Hello again! Today I may have messed up.

I woke up, had a good stretch, scratched julius behind his floppy ears, and ignited a new critter.

I named this new find the Ugly-jumper. Ugly-jumpers are ugly, and they jump.

They are squat, four limbed, slimy skinned, warty critters. They make a sound somewhere between a whistle and a burp. They come up to about knee high but they are very fat and heavy. Their front legs are small, barely able to hold up their large heads with the bulging eyeballs and gaping toothless mouth. But their back legs are very long and strong.

They keep these long legs tucked up and under them and use them to propel their body through the air at surprising speeds. Its kind of like a super jump. One of these things came jumping at me, a sharp stick held in its forelimbs and angled to puncture my stuff I need. Like my guts and things. Another jumped Julius with mouth agape and swallowed him whole.

Neither of them had long to regret that. They don't taste good, but do make a satisfying popping sound when they explode.

I followed the tracks of the ugly-jumpers to find more of them to pop. Their trail led me into a marsh. Unlike the other marsh I had been in this one had less water and mud. Rivers slithered through tall grass hummocks. The occasional sandbar and pool of water rested in the shade of large bush-like trees. Ugly-jumpers, longleg birds, and some fuzzy water critters that seemed very intent on making a wall of sticks were the majority of the critters. And bugs of course. Nothing a fire coat couldnt handle

Julius hopped from the top of one grass hummock to another, blasting any ugly-jumpers or bugs that got near him. I tried to imitate him but kept slipping an falling into the mucky valleys between the hummocks.

After blazing a trail for a long while we must have been nearing ugly-jumper HQ because their numbers started to really ramp up. After incinerating a dozen rather coordinated ugly-jumpers I heard screaming.

Picking up the pace me and Julius found an odd village. Dozens of shallow pools containing slimy green-black orbs the size of my hand lay between low but wide mud huts. Ugly-jumpers crawled and jumped about moving from hut to pool and in the center of the collection of water and mud was a large group surrounding the source of the screams.

A tall but skinny person, with long shiny gold hair and big teary blue eyes was surrounded by ugly-jumpers. He was waving about something very shiny and making a lot of noise. The ugly-jumpers seemed wary of the thing he was waving about but it was clearly only a matter of time until they swarmed him.

So I burned them, I burned them all.

Did I mention they explode when you burn then? Its really splooshy. The Screaming Man got a mouthful and started to retch and vomit. I left him to get himself in order and set about burning the huts and boiling the pools.

When I finished I picked up Julius from where he was, idly nibbling on some grass while shooting the occasional fireball at the fleeing ugly-jumpers. I think he was enjoying watching his enemies flee before him in terror.

Cuddling the fluffy Julius I walked over to the Screaming Man. He was still retching but when he heard me approach he straighten his back and hold his shiny out towards me

"Halt, brigand! You stand before Prance Francis Rex Armitage! State your name and purpose!" He was shouting again.

He shouts a lot. I don't know what a prance is, but if they are all as weak and loud as this one then I think its surprising they haven't all died out by now.

I decided to try and be polite and start things off on the right foot so I reached out and grabbed the shiny he was offering me. It was sharp and cut into my hand and fingers. This is a terrible greeting.

I instinctively started to send tingles to my hand to heal the damage. The shiny started to do something weird. It glowed and changed colors before it turned soft and dripped out of my grip onto the ground where it pooled and sizzled.

The Loud Prance got thankfully quiet and with a small whimper his eyes rolled up and he collapsed. I didn't know eyes could rolled back. I tried practicing that for a while but I don't know how well I did since I can't see my own eyes.

Leaving the prance to rest I checked out the nearby area. The ugly-jumpers had a weird place. All kinds of berries and edible plants were gathered in one of the bigger mud huts I hadn't managed to burn yet. Inside there was a new food I hadn't seen before. It was a long red plant pod. It had a crunchy dull red shell that tasted good by itself, but inside were the true prize. one pod was maybe the size of my arm, and inside were these juicy pulpy sweet orbs.

The sun was going down anyway so I decided to eat these for dinner and rest here for the night. I'll try talking to the prance tomorrow. So far I am not impressed though, why was I so nervous about meeting such loud and weak things?

Goodnight.