"Oh god dammit," I muttered, staring at the sandstorm on the horizon. "Well, guess I was wrong about this place having boring weather, huh?"

"I'm guessing the black cloud on the horizon is a bad thing?" Emily asked.

"Yeah, that's a sandstorm," I said. "Like a regular windstorm, except there's a lot of loose sand on the ground that gets picked up and thrown around, thus making it extremely inadvisable to be out there during one."

"Aren't we inside, though?" Emily asked.

"We are, and it is the case that there really is not that much out here that needs to be avoided, so we could hypothetically just keep driving through it, but..."

"But you're stopping anyways?" Emily said.

"Mhm," I said. "Because the engine has to suck in a lot of air to run, and I don't want to risk it sucking in sand. So I'm just gonna... Kill the engine, shutter the air intakes, and we're just gonna wait this one out. And while I'm doing this, would you mind running and fetching Talia for me? Oh, and tell her to put on her desert gear, too."

"Okay," Emily said, standing up from her seat. "Be careful."

---

Talia was just wearing her usual tank top and skirt when she came into the cabin, whereas I was already wearing my desert gear.

"Talia, come on," I said. "Put on your desert gear, please."

"Alright, alright, relax," Talia said, pulling the loose white jumpsuit out of her cleavage. (I had, in fact, managed to make her a copy of Duchess Melody's own cleavage-mounted bag of holding, and Talia had fallen deeply in love with it, both from practicality and from just how enamored she was with her own boobs.) "Sandstorm, huh?"

"Eyup," I said, nodding my head. "I'm gonna help you put up a quick weather ward to keep the worst of it off of us, but the edge of the storm is already almost here, so..."

"Got it," Talia said, nodding as she suited up.

Our desert gear was pretty standard for Adventurers, albeit with very new modern materials substituting for what used to be some pretty expensive enchantment. The main piece of the gear was a loose-fitting jumpsuit with integrated gloves and boot-covers, made of pure white fabric that was very tightly-woven to prevent fine-grained sand from getting inside. On our heads, we wore tight-fitting hoods of the same fabric, and then on top of that, we wore fully-enclosed helmets with big, full-faced visors that were traditionally made from enchanted glass, but on ours were instead made from a lighter, less-brittle material called polycarbonate that was synthesized by alchemists from mineral oils. Inside those helmets were some enchanted speaking stones, so that we could keep talking even in the roaring winds of a sandstorm. And holding the whole thing together was a deeply convoluted system of flaps and zips and buttons, all aimed at keeping sand from slipping in through gaps in the cloth.

"Alright, let's do this," I said, casting a modified shield-bubble spell on the door before opening it. This particular shield-bubble was, ultimately, quite simple: it blocked sand, because otherwise opening this door would let sand into the cab, and I didn't want to spend hours laboriously cleaning sand out of the cab, nor did I want to burn that much magicka on cleaning it the fast way, especially when I could just block the sand entirely for less magicka.

We climbed out of the van quickly, shutting the door behind us, and immediately got to work on marking out a quick five-point ward array. I used Arcane magic to create a more solid physical structure from the sand- just a simple 'sand to glass' transmutation, which didn't really make glass per se due to the sand here being rich in iron rather than just simple pure white quartz sand- and Talia used Primal magic to anchor weather wards to the more solid structure.

Now, as it turns out, walking on deep, soft, shifting sand was really hard, and seeing what you're doing as a cloud of flying black sand is descending upon you is also really hard. I had no idea how long we were out there, but it was too goddamn long, and only once the last point of the ward array was complete did I finally feel like I could breathe a sigh of relief.

"Okay," Talia said. "We've got a pocket of safety against the sandstorm, now. Or at least, we're not getting pelted with sand nearly as hard anymore."

"That's something," I muttered, before sighing. "Ugh. Fuck a duck..."

"There's something weird about this storm," Talia said, frowning. "Even in a desert, there's a sort of ambient background glow of Primal magic- it's everywhere, after all. There's a little bit in every raincloud, every gust of wind... but there isn't any here. It feels just... devoid of magic."

"Huh," I grunted out. "So what do you make of that?"

"Honestly? No idea," Talia said. "There's just... I literally do not understand how that could happen. Maybe there is some Primal magic in this storm, but it's just so weak that I'm not noticing it?"

"Well... Keep an eye out," I said, furrowing my brow. "Hopefully we don't have another sandstorm tomorrow; I really don't wanna spend more time than I have to out here in this stupid desert."

"I hear ya," Talia said. "My curiosity has been more than satisfied, I think."

"Let's just... get back inside, and get out of this desert gear," I said, sighing deeply. "Fuck, I hate sand..."

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

---

"Motherfucker," I muttered, once the sandstorm had passed.

"What is it?" Faith asked, turning to look at me.

We were all outside, checking the exterior of the van- thankfully, my toughening charms had held, and neither the paint nor the glass were unduly damaged by the sandstorm. The engine, however, was a different problem.

"There is sand all over this goddamn thing," I said, pulling out a wire brush and beginning to scrub sand out of the intake shutters. "Worse, there's sand all inside this goddamn thing, and I can't start it back up until after I've cleaned all the sand out."

"What would happen if you tried anyways?" Faith asked.

"There's a lot of moving parts in this thing, and the grains of sand would get between moving surfaces and scratch 'em up real bad, until suddenly the tolerances are shot to hell and this thing either locks itself up or rattles itself apart," I said. "So, y'know. Nothing good. Ugh, this is going to be my whole day..."

"Anything we can do to help?" Talia asked.

"Honestly? No," I said. "There's not enough elbow room here for more than one person to work on this engine, and none of you are machinists, so... I mean, you can sit nearby and provide moral support, but I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to sit out here in the desert for the hours it's gonna take me to clean the goddamn engine properly."

"Moral support it is," Faith said.

"Oh, and Emily? I'm sorry, but we're going to have to skip tonight's hypnosis session."

"It's okay, Joseph," Emily said. "I can be patient too. Take your time."

I sighed, taking off my jacket; the long, loose sleeves were just too much of a risk around the moving parts of an explosive engine. Once I had the jacket off, I passed it wordlessly to Volex, and went back in with the wire brush.

---

"I hate sand," I said, to nobody in particular.

"So I've heard," Volex said idly, perched on the frame of the van, but still sufficiently out-of-the-way that I had room to work. "So... How're you feeling about the girls so far?" I could feel a flicker of Occult magic pulse outwards from her, and I could even tell that it was just a simple privacy charm.

"You'll have to elaborate," I said, turning to glance at the rest of my adventuring party, who were sitting on upside-down tin buckets because we didn't think to buy camp stools. The sun was setting, and while I had responded by busting out a simple magical work-light, they were responding by busting out a magical log to have a little campfire- that log would never burn to ash, but it would also never burn particularly hotly, either; it was nice to have, but if we wanted to really cook something, we would've needed more logs.

"That's what I want you to do," Volex said. "Just... Give me a minute of talking about your overall impression of each one. Start with Talia, since you've known her the longest."

"She's my friend," I said, shrugging. "Our personalities are compatible, we both think the other is funny and considerate and a good friend to have, and we also both think the other is very attractive. We plan to be life partners for a good long while, but are also aware that, y'know, circumstances and people do change, especially early on in life while we're still figuring ourselves out. Maybe I will marry her and have kids with her, maybe I won't. It's all in flux."

"Fair enough."

"Emily's nice, but still kinda shy, and hasn't fully come into her own yet," I said. "I'm hoping that being around elven peers for long enough will make her start acting like a real half-elf, but until then, it's hard to think of her as anything besides a cute, shy girl who I have to look after."

"I'm pretty sure you think she's more than just cute," Volex said, smirking. "You've got the hots for little miss Redwater, little man."

"It's not my fault I know she's gonna turn into a milf," I muttered.

It was a common misconception that elves, being perpetually youthful-looking, had a preference for humans who were also youthful-looking. And while it was true that a few elves were like that, the far more common opinion was that visibly-older humans were in fact hotter than humans who looked like they had just graduated high school. It was novel and exotic- the same reason so many humans had a weird thing about elf ears, and tended to draw elves with longer ears than we really had.

The upshot of this attitude was that an elf courting a human in their twenties was not, in fact, a creepy old man who wants a wife who's still young and beautiful, but, more likely, a connoisseur of the middle-aged and perhaps even truly old, who was simply getting in early, before someone else married her.

Volex simply laughed, high and sharp.

"Anyhow," Volex said. "What about Faith?"

"Faith is... complicated," I said. "Before the War, she'd probably have just straight-up moved in with me and Talia by now, and we'd be calling her part of the family. But... Well, she introduced herself to me as a Paladin, and the bad blood runs deep. It seems like she's slowly realizing that she's in the wrong, here, but... She's still holding on, because she feels like she has nothing going for her except being a Paladin, and she'd have nothing left if she just let go."

"And what would you tell her to do?"

"I'd tell her she's eighteen years old, and I am the weird one for already having a vocational skillset," I said dryly. "I'd also tell her to try praying to The Mother for guidance, because she's closer to what Faith used to think Paladins were all about."

"I see, I see," Volex said. "And... you haven't told her this... why?"

"I don't want to push her," I said. "Ugh. Finally got this stupid engine back together... I want to never do that ever again."

Volex disappeared into a puff of smoke, flowing back inside the van and back up to her reliquary, still in my jacket's pocket, and with my jacket likely being hung up in my room, allowing me to drop the engine hood back into place.

"Alright!" I said, raising my voice a little and popping Volex's privacy charm. "The engine's fixed. Y'all roasting some sausages?"

"Eyup," Faith said, holding out a long, wood-handled metal skewer with a nicely-browned sausage link speared on its twin tines. "You hungry?"

"Ravenous," I said dryly. "Ugh. This stupid Mount Fate bullshit better be worth it."

"Hey, actually," Faith said, as she passed me the skewer, and then began preparing another one. "What's your plan for the future, anyhow? I know there's something in there about unicorns, but... What's your goal, after you graduate?"

I hummed quietly, my mind drifting as I asked myself, 'what did I want life to look like when I was thirty?'

"...Well," I began slowly.