Iris touched down on the branch with a soft landing, the curving hull of the Gaping Maw looming large behind her. Adan soon landed beside her in a crouch, having leapt from the main deck without concern for the distance. The pair were soon joined by a ghostly Victoria slowly descending from above, and a moment later the swamp elf Misty descended on a vine with Killup clinging to her back and shoulders.
Iris had expected to be quickly put to work repairing the ship upon her return, but to her surprise she had instead been drafted by Autumn for an expeditionary team tasked with exploring the giant tree and gathering any food it had to offer. So long as the peace deal with the Rat Kingdom held, Autumn had plenty of supplies to feed the crew until the ship could restock at Fale Nalore. This mission was purely for the sake of satisfying the captain’s curiosity about what food might be found in these trees, and he had given Autumn full authority to put together a team of her choosing for the task.
She had elected not to go along herself, citing that she was ill-suited for navigating the unique terrain — though Iris suspected her fear of heights had a lot more to do it with. True to her reasoning, however, the members of the team had largely been chosen for their mobility and the likelihood they wouldn’t fall from the tree and die. Additionally, Adan had been chosen as the leader of the team for his quick and analytical thinking, while Misty had been a favored pick for her knowledge of the region.
Only a few steps into their mission, Misty stopped and pointed out a large white flower growing from a vine. The vine was so tightly wound around the branch that it was visibly embedded within the bark, as if the branch had stubbornly grown around and began to consume the vine that constricted it. The flower itself had five slightly overlapping, triangular petals surrounding a fluffy yellow center. Misty crouched and picked the flower, handing it to Iris to inspect.
“We’ll want to gather as many of these as we can, they can be used with a few basic ingredients to make a wonderful jelly.”
Iris briefly inspected the flower, memorizing its details before nodding and stuffing it into her bottomless bag.
“We should be on the lookout for bellfruit, as well,” Misty said as they continued making their way down the twisting branch towards the trunk of the massive tree, “as you might imagine, they’re vaguely shaped like bells, and typically yellow or purple in color.”
“Like that one?” Iris asked, pointing to a dangling fruit a few dozen feet above and just up ahead.
“Yes, but—” Misty paused as Iris launched into action.
Driving her broom into the bark beneath her feet, she released a burst of force to launch herself into the air towards the fruit. After closing the rest of the gap with a series of blips, she plucked the fruit from its vine and chained another few blips to land on the branch in front of the team.
“There will likely be plenty that are easy to reach,” Misty finished.
Iris shrugged and stuffed the fruit in her bag, while Victoria gave her a critical look. As they walked, Iris reached out with tentacles from her palm to delicately pluck the flowers that they passed, while Killup ran along on all fours and snatched up a few of his own which he occasionally sprinted up to Iris to place in her bag.
When the team reached the trunk, their next objective was to travel around it in an upwards spiral to reach the higher branches. Each adventurer had their own methods of doing so, Iris launched off with her broom and chained blips to close the gaps between branches while Victoria casually floated upwards. Killup climbed on the trunk itself, scurrying across it on all fours not unlike a large, stone-skinned squirrel. Misty commanded vines into her grip and then made them retract to pull her upwards, occasionally using them to swing across gaps.
Adan paused for a moment and evaluated his options, ultimately deciding the best approach would be to simply leap. It was rare he had an opportunity to really push his agility to its limits, but he was confident he could clear the distance and height necessary to reach the next branch. He fell into a deep crouch until his outstretched hand touched the branch beneath him, and then launched upwards in a flash. The leap carried him in a high arc, his trajectory carefully calculated to ultimately drop him securely in the center of the branch upon which he landed.
As they climbed, leapt and flew through the tree, Iris occasionally paused to inspect some of the smaller branches and compared to a few sketches on a scrap of paper which Eli had given her before she departed. He had requested that she retrieve as many branches she could find that resembled his specifications, explaining that he was hoping at least one of them would be a good candidate for crafting his new staff. She broke off the ones she was able to, and asked Adan to help with the ones she couldn't, and dutifully dropped each of them into her bottomless bag.
After climbing up past several branches, the team stopped for their first objective. It was a large bird’s nest situated at the very end of a long, squiggly branch. Inside the nest, they suspected, would be several large eggs that the captain would quite enjoy. The nest had been spotted from the ship, and retrieving the eggs was a specific goal given to them by Autumn before they departed.
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The main issue with retrieving the eggs — other than the fierce looking eagle that currently sat in the nest — was the abundance of thorny vines that wrapped around the majority of the branch’s length. Like most things in the Giantrock Region, these thorns were supersized and significantly more dangerous than any Iris had seen before. The vines themselves were made of a thick woody material, and were large enough to be considered branches in their own right by the standards of normal sized trees. Every few inches of the vine’s length, the same woody material curved outwards into brutally sharp points at the end of nearly foot long spikes. The thorns were so large, and the branch so inundated with them, that walking or even blipping across wouldn’t be an option.
Iris withdrew her spyglass from her eye after watching the bird for a while, “it doesn’t seem to have noticed us yet. Hard to tell how big it is from this far away, though.”
“Quite large,” Adan said, “I am open to suggestions.”
“I could get over there pretty easily,” Victoria suggested, “but I’d need someone to distract the bird.”
“I could probably fly around on my broom and get it to chase me?” Iris offered.
“No,” Adan said, remaining silent for several seconds before offering an explanation, “the eagle will be quite dangerous and will certainly be more agile in the air than you, it is best if Victoria distracts it.”
Victoria shrugged, “works for me.”
Iris looked around at the other members of the team, “that leaves me to get the eggs, doesn’t it?”
“Killup could fly over, I suppose,” Adan said, “you would need to lend him your bottomless bag.”
Iris looked down at the bottomless bag, which responded with angry sounds, “she says no.”
“Would probably drop her,” Killup nodded, “smart bag.”
Iris stepped up to the edge of the bramble and evaluated her options. There were technically enough small gaps in the thorny coverage that it would be possible to blip through the bramble for at least a portion of the distance, but the gaps were so small and the thorns so large and numerous that it would be an extremely dangerous undertaking. One slip could land her face first in a bed of spikes with no good place to blip to to avoid them. Instead she looked to the air and began gauging the viability of flying over the vines.
“I think I can do it,” she said after a moment, “it’s dangerously likely that I overshoot, but worst case scenario I just loop back around.”
“Then it is a plan,” Adan said.
Once it was confirmed that everyone was ready, Victoria floated off towards the nest and began antagonizing the eagle. At first it hunkered down over its nest, but after enough pestering from the ghost it finally flapped its wings and took flight to chase her, letting out a furious screech as it did so.
That was her signal, and Iris quickly hopped onto her broom and launched into flight. She stayed low over the branch, aiming in a straight line towards the nest as the thorns zoomed by just below her. She stopped putting mana into her broom and twisted ninety degrees in the air to slow her speed as she approached, but overshot it just as she had feared. The nest whizzed past beneath her, and without the constant lift from her broom she quickly fell below the edge of the nest just beyond the branch.
Normally she would have simply blipped back above the nest and fallen blindly to her landing, but that would risk crushing the eggs they were here to get. Instead, she resumed her flight and looped around in the open air beyond the edge of the tree’s crown and reoriented for a diving approach towards the nest.
Something large and fast entered her awareness and she instinctively threw herself to the side to lean out of the way just as a feathery mass and gleaming talons whizzed past her. This caused her broom to swerve and threw her into a horizontal spiral that took several seconds to recover from, and by then the bird was coming in for another attack.
“Sorry!” Victoria shouted as she flew past Iris.
As Victoria’s ghostly form passed through the body of the eagle, its screech faltered and the beat of its wings was disrupted. The disorientation lasted only a second, but it was enough that the eagle’s dive towards Iris fell several feet short, and allowed Victoria to recapture its attention.
Iris wrestled for control of her broom, feeling like the wind and the broom itself both had minds of her own and she was fighting against both of them. With a sloppy, wobbly path, she dove towards the nest and locked her eyes on the eggs. There were three of them, closely cradled together in the center of the nest with just enough space around the edge for her to land without crushing them.
Not even remotely trusting her aim for such a precise landing, she instead opted for a blip. She hopped from her broom, flinging herself through the air towards the nest, and kept her eyes intently locked on the exact location she intended to land. It was only when she grew close that the rapidly incoming problem flashed through her mind.
With no backup plan, she blipped to the spot with her broom outstretched to absorbed her momentum, but as she feared there was no solid surface for it to impact. Instead, it sunk between the twigs, feathers and hair of the nest and failed to absorb any of her speed. Her feet punched through the nest, then her body, and she erupted out the bottom with debris showering all around her. Tentacles erupted from an outstretched palm and wrapped around the smaller branches that cradled the nest, leaving her suspended and gently swinging above a very long drop to the swamp far below.
One of the eggs rolled and slipped through the hole Iris had punched in the nest, tumbling past her with no way for her to catch it. Thankfully, Abby was prepared, and tentacles reached out of the bottomless bag and enveloped the egg — which was approximately as wide as Iris’s torso — and pulled it into the void.
“Good catch,” Iris gasped.
After a few more seconds to find her bearings, and to be certain no more eggs were about to fall, Iris gently blipped into the nest. As the tentacles slurped back into the void-tear in her palm, more erupted from the bottomless bag and scooped up the remaining two eggs, promptly depositing them in the void.
She stood and watched for a second as the eagle effortlessly changed directions mid-flight to chase after the zig-zagging ghost that harassed it, smirking at the silly sight before calling out, “all clear!”