Victoria's morning watch came to a close as faint sunlight began to cut through the canopy. The rain had thinned, but not stopped. Victoria sat perfectly still as an elk and her calf grazed near the edge of the ruins. Carefully, she pulled out her notebook and began slowly scribbling. She activated her auravision and evaluated the auras of the elks, still scribbling messy notes without looking at the paper.

After she'd gotten everything she could, she watched a while longer, then released a faint aura burst out in the ruins. The mother elk snapped her head towards the burst, then leapt away with her calf following close behind. Victoria added one more note about their ability to sense auras, then pulled out a stick of charcoal. There'd be no dry spot to mark where they'd been grazing, so instead she made a mark on a pillar with an arrow pointed towards the spot she'd seen them.

Soon the others had stirred, and Eli was giving orders, "pack it up quickly, the sooner we're out of this temple the better. Autumn, think you can scavenge up a breakfast on the hike?"

"Trail breakfast?" She groaned.

Iris was the last to wake, groggy eyed and disoriented. The first thing her eyes saw was the red dragon's fire breath, and for a moment it captivated her.

"Iris," Eli said from across the room, "get moving."

Iris nodded and climbed out of her bedroll. It was harder than it should have been, as she'd apparently stuck a leg through one of the rips while she slept. After packing in her bedroll she checked her robe, and was disappointed to find it still damp. She supposed it didn't matter anyway, they were in for a long trek through rain, so she found a corner behind some rubble to change. They were on the move and trudging through mud in less than an hour. Large frogs croaked in the distance, and songbirds sang as they ventured from their nests despite the rain.

"We'll reach base camp by nightfall," Eli said, "be extra vigilant for bodies of water, we still need to find an octopus for Autumn."

Victoria hid a laugh as Iris glanced at her and smirked.

"It's real!" Autumn insisted, noticing her teammate's amusement, "all the things we've seen in this region, is an octopus really that hard to believe?"

"Now, I dropped out of school," Titus said, "but I think, typically, octopuses are in the ocean."

"Or at least the lake," Victoria said, "I mean if it has a hydra it might have an octopus."

"I'm telling you, the quest says there's octopuses in the forest," Autumn argued.

"No one's allowed to say octopus again unless they see one," Eli commanded.

Iris, Victoria and Autumn all groaned in annoyance.

Iris, feeling somewhat better than the day before, took to the canopy to scout. She leapt and blipped between branches, careful to stay above her companions as they trekked through the muddy forest below. A few hours into their journey, she spotted a small pond recessed between a rim of redwood roots. With a few quick blips down to the ground, she informed the others and they veered towards it.

The heavy rainfall had filled the pond until it began to spill out over the lowest points in the roots that surrounded it, creating several streams that ran off into the forest. Victoria scanned the pond with her auravision, "nothing but tadpoles."

They continued on towards basecamp, with Iris returning to the canopy. They stopped at two more similar ponds, but still found no results. In the afternoon they found the largest pond yet. It was two hundred feet across at its widest, and had eroded soil on its edges until it carved out hollows beneath roots and trunks. Some time ago a redwood had fallen across it, and a large section of the trunk now rotted in the water, partially submerged but suspended across the deeper center of the pond by either end resting on the shallow edges.

"We can rest here for a while," Eli said, taking a seat on a rock to dump the water from his boots.

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Victoria absentmindedly scanned the water, while Iris blipped out to the center of the pond on the rotting trunk.

Victoria's eyes widened, "actually, there's something in there."

Eli shoved his boot back on and rose to his feet, "Iris, get back here."

A tentacle shot out of the water and reached out towards Iris, who blipped away just in time. She briefly appeared over the water, then blipped again to solid ground.

"I fucking told you!" Autumn shouted, reaching both hands into the ground in front of her. She pulled the full length of a stone broadsword from the ground, and charged out across the fallen trunk.

Three more tentacles rose around her, and she swung the sword with an exaggerated spin, slicing a tentacle in half with sheer force of impact from the almost blunt blade. Eli held up his staff to charge a blast, but Titus lowered the staff with a hand.

"She's been looking forward to this," Titus said, "let her have it unless she needs help."

Iris appeared beside the others, joining as they watched Autumn fight. She'd slashed two tentacles and cut through another before her leg was grabbed. Eli was poised to intervene, but Autumn deftly twisted around and sliced through the tentacle that held her.

Four of the remaining tentacles wrapped around the rotting trunk and squeezed. It snapped and splintered near the middle, where Autumn now stood. She lost her balance and stumbled back, sliding down the slippery trunk towards the water. She caught a handhold in the bark, but it broke off and she dropped into the pond and disappeared beneath the surface.

Eli dropped his staff and ran to the water's edge, stripping off his boots and socks. Before he could dive into the pond, large stone spikes erupted throughout the pond. One pierced a tentacle and pinned it in place as the remaining length flailed helplessly. The pond soon turned a dark black, and Autumn remained unseen. Eli hesitated, unsure if more spikes would come.

After an agonizing moment, Autumn popped up out of the water. With her feet and one hand she climbed onto the lowest point of the trunk, her other hand clenched around a tentacle. When she found steady footing, she laughed maniacally and held the tentacle up over her head.

She crossed the length of the trunk, pulling the tentacle and dragging along something big beneath the water. When she reached the shore, she gripped the tentacle with both hands and pulled like a game of tug-o-war. Titus joined in to help, and soon the deflated, lifeless corpse of an octopus the size of a carriage was dragged ashore.

Autumn, stained with black ink and blue octopus blood, placed a foot against the creature's body as she held up her arms and flexed, shouting "get fucked!" at the corpse.

The next hour was spent butchering the octopus, including the chunks of dismembered tentacles that Autumn went back to fish out of the pond. Autumn had included a hefty supply of wax paper in the provisions she'd ordered, so the finished product was well wrapped morsels of octopus meat.

When it came time to store the meat in the bottomless bag, Iris frowned. She repeatedly shoved a morsel of meat against the top of the bag, but it didn't open. She placed the meat aside and removed the bag from her waist, manually prying open the drawstring portal. When she moved the meat towards the opening, the bag cinched shut.

"What's your problem?" Iris asked, indignantly.

The bag said nothing.

She pulled it open again, and it cinched closed again.

"What's going on?" Eli asked, walking up to Iris.

"I don't know," she tried again to shove the morsel at the bag, "it doesn't want the meat."

"Is it full?" Autumn asked, looking up from the tentacle she was chopping with an axe.

"It shouldn't be," Iris frowned. She picked up a rock and offered it to the bag, it opened and let her drop the rock into the void, "nope."

"Maybe it's got a seafood allergy," Autumn offered, slamming the axe down again and splattering herself with more octopus blood.

"You need the meat for your quest, right?" Eli asked Autumn, "it won't keep until we get back to the city. Not unless we find a fuck ton of salt."

"There's plenty of salt in the provisions," Autumn said, "the real problem would be carrying it all."

"Everyone just, hang on," Iris said, "give me a second."

She took her bag and blipped away behind a tree, kneeling down and whispering to it, "what are you doing? This is really embarrassing."

The bag said nothing.

"Okay, look, I get it. You don't want octopus meat inside you. Totally fair. But I reaaaally need you to carry it, please?"

The bag said nothing.

Iris groaned. She sat for a moment until she had an idea, "well, if there's things you don't like, does that mean there's things you do like?"

The drawstring loosened slightly.

"Yeah?" Iris perked up, "okay, tell you what. If you carry this octopus until we get to the city, we'll figure out some way for you to tell me what you like, and we'll get you some of that. Maybe I can even take you shopping?"

Nothing happened for a moment, then one end of the drawstring rose up and extended towards Iris. She frowned at it for a moment, then apprehensively reached out and shook it like a tiny hand.

"Okay," Iris said, bewildered, "good, thanks."

She blipped back to her companions and tried again. This time the bag accepted the morsel of meat, though it did cross its strings like an upset child crossing their arms.

"How'd you fix it?" Autumn asked.

"I, uh," she thought back to a word she'd read in a library book, "I recalibrated it."