“So you can take flowers and plants and stuff and make potions out of them, right?” Lumiriel asked as she reignited their campfire. The two of them had woken with the dawn, a chorus of birdsong echoing through the woods around them. Lumiriel had awoken easily, delighted by the noise. Jason just scowled and grumbled something about sleeping in before he too hauled himself upright.

Covering his mouth with the back of his hand, he stifled a yawn before responding.

“Yeah,” he said after a moment. “At least, I’m assuming so. Those mushrooms we’ve been eating have the 'Restore' trait, so I know ordinary plants can at least be used sometimes.”

“Cool," she said, feeding some twigs into the fire. She sat on a small mound of earth she'd conjured to use as a chair. "So I was thinking, I walked that road like all day yesterday, and not too long before I met you, I came across a patch of wildflowers at a fork in the road. Maybe we could take the other fork, since you came from the other direction, and while we’re at it you could do your thing and see if any of the plants there are good for something?”

“Uh, actually I haven’t been taking the road,” Jason said. “I er, got dropped into just dense woods, and was actually just following some game trail over that way.”

Jason pointed over his shoulder.

“But yeah,” he continued, “that sounds good to me. I mean, one direction is as good as any at this point. We might as well take the route that could net us something useful.”

Once he was fully awake, Jason used his knife to slice up the remaining mushrooms from the previous night, and they had short, meager breakfast. He made a mental note to keep an eye out for more foodstuffs while they traveled, and resolved to come up with a better meal plan than just sliced veggies. Even without a Skill, he knew he was capable of better; it was just that he hadn’t had time to sit and think about it.

While he was busy thinking, Lumiriel let out a sudden “Aha!” and a new notification popped up in Jason's view.

You have been invited to form a party with Lumiriel Dun’val. Do you accept? Y/N?

“Yes,” Jason declared, grinning. A small, unobtrusive window popped up in his peripheral vision, showing both their current status. “How’d you manage that? I didn’t even hear you open your UI.”

“Oh yeah, I noticed you were using vocal commands last night. It’s part of the customization stuff. You can just set it to activate through thought or gesture as well as speech. Even a combination of things.”

“Oh is that what you meant by quickcasting, yesterday?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “I wanted to just be able to use a gesture to activate it, but it’s super picky about getting it just right. I mean, I guess that’s a good thing so you don’t accidentally light someone’s hair on fire, but it’s taking some practice to get used to.”

“Anyway,” she continued, “apparently there’s a third screen apart from the status and customization ones, that shows some different commands. Pretty standard MMO stuff it looks like, though there’s some kind of cost associated with some things, like private messages. I don’t recognize the icon. Some kind of pile of powder or something, it looks like.”

“If it’s some kind of microtransaction bullshit, I’m having words with the system later.”

Lumiriel laughed. “You and me both. But my guess is some kind of spell reagent, yeah? Pretty common in tabletop games to have long-range speech spells, and most MMO’s charge trivial amounts of copper or something to send mail, as a money sink.”

“Hmm, you’ve got a point there,” Jason replied. He pulled one of the mushroom skewers from the fire, and passed it to Lumiriel. The other he kept for himself, blowing on it to cool it down slightly.

“What screen are you talking about though? I didn’t see anything like that,” he said after taking a moment to have a bite of mushroom.

“Just scroll down from your status screen. It’ll take you to another page.”

Jason looked confused for a moment. “Status,” he said, and reached out to try and scroll with one finger.

“Hmm. Doesn’t seem to work with mine,” he said with a frown.

“That’s weird, let me see?”

Jason shared his screen with Lumiriel, then repeated the attempt.

“Oh dear,” she said. She smothered a grin with her free hand. “I think I know what happened. I did it once myself, back home. You customized your layout, and just mass deleted the stuff you didn’t want, didn’t you?”

Jason groaned, facepalming. “Goddamit, you’re right, I did, didn’t I?” He laughed, shaking his head, then his face turned thoughtful for a moment.

“You said standard MMO command stuff right?”

“Yeah.”

“Slash ResetUI” he declared. His status screen fuzzed for a moment, turned blank, and then reformed in its default configuration.

He flicked upwards with a finger, and sure enough, the third page popped up, listing numerous additional options and commands he’d completely missed.

“I cannot believe,” Jason sighed, “that I made such a noob mistake. It’s not like we weren’t living in the age of smartphones or anything.”

“Swiping different directions to check for other options should be second nature by now,” he laughed. “Well, I guess I’ll have to re-do my setup here. Can you show me how to set the command types too while I’m at it?”

“Sure.”

A few hours later, they’d finished their breakfast, reconfigured Jason’s UI, cleaned themselves up a bit, and were now walking slowly down the road in the direction of the wildflower patch Lumiriel had come across.

“So, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Jason inquired. “Sorry if it’s a bit rude, but what’s up with your name? You said you’re from America like me, but that’s a really unusual name. But it’s right there on my UI now that we’re formally a party, so that’s actually your name, right?’

‘It isn’t, not really.” She confessed. “You can change your name up to two times in the UI, actually. Back home I went by Alice, but since I was pretty sure I’ll be stuck here for the foreseeable future, I decided I wanted to be someone else.

“Even better,” she continued with a laugh, “it seems I can! Boring old Alice was a barista in a coffee shop. Lumiriel though? She gets to be a badass swordfighting wizard!”

She struck a deliberately ‘heroic’ pose for a moment, fist pumping, and then laughed again. “And here we are, on an adventure already instead of starving in the woods.”

Jason grinned back at her. “I hadn’t thought of things that way, but you're right. I wonder why only the two changes though?”

“My theory is it’s an age thing." Lumiriel shrugged. "You know, how kids or teens go through a phase where they decide they don’t want to be called by whatever their parents called them as a baby anymore, but sometimes they keep a general nickname or use a middle name? And then later on of course, people sometimes either need to actually change their names legally for some reason, like if they take a spouse’s name, or they want to distance themselves from their family.’

“Yeah maybe. Why not just leave it open or something though?" Jason replied. Then he laughed. "Or give it a point cost. Everything else seems to have one.”

She laughed alongside him. “Who knows, maybe there’s a skill for it! I can’t imagine roguish types wouldn’t want an ability like that.”

“You may have a point there.” Jason paused a moment, considering, while he stopped to pluck a handful of purple blossoms from a vine hanging from a tree on the side of the road. “I wonder if there is any other stuff we can change? Race? Gender? Features? I never even thought to try and interact with that part of the UI.”

He then ate one of the petals after confirming with [Advanced Survivalist] that it was safe.

Wisteria Blossom: A bright purple flower taken from an aggressive species of vine. Occasionally used to create floral wines or jams. [Wisteria Blossom] Trait Discovered: Self

Jason scratched his head, unsure of what that trait might be for. After all, potions usually affected the one drinking them, right?

Lumiriel meanwhile continued on about changing one’s status.

“I don’t think we can currently,” she said. “I had a pretty extensive look around that first night after I picked up my magic skill, trying to figure out how to use it. I figured out pretty fast that just about any entry is expandable for further explanation, but not everything has options and a lot of them aren’t terribly helpful. Most of them are just single-sentence descriptions.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were ways to permanently change yourself with magic though," she continued. "That’s pretty common in games, yeah? Fleshcrafter NPCs, barber shops, respec potions, cursed belts, polymorph spells, reincarnation scrolls....all sorts of stuff. This system seems incredibly broad, so it might be in there somewhere. I’m hoping there’s something that will change my hair color for good.”

“Mmm, yes, dyed right?” Jason asked. “I thought I recognized that coppery red. Well, if we can’t find you a permanent spell, maybe I can whip up something.”

He chuckled to himself a bit with a grin. Here they were, two adults who probably hadn’t held a weapon in their lives, walking through the middle of monster-infested woods on some god-knows-where world, with no idea how or even if they could ever return home, and here he was talking about inventing hair dyes.

He shook his head at himself a bit ruefully. “Alchemist, yeah? I’m sure inks and dyes fall into that. Things like polymorph potions, dusts of illusion, and magical ink should, right? So why not magic hair dye?’

“I might just take you up on that," Lumiriel said with a small smile. “I hate my hair. It’s just a boring old light brown. Dress me up in slacks and a blouse, give me glasses, and take away my hair dye, and I look like a librarian."

Jason eyed her dubiously from the side. She certainly didn’t look it now. Then again, the two of them were both pretty filthy from a day and half of wilderness travel. Dirt smudged their faces and hands, and they still had smaller bits of leaves stuck in their hair, despite having assisted one another with a bare minimum of grooming earlier before striking camp. It had been a bit weirdly intimate to do that with someone they barely knew, but when they’d awoken Lumiriel had had several sticks tangled painfully in her hair that she didn’t want to just leave in. Since they had no mirrors, Jason had assisted her in getting them, and the resulting tangles, out. She had returned the favor.

In addition to the dirt, they both had still had a degree of dried frog blood on their hands, arms, and clothes left over from their harvesting and cooking. So they had had a sort of an improvised shower, courtesy of Lumiriel’s [Cantrips]. All she could conjure was one medium sized ball of water at a time though, so it was more like dousing someone with a bucket to get rid of the worst of the stench. They could still have used that to wash more thoroughly, or gone down to the stream, but neither one of them had been willing to strip down in front of a relative stranger and assist them in having a bath, no matter what the situation, and they didn’t want to go down to the stream alone in turns, in case more Frogoids showed up. So instead, Lumiriel just hosed each of them down down with repeat castings, clothes and all, and they just dried out as they walked along.

“I have trouble buying that.” Jason said teasingly. “You don’t even have glasses. Isn’t that, like, required?”

She laughed ruefully and then shook her head. “Ugh, don’t remind me. I begged my parents to get me LASIK when I first started college. You have no idea. People laugh about librarians being a fetish, but I got hit on constantly at work. Being a barista is bad enough. Being a barista who also conforms to a common fetish was a serious creep magnet.”

Jason grimaced. “I can’t even imagine what that’s like. Can’t say I blame you for changing things up, though.”

In a blatant attempt to move away from memories Lumiriel probably didn’t want to dwell on, he changed the subject. “So, how much longer until that fork in the road you said you found?”

They continued down the road, talking about inconsequential things for awhile. With their immediate needs met between Jason’s foraging skills and Lumiriel’s magic, they could each afford to relax some and just enjoy the walk. For a little while, they could almost forget their situation and just think of it as taking a long hike with a friend. Jason guessed that as long as a storm didn’t roll through, they could easily continue on like this for a few more days. He hoped so, anyway. Neither he nor Lumiriel were sure if it was a bad idea to drink conjured water or not, but since the ice they had used for their cooler hadn’t just vanished after awhile, they had agreed that it was probably fine.

After about another hour’s leisurely walk, they finally came to the turnoff. Lumiriel had perhaps slightly understated things in describing it as ‘a patch of wildflowers’. It was a massive clearing along the side of the road, and it was absolutely filled with a wide variety of different colored flowers, and a number of flowering bushes as well. Jason thought he saw some edible berries, too.

They spent quite some time harvesting, Lumiriel carefully assisting under Jason’s instruction. She also earned [Basic Herbalism] as well, though she did turn it down; there wasn’t much point in both of them having it.

Many of the flowers turned out to be perfectly ordinary, with no alchemical traits. Lumiriel attempted to string them into a wreath and place it on Jason’s head when he wasn't looking, playfully claiming that a [Knight] was supposed to give gifts to her Lady. Perhaps fortunately to Jason's mind, the whole thing just fell apart because weaving flowers together is harder than movies make it out to be. Still, they at least got a good laugh out of her antics.

Several other plants did turn out to be useful, though. A pale white flower that grew on a plant with triple-bladed leaves had the trait ‘Fortitude’, which Jason thought would be very useful, while a purple-stemmed fern with dark leaves had the rather unusual trait of ‘Volatile’.

[Iparea Petals] Trait Discovered: Fortitude [Mellax] Trait Discovered: Volatile

Jason picked several of the Iparea, roots and all, and packed them in a small pouch of hide along with some soil. He didn’t know if they’d survive the trauma, but you never knew. As for the Mellax, unfortunately there was only one plant present, and he could only enough harvest enough for one additional dose after having consumed the first. However, when he harvested the last of it, he got a pleasant surprise.

Critical Success: [Rare Seed] Obtained. [Rare Seed]: A mysterious seed occasionally found when harvesting other plants. Can be planted to grow a random rare-quality plant useful to herbalists.

Jason pocketed the seed along with the other reagents. Maybe it would produce something with a useful trait later.

The pair also spent a bit of time replenishing their food supplies.

Among the plants found here was a species that produced a pale pink berry that [Herbalism] identified as an ‘Amarca Berry’, which was sour and juicy. Like most of the nearby flowers, it too didn’t have a trait.

They also found some more wild onions, which along with the berries, the two happily added to their stash of food for later. More mushrooms were present as well; the things seemed to be everywhere.

“You know,” said Lumiriel, “I know it’s a bit cliche in fantasy worlds to have giant mushrooms, but I hadn’t realized that real mushrooms back home could grow so large, too. I mean, I’d heard they were big, but when you think ‘large mushroom’ you probably think of like, a particularly large toadstool in your yard. I wasn’t expecting massive, head-sized orange mushrooms.”

Jason had found one with a stalk as wide as his hand, six inches tall, and a cap almost a foot across. Picking just a percentage of the patch had resulted in several pounds worth of food.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he said. “I’d seen them before at the grocery store, but I guess those were just small varieties. These are ridiculous. My phone says that these particular mushrooms really do get this big though. There were pictures.”

After a short lunch of raw berries and mushrooms, the two resolved to travel a bit more slowly and look for things to add variety to their meals. While they took care to keep the road in sight at all times, they began to veer off the road slightly into the woods to see if they could find things just off the road. They made sure to keep each other in sight at all times so nobody got lost, and generally avoided areas where the vegetation would slow them down too much, but this allowed them to search a larger area in hopes of finding extra things to add to their diet, since they had no real idea how far they might have to go to find a town or a village.

It turned out to be a good thing they had, because that was why Jason found the girl.

If Jason had just been walking the road, he would have missed her completely. Instead, he’d been investigating a large shrub that sported some large, appealing-looking white berries, which [Survivalist] promptly told him he should emphatically not eat, as nearly all varieties of wild white berries were highly toxic.

So Jason skirted around to the other side, ignoring them, and squeezed past a patch of brambles only to promptly trip over a tree root. He came crashing down, and with a loud exhalation of air, found himself lying on the ground a short distance from a young woman sitting up against a tree.

“Oh! I’m sorry, I-” he began, and then froze, falling silent.

She wasn’t sitting against the tree, so much as she was slumped up against it. Her arms dangled by her sides, hands unmoving in the grass. The girl's head was slumped forwards, hair obscuring her face. Dozens of angry red scratches covered her arms, some of them crusted over with dried blood, as if she’d been repeatedly raked with thorns.

She didn’t react to his presence, and for a moment, Jason thought she might be dead. Then he saw a leg twitch, and a bit of drool dripped down from her concealed face and into her lap.

“Miss? Are you Ok?” he said cautiously, climbing to his feet.

No response.

“Miss?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lumiriel turn towards him in the distance, clearly wondering why he’d stopped.

Jason cautiously stepped forward and reached for the girls shoulder, ignoring Lumiriel for the moment. He was tense, and held himself ready to jump back at any second, because hey, fantasy world.

The girl's head lolled to the side as he gently shook her by the shoulder. Dilated, vacant eyes stared up at him as foam bubbled slowly out of her mouth, and she twitched again.

Shit! The berries!

“Lumi!” Jason yelled, “I need help here! She’s still alive! Barely.”

“What? Who?”

He heard Lumiriel start pushing her way through the foliage to reach him.

Without waiting for a response, Jason shucked off his backpack, just letting it crash into the vegetation around him. He grabbed the girl and carefully tilted over onto her side. Then, grabbing her by the back of the neck, Jason tilted her head backwards and pushed his finger into her mouth and to the back of her throat. It was an emergency measure; Jason knew that inducing vomiting that way could potentially injure someone, but it wasn’t like he could call Poison Control and have her taken to hospital. Better injured than dead, and she would be if he didn’t do something, and fast.

The girl gagged. That her autonomous reflexes were still functioning was a good sign. After a few attempts, being careful not to poke the back of her throat too hard, she vomited, heaving up a disgusting slurry of barely chewed leaves and berries. It looked like she’d swallowed them whole or something.

While holding her sideways so she wouldn’t inhale her own vomit, Jason finally noticed her clothes. They were torn up badly and covered with dirt, but she was wearing jeans and a t-shirt much like himself.

She’s from Earth! he realized. She must have been starving, wandering out here for two days. She probably saw the berries and just shoved by the handful into her mouth.

Once the girl stopped vomiting, Jason checked her throat again to make sure it was clear before righting her. By then, Lumiriel had reached him and seemed to have realized what was going on.

“I need her to drink some water so I can make her vomit again,” Jason explained. “Need to clear out her stomach as thoroughly as we can. Can you conjure me some? Any container will do.”

Lumiriel rummaged through her backpack, pulling out a patch of frog skin they hadn’t yet done anything with. Cupping it with one hand, she conjured a ball of water and dropped it. Most of it went all over the place, but some when into the ‘cup’.

Jason snagged a long, thin leaf, from a nearby bush, making sure to grab one from something other than the berry bush. Gesturing to Lumiriel to hold the cup up to the girl’s mouth, he spent a minute slowly spooning water into her mouth a tiny amount at a time. Then, he tilted her over and made her vomit again. Lumiriel made a slight gagging noise of her own, but didn’t say anything.

“Alright, let’s move her to the road. We’ll need to set a camp. I’ve got something else that might help, but I need some space. I’ll carry her; see if you can find a large log or something to prop her head up. Otherwise we’ll have to use the pack.”

Lumiriel actually did manage to find a short, thick log that had split off from a fallen tree not too far from where they were. It took her a few casts, but she used an Earth [Cantrip] to dislodge it from the ground and roll it up and out into the road. Jason set the girl down next to it, propping her up, but kept her body turned to the side slightly, in case she vomited again. She seemed slightly more aware of stimulus now, but her eyes were still glazed over and her skin was cold. He suspected she was going into shock.

“Grab any kindling you can,” Jason directed. “We’ll want a fire shortly to keep her warm. I wish we had blankets. I suppose we can just empty the backpacks and drape those over her. Its better than nothing.”

While Lumiriel assembled a fire pit, Jason rummaged through his supplies. He pulled out one of the Iparea, and after a moment’s hesitation chose one of the mushrooms over the currently-frozen remains of the Frogoid brain. If his first attempt failed, he figured he could use that as a back up, and he had plenty of flowers and mushrooms.

Jason also pulled out the charcoal powder he’d ground up that morning before they’d buried their fire. It didn't actually have a trait, but he'd read somewhere that it helped prevent the stomach from absorbing toxins, so couldn't hurt.

Mashing the flower petals and mushroom stalks between a pair of flat rocks, Jason mixed the paste with some of the charcoal powder. He then asked Lumiriel make another cup of water, and stirred the goop into it with a finger, carefully avoiding spilling the resultant mixture.

He took a deep breath and then [Looked] at the cup she was holding.

Nothing.

Oh, right. The mana part.

Jason hesitated, since his Interface hadn’t ever really explained the next part. But someone’s life was at stake here, so he figured that if making a fool out of herself had worked in Lumiriel’s favor, he could do the same.

He closed his eyes, focused on willing his mana into the cup, and said loudly, “Brew Potion, Infuse!”

With a sudden swirl, the mixture turned from a disgusting-looking dark goop into a pale white, uniform solution that glowed faintly.

He [Looked] again.

[Antitoxin, Least] - Consumable. Counter a single minor poison effect currently afflicting the user. Can fail when applied to medium strength poisons. Automatically fails on higher strength poisons.

Jason gaped. That was far better than I’d expected. He hadn’t been completely sure what ‘Restore’ plus ‘Fortitude’ would result in. He had just been hoping for something that would boost her Fortitude, and half expected to instead end up with something that just cleansed a Fortitude debuff, and that he would have to try ‘Enhance Fortitude’ instead so that she could fight off the effect of the berries on her own.

This though sounded like it would actively cure her instead of just making her more resistant. Jason wasn’t sure what constituted a medium or high strength poison, but usually in RPGs it had to do with the difficulty of resisting, rather than deadliness; In the games he'd played, most poison effects were always deadly, except in the few systems where you simply couldn’t die from it as a status effect. He was willing to bet money that simple berries growing on the side of a road weren’t going to count as anything other than minor. Usually the stronger stuff was somehow very rare or magical in nature.

Lumiriel saw his expression. ‘“What? What’s wrong?” She was still holding the cup.

Jason took the cup from her with a small, if tense, smile. "Nothing at all. The opposite in fact. I may have just saved this girl’s life. Here, help me feed this to her."

They carefully spooned the antitoxin into her mouth, once again taking things slow, giving her only enough at a time to make her reflexively swallow. Once the girl had drank it all, Lumiriel finished lighting the fire while Jason treated the girl for shock. He rolled her over carefully, propping her feet up on the log and turning her head to the side, just in case.

That turned out to be a good idea, because two minutes later, the antitoxin kicked in, and the girl rolled over and threw up a third time. This time though, it was clear something was different. She twitched violently after throwing up, and then a green glow suffused her body for a moment. She heaved, followed by a fit of coughing. Her skin appeared flushed slightly, instead of the paleness of a person in shock.

Lumiriel’s eyes were wide as she stared at Jason. He moved over to help the girl sit up, and leaned her up against the log.

“Easy there. You’ve had a rough time, and you’re probably dehydrated. Take a moment.”

Still disoriented, she mumbled something weakly.

Lumiriel conjured another cup of water on her own initiative and brought it over.

Jason took it from her and held it up to the girl. “Here. Use this to spit. Don’t drink it. You’ll want to clean your mouth out first.” He had to help her steady her shaking hands, but she did as instructed.

Next, Jason gave her another half cup’s worth. “Ok, you can drink this next one. Slowly,” he emphasized. The girl complied, then leaned backwards, exhausted. “Just relax there for a few minutes. You’re safe with us, now.”

After a few more light coughs, murmured something indistinct, and then promptly fell asleep.

The girl awoke a short time later to the smell of Jason applying his [Basic Cooking] to some more kebabs. Lumiriel had found some additional wild onions, and even some fresh peppercorn. After expressing surprise that she’d recognized it, Jason was informed that A; the fresh seeds were called ‘white pepper’, and B; her mother had some growing in her garden.

So Jason had prepared several skewers of kebabs, this time fashioning then into a proper meal. He’d crushed the pepper seeds into fragments, and along with some mashed amarca berries and bits of mushroom he stuffed it all into portions of the frog meat, and skewered it alongside more mushrooms and the onions. For good measure, he’d then wrapped the whole thing with the onion stalks. It would be a pungent meal, but a good one.

“Hey.” He said quietly, seeing the girl stir. “Feeling better?”

She inhaled deeply, opening her eyes and blinking several times. It took her a moment to get her bearings.

“That smells really good” she said sleepily after a moment. Then she asked, “How did I get here?” Confusion was written all over her face, along with a healthy dose of concern.

“Don’t remember?" Jason said, "I’m not surprised. Shock will do that to you.”

“I don’t.. I’m not sure. I was so hungry. Am hungry. I don’t think I’ve eaten properly in days. I-I was.. and then... I don’t know, everything’s kind of foggy. I was somewhere else.” She started to get upset. “I got chased by… something big. Then I found these berries, and I was just so hungry... and now I’m here?"

“That sounds about right,” Jason said softly. “You ate some bad berries. Really toxic ones. You almost died.”

Her eyes widened.

“You’re lucky we came across you,” Lumiriel said. Jason had taken the time to fashion an actual cup out of the scrap of hide we’d been using, and Lumiriel held it out to girl, who gave it an odd look of confusion but quickly drank from it.

“Careful, you’re probably still dehydrated” Jason cautioned her. “You threw up a lot, and you were probably dehydrated to begin with.”

Lumiriel held out a hand over the girl’s cup after she finished. Her hand glowed brightly, refilling it. Jason idly noticed that this time she’d managed her make gesture cast correctly.

The girl gasped, looking down. Her eyes were the size of dinner plates. "Wh-? What did you just do?"

Jason and Lumiriel looked at each other in concern.

She doesn’t know yet? Jason wondered. Did she somehow miss the system message?

He looked back at the girl, thinking rapidly about everything she’s said far.

"Uh, I’ll explain that later," he hedged. "I’m Jason." He gave a small wave.

Lumiriel stuck out her hand. "And I’m Lumi." Jason noticed she’d chosen to give the shortened version of her name that he’d used in haste earlier.

"Uh, Janet" she replied, shaking the offered hand. Then she looked around. "So um, where are we? I don’t remember how I ended up here. One minute I was with my friends, another I was here in the woods. I must’ve passed out in between."

Jason shifted uncomfortably, as Lumiriel started to open her mouth. He cut her off. “You should probably eat first before we explain. You… probably won’t like the answer.”

He held up a hand to forestall any protest or concern. “You need to eat proper food, badly, to replace all the energy you’ve lost. Then we can talk about our situation. I assure you, we had nothing to do with it. We’re victims just like you.”

Jason pulled a skewer off the fire. They smelled fantastic. He offered it to Janet, who looked like she really wanted to ask questions first, but her hunger seemed to get the better of her. She complained when he made her eat carefully and slowly, but she listened anyway, after Jason explained that if she ate or drank too much or too fast after malnourishment, she’d end up with terrible, painful cramps, and possibly bring everything back up.

The three ate in relative silence. They only had the one cup to pass water around, but they managed. Janet kept trying to sneak furtive glances at Lumiriel every time she cast her spell. Not that it wasn’t obvious with just the three of them present.

One benefit of roughing it the way they were was the total lack of dishes to clean up. The skewers could just be snapped and added to the fire, and the ‘cup’ could just be turned inside out and rinsed. So it wasn’t very long before they’d finished eating and put away their supplies. Lumiriel had finished setting up the rest of the camp, such as it was, while Jason had cooked, so there wasn’t much else they needed to do. It was still a bit early to turn in though, which meant it was a perfectly good time to give Janet the rundown on what Jason and Lumiriel thought had happened to everyone, and where they planned to go from here.

Janet took it surprisingly well.