Midaan and his half of the party entered the guild around dinnertime, the time they’d agreed to meet and select a job. They picked out a table towards the middle of the room, one of the ones surrounded by chairs, and set up at one end as Piera and Vex headed over to the bar to pick up a few drinks for the group.

Oren walked in as they returned to the table, his face clean-shaven but for his graying – though still mostly black – goatee, and his eyes reflecting a harder confidence than they’d seen from him last night. He waved at everyone gathered at the table, and let them know he was going to go get his own drink. He passed Piera on the way over, and her eyes lingered on him surreptitiously as he walked by. Oren didn’t notice, but the rest of the party at the table did, Ciel’s eyebrow raised towards her in interest.

“Nah,” Piera whispered as she distributed drinks. “Too serious for me. Cleans up nice, though.”

Ciel half-shrugged as she took her drink.

Oren joined them all a moment later with his own beverage. Some kind of juice; it didn’t smell alcoholic. He took a seat opposite the others and put his feet up on the chair next to him.

“We still deciding on which job we’ll take?”

Midaan nodded to him. “We just got here ourselves. I figured we’d wait until everyone got here before picking a job.”

“Makes sense to me,” Oren said, then took a sip of his drink, puckering his mouth with the strong sweetness of the juice. He glared at the drink, like it had offended him, then brought it back up to Aron, who, laughing, added a splash of liquor to offset the juice. Oren returned to the table, shaking his head. “No wonder I only ever see this stuff mixed.”

Geon slipped in as Aron finished up the dinner service, a thick meaty stew that filled the air with it’s savory invitation. Many guests came from the lobby into the tavern for their meal, Geon just beating out most of them, and Midaan and the others had to rush to the bar to get their share before the ravenous mercs emptied the pot before they got a helping.

They sat peacefully eating their meal, waiting for the last member to show up.

“I wouldn’t expect Deya until late,” Geon said. “She’s really excited about that wand. I saw her outside her shop earlier today; she’s probably still working on it if she expects to gets the whole thing done tonight.”

Midaan massaged the stubble on his chin. “Hmm, well, do you think she’d mind too much if we just picked a job out?”

Oren shook his head. “If she had an eye on any of those jobs in particular, we’d have heard about it four times already.”

Midaan drank the dregs of his stew and stood up to return the bowl. “I’m going to go take a look, then. See what’s available.”

Ciel hurried to scoop the last of the stew down her throat, too, then followed him out of the tavern to check out the state of the board. Luckily, there were still plenty of jobs left over, though a lot of these were for patrols that were a bit farther away. They’d have to do a couple days travel just to get out to the area of the first stop on the road. Midaan grimaced as he shuffled through the other contracts, trying to find one that started a little closer to them.

“We’re going to have to go so far away for all of these. The extra time getting out there is doing a lot to offset the payout pretty significantly. These are Rank 2 contracts, sure, but lower-tier ones. The pay isn’t that much better.”

“Hmm.” Ciel took the bundle he was looking at from him, taking a closer look at some of the ones he’d passed over. “Well, here, look at this. This one starts farther away, but the last leg is actually pretty close to Vane Gloria. It’s starts about three days out, but returning after the last leg should only take two days.” She waggled the jobs in her other hand. “These all have nearly a week of return trips at the far end.”

Midaan took the promising job from her and looked it over, flipping through the reports of each imp camp on the path. “Looks like a good one. “

Ciel nodded and dropped the other contracts onto the table in front of the board. Midaan didn’t head to Glory’s desk, though, instead bringing the contract to the others sitting in the bar and passing it around.

Vex read through the jobs thoroughly, as though he were looking for a specific detail that would invalidate his choice of contract. After a minute, though, he passed it on to Oren with no objection.

Oren only took a cursory glance at the jobs, only making sure that the camps weren’t too big for their group to handle. He shrugged and handed it back to Midaan. “Looks fine to me. I say we register it and get ready to leave tomorrow morning.”

“Any objections?” Midaan looked around the group gathered there. No one voiced any issues. “Alright, then. I’ll let Glory know.”

He went out to the quest booth as the rest of them chattered. Geon got up to go chat with some of his own friends at another table, and he was greeted with a round of welcome and cheer.

Piera glanced away from the party around the table, looking over the other patrons nearby, eyes in search of something specific. She hovered over the table where Geon now sat, and her eye caught someone interesting. A large, barrel-chested man with a kind face and a charismatic eye. He laughed heartily as Geon told him some joke or story, and Piera smiled at the infectious sound. It was the sound of someone who loved to laugh, and found any excuse he could to belt one out.

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After a few minutes of watching him, he got up and approached the bar to get a drink. Piera followed him, drawing Ciel’s attention as she made her way between tables toward him.

Ciel watched Piera walk up right beside him and order a drink, almost shoulder-to-shoulder with the man. For his part, Geon’s friend took the approach in stride, and they traded names and histories while getting a feel for each other. She was a forward woman, and he matched her small talk with his own flirtatious banter. But there was something about their body language that seemed to put Piera off. He would stand tall over her, as though to draw her in; but she would stand straight before him, like a rock against his wave, braced against the undertow. The attraction was there, but the chemistry wasn't. She eventually disengaged, heading back to the table and leaving the man bemused as he watched her walk away.

Piera sat back down with the group unceremoniously, only Ciel noticing the pass she’d made. They chatted for a few minutes about the towns they would have to pass through on the way through their contract. Midaan was familiar with two of them, his family owning a vacation home in one, and a cousin’s family living in another. Piera knew that latter town as well, though for her, it wasn’t a pleasant memory. Many of the upper crust towns were a bit snooty to her kind.

Just as the group started to get restless, Deya finally poked her head into the tavern. She bounded in, unable to contain her excitement.

“Wand’s done, I’m going out back with Evaia to test it. Then I’ll be back in.”

The entire table scrambled, bringing empty dishes and glasses up to Aron for washing or for refills, then they followed after the duo in a crowd. Eyes followed them on the way out, wondering why people were headed out back in the dark of night.

Deya grumbled as they met Evaia outside and made their way around. “Shame it’s so late. We’ll hardly be able to see it.”

Vex laughed beside her, and held his hand up. It glowed a light yellow, and a bright orb rose up from his palm, lighting the path they took.

Deya nodded in thanks to him, and then pulled the scepter out.

It looked more like a mace to Ciel, the thick handle wound through with gold alloy trim leading up to an iron ball with crystalline blue spikes protruding upward all around it.

Geon guffawed in awe, not expecting the scepter to look so brutal. “You could just club people with that to kill them!”

Deya grinned wickedly. “Damn right. It wasn’t the goal when I made the plans, but now that I see it, it’s pretty cool.” She rolled the shaft between her fingers, impatient.

They managed to make it down to the firing range before Deya exploded from over-anticipation, and she jogged up to the embankment in front of the firing range, looking over the targets illuminated by Vex’s Light orb. Then, she looked down at her creation one last time, just in case it blew up and she never saw it again.

She focused on the closest dummy to her, ten yards away. Then her blue Ice rune glowed, and she raised the scepter up, pointing towards the straw man. She filled the core with mana, and she felt the tendrils of power curl through the core and spread into the teeth in the iron head.

It poured into one of the teeth until it was full…and then it filled another, and another.

Her eyes going wide in surprise, she let the mana dissipate. Nothing cast. She stared at the scepter, puzzled.

“What’s wrong?” Oren asked.

Deya shook her head. “It’s supposed to fire after it fills each tooth, but it’s filling more than one…”

Then, her eyes hardened. “Stand back a bit.” The rest of the group did so; they didn’t want to be near her experiment if it exploded.

She held the staff out, and shoved power into it, filling tooth after tooth with the mana. Deya felt pressure build in the tool, and then, with ten teeth full, the mana burst out.

Ice shattered forth from a point in front of the scepter, spitting arm-length Ice shards ahead in a scattershot pattern. The shards ripped right through the ten meter target, throwing straw into the air as its limbs were torn off and pulled down into the ground a dozen feet away. More shards traveled into the next target back, ripping that straw man off its pole and staking it to the ground beyond it.

Deya stared down at the scepter, her eyes glittering. “It’s…it’s so beautiful.”

The rest of the party behind her broke out in amazed chatter, trying to pull information out of Deya; who had made it, where her plans were, could they use them? She rebuffed all of them with a mix of exasperation and a fulfilled glee.

She examined her core, feeling it at about three-quarters full. Evaia walked towards her, trying to get her attention. Deya didn't see her, though, and she jogged along the range, to a spot with an intact close-range dummy, hearing the chatter simmer down behind her.

Deya filled the wand again, and this time when she felt the power flow out of the other side, she pushed even more power in, until every tooth in the scepter flashed – and three gigantic blasts thundered across the field. Giant icicles fell upon each target ahead in a thirty-yard radius, running them all through and tearing pieces out of the standing dummies. Any person standing there would have been skewered.

Steam rose from the stakes of ice that devastated the field. It had worked! Not at all the way she'd intended it, but it worked!

Evaia caught up to her and snatched the scepter out of Deya's hand. She didn't resist, still dumbfounded at the damage that the wand could channel. She pulled an enchanter's glass out of her pocket and used her Sight rune to look through to the core, checking it over closely.

“Well, girl, I don't know why it's doing that instead of what you wanted, but I'm also not seeing any hint of damage.” She eyed Deya, swaying slightly from the drain on her mana. “Which is wild, considering how much power it just chewed through.”

A commotion came from behind the party as a group of people charged from the guild down the hill, eyes wide investigating the clamor. They were greeted by a field filled with stakes of Ice plunged deep into the dirt over the firing range.

Glory was at their front, gaping at the destruction across the field. Finally, her eyes landed on Deya, holding the steaming scepter, weary from the effort of draining her mana core.

Deya looked up at Glory and met her eyes. After the obstacles Glory had put in the way of her accomplishing this feat, a smug, toothy grin filled her face, defiant in the face of the guild leader's overbearing precaution.

After a moment, the group behind started remarking at the destruction of the field in front of them, a couple of them complaining that they’d wanted to use the targets in the morning. Glory waved them off.

“I’ll get Corin to put new targets out tonight, it should be ready to use in the morning. Deya, how did you do this? That wand you were making…that did all this?”

Deya bobbed her head. “Not bad, right?”

“Yeah,” Glory whispered. “Not bad.” To be honest, she felt a little dumb. To think she’d questioned this girl’s ability to take care of herself. But she shook herself out of it. No, she wouldn’t start second-guessing herself now. Even if Deya had the core and the power and the ingenuity to keep herself alive, there was no way for Glory to know that without putting her into the field with people that could vouch for her abilities afterwards. Now she knew.

After a few minutes of wonder at the destruction, the group started to disperse back up the hill towards the guild. Midaan’s party chattered as they went back up, making plans to leave tomorrow morning on the cart headed north, and Evaia waved goodbye to Deya, heading back to her home and workshop.

They relaxed for a couple more hours at the tavern before heading out get an early night’s rest. They would be gone for quite a while; and warm, comfortable beds would be a couple weeks away once they left.