Gabrielle Pellin is moving through the storage rooms in the cellar of the temple of Knowledge in Greenstone. She knows where to go and what to fetch. Knowledge’s temples have certain standard resources in storage. She puts six skill books of the common trade language into her dimensional satchel.
An acolyte with her armour recently fixed in the armoury of the holy warriors clears her throat to catch her attention. There is no need to mention the extra potions loaded into her belt. Likewise they turn together at the same time and walk up the stairs to emerge from the storage section’s back door to greet the scholar from the Magic Society called upon to operate their skimmer.
„Knowledge’s blessings to you, scholar Clouns“ she declared. „Acolyte Lorana will come with us to the dock.“
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KN: Nobody of you knows how to make health potions. All we have used, up to now, have either been traded, taken from defeated enemies or generated by magical means you have no control over. Do I see this correctly?
P: Yes.
L: That means that in theory we could wait for monsters to turn up for us to fight until we get enough health potions.
Z: How long would that take?
KN: Too long. So far we have gotten none at all here.
P: That leaves us two options. Either we seek out concentrations of monsters or we find people to trade. Both options mean that we need to move away from this camp.
Z: Not in our entirety. In fact keeping this camp defended gives us two places to fight and loot monsters at.
P: It also increases our risk
KN: A risk we have to accept. Our people may be running out of time.
P: Very well. I can see the point. Zora, will you stay here? If so, I should take your car out of storage. I probably cannot put it back in, though. That was possible only under the special conditions of the zone.
Z: I guess I’ll have to stay here. Lidija cannot deal with a dog monster alone.
L: It pains me to say, but you are likely right.
KN: Why can’t you two explore?
L: I am not good enough at flying and neither of us can teleport.
I am returning Zora’s car and its specialty backpack. We decide that I will have to live with a photograph of the potion we seek for trading purposes, as they may need it for complications that may still arise.
I also leave them half the weapons I took from the vault under the lake. Zora and Lidija already have their share of the quintessence.
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Dean is pondering the display of the farseeing crystal. He ought to feel lucky to have it. You can count on the Gellers to have the money to buy the good stuff. To their credit they are not hogging it.
Yet he just feels clueless on a higher level. In fact the recording and replay option just deepens his confusion.
RP: That was a monster in its terminal frenzy.
OL: Yes. The local essence users have stopped patroling the desert due to bandit activity. The longer we to let those bandits run around, the worse it’ll get.
RP: True. But first we have to catch them.
OL: We can catch these. Whoever they are, they do not belong here.
DT: We do not attack people just because they are foreign.
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OL: So they just happen to be innocent foreigners arriving cluelessly during an operation against bandits?
RP: They could be traders.
OL: Without trade goods? Putting up a lonely camp with a village just a few kilometers away?
DT: By the same logic they are not bandits.
OL: Sooner or later we will have to find out.
RP: There could be another group watching the camp with a crystal just like us.
OL: So we just wait for them to find us?
DT: No. We are waiting for them to show their hand.
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I am leaving Argus#1 here. That removes one of my weapons, but I have gained the option of a quick retreat via a teleport beyond the line of sight. I am extending my wings. Are they worth giving up membership in my species? The question has become moot.
My car becomes my armour again. This feels kind of like in Transformers. I teleport high up into the cloudless sky. Should I have done this immediately? But then those people who built a base, that got partially destroyed, under a lakebed for sure had enemies. Well, if worst comes to worst I still have a glider in my inventory. Facing away from the desert I see something that could be called a xeric steppe or a desert, or a mixture of both. This makes it clear that any immediate hope of meeting human beings will be limited to the shore of the lake. So I start lazily flapping my wings to slow my descent and do a wide turn. I cannot see the other side of the lake. What I can see, though, tells me that this lake is artificial. It is perfectly round. That is frightening. A detonation strong enough to carve this out of the ground would rival a major asteroid impact. And this is quite young. No landslides or deposits breaking up the clear shape of the coast. That makes the jetties spiking into the lake in the distance quite obvious. I have a destination.
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OL: The mantis-scorpion man has wings!
DT: Are they functional?
OL: I’ll let you know as soon … . He has vanished.
DT: Olutha, take my sector. This may be a distraction. I am going through the record.
They switch places.
DT: There he is. He teleported upwards. Looks like he was saving stamina and time.
RP: If they have a teleporter, why are our people following a track?
DT: Presumably because he is iron rank. If you were a competent bronze ranker, would you waste yourself on stealing from remote villagers? Any bronze rank teleporter can get a job that does not cause the Adventure Society to hunt you down.
RP: You could have a Death essence.
DT: Even more of a reason not to make the Adventure Society take a closer look.
Olutha sighs.
OL: By that logic he should not be here. Yet he is here.
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Russell Clouns: Priestess, I can see how we are supposed to meet somebody. But may I ask, why?
GP: They have brought important tides. My goddess wants to repay that.
RC: I was wondering whether Knowledge has any plans for them or they can be, well, cooperated with.
GP: You may find that discoveries without context are far less productive than you hope them to be.
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RP: You mean he was here.
OL: Smartarse.
DT: Do you have any better idea?
OL: Well, we are right next to the place the Reaper trials happened.
RP: The astral space going away is exactly what triggered the troubles here.
OL: That we cannot get there anymore does not mean that everybody must have the same issues.
DT: This is speculation. We need to make a decision. Do we contact them?