Iris awoke the next morning with a weight on her chest. Peeking open an eye, she saw Littletooth curled into a ball on top of her, sound asleep, with Abby just off to the side. She smiled, then gently woke the wyvern with a head scratch.

"Hungry?" she asked in a croaky morning voice.

The baby wyvern shot up, stumbled to his feet and leapt off the bed with wings outstretched. He landed with a thud and a tumble, followed by skittering on the wooden floors as he staggered back to his feet. Iris laughed loudly, and quickly prepared the wyvern's breakfast. While Littletooth ate, Iris picked up her journal and began reviewing her attribute points.

Attribute Scores:

- Vitality : 36

- Strength : 41

- Speed : 31

- Intellect : 31

- Spirit : 46

Unspent attribute points : 5

She had felt confident in her balance of attributes lately. Though she often pushed her mana to the limit, she was certain she'd do that no matter how much she had. She considered it more of a question of if her current mana capacity was getting the job done or not, and lately, it was. With the acquisition of her newest ability, she now had a concrete reason to invest in Spirit other than mana, but the last thing she wanted at the moment was to expand the range of the new ability and inundate herself with even more overwhelming pressure from all directions.

Intellect was the other attribute her new ability called for. After increasing her Intellect following the battle with the shock wizard, she had grown confident that it did in fact help her analyze and plan in the midst of battle, which was something she greatly valued. As she thought about it, she remembered she had also struggled for a moment to come up with strategies at one point during the slime battle, and decided that Intellect was definitely her most lacking area right now. Plus, with any luck, increasing the detail she could discern from her new ability might serve to decrease the disarray it caused amongst her other senses. She hadn't let go of her desire to be an unstoppable powerhouse, however, so her final decision was to put one point into Strength, and four into Intellect. Next, she flipped to see if there were any new entries from her mother, and was delighted to find one.

Dear Iris

My companions and I will be departing from the Shining Peaks tomorrow. The Stone of Forgotten Woes has been charged and we’ve gotten all we can from the Wizards. Our next destination is the Veiled Catacombs, in the Crooked Woods to the north beyond the plains. It feels like time is moving so fast, I swear sometimes I can't even remember yesterday.

I've had little luck in the libraries, but I'm thankful to have struck at least one lead. In a book listing each of the kings of a long dead kingdom, I found reference to a King Xear, who is said to have experienced "concurrent lifetimes." It's a long shot, but it's the only condition similar to my own that I've found reference to. If things go well in the catacombs, our next stop will be capitol, and if there's anywhere I should be able to find more information about ancient kings, it's there.

I hope your adventures are going well, Iris. I often wish you could write back to me about them. I hope one day when we meet, you'll tell me all about them.

Mary Orion, 969

Iris was delighted to see new locations referenced in this entry, it would give her something to map out in the library and uncover just a little bit more about her mother's story. With a smile, she began her own journal entry.

Dear mom,

I wish I could tell you about my adventures, too. My magical bag is alive, I have a baby wyvern that lives inside it, and my friends and I just decided to hatch a plot to earn our place on a pirate ship captained by a shark man. Adventuring is everything I hoped it would be, and I hope I get to tell you about it one day.

Iris Orion, 997

After snapping the book closed, Iris got dressed for the day. She decided on her black robes and hat because she thought it was the outfit she looked best in -- and it was the most clean. She decidedly did not wear her leather armor, instead tossing it in her bag in case she needed it later. Extra care was put into making sure just the right strands of hair dangled out of the hat and fell around her face just the right way.

When she was ready to go, Iris held out the open bag to Littletooth and tried to usher him in, but he refused. With a sigh, she grabbed his elk plush and tossed it into the void, which he happily chased after. He tripped on the edge of the bag and tumbled in awkwardly, disappearing into the emptiness.

After a quick breakfast, Iris blipped her way through the Underbelly, around to the city gates, and over the rooftops of Giantrock City. She was blissfully free of the overwhelming pressure she had felt the day before, and could now properly enjoy the benefits of heightened spatial awareness. The most noticeable advantage for blipping was that as she ran, leapt and blipped across rooftops, she could feel if every step would land ahead of time and without looking down, freeing up her eyes to scan ahead for blipping locations.

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She came out of a blip and landed on a balcony, striking her walking stick into the deck to absorb her momentum. The door was open, and the sounds of hissing air and clanking metal could be heard from within. She checked her hair in the reflection on the widow, then confidently strode inside.

"Hey!" She said with a cheery wave.

"Oh!" Milo shouted, shooting up from the machine he was working on and almost hitting his head on a metal beam.

"Sorry," she apologized sheepishly.

"It's okay!" Milo said, climbing out of a recess in the floor beside the printing press.

The machine was a marvelous sight, and captivated Iris every time she saw it in action. It was massive, taking up one full half of the room, which itself was quite large and double the height of what Iris imagined to be a normal floor for the building. Large chunks of metal hoisted and slammed, sometimes extruding steam from exhaust pipes. One-by-one, the machine moved large sheets of paper under a broad, flat press, which slammed down on the pages, radiating a strange green light before retracted while the next page was moved into place.

"I must have lost track of time," Milo said with an apologetic laugh. He was carrying a large wrench and wearing tan overalls with a white undershirt which were both stained with either ink or grease.

"Problems with the machine?" Iris asked, nodding towards the behemoth.

"Yeah," Milo put a hand on his hip and turned to face it, "it's printing off-center, and I haven't found the culprit yet. The copies are still good enough, we can use them, but I just can't stand the way it looks."

"Well, you still owe me a look around this thing," Iris said, "maybe I can help."

"Are you sure?" Milo asked quickly, "I mean, alright. If you really want to."

Iris took off her hat and placed it on a table, which was overflowing with stacks of paper on the corners and littered with mechanical bits in the middle, and then rolled up her sleeves.

"Let's get to it," she said with a smile.

Milo smiled back and nodded in response, then turned his attention to the machine, "the problem's gotta be somewhere in the back. The belt and the press are in perfect alignment, so that must mean the pages are getting offset somewhere up in the machine, probably the alignment sticks."

He walked to the far end of the machine and yanked down a large metal lever, and the printing machine began to slow. It printed one more sheet, then the press meandered its way back to its starting position and the machine went still and the room went quiet.

"Now," Milo said, "there's not enough room to climb straight through behind the press, we'll have to go in through the top, climb down between the pistons, and squeeze between a couple gears to get to the sticks. Are you sure you're up for it?"

Iris crouched and peered beneath the press. There was just enough room for her to squeeze between the printing press and the belt, but the support bars on the back side of it were far too close to the beltway for her to fit through. While Milo was retrieving a ladder, Iris approached the machine, closed her eyes, and focused on her newly acquired senses. She felt the bulk of the machine at first as a single mass, but as she honed in her focus she began to discern some of the larger distinct parts, and then began to notice the gaps between them.

Milo turned around with the ladder held straight up, awkwardly balancing a few steps before he was near enough to prop it against the machine. He then got to work carefully positioning it so the posts of the ladder weren't resting against any uneven or movable parts. He eyed the ladder with trepidation, trying not to look at the assorted pipes, beams and pistons he could hit on the way down if he fell.

"You mean these sticks?" Iris's voice echoed from somewhere in the machine, "two spindly things, kind of make a triangle?"

"How did you--" Milo ducked to peer under the press, where he spotted Iris near the back of the beltway, "yeah, that's them. Did you blip back there?"

"Yep!" Iris called back, "what do I do with these things?"

"Are they symmetrical?"

"Looks like it," Iris trailed off as she inspected the sticks more closely, "actually, this one's a little bent."

"Must have been damaged in the jam yesterday. Hang on a minute, don't move."

Milo came back to the machine with an armful of tools and a spare alignment stick, which was really just a thin brass bar with squared edges and a precisely molded socket to attach to the machine. He dumped them down on the belt in front of the press and began to climb on top of it to carry the tools hopefully far enough for Iris to reach them. Before he got his second knee on the belt, the items started disappearing before his eyes.

"Uh, is that you?" he asked.

"Yep! More magic powers!" Iris called out from the machine, "what do I do with these, by the way?"

After repairing the machine, Iris and Milo spent much of the day together. They went out for the lunch as originally planned, then caught an afternoon play at the closest thing Giantrock City had to a theater, and finished off with window shopping in the richest area of town. Iris had since walked Milo home, and was now strolling through the city in the late evening. She chose to walk rather than blip because it wasn't as hot as it had been most days that week, and she found peace in the casual stroll after a busy day.

She stopped when she detected something on the sidewalk -- something that wasn't there. She turned and peered at the spot, seeing only the wooden wall of a closed storefront, but her Awareness of Matter ability was telling her something was there. Then, as fast as she had noticed it, it was gone. The sensation was pleasant, like a blissful relief that existing matter had -- for once -- stopped existing. She stared at the spot with a peculiar expression for a while longer, then moved on.

The sun was setting over the tops of the redwoods when Iris entered the Underbelly and soon arrived home at the Flopping Fish. Inside, she found Eli and Cameron sitting at a table with a pitcher of beer.

"I bought it from a metal crafter in town," Cameron was saying, "high level Champion, he crafts everything with his abilities."

"That must have cost a fortune. You're hoping it'll pair well with your bomb jump trick, aren't you?"

Iris waved as she walked by, noticing a strange, seemingly handheld contraption on the table. It looked like a small crossbow with large hooks on the end of the projectile, which itself was connected to a metal cable that wrapped around a spool affixed to the side of the device. The two men nodded at her in greeting without skipping a beat of their discussion. For a moment she thought it would be fun to pick on them for the amount of time they'd spent together recently, than realized she had just returned from her second date with Milo this week and was in no position to talk.