As they hiked closer to where smoke was still faintly rising into the sky, Darten kept asking questions that none of them had the answers to.

“So no one knows what it could have been?”

Eleniah sighed. “No, we know what it could have been. The problem is it could have been a lot of things, and we don’t know enough to narrow it down.” She started listing options, “It could have been a battle of some kind, a monster we don’t know about might have done it, it could have been some kind of accident, someone could have cast a spell or used a skill to do it, or it could have been something completely natural that we just didn’t know about. For all we know, this could be a volcano!” She pointed exaggeratedly at the mountain.

“I’m pretty sure it’s not,” Kay said. “There’s no caldera.”

Eleniah scowled at him. “Fine, it’s not a volcano. But all the other options are still possible.”

“Sorry,” Darten cut in, easily sensing Eleniah’s frustration, “What I really mean is: What should we be expecting?”

“Be prepared to fight for your life, and you’ll never go wrong.” Meten tapped Darten on the back. “Tall boy, are we getting closer? I think we are.”

Darten sighed dramatically. “Uncle, must you call me that? And yes, I can see more of the smoke; I think it’s right around that bend.”

“You can blame your siblings for the nickname; they started it.”

“You don’t have to use it, though!”

They hiked up towards the aforementioned bend and proved Darten right as the site of the explosion came into sight. The walkable area they were on widened from a few feet to four or five times that, and near the other end of the space was a small crater in the ground, still smoking and surrounded by smoldering bits of broken wood.

“Hey!”

They turned towards the voice and saw a small group of people clustered near a cart parked as far from the edge as they could get. A few of them were lying down on sheets spread across the ground, obviously injured. Responding to the shout of one of them, a few more looked over to see Kay’s group. They grabbed weapons and shifted to face them, placing themselves between the four strangers and their wounded.

“Hello!” Kay called out. He’d talked it over with the others, and they’d decided that his “leader in training” role meant he would talk to anyone they ran into. “We don’t mean any harm; we just came to see what that explosion was.”

Looking at them, Kay could easily tell they were dwarves. Or at least he hoped they were, running into Meten and Darten and having their species translate as Oni and Ogre had made him doubt his correlations between Earth folklore and his new world. The people staring at them suspiciously were short and stocky, and the few he could see clearly had large beards. As they glanced between each other and had a hurried conversation in low tones, Kay leaned closer to Eleniah. “Dwarves?”

“Right.”

“Awesome. Anything I should know specifically? Besides, don’t be a dick and all that.”

Eleniah’s face scrunched as she thought quickly. “I don’t remember all the details, but there’s something about an Outworlder and stupid assumptions that came up with some dwarves out west…”

Kay nodded. “Cool, treat them as I would anyone else I don’t know, and don’t be surprised if they don’t act like fantasy dwarves from home. Easy.”

The dwarves finished their conversation, and one of them stepped in front of the rest of the group. “We had a bit of an incident!” He called out in slightly accented Sha'ken, “If you have any healers with you, we’d pay for some help!”

Kay glanced at the rest of his group, easily ignoring the fact that the accent the dwarf had wasn’t Scottish in the least. I guess the Lord of the Rings movies never made it here. “I have a healing skill!” He called back after his three companions had nodded agreement, “It’s not all that high level, but it works with cuts and puncture wounds!”

The dwarf nodded and gestured them closer. When they were in range for a regular speaking voice, he nodded at each of them. “My name’s Senik. Thank you for any help you can offer.” He gestured behind him, and the wall of dwarves split apart.

Kay stepped closer to the three wounded people lying on sheets on the ground.

“I don’t need any healing!” One of them insisted as Kay stepped up. “It’s not that bad!”

“Dammit, Rhia!” One of the other dwarves snapped, “That splinted left a hole in your shoulder! Shut up and take what we can get!”

“It’s nothing against you.” The beardless and visibly female dwarf told Kay, “But Vened and Leya are worse than I am.”

Kay glanced down at the other two dwarves. Both of them were grimacing slightly in pain.

One of them waved a little. “Hi, I’m Vened. None of us are that badly injured, actually; Senik’s just panicking a little. It’s the first time we’ve had any injuries more than a scrape or a bruise.”

Okay, they obviously don’t all have beards, even the men, since Vened is a guy, and he’s got no facial hair. So another thing to throw out from home, but that isn’t a hard one. “Right, well, my healing skill isn’t that great either, so I guess we’re meeting at a good point.” He grabbed his punch dagger, then stopped in place. “Right. Um, before I start, I should tell you that my skill looks a little… strange, and it’s not that comfortable to have it used on you. So don’t freak out or anything, please.”

A few of the dwarves furrowed their brows as they looked at him, but they all nodded along.

“Who’s worst off?” Kay asked.

Another dwarf stepped closer. “Leya is.” She pointed at the other woman lying in the middle. “She took the worst of the shrapnel.”

“Rhia has a hole in her shoulder!” The man who’d snapped at Rhia earlier insisted.

The woman glared at him. “It’s a flesh wound. They are all, thankfully, but Leya’s are deeper. Calm down.”

“Dammit, Ahthia! She’s-”

Ahthia cut him off with a sharp gesture. “Who has the most medical training here, Devon? Me. I’m the healer for this ill-thought-out expedition, as much as I can be without any real healing skills, so what I say goes for this. Rhia will be fine.” She turned her head and looked at the rest of her group. “All three of them are going to be fine! None of them are hurt that badly!” She looked over at Kay, “They’d be fine even if you didn’t help. No offense, I’m happy you are since it’ll help them heal faster, but they’d recover with just my salves and some tending if we had to.”

“Good.” Kay smiled at her. “Like I said, I don’t have a life-saving skill, so wounds that they can already recover from are fine.” He looked down at Leya. “Like I said, it doesn’t look that fun, and it feels weird.”

She smirked up at him from her back. “I can deal with it.”

“Good. Ahthia, would you help? I need access to the wound.”

Ahthia pulled back some bandages, showing a slowly bleeding cut on Leya’s leg.

Kay nodded and sliced his arm.

The dwarves all jumped back as he pulled some of his own blood in a stream. He paused the flow next to Leya’s leg. “Ready?”

She looked at him with wide eyes, but she nodded. “Sure?”

He pushed his blood into her veins, gathering her blood that was trickling down her leg and adding it to the flow as well.

Leya made a face as she watched, “Oh, that does feel strange.”

“What, exactly, is your skill?” Ahthia asked in a calm voice.

“It’s called Blood Transfusion,” Kay replied, “It combines with two other skills, Blood Regeneration, and Healthy Blood. Blood Transfusion lets me give my blood to someone else to restore any blood they’ve lost; Blood Regeneration makes me get blood back faster than I would normally, so I have enough to give and not hurt myself, and Healthy Blood is a passive healing effect connected to my blood that gets transferred to the recipient when I use Blood Transfusion.” He let the flow go on for about thirty seconds, then cut it off. “Wrap her back up please, it’s not that fast, but the regeneration effect should close that up in an hour or two.

Ahthia looked down at the two-inch-long gash in Leya’s leg. “A couple of hours? Also, you have a full healing class?”

“Yeah, it’s called Bloody Healer, and the highest skill I have for it is ten, so the healing isn’t that fast.”

“From what I remember, that’s pretty good for a passive effect.” She muttered as she finished wrapping up the wound. “On to Rhia then?”

“No, I should do all of the bigger wounds on everyone. I regenerate fast enough to do that, and it’ll speed things up. That much blood across her whole body won’t get it done in a few hours.”

“Alright.” Ahthia manhandled Leya around and unwrapped the next set of bandages.

Kay gave all three of them about thirty seconds of flow to each “large” wound, maybe enough to fill two and a half blood bags. When he was done, he felt a little light-headed. He was startled when someone pushed something into his hand, but it was just Eleniah giving him some food. “Oh, thanks.” He bit into the dried meat and washed it down with some water.

“Thank you.”

Kay glanced over to see Senik, who Kay was pretty sure was the leader of the group of dwarves. “Like Ahthia said, we wouldn’t have lost them, but getting them some healing takes a weight off my mind.”

“Not a problem.” Kay slowly stood up. “I’m happy to help people when I can.” He shook himself and blinked a few times. “That took more out of me than I thought it would. Eleniah, can I have the bag?”

Eleniah tossed it to him, and he dug a few more pieces of jerky out. The dwarves gathered around their injured members and started talking to each other.

Kay wandered off as he munched on the meat. He looked down into the foot-deep crater, where it spread out for several feet. He saw pieces of a blackened wagon wheel sitting near the mountain’s edge and the spokes of a barrel off in another direction. He turned around and looked at the axe-pistols that some of the dwarves were carrying. He looked down into the crater again. “How much powder were you guys hauling?” He wondered aloud.

“What?”

The sharp tone had Kay looking over. One of the dwarves whose name he hadn’t gotten was glaring up at him.

“What?”

“How do you know about the powder?” He demanded.

Kay pointed at the crater and the remains of the wagon and barrels. “I mean, it’s pretty obvious once you see the evidence.” He glanced over at Eleniah, who’d followed him over. “Right?”

She stared back at him with a look of confusion. “Uh, no? How did you know what it was?”

“Oh.” He looked back at the dwarf, “Is it not that common here? I saw you guys had guns, so I thought it would be fairly wide-spread.” He turned back to his teacher, “You don’t know what gunpowder is?”

She shook her head.

“How do ships defend themselves then?”

“Magic?” She replied like it was obvious.

“Huh. I thought since people had indoor plumbing and running water, there would at least be cannons.”

The dwarf stepped closer, his hand on his weapon. “How do you know about the powder? No one outside of the Clans should know about it!”

“And what’s a gun?” Ahthia asked, her and Senik drawn over from the commotion.

Kay pointed at the axe-pistol on Senik’s belt. “That’s a gun. It’s a general term for weapons that use gunpowder to fire pieces of metal forward as a projectile.” Kay paused a moment, “I guess technically it’s weapons that use explosions to shoot pieces of metal since we don’t use actual gunpowder anymore. Wait, maybe it’s still called gunpowder? I guess we don’t use black powder anymore.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Senik asked.

“Oh, sorry.” He glanced at Eleniah, who shrugged and looked confused. “I’m an Outworlder. Almost every weapon we use in warfare back home is some kind of gun. Or advanced from guns, at least. We’ve been using them for a couple hundred years now.”

Senik slumped in relief. “Oh, good. We haven’t lost out advantage then.”

“Not necessarily.” The first dwarf that had been angry now looked apologetic as he responded, “If it’s that common on his original world, nothing is stopping other Outworlders from telling people about it.”

“Shit!” Senik growled and grasped at his beard. “What are we going to do?”

“Um.” Kay waved at them. “What’s happening?”

Senik sighed. “We’re… homesteaders? Prospectors? Something between the two, probably. We’re trying to split off from the Weathered Clans and start our own place.”

Eleniah looked around their group. “With only nine people?”

“We’re hoping to draw more people in once we can show some level of success.”

“What does that have to do with gunpowder?” Kay asked.

Senik looked determined. “One of the reasons that we want to leave the Clans is because of how stagnant they are. Things don’t advance; they just stay the same for decades or centuries. We wanted to take an advancement someone made that was neglected and show them how it could be improved. Show them there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with new things!”

Kay looked down at the flintlock axe-pistol. “How long have you had gunpowder?”

“About seven hundred years.”

“That long? And you’re only at flintlock weapons? Damn, that is slow.”

“So it’s not so much of a problem with your goal to set up a new place,” Eleniah cut in, “but it hurts your goal of proving something to the Clans?”

“Right. We wanted to show them that they’re wrong. If someone else has already advanced the technology, the leadership would probably make some excuse to ignore it, but if people who left the Clans did it…”

Kay ignored the logical flaw in that statement. If the Weathered Clans’ leaders would ignore it, they’d ignore it, no matter the source.

“Senik, Karl, you’re both ignoring something,” Ahthia told them.

They glanced over at her.

She pointed at Kay. “His people have been using gunpowder weapons for hundreds of years, and they’ve advanced past that to weapons’ based on’ gunpowder weapons. Or, they don’t use black powder, whatever the difference is.”

“So?”

“So he’s living proof that there’s something to advance to. If his entire people use more advanced weapons, it shows that change and advancement can be good. Pick his brain, and you can get all kinds of ideas to show the Clans up with.”

Senik and Karl looked up at Kay with glowing eyes.

Kay suppressed a sigh. “Can you give us a moment?” He grabbed Eleniah and dragged her off to the side. “What should I do?”

She glanced over his shoulder at the dwarves. Meten and Darten walked over, having listened to the conversation. “I think you should invite them down to the base and talk there. Definitely don’t make any big decisions without thinking it over. And you should probably explain what the hell you’re talking about to me so I can give you good advice before you do make a decision.”

Kay looked at Meten, who nodded in agreement, and Darten, who shrugged and made a “what do I know?” face.

“Alright.” He turned and walked back over to Senik, Karl, and Ahthia. “How about you come down to our base. We can talk more about this down there, where we have some shelter. As long as it’s safe to move those three, that is.”

Ahthia nodded. “Like I’ve said, they’ll be fine.”

Senik nodded after getting an okay from his healer. “We’d love to partake in your hospitality.”

“It’s nothing special,” Kay warned them.

Senik grinned. “We’ve been wandering through the wilderness looking for somewhere to set down. Any hospitality is good hospitality at this point.”

What’s that feeling? Kay wondered to himself. It’s like foreboding, but not as dark. He snorted. Could it be real-life foreshadowing? No way, right? He asked himself sarcastically. There was a good chance that “his” little base had just grown into a small settlement. If they stick around, that is! It’s not like I’m some kind of historical gun buff! Although I do know a few things… I wonder if their weapons are rifled? They’re definitely muzzle-loaders… Kay’s thoughts trailed off as he’d already started wondering how he could help the dwarves.