Juniper, Amaryllis and Fenn reach Barren Jewel and plan their next move.
Synopsis[]
Juniper narrates the party's arrival to Barren Jewel to the rest of his gaming group, currently consisting of Tom, Reimer, Craig, Arthur, and Tiff. He describes Barren Jewel as a city beset by corruption and cut off from civilisation by the Datura Desert. Reimer immediately questions how and why the city can exist, forcing Juniper to improvise a backstory to the city. The Datura Desert turns out to have once been a verdant place before a blight spreading across the land started killing every natural thing in the region. Barren Jewel remained, supported by the sacrifice of the mage Alvion who created a wellspring of magic that enabled the summoning of bread and milk from anywhere within the city. This amounts to casters being able to cast Create Food and Water as a 5th level cleric once per day.
Reimer asks why people still live there, precipitating one of many heated discussions between Tiff and Arthur about social justice, economics, and other things like that. These discussions characterise what Juniper refers to as the Tiff-Arthur epoch of their D&D group.
After the party teleports away from Sorian's castle, Juniper reviews his character sheet, viewing his statistics, his quests, and his companions. His current quests are Straddling Worlds, God Botherer, and The Lost King, Found?. He also reads Amaryllis's biography for the first time.
Juniper's party teleports to a place in the sands just outside of the walls of Barren Jewel in order to avoid being spotted. Juniper discovers that the teleportation key causes intense pain in the instant of teleportation—a pain worse than having his vein cauterized or being hit by multiple arrows—despite seemingly no time passing at all.
Fenn and Amaryllis discuss the party's next steps. They need to get into the city and find a place to stay, while Fenn wants to pawn off things that she had looted. Fenn insists on being told about Juniper's circumstances and he tells her about being dream-skewered, his fast learning of skills, and having access to information from the game layer. He proves the latter by saying to Fenn that in her childhood she lived in the Isle of Eversummer and the colony of Rogbottom. When Juniper tells the other two that he will recite their biographies in private, Fenn's Loyalty increases to level 4.
Amaryllis explains the limitations of the teleportation key, which are that it can only take the user to places they've been before or to touchstones, and that it has a cooldown time of two hours. Juniper suggests that Fenn and Amaryllis secure a room in Barren Jewel and collect him afterwards while he waits out in the sand, as he is conspicuous and dream-skewered. Juniper jokes that if he had to put a number to his health, it would be at eleven out of twenty-seven, which earns him a skill increase to level 3 in Comedy.
Juniper's idea to get the two women over the walls of Barren Jewel is to use the Crimson Fist spell with his leg to boost them as they jump. Experimenting with heavy rocks lets Juniper unlock the Crimson Foot and Sanguine Surge spells. His idea works, and the two hop over, but not before Amaryllis leaves behind her void rifle with him. Amaryllis apologises for leaving Juniper behind again.
Juniper waits in the sand, musing about game design not leaving protagonists to wait around in boredom, and about events that could occur to spur a protagonist onward. However, nothing happens, and Juniper is left alone with his thoughts about surviving on Aerb and the people he had killed escaping the Risen Lands. Juniper falls asleep and is woken by Amaryllis, who is wearing clothes more suitable to the Barren Jewel. They teleport to a room that the women found.
Amaryllis says that the party needs healing. Fenn has scouted a bone mage and a blood mage willing to do the job; Amaryllis prefers the bone mage because of the better quality of their services and because Juniper might be able to pick up bone magic from watching the mage work. Fenn is put out by not having a secret of her own like Juniper's game layer or Amaryllis's difficult political issues, but the other two ignore her.
Featured characters[]
- Juniper Smith
- Amaryllis Penndraig
- Fenn Greenglass
- Tom (flashback only)
- Reimer (flashback only)
- Craig (flashback only)
- Arthur (flashback only)
- Tiff (flashback only)
Quotes[]
“It’s just a model.”
- —Tom trots out his running joke.
“Okay. Create Food and Water is a 3rd level cleric spell, they get one of those at 5th level, plus another if their domain is creation, so a single mid-low level cleric can provide 24 hours' worth of food and water for maybe thirty people, and a 20th level cleric would cap out at providing food and water for maybe two thousand people, if that was literally all they were doing with their magic. So it doesn’t work out unless there are a hugely disproportionate number of really powerful clerics in the city.”
- —Reimer picks Juniper's worldbuilding apart.
“But why do people live there? Why not move someplace else?”
“Yeah. Why do people live in Flint, Michigan, why don’t they just move somewhere where there’s clean water and functional city services? Why do people starve to death in Africa when they could just fly to America and buy food from supermarkets there? Why do those dumb Chinese peasants toil away in factories making cheap cellphones for pennies an hour instead of just moving to San Francisco?”
- —Reimer and Tiff ask the hard questions.
“I’m sorry that I’m leaving you again.”
“You waited for me in Silmar. There was nothing to forgive, but if there ever was, it would be forgiven.”
“You think too highly of me.”
- —Amaryllis feels guilty over having to leave Juniper behind a second time.
“Juniper is a savant. He learned the basic principles of blood magic in the space of a few minutes this morning and got us over the wall this afternoon by applying those principles in novel ways. I don’t know whether this will extend to other skills to such an extent, but if he keeps up this rate of progress then he’ll be able to rival the gods within a month.”
- —Amaryllis puts her chips on Juniper.
“Juniper is a lever by which the world can be moved.”
“Well, that at least explains why you stuck around waiting for him.”
- —Amaryllis and Fenn take stock of what Juniper is.
Notes[]
- This is the first chapter in Book II of Worth the Candle.
Continuity notes[]
- The Straddling Worlds quest is finally resolved in Chapter 112, Egress.
Real-world references[]
- Tom paraphrases a line spoken by Patsy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "It's only a model." The movie is apparently a favourite of Juniper's group, as they'd previously been shown to reference it in chapter 13.
- Tiff's rant makes reference to world affairs such as the Flint water crisis, famines in Africa, and Chinese sweatshops such as Foxconn factories.
- Juniper notes that he'd envisioned Barren Jewel as having Moorish architecture like that of Agrabah: the fictional city from Walt Disney's Aladdin. In actuality, the city has more in the way of Brutalist architecture.
- The "Microhitler" achievement, obtained last chapter, is a reference to Adolf Hitler. Juniper notes that Craig had been the one to explain the phrase, and that he probably got it from 4chan, which is the kind of website that would joke about such an achievement. Juniper imagines that, had Tiff been there at the time, she'd have put on an impression of Hermione Granger from Harry Potter and talked about the Nuremberg principles.