“That’s pretty!” Murunel exclaimed as they looked down the cliff to the glittering lake below.

“It really is.” Kay agreed quietly.

When the forest had finally ended, the land started to rise as they traveled. After passing through a very hilly area, the group of three had found a valley sloping downward. Kay had decided that they’d go up to get a better view of the area before deciding whether or not to go down into the valley itself.

Eleniah leaned forward as she looked down. “That looks like a good place to make a base. The lake’s a good source of water, I bet, the trees over there and that mountain,” She pointed into the distance across the lake, “Will make it easy to get resources we need.”

“Are you planning on having us settle here?”

“I mean, we could if we wanted to, but I was just planning on making us a base for a couple of years.”

“A couple of years?”

She looked at him with confusion in her eyes. Slowly understanding dawned. “Oh. Kay, you’re going to live hundreds of years longer than you would have on your homeworld, as long as nothing kills you. A few years living in the wilds to train you up and get you some experience isn’t that long now.”

“I…”

Her smile was small. “There’s a lot more time in the world now, at least from your perspective.”

Kay stared down into the valley, his thoughts running a marathon. “I need… I need some time to process that.”

“Yeah.” Eleniah looked slightly guilty, “Sorry, that’s something most people just, well they just know it. I forgot you wouldn’t.”

“It’s fine.” He waved her off. “I’ll think about it for a bit.” He retreated back to a safer topic, “We climbed up here and took a good look around. There’s nothing down in the valley that I’m too worried about, and I can’t think of a good reason to stay up here on the side of the mountain right now. Anything I’m not thinking of, or should we just head down?”

“There are all kinds of reasons to explore mountains,” Murunel replied, “But I don’t think we’re prepared for it at the moment.”

“Alright, down into the valley it is.”

It had taken them most of a day to climb up to that point, so they found a good spot to set up camp. Eleniah decided that his punishment for failing to locate her before she ambushed him and sometimes for not reacting to her attacks adequately was to do all the camp chores by himself. So he set up camp by himself, tore it down in the mornings, cooked, cleaned, all of it by himself. It was an effective punishment to him since it was annoying as all hell to do all that work with no help.

He handed Eleniah her portion of the simple meal he’d made out of some small game they’d hunted on the way up the mountainside.

“Thanks.” She stared at him as she took a bite.

He ignored her for the moment as he started in on his dish. He slowly chewed as he thought over the topic he’d been avoiding while he worked. “I’m going to live a lot longer than I was going to before all this.”

“Right.”

“That’s… That’s both fantastical and a little scary.”

“Why scary?” She asked, “I can see how it could be fantastical, but why scary?”

“Because what do you do? The deadline of mortality that pushed you to complete your goals is just gone. What drive is there to-”

“Whoa whoa whoa!” She waved her hands in front of her as she interrupted him. “That’s not right. You are still going to die. This has not made you immortal.”

“What’s the difference if I’m going to live hundreds and hundreds of years?”

She leaned back against the rock as she looked at him, a pensive expression on her face. “Okay, you were going to live around a hundred years before this, right?”

“Probably closer to eighty or ninety, but one hundred isn’t that rare with the advance of health care.”

“You’re still going to die; you’re just going to die five or six times later than you would have, at least right now. By tier six, you start getting into the thousands of years, but that’s not important right now. Everything dies eventually, even if it’s not for a long time. You still have that looming specter of death coming your way; it’s just longer off now. You shouldn’t lose motivation to finish things just because you now have time to finish them and then do, even more, you should just be grateful you have the time.” She tilted her head to one side and grimaced, “This topic is part of a philosophical debate that I fall to one side of, so you obviously don’t have to take what I say as the truth, but I believe that turning into a person that does nothing, or does very little, just because they can afford to do so, is wasteful. If you have a long period of time to finish a goal, it doesn’t mean you have to stretch your work over that entire period. You can finish in however long it would take normally and use the remaining time for something else. Or even use it to make whatever goal you achieved or thing you made even better.”

Kay stared up into the sky as he listened. Originally, the incredible cosmic sky-scapes had freaked him out when he looked at them for too long, triggering existential crises similar to what he was having now. He’d only seen the stars in all their glory like this once before, out in the middle of the Arizona desert, and even then, that didn’t compare to the completely unsullied glory of staring up into an entire galaxy twinkling in the night, every night. A few months in, he’d eventually become used to looking into the stars and realizing that he was small compared to all of reality. “I understand what you’re saying, and I think I agree. It’s probably going to take me a while to get used to the idea of having that much time on my hands.”

“Alright. Do you have any problems with setting up a base of operations to stay in for however long we’re out here?”

“No, but… Years still seem like such a long time to spend just doing whatever we want in the wilderness. I’m used to needing to work and get money in order to pay your bills and get food and necessities.”

Eleniah waved her hand lazily. “Welcome to a different set of circumstances. It can be weird jumping from one end of a dichotomy to the other, but you get used to it. Or choose to go back to the other side, but that’s up to you.”

“So what kind of criteria do we need to look for to find a good spot?” Kay asked, changing the subject.

“Clean water and defensible are the two really important ones. The lake will probably be a good source of water, so somewhere close enough to the shore to transport some is probably best unless we find a good spring or something similar. Defense would be easier if we find somewhere with a geographical feature we can take advantage of, but if we need to, we can build walls and make our own defenses.”

“Wouldn’t we make walls even if we find a place to put something at our back or whatever?”

“Sure, but I mean all around us.”

They discussed what they felt was or wasn’t necessary when looking for a site, with Murunel chiming in now and again about defending from flying creatures and other things she knew about.

The next morning before the sun rose, Kay got up and started cleaning up the camp. Eleniah woke up and got out of his way when he started pulling down the tent.

“It’s a little chilly up here,” Eleniah commented as she stared at the top of the mountain they were on. She glanced over at Kay cheekily, “Maybe I should wear a sweater.”

Kay rolled his eyes. “This again? Really? I thought you said there wasn’t anything wrong with liking women in sweaters.”

“I also said I was still going to tease you!” She laughed.

“Leave me alone while I pack everything up!”

“No, it makes your punishment that much worse.” She laughed again when he glared at her. “Don’t be mad, you’ve only got what, ten more days backed up? You’ve been doing well recently. Pretty soon, we’ll have you all trained up properly.”

He grumbled as he continued to clean up, and they made their way back down towards the valley as the sun rose in front of them. They paused and watched the sun soar into the air in a beautiful and glorious display.

“We need to do that again.”

“Yeah.”

They continued on after the show ended and made their way into the valley proper. Kay didn’t really have anything back on Earth to compare it to. The valley itself was oval-shaped, with the lake taking up a large portion of the northern edge. The rest of the northern part was wooded, with the edges of the valley making a softer bowl shape compared to the sides that made it hard, difficult to climb walls in their own ways. The western side was the mountain they had climbed part of the way up, with some difficulty, while the eastern and southern sides were… plateaus? They were flat, and the valley went down and then came back up. Maybe they were just… ground? Kay wasn’t bad at geography; he was actually pretty good at it, which was part of his interest in making maps, whether that became a class for him or not. But he wasn’t really sure what the correct terminology here was. Either way, the northern and southern sides had gentler slopes, the eastern side was basically a cliff, and the western side was a mountain. If you came at the mountain from the side, it wasn’t that difficult to make your way up and around a bit, but coming straight up from the bottom of the valley would be an exercise in high-level rock climbing.

Getting into the valley was easier than getting above it since there was a path down into it, formed by various animals and monsters wanting to get to the water most likely.

They made good time to the valley’s floor, and they decided to look in the northeastern side for a good location first. Eleniah hoped to find a good spot to use the cliff as a natural wall to their backs.

As they walked, Kay glanced around the valley, a frown forming over his face.

“What’s wrong?” Murunel asked, looking up at him from around his neck.

“This valley is triggering my instincts somehow.”

Eleniah glanced back at him from the small boulder she was climbing. “In a ‘there’s danger’ way?”

“No, in a ‘something is weird’ way.” He turned to look at the eastern cliff. “I feel like something about it isn’t natural. Like valleys aren’t supposed to be like this.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. But it’s bugging me.”

“Well, maybe you’re wrong. Or maybe there’s a magical explanation.”

Kay opened his mouth to complain about that idea, then stopped. There really wasn’t anything saying there couldn’t be a magical explanation. For all he knew, lots of geographical formations could be magically based here on Torotia.

“Don’t worry too much about it for now. We can always look into it later.”

He shrugged in agreement and started going around the boulder. “Why did you climb up there?”

“It’s fun!”