"This is kind of exciting. Isn't this exciting?"

After nearly an hour of walking quietly, the peaceful silence between the duo is finally broken. Well, peaceful for Maury, at least. The general direction indicated by the carrot dowser led them north on the main road and out of Southill before eventually forcing Maury to turn off into tight brush that lined both sides of the wide thoroughfare. They came across a game trail that ran more or less in the direction they needed, thankfully, but the journey was still far from easy.

"Were you this annoying when you had two legs as well?"

"I was well liked for my easygoing disposition, thank you very much."

Maury rolls her eyes and pushes a whip-like branch out of her way, letting go at just the right time so that it will swing out one inch above her shoulder and hit the chattery green blob sitting on said shoulder. The welcome quiet that follows the slime being smacked backward twenty feet lasts only as long as it takes him to bounce back to her and regain his perch.

"You were so lucky that didn't hit you!" He exclaims, settling himself in place again.

"Luck is just math," she responds with a smirk. He seems to consider that, and if he realizes that she did it on purpose, he doesn't say anything about it.

"I always dreamt of going on grand adventures when I was a little boy. Are they always so exciting?"

"What about this is exciting? We are tromping through the woods searching for carrots while being eaten by mosquitos."

"But isn't it better than all that sitting we did yesterday? Mrs. Spencer was very nice but we just sat all evening."

"Yeah," Maury sighs wistfully. "It was great."

"Not great, boring! Bor-ing!I don't think I have ever been so bored. I couldn't even twiddle my thumbs to entertain myself!"

Maury listens as he prattles on, occasionally snapping a tree branch back toward him, but he is looking for them now, so he hops over them and continues his ruminations. All around them, the sound of bird song fills the air as the world wakes up. The sun was just beginning to rise when they left the little cottage, and at this time, back in the dorm, the first classes would not yet have begun.

"Newspaper, you don't have to fill every silence. You might even find it enjoyable to not talk every now and then."

The little bone floats in the air, tugging occasionally if they are not following it exactly to let them know that they need to turn more. Maury grimaces as it points toward a row of thorny bushes taller than she stands that stretch out in a sea before them, filling in the gaps between massive trunks spaced too far apart to try and climb to get above it all. Not that she has any intention of climbing one of those big things. Or of hopping across branches high overhead like a squirrel.

"Maybe I should just burn it all," she mutters darkly, raising her fingers as she considers doing just that. Perhaps if her magic behaved the normal way, she wouldn't even think about it before doing it.

"Wouldn't it burn all the trees as well? And thorny bushes are really hardy. It could take a while for them to turn to ash. Why not just fly over them? You have wings..."

"Which are more ornamental than anything else at this point. They aren't big enough to get me off of the ground. Have you ever seen a celestim flying?"

"No," Neumann begins, sounding rather chastised. "But I haven't seen many not inside of buildings except you and the nice old lady in her garden. Why do you have wings if you can't fly?"

Maury swallows another sigh and walks along the edge of the pointy barrier for a while. "When the universe decided that we no longer needed to rule the skies, it didn't just lop off all the wings. It will probably be thousands and thousands of years before we don't have them at all anymore."

"That's... kind of sad."

"How so?" A small break appears in the bushes, and Maury cautiously eases into the gap.

"You have this reminder that you could once do this amazing thing, but it is just a memory of something you personally never had."

"That is..." Maury pauses to consider. Her wings have always just been something that is there, a part of life. "That is kind of depressing."

"Oh. Sorry." He begins to say something else, but he stops when Maury raises a finger, indicting he wait.

"Quiet. I hear something."

Moving slower still, one booted foot delicately setting down before the next raises up, Maury creeps along the winding path through the hurty plants. Just ahead, she can see a break that sunlight is pouring through, and she gingerly eases out into the light.

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A medium-sized clearing, perhaps thirty feet across, lay bathed in sunlight coming down through the break in the tree canopy. Directly across from where they emerge sit four large lean-tos. Barely even enough to be considered that, actually. They are not much more than a few logs punched into the ground so that they stand upright with another log lashed across the top and evergreen branches leaning up against those to provide a small amount of protection from rain.

The sheer size of those branches has Maury backing toward the break in the bramble before she has even noticed the three individuals watching her from a large fire on the left side of the grassy area. Sitting, they are almost as tall as she, and as she backs away, they all begin to rise as if on cue.

"Wuz this wingy thing doin' in our spot?"

"What are they?" Neumann whispers, jiggling as he stares at the unfolding behemoths with wide eyes. Easily two feet taller than the purple girl who looked down at him when he was a human, covered in dense muscle even across their bare, sloping heads. Beady eyes set back deep in broad faces look at them with just enough spark to be considered intelligent.

"Ogres," she whispers back, not because it will keep the ogres from hearing. They do have working ears, after all. It just seems like the thing to do when you burst into someone's living room. Even if said room is outside.

She looks down at the necklace, which is tugging at her neck and trying to get her to walk toward the right side of the clearing, away from the ogres. On the ground to the side of the furthermost lean-to, she can see something orange lying in the grass.

"Sorry," Maury says politely, holding her hands up to show she is not here to start any kind of ruckus. "We don't mean to intrude. We are trying to find someone. Did somebody come through here with a whole bunch of carrots recently? Long, skinny orange things?"

"I don't like carrots," the tallest ogre answers, rubbing his stomach before scratching at his groin. His eyes follow her as she slowly slides her feet along toward the other side of the clearing. "Never ate a purple wingy thing before. We hungry..."

"Oh, you wouldn't like me at all. What you want is something with muscle, and I have hardly any at all. My little slime has none, but you are welcome to give him a nibble if you like."

"Hey!" Neumann exclaims, shrinking against her neck.

"Slime taste bad."

"I can imagine," she agrees, crouching down to pick up what she discovers is indeed a carrot, dirt still clinging to its sides. The necklace wiggles as it resets, yanking upward and pointing off into the woods again. "Well, since we wouldn't make a very good meal, we will just be on our way. I hope a nice juicy boar comes along for you soon."

"Want to eat purple wingy thing. No talk, we eat you now."

Reaching over her shoulder, Maury slides her new acquisition into her bag. Her fingers reach for any of the weapons she crafted the night before as she turns to sprint toward freedom. A yelp is pulled from her lips when she nearly runs face first into a fourth ogre who must have been out in the woods when she stumbled into their camp.

"Of course," she moans, throwing herself to the side as a big meaty hand reaches out to grab her. There are four shelters but only three ogres by the fire. She ducks behind the first lean-to, the ground shaking beneath as all four muddy green behemoths charge after her. Despite being smaller and lighter, she is in much worse shape than they, and already her lungs are straining between panic and sudden exertion. Her fingers thrust into the pack on her back again, grabbing the first of the long bones that she comes across.

Not a moment too soon. A hand the size of her face reaches around the leafy makeshift roof, and she smacks her bone down on it, hard. The hand disappears but more appear, and she flails about, swinging the bone club around her in a circle. She feels it hit multiple things, but then something wraps around her ankle, and she is flipping through the air.

The world swirls around her, and it takes a moment to see she is upside down, hanging by one leg from the meaty mitt of the ogre that was speaking to her at the beginning.

"What you do to my friends?" He asks, sadness and anger plain in his voice. He shakes her once, and she can swear she feels her brain rattling in her head. He swings around and walks back toward the fire, moaning in his broken speech about his friends being gone. Maury looks around frantically for her dropped club, but a meeting between her head and the ground interrupts the search. Her head aches, vision full of stars, and her hands drag along the grass below her. Her vision is just clearing when she feels her leg released and the ground is rushing up far too fast thanks to gravity.

The ogre is stumbling and clawing at its face, its yells muffled by a blob of green goo surrounding its head. Maury pulls herself across the clearing a few feet before managing to get to her feet, only to drop to her knees again immediately when her leg decides not to support her. She crawls instead, grabbing her club and turning as the ogre approaches again, Neumann nowhere in sight. She swings the club at the approaching hand, and with a poof (or more like a fwump, but a small one), the ogre is gone.

A few minutes pass as Maurgeth tries to get the world to stop spinning and her leg to stop aching. She lays sprawled out on the grass, the club still in her hand. Maybe she really should start exercising, just a little, so she can run away from things.

... No, after this quest, she is never going outside again. Why bother?

"Maury?" A scared voice calls out from somewhere nearby. She cracks one eye open and watches as a bedraggled looking Neumann slides up next to her. "I tried to help!"

"Yeah," she responds, closing her eye again and pushing herself up to a seated position. The world spins faster for a moment before settling into a leisurely swirl. "You okay?"

"I..." he pauses, and she opens her eyes to look at him. Not that she would know how to tell if a slime was injured. Do slimes have blood? Can they break? "I am okay, I think. Where did they go?"

Maury slowly turns her head, gesturing vaguely at the white turnip sitting on the ground in front of her. "There should be three more of those somewhere around here. We need to go, though. I don't know how long the transformation will last."

"You turned them into vegetables? I guess I can't complain about being a slime. At least nobody is going to grate me on a salad for lunch." He does a little hop to get up onto her lap. "You said it is temporary? Is mine temporary, too?"

"I don't know," she admits, reaching past him to carefully pull her pants leg up. They both hiss at the dark bruises wrapping around her shin. "I really don't, Newt. This was a completed rune. Yours was an interrupted rune and an unspoken spell. Now, please, just let me sit here for a few minutes and appreciate not being dead. Then we can go looking for the next carrot."

"Well, it can't be as hard to get the next one as this one was, right?"

"Thanks for the jinx, idiot."