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Desert Course

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The party gets stranded in the desert.

Synopsis[]

After leaving Barren Jewel, Juniper, Amaryllis, and Fenn begin to trudge through the Datura Desert towards Caer Laga. The thaum-seekers in the desert detect active and passive magic associated with the use of spells, but not the latent magic that is present within entads and certain materials on Aerb. The consequence of this is that the party cannot use most of their magic without calling down dozens of thaum-seekers to their location. Juniper figures—apparently correctly—that his game layer does not count as any kind of magic.

Juniper estimates that the party covers ten miles and drinks one gallon of water per person every day. Most of the walk is uneventful, with Fenn becoming less talkative as time goes on. Juniper wonders aloud about the distinction between magic and non-magic on Aerb to Amaryllis, but the conversation doesn't go anywhere. Juniper recalls an attempt back in the hotel room to calculate how much water is necessary to carry when attempting to travel a particular distance in the desert. Fenn hints to Juniper that he could put his ability points from his last level up into the LUK stat.

The party walks during the day and sleeps during the night, with one person taking watch, as the thaum-seekers are the greatest hazard in the desert. Juniper hates keeping watch, not due to attention problems as Amaryllis thinks, but because of the direction his thoughts take when he has time to himself. When he is alone, Juniper thinks back to his time on Earth...

A month after Arthur's death, Juniper and Tiff climb onto the roof of Tiff's house to look at the stars. Juniper is lying on his back on a blanket, trying to remember constellations he and Tiff made up together but unable to focus, and Tiff is curled up next to him. Tiff is worried about Juniper hurting and sinking into his pain. She tries to tell him that other people are hurt by Arthur's death too, even if they weren't as close to him as Juniper was. Juniper rebuffs her, telling her that she understands him less than she thinks, and that the void Arthur left in her is not the same as the void in himself. Tiff starts crying. Juniper doesn't say anything, as he doesn't think the reassurances that Tiff wants to hear are true. After that, Tiff stops showing up to Juniper's gaming sessions.

On the fourth day of the walk, the party spots Caer Laga, a round fortress with small windows and a sloped roof. However, six miles away from the fortress, Amaryllis takes a fall that twists her ankle badly. The party discusses their options, which are to outrun the thaum-seekers across the remaining six miles, or go slower and fight the few creatures that show up early, or to retrieve the teleportation key from Amaryllis's arm. Juniper's plan is that they drag Amaryllis to the cliff that Caer Laga is built on, heal her there with magic, and ascend the cliff before thaum-seekers reach their location. They fashion Amaryllis's bag into a sled, unlocking the Engineering skill for Juniper, and begin dragging her along the sand.

After five hours of this, the party spot a thaum-seeker's red, four-legged form. The party navigates out of its line of sight and keeps to low terrain, not moving at a very fast pace. By the end of the day, they still have two miles to go before reaching the fortress. As they stop for the night to eat and sleep, Juniper asks what Amaryllis wants to do, noticing for the first time that the rat rot infecting her right hand has become much worse. She wants to continue on. Juniper agrees, but wants to teleport out to recuperate before teleporting back to the base of the cliff. When Amaryllis tries to dig the key out of the tattoo, the tattoo doesn't yield the key. Fenn is suspicious that Amaryllis is only pretending, but Amaryllis explains that she has nothing to gain. Juniper states that they are stranded and gets the quest Exit Strategy. Since the key is no longer an option, Amaryllis persuades the others that their best option is forging onwards into Caer Laga in the hope that supplies and healing are available.

Juniper takes a break to deliver the reader some exposition that clarifies things at the current point of the story. Amaryllis is the most direct descendant of Uther Penndraig because Amaryllis's ancestors pursued the strategy of maintaining a long time between generations to maximise their pool of inherited entads, with the men of the family mostly carrying the name and having children late in life. Amaryllis's father died at the age of eighty-four when she was two, and her mother died when she was ten. The teleportation key is limited to taking the user either to teleportation touchstones or to a point in space the user had occupied in their history. Because Amaryllis's parents died young, they didn't have the opportunity to take her to places like Caer Laga. Finally, the reason there are any magic items in Caer Laga, when the place was mothballed during the spreading of the blight, is to improve the fortress as a defensive point for somebody under threat of assassination.

Three hours after sunset, the party reaches the bottom of the cliff without incident. Amaryllis gets Juniper to put holes in the cliff face using the void rifle to aid the climbing. Fenn suggests that they sleep until the next morning before actually attempting the climb, because if anyone falls and dies, the others would not be in a position to collect their soul before the hells claim it. Amaryllis agrees to rest until first light.

Amaryllis takes the first shift, and Juniper eats and sleeps. He is woken up by yelling.

Featured characters[]

Quotes[]

“Never call an athenaeum a university,”
“Rule number 137 for surviving life on Aerb.”

—Amaryllis tells Juniper off yet again while Fenn pretends to keep track of it.


“On the bright side, we still haven’t seen any of the thaum-seekers, right? If we can make it to Caer Laga without running into one or having an incident, then we’re basically home free, right?”
“I don’t think we’re that lucky. But … maybe we could be?”

—Juniper is nagged by Fenn about putting his spare points into LUK.


“You think you understand me better than you do,”
“Maybe. I’m trying though. I know there’s this void that can’t be filled. I know that. It’s the same for me --”
“It’s not the same.”

—Juniper burns his bridges with Tiff.


The nails were thicker than they had been, almost completely yellow, and cracked down the middle, where they wept a clear fluid. That I hadn’t seen them before said to me that she’d been hiding them from us.

—Juniper notices the state of Amaryllis's rat rot.


“So. That would seem to be a problem, since we’re forty-some miles from Barren Jewel and have, conservatively, a day’s worth of food and water left.”

—Juniper comments on Amaryllis's tattoo not working, getting a quest out of it.


“So. Thaum-suckers don’t have shit on us.”

—Fenn is pleased with the team's progress.


“We should plan out a route up the cliff face. It doesn’t look too difficult to me. Joon, if you could get out the void rifle and start firing up the cliff to get us some handholds and places to put pitons, that would probably be a good use of downtime.”

—Amaryllis is resolute in the trying circumstances.

Notes[]

  • This chapter's title is a pun on "dessert course".

Real-world references[]

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