Brad

"Watch where you're stepping, you gnelfy bumblefoot!" a gruff voiced goat bodied centaur-thing snarled at Dibbs. The goat-centaur appeared to be male. His head barely came up to Dibbs' elbow, and he wore a puffy undyed gray shirt with a brown canvas type cloth vest full of pockets over it.

"[Bane]," was Dibbs reply.

The goatish centaur squawked and threw something out of his vest. Then he clattered off, bounding almost deer like into the crowd.

Dibbs caught the something, which turned out to be a pouch with the drawstrings cut.

"What was that?" Brad asked, flexing a wing to point at the fleeing creature's wake.

Dibbs didn't even look as he responded, continuing down the cobbled street while he tucked the pouch into his vest. "Gidataur. They have curious fingers. The ones that can turn that curiosity into more intellectual pursuits have a gift for illusion magic."

Dibbs wore trousers, walking boots, a more fitted puffy shirt with a vest that looked to be made from silk under a knee length, full skirted great coat. Brad rode on a perch made from a pair of crossed 3 cm diameter dowels attached to a leather pad behind the mage's left shoulder.

"So he did just pick your pocket?" Brad asked. "You seem pretty nonchalant about the whole affair."

"Yes, and if you're the sort to get upset about a creature following its instincts, well, it's your loss if you mind it. That's why I made sure our equipment has been enchanted against theft. Precautions over petulance, as my mother used to say." Dibbs cupped his left hand and a glow appeared, which quickly formed into an arrowhead pointing about 15° to the right of their current path.

"Why do you even carry a purse?" Brad asked.

Dibbs sounded amused as he answered. "You mean because of my storage? It takes mana to open that, which is flashy, and not everyone loves mages. Besides, I'd rather lose a purse than announce to every cut throat around what a juicy mark I might be."

"That's fair," Brad conceded. "So, where are we? The city looks and smells better than I expect from a medieval town, but I'm not seeing any modern conveniences, either."

"We're in the port city of Dernahan on the north eastern coast of Felor. That's the closest portal the Asylum has to our destination, which is on the south western side of Malta. A quick trip north across the Green Sea should see us to Port Sala, and from there we'll take the Rimward Trading Road to the city of Lotrot."

Recalling the world map Brad had seen during his rummaging through the wizards' notes, he thought that put them in the southwest corner of the map, and the world if the Mana Wastes were real. "From the way Feltz goes on, I would have thought the Arcane Asylum was located in the center of the known world."

Dibbs side stepped a pair of arguing gnomes and took the second street branching to the right of the one they were on. "It's a 'do and don't'. The Asylum is located in an extra-dimensional space and has portals to every continent and most major centers on the continents. Dernahan is a major stop on the Rimward trading routes and has been since the eighth age. Southern Malta isn't politically unified enough to warrant a portal when Dernahan's here. Our other choices would have been about center in the Othielian Alliance in Malta's Shining Sea or in the Dwarven Cragheights of Northern Malta. As neither Feltz nor I are teleportation specialists, Dernahan's our fastest option."

"And speed is of the essence, is it?" Brad asked. He had an uneasy feeling about this trip. On one hand, he wanted to be there now just to confirm that this group of Aware Travelers had nothing to do with his friends. On the the other hand, given his experiences with the mages of the Arcane Asylum he wasn't sure he wanted to inflict them on these poor blokes, *especially* if they turned out to be his friends.

"Yes, it is," Dibbs said with a grim solemnity. "Lay people are highly superstitious and prone to panic. The approaching Unraveling just adds to that readiness to fear the unknown and seek to blame it for any bad things happening in the area. We want to make sure we get there well before any mobs start forming."

Brad shut it while he digested that. During the silence, Dibbs checked their direction two more times. They were approaching a specific pier along the merchants' wharf when Brad asked, "What do you plan to do with these Travelers when you find them?"

Dibbs said, "Ask questions. If they are benign, then we will trade our assistance in acclimating for their knowledge. If they are hostile, we will contain them. While we have a number of strategies to fall back upon should they be needed, we don't have sufficient information to formulate any solid plans. You lot are prone to presenting unique circumstances."

While not satisfying, it was a far more peaceful answer than Brad had dreaded. "Well, as you're bringing me along, how likely am I to get a say in how you treat with this group?"

"The better your arguments, the more likely we are to heed them." Dibbs turned onto the pier he had been aiming for and waved to Feltz, who stood beside the docking bridge of a wooden, round bellied, three masted sailing ship. Brad had no real experience with seafaring matters. The only thing he could think to call it was a galleon.

As soon as they were within a few meters of the older mage, Feltz hollered out, "It took you long enough!"

"I packed everything," Dibbs said with a studied nonchalance in his tone.

Feltz blew out a laugh. "Planning on relocating, are you?"

Dibbs shrugged. "I'm not political enough for the Asylum."

Feltz stopped smirking. "You're serious?"

"Yes. Don't worry. I'm not cutting ties or anything drastic like that. I just think it's time for me to stretch my legs again. Besides, this alleviates most of the worries of Vorbolinsh getting greedy enough to attempt to seize Brad."

"You really are serious," Feltz said, a fierce scowl covering his features. He sniffed, turned, and led the way on to the ship.

*~*~*

They departed with the evening tide. The ship, named the Merry Rover, turned out to be a carrack, 40 meters long and 8 or 9 meters at the beam. From what Brad overheard from the sailors, they had enough crew members for three watches, 47 sailors in addition to the officers, which was a luxury on most merchant ships. The captain had agreed to help his first mate train the core of a crew to take with him when he picked up the ship their merchant House had promised him in Port Sala.

The trip from Dernahan to Port Sala took two weeks. Brad got a lot more reading in, finding that picking up the various languages of Rhofhir, both modern and ancient, came suspiciously easily to him. His memory also seemed much clearer, more precise, than he had been used to, which led him to wonder if Terry Pratchett had been on to something with all of his jokes about the glandular issues of the embodied.

His very existence confounded Brad. He had emotions. If anything, he felt those emotions with greater clarity than he could recall. At the same time, they were never as overwhelming. Perhaps it was a product of having a crystalline memory matrix as opposed to the more squishy construct of a brain? Brad knew the provocation of each emotion he felt whereas before being implanted in a golem he had felt deeply but without understanding why he felt as he did. Perhaps, just maybe, emotions were more than chemical reactions, more than hormonal responses to stimuli?

To avoid lingering on such unproductive thinking, Brad dove into the treaties on the workings of the Grand Tapestry and the nature of Skills, Aspects, and Designs. Dibbs encouraged his reading, going so far as to provide Brad with a storage amulet. To use it, Brad just had to tap a short melody on the runes and then he had access to an extra-dimensional pocket with enough room for ten scroll boxes. One of those boxes contained Brad's current notes.

Brad couldn't stand being closed in with Feltz. The man's refusal to respect Brad's sapience irritated him to no end. He even discovered that his golem form had retractable fangs thanks to how they flexed when Feltz was at his most orneriest. During the day, Brad took advantage of the climbing capability of his serpentine form and went up into the rigging of one of the masts, finding that to be one of the better ways of staying out of everyone's way and far enough from the sea spray not to worry about damaging the scroll boxes.

His gaze kept being drawn to the water and the faint green cast to the waves. The sight soothed him, and he found that his [Meditation] skill leveled quickly, soon transitioning to [Mindfulness] as he watched the play of light and shadow into the ever changing sea. The first time he caught sight of the coppery furred seals following the ship, he nearly dropped the scroll box he had been reading.

The sailors didn't seem to mind. In fact, they took the sight as a good omen and regularly tossed dried meats and fruits to the seals. Brad was sure these seals were not like Earth's seals because they seemed to prefer the dried fruits to the meats.

Two days out of Port Sala the seals were nowhere to be seen. The sailors were uneasy until the fellow in the crow's nest spotted land near noon, and then turned cheerful. They followed the coast west and north until they reached their destination.

Brad was again up in the masts during the docking. A group of seven anthropomorphic lizard men wearing a green tabard over leather armor waited on the pier. Their scales were a matte gray akin to the color of storm clouds. The one in the front had a sword belted to his side, as did three more of his companions. The remaining three had bronze tipped spears carried in their left hands.

The captain and first mate greeted the waiting lizard men and, after verifying their badges, invited the customs officer and his squad on board.

They waited for the customs officials to inspect the cargo before receiving permission to disembark, at which point Brad came down from the main mast. Dibbs had once again donned the shoulder perch, and he turned his back to the mast to make it easier for Brad to climb on.

The customs officer blinked and frowned as he watched Brad settle onto the perch. "What in the Wastes kind of creature is that?"

"Golem," Feltz said. "My friend's personal property and not for sale. It has monstrous sapience and is bound, so it's not your concern."

The customs officer sent a narrowed eyed glare in Feltz's direction. "I'll thank you not to pretend you know my concerns." Then he turned to Dibbs. "Can you prove it?"

Brad asked Dibbs, not bothering to lower his voice, "What's with the talking dinosaur?"

Dibbs said, "Please don't try to help, Brad."

"Why would I want to help?" Even as he said it, Brad let the humor in his voice show he meant his words to be taken in jest.

The customs officer nodded. "I happen to be an arassas, not whatever a dinosaur might be. The gray dye on our scales is reserved for guardsmen. We have more experience with ignorant visitors, so we're not as easy to provoke as many of the citizens."

The calm dignity with which the customs officer spoke shamed Brad. He bowed on his perch and said, "I apologize for the rudeness on my part. My frustrations are not your doing and it was poorly done of me to include you in my spite."

"Apology accepted. You three are free to be about your business." The customs officer turned to the captain and resumed the conversation Brad's arrival had interrupted.

*~*~*

Lena

If Lena had a body, she would be pounding her head against a wall at this point.

Sha'lanadi and Sha'dakai had quickly accepted the decision handed down during the first trial held in the Studio of Capricious Dreams, but weeks later Sha'vord still refused to release his ownership of the harpies. As a consequence, he and the harpies remained in their cells.

Candy and Lena, in the mean time, had been poking the Tapestry system for ways to activate a Zone Core in a different dungeon. They hadn't gotten very far. It did not help that Candy and Sha'lanadi kept going off on tangents about mana flows and controls and the like. Lena would likely have been more upset about the distractions if she hadn't gotten several more techniques, including one called [Storage] that acted like an expandable bag of holding.

After discussing it, they had unanimously agreed to share the trial with the corporals, using that as an opportunity to get further insights into their psyches. Poor Baline had looked confused, not just at their trial methodologies but also the fact that they were willing to provide the corporals with a seat in gallery, so to speak.

Lena had some troubles with the replay of the trial. The Zone Cores had no recording capabilities and Lena's perspective as a non-corporeal entity merged with the dungeon meant that she didn't have the same kind of fixed point of view that she had possessed as a corporeal being. On the bright side, her memory had improved to near perfect recall. The words came through right, even if the image she projected constantly shifted focus, flickered, and danced between angles.

Tremshur and Ignemrot had quickly closed their eyes, focusing on the audio replay. Custer had handled the visual perspective shifts pretty well, but Baline and Fallan had gotten queasy, their scales rippling for several minutes after they were forced to look away.

Tremshur took the lead in asking them about their decision making process, with Custer and Ignemrot participating. When Baline and Fallan were composed enough to join in, they both remained silent and observed.

At the end of the seven day trial period, the Studio crew knew that Baline was out, Tremshur was in, and they were divided about everyone else. Candy was the only one to vote out Custer, so she was asked to tie break between Ignemrot and Fallan. She made a coin and flipped it, and Fallan was their second elimination.

Muglibaum selected Ignemrot to be their liaison with the Lotrot military. The first thing he was tasked with was arranging for a squad from each of the three talons to train in the military floor.

Reviewing the level's core, Lena discovered that the soldiers were soaking up mana. She brought that to Ignemrot's attention.

He smiled and nodded. "Dungeon training produces amazing growth in the short term. That's why we're cycling the squads through. They'll spend time training out of the dungeon to get the most out of their gains and really take ownership of the growth. It would be even better if we had monsters to train them against. Goblinoids would be our preference seeing as they're the most likely of the mon-saps to cause trouble."

Lena frowned. "That's an ethical quandary I'm glad I don't have to face at the moment. I don't have the patterns to create them."

Ignemrot said, "That won't be a problem for long. Having the patterns, I mean. Our patrols have picked up signs of a war band in the area, and it is much safer to bring the bodies to a dungeon for disposal than to leave them be. Fire's a low second choice. Their bodies release toxic fumes when they're burned, but left where they fall or, worse, buried, and goblin trees spring up."

"Quah?" Lena asked, tilting her head to the side.

"They're plant monsters," Ignemrot explained. "War bands find a place they like, slaughter indiscriminately to fill the soil with blood, and when there's nothing left to slaughter, turn on each other to release their parent tree's seeds."

"Oh. Okay," Lena said, nodding and letting her toon fade out.

Ouliel, at least, had been an uncomplicated win as far as Lena was concerned.

When she came to the noct after receiving his contract, there had been a cold fury shaking his body, but he had not spoken. Lena, with some coaching from Rob and Jason, negotiated a new contract as a part of their crew for both him and Wisp. She even raised [Bargain] to [Negotiate] during the back and forth. As the two helped come up with protections in the contract, Ouliel's fury died, replaced with hope and enthusiasm.

He and Wisp took the negotiated contract and found a place on Aaron's level to call their home. The Tapestry would not allow Lena to make either of them Territory Managers, and Aaron was the only one with a level that looked moderately natural and hospitable to the pair.

Buttercup had taken to Wisp almost as well as she had taken to Aaron, though she watched Ouliel with a fixated fascination. The noct, for his part, delighted in teasing the dire cat, secure in the non-aggression clause in his contract with the Studio.

He and Aaron worked on making a part of the level into a temperate rain forest as much as they could with the patterns at hand. It was as much for Ouliel's comfort as for the harpies, whenever they figured out how to get them away from Sha'vord.