, lifting one hand higher, “the canoe will turn left. That is what cutting away all the small branches will do. It’s like taking some of the paddles out of the water.”
“Oh! Now I get it. How do we keep from flipping all the way over?”
“I don’t think we will. At the moment, we have a kind of catamaran going here. To keep it balanced, once we clear the right side below the water, we could take a few branches above the water line off the left side to maintain the balance.”
Kaid looked dubious. “Do I need to know what a catamaran is?”
“Imagine the canoe has a floating arm out on each side of it.” Joe implored.
“Ok. Wait. I’ve seen boats like that. Got it.”
Joe worked his way back out away from the trunk, causing the limb he was on to drop lower into the water. Kaid, being much lighter and more agile, scampered to the dripping bough and began shearing off the small branches in a swing or two of some heavy kukri-shaped knife Joe had never seen before. He stopped any time it took an extra blow to shear off a branch and stropped his blade sharp again on a whetstone he had on a thong around his belt.
Joe kept climbing up out of the water and then pulling his side back down. Each time he exposed more for Kaid, he would sit in the cold water and watch the thief work. Thankfully, the [Heartfire] did not slide off the trunk or vanish even when it was fully submerged by the river.
Kaid moved with such sure, fluid motions that he could have made a monkey jealous. When he had cleared three big limbs down to just the main branches, Joe had them returned to the center to make sure they were balanced. They were a little left heavy now.
Joe took out his hand axe and started cutting off a thick branch that hung high above the water. Just before he finished, he had another idea. Taking some of their rope, he asked Kaid to climb out and tie one end to something strong just above the water line. Tying the large, mostly severed branch to the middle of the rope, they fastened the other end to the trunk. When Joe finished chopping off the big limb, they let it fall into the water. All the small branches attached to the bough added even more drag to the west side.
It quickly became apparent their plan was working. It wasn’t long before they were noticeably closer to the middle of the river than they had been just a few minutes ago. They made a few more adjustments and then let the current do the rest of the work for them. Moving to a higher, and thus dryer spot, had the added benefit of more leaf cover just in case someone was on the shore. The two spent some time hanging a blanket in the thickest cover they could find, so Joe could recast his [Heartfire] inside the makeshift screen.
A few hours later and much closer to the west bank, they began to hear the sounds of twigs scraping and snapping on the bottom of the river. The first jump of the log occurred a few minutes later as a larger branch caught and snapped.
“I think it is getting to be time we abandon ship,” Joe declared. “Let’s let the extra limb go and get our rope back. And the blanket, too. Then we should try and make it the rest of the way to shore. We should be close to teleporting the remaining distance. Worst case, we swim the rest of the way.”
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“Says you. I’m not so sure I want to risk freezing to death a second time.”
“We should be ok,” Joe said, “Now that I know [Heartfire] can be cast on a moving object and that it can be submerged, I’ll put one on my backpack for us.”
“Oh, spit. That would work! Nice one, Joe!”
In a flurry of motion, Kaid had the blanket down and met Joe at the waterline to untie the branch. After they recovered their gear, they climbed their way as far toward the shore as they could among the branches. As they got to the end of where they could balance, Joe assessed the span of water they still had left to cross.
Not good. It was over three times further than he could jump to. The furthest target his eyes could catch on was a rock roughly a hundred feet from the shore. Worse yet, it was a tiny target, just the tip of a rock that flicked in and out of his range. It would be almost impossible to lock onto it in time.
Looking beyond where the stone was, Joe saw many more rocks peeking out from the river around fifty feet from the river’s edge. If the two banks were at all alike, that area should only be a few feet deep. If he could get one good jump from the tree, then a second jump should get them to where they could wade out.
“Kaid. I need your high perception. We need a rock in the river that will pass within medium range of us.”
“Got it.” Scampering up an upward-pointing limb, the tiny little man found a perch to scan ahead from. Every time the tree skipped or lurched, Joe tensed, but Kaid rode the shifts like a mariner. After a couple of minutes, he pointed downstream. “Here comes one. A big guy, too.”
“Ok. Get back here and tie in. Joe moved a few inches further out to get a better view of the water ahead. Sure enough, a boulder rose out of the river. They should pass within forty or fifty feet of it. That distance would waste some of the range they needed to make it to the far shore, but it would give Joe more time to lock onto it.
“Get ready,” he announced, grabbing Kaid’s ankle. The rogue had already resumed his perch on Joe’s backpack, literally sitting inside the corona of spectral flames. Joe watched the wet slab of stone come closer and closer, until he felt the connection take hold. Joe spun his new [Nimble Spinner] and felt his perch among the branches become effortlessly easy. Crossing his fingers, he jumped them both.
The teleporting pair appeared and, regardless of his increased agility, immediately skidded right off the top of the large flat rock. Joe flopped into the frigid water but snapped to a stop a second later. The moment they had appeared, Kaid had leapt off backward. Using his small body as an anchor upstream of the stone, he stopped them from tumbling downstream again.
Not waiting for a rescue this time, Joe grabbed the rope and started pulling himself towards Kaid. Even though the current was less in the eddy of the boulder, he was barely making any headway.
Not wanting to chance losing this opportunity, Joe threw a free point into Strength. His hands latched onto the rope with a firmer grip. Pulling his mass through the icy, rushing current was no longer nearly as challenging. Hand over hand, Joe reached the stone and slid himself up and onto the slick surface.
“I’m up, Kaid!” he shouted, lying on his back, tightly clasping the rope connecting him to his small friend. “Get up here and get warm.” The ethereal flames of their [Heartfire], tipped sideways from the top of his rucksack, were raging around Joe’s head. The absurd thought of ‘I’m Ghostrider!’ flashed through his mind as a small blue-lipped scoundrel flopped down next to him.
“Ugg,” groaned the gnome.
“Yeah. That was rough. Nice save.”
“Mrph. Thanks,” huffed the reply.
“Good news is the next jump should put us in the shallows. Give me a second, and I’ll see how close I can get us.”
“No rush. I’m just going to lie here and knit my back back together. I think I herniated something when you yanked to a stop there.”
Joe let his arm fall onto Kaid and cast.
You have restored 24 points of Kaid Ward’s health and removed the {Impaired} condition. His current health is at 100%.
“Ooh. Thank you, sir. Still gonna lie here while you do your thing.”
“All good. You stay put. I’m going to try not to fall back into the river.” Joe carefully stood, feeling the fading boost to his Dexterity paying off. The boulder was mostly flat, but a slick film of algae covered it. His feet kept sliding in odd directions, worse than trying to stand on ice without skates. Only by tensing his leg muscles tightly was Joe able to get himself fully upright.
When he was steady, he looked for something to teleport to in range. The good news was there were plenty of targets between their slick perch and the shoreline.
“Whatta ya say we blow this popsicle stand, Kaid?”
“I have no idea what that means, but if you're asking if I want to get out of this damn river, then yes. For the love of Murrcee, yes.”
With far less difficulty than Joe, Kaid hopped to his feet and glided over the slick rock to his side. Taking hold of the little man, Joe focused on a spot where a cluster of stones would catch him if he lost his footing on landing. In a blink, they vanished and reappeared among the rocks thirty feet from shore.
Sure enough, his feet shot sideways across the small target rock, dropping him into the thigh-deep water. His plan worked as he cracked his shin and chest painfully into the cluster of stones just downstream from his arrival point. As agonizing as the collision was, it immediately stopped them from being sucked downriver.
The pain in his shin was especially excruciatingly bad: possibly broken badly. Yet, at the moment, he didn’t have time to let it distract him.
Worried about Kaid, Joe pulled himself up onto one of the river rocks, only to spot the little man springing from rock to rock toward the grassy bank. Joe took a second to reel in the rope the rogue had united himself from before locking onto the shoreline and jumping there ahead of the agile gnome.
Making sure to land with his weight on his uninjured leg, he let his pack slide off his back before flopping down to join it on the long grass. A moment later, Kaid appeared beside him with chattering teeth.
Joe’s only additional effort was a new [Heartfire] for the frozen scoundrel and then a great deal of panting.
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