When they arrived at the beach, Kaldalis felt like he was seeing it for the first time. It was almost as if every previous time he’d been out here, he hadn’t really seen it. Or, at least, not like now.

He hadn’t had a good view of it when he was fishing because he’d come down at twilight, and the last time he’d been out here it was during the aftermath of the shipwreck, the place had been swarming with adventurers.

In the early light, with the rising sun out over the ocean and only a few scattered adventurers poking around on the sand, it was beautiful.

The morning sun made the sand a rich white color, and everything else on the beach stood out stark against it. The tide was all the way out, and there was a line of kelp running down the beach halfway between the upper edge of the sand and the water line - marking the line of Arma Tide near the top of the floating dock. There were a few shells and bits of driftwood standing out as dark shadows against the white backdrop, even as adventurers picked their way across the sand to collect them.

The water was a light blue color, looking as inviting as the ocean ever could be, and beyond it, only a few wisps of cloud separated it from the blue of the sky above the horizon line.

Kaldalis felt the urge to ignore his obligations and strip down to dive into the waves. It had been a long time since he saw a beach with actual sand. Everything around Seattle was rock.

Fortunately, Kaldalis had the discipline to shake off the siren song of a beachside vacation and get to work. He and Haldir started with the tasks nearest at hand in taking care of the needs for camp reconstruction.

Kaldalis ended up volunteering to take care of the fishing while Haldir gathered driftwood. It was a great sacrifice on his part, truly, and the other Vathon seemed to be completely oblivious. Maybe Haldir wasn’t a fan of fishing mini games. Kaldalis knew he needed twenty of the oilfish to have five for everyone, and he’d gotten three of them last night, so it wouldn’t take too long to fish up what he needed.

Since it was low tide, the fishing was slower than it had been the previous night, but either because of the time of day, the tide, or some random happenstance of the quest, he was catching more of the oilfish than anything else, and he got the seventeen he needed - plus six more pale perch - in a little over forty minutes. He even got to help Haldir gather the last of the driftwood they needed.

“I feel like I’m leeching off of your effort here,” Kaldalis said, “I’ve only picked up four pieces of wood out of forty, and we’re done.”

“Yeah, but how many fish did I help you with?” Haldir asked in a slightly haughty tone. “Don’t worry about it, I’m sure we all feel like we’re leeching off of you.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how you can stand fishing, anyway. It seems like such a drag.”

Kaldalis furrowed his brow at Haldir. He was so tempted to just ask. The other Vathon had to be an NPC, right? Haldir had updated the quest for the censer yesterday. Players couldn’t do that, right? But now he was talking about game mechanics. He had a similar opinion about fishing as many of the other players he’d spoken to. What was going on? He didn’t know what to believe.

Then again, perhaps he was looking at this the wrong way. Maybe some of the people he’d thought were PCs only seemed that way to him because they’d spoken about game mechanics. Maybe Haldir’s behavior was normal, and they were all NPCs.

But Kaldalis didn’t want to find out what happened when you upset the rules of the game. He was supposed to keep from asking, so he kept from asking.

But it was really tempting.

“Now for the real work of the day,” Haldir said, heading northeast up the beach. “Keep an eye out for coral fragments; some of them might be this far up the beach. But the shellfish will be up at the tide pools.”

“Do me a favor and keep your eyes open, too. We might see Sivima’s palette up here somewhere, too.”

They picked their way up the beach. On the way they found one or two pieces of pink-white coral poking out of the sand.

Kaldalis wondered if the other adventurers gathering materials on the beach noticed what they were grabbing, as Haldir had mentioned earlier.

He wasn’t in the habit of trying to get attention for everything he was doing, so any attempt to draw attention to himself would be clumsy at best. He just did what he would have done without Haldir’s explanation, and hoped that was enough.

The beach gradually grew rockier, a few outcroppings of stone sticking out of the sand here and there. Then a few more. And then the sand wasn’t sand at all, but very fine gravel. And then the gravel was small stones, worn smooth by the lapping of the waves. Then the rocky outcroppings grew larger. Soon Haldir and Kaldalis were picking their way over larger rocks instead of walking around them, carefully hopping over the smaller tide pools to find the larger ones, where they would find what they were after.

There were a few other adventurers out here, using the rocky terrain to find better high ground out among the waves to fish for the oilfish everyone needed to gather. With that task completed, though, Kaldalis followed Haldir’s lead in looking for what else they needed for the censer, as much as he wanted to throw in a line to relax.

The coral fragments were easier to find among the rocks, since they weren’t half-buried by the sand, and they were able to find two or three at a time in the places where the tides had washed things back into crevices.

Once the coral was done, Haldir got out his sword and shield and Kaldalis got out his spear, and the real hunting began. The clawed rock shrimp were no challenge in a fight. Just like the other mobs Kaldalis had hunted for quest materials, only a couple hits took them out, and their attacks did minuscule damage to him. The problem was that the rock shrimp were almost indistinguishable from medium-sized boulders. He and Haldir split up and went around poking at the rocky outcroppings around the tide pools with their weapons.

“This’ll make a great story later,” Kaldalis said, prodding at a rounded boulder he suspected was a clawed rock shrimp based on the rounded-off shape.

“Why’s that?” Haldir asked, clambering up a steep bit of the stone to find the next boulder to check.

“Oh, you know.” Kaldalis frowned as the boulder turned out to be just a boulder. He gave it a halfhearted kick as he moved on. “I think it’s more about the way I’d tell it. Though I would take a lot of artistic license with the details.”

“Yeah?” Haldir asked, absently poking a boulder. It started to shift, and Haldir almost jumped out of his skin. He hammered his sword down on the top of the hard shell three times almost before Kaldalis registered that it was a clawed rock shrimp. The thing was dead before it could even bring its claws to bear. Haldir let out a slight chuckle at his own momentary panic. “Like what kind of details would you change?”

“Well,” Kaldalis tried to keep a straight face. “Something about everyone having matching towels, obviously.”

Haldir turned and squinted at Kaldalis for a long moment.

Kaldalis kept his face stone-serious as he made his way to the next rock to check. Haldir didn’t say anything as Kaldalis poked the rock gently, and then jammed his spear into it as soon as he saw the little insect like feet lift it off of the rocky outcropping it rested on.

When Haldir didn’t say anything else, Kaldalis grimaced. He was hoping Haldir would say something about there being a dock to look underneath. Or a genuine question about why Kaldalis would suggest such a weird detail.

Sure, Haldir was confused, and that was a step in the right direction. But was it because he was an NPC who didn’t know what Kaldalis was referencing, and NPCs seemed to just ignore it when PCs made pop culture references? Or was it because Haldir was a PC who wanted to keep his identity under his hat?

He didn’t have an answer.

At some point, he was just going to have to bite the bullet and ask him directly.

Rules be damned.

Once they had a dozen clawed rock shrimp shells, Haldir called Kaldalis over and they started working on the shellfish. Unlike the rock shrimp, what they were hunting for was underwater, and Kaldalis found himself looking forward to the search.

He’d forgotten how smoothly he could navigate the waters. He didn’t even realize he hadn’t gone swimming since the shipwreck. It felt weird at first to dive in with his armor on and weapon in hand, but following Haldir’s lead into the water he found himself excited for it all over again.

Haldir beckoned Kaldalis out, and they swam way out from the shore. Kaldalis realized quickly that it was to avoid getting snagged or tangled in any fishing lines other adventures had out in the water. Once they were out in open water, Haldir briefly stopped at the surface to take a deep breath before diving down to the bed. Kaldalis followed suit.

The shellfish they were looking for were something like a cross between a barnacle and a sea anemone. It had high defense, and so Kaldalis and Haldir worked together to wear them down. Its attacks applied the poison debuff, but the total damage output was relatively low, as long as it was coming down on Kaldalis instead of Haldir. Killing them told him that they were called a sea poppy, and apparently them being a part of this quest meant that no research notes were forthcoming.

Frustratingly, he capped out his spear skill while fighting them. A quick check of his character page showed that he learned the Jump ability by doing so. Activating it did nothing, and Kaldalis surmised that it probably wasn’t going to have any effect while he was underwater.

He was aware of the buff duration ticking away uselessly for about a minute before it ended, untested. Kaldalis had a little while before he could use it again, so he was in no hurry to return to the surface to test, but he kept in mind that once he had the chance, he should investigate.

Kaldalis’s breath bar was at about halfway when Haldir gestured up towards the surface. They’d only fought five or six of the sea poppy, but every one of them had dropped a Poppy Cement Gland and two cirri for Kaldalis. Perhaps that was enough.

“That’s all we need for the censer,” Haldir confirmed when they both surfaced and caught their breath. “Enough for two or three of them, whenever we get the cores.”

As Haldir said that, the quest for the censer updated, directing him to rendezvous with the rest of his group to get all the materials together.

“Just one more thing before we head back,” Kaldalis said.

“Sivima’s palette quest,” Haldir said with a nod. “Let’s get it done, then, and we can get our stuff together so we can move to the preparation phase.”