Kaldalis usually found fishing relaxing, but his inner monologue was a complication. Despite how much the sound of the ocean waves soothed him, he couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d failed Dalgaard. He had been the one making the mistakes, but Dalgaard had been the one paying the price.

Going over it again and again in his mind he just kept finding new choices he could have taken.

Some of them were extremely obvious and stupid. Of course he could have attacked Ara as soon as he saw her. But he had no reason to distrust her on sight to the point of hostility. There had also been no explicit reason for him to pick his way around the lake as he fished, putting Dalgaard out of sight when the cloud had blocked out the moon. But Onirioago’s quest had been adamant that no one see the fish, incentivising him to seek some privacy.

There were some doubts that actually haunted him.

Ara’s aggressive affections should have kept him from sitting so close to her that she could hurl herself on top of him like that.

If she hadn’t gotten the drop on him like that, he might have had time during her transformation to run to Dalgaard and just pick them up and carry them off the scene.

If he had used Flicker when she had pinned him for that first kiss, he wouldn’t have been paralyzed for her to rip open Dalgaard. It hadn’t occurred to him then, and he told himself now that it was because it had happened too fast... but had it?

Once he got his quest fish - along with a dozen more pale perch - Kaldalis decided he needed something to change, just to support his mental health.

Luckily, he had something for that.

Ein made for a marvelous distraction while he fished. It was much harder to wallow in self-recrimination when he was trying to keep track of the location of a small and extremely energetic dog. The little corgi seemed physically incapable of sitting still, demanding Kaldalis’s constant concern.

First he ran from one end of Foturn’s floating dock to the other. Repeatedly. Barking at every crashing wave.

And then, once the tide dropped enough for the pup to get to the beach, he went really wild, sprinting up and down the sand as fast as his little doggy legs could go. There seemed to be a radius from Kaldalis he was unable to or unwilling to exceed, but within that radius all bets were off, especially when any seabird dared to fly within yapping distance. He periodically sprinted back up the dock just far enough to almost collide with Kaldalis’s legs before turning and sprinting off again, claws clicking and scraping on the wooden dock.

There appeared to be no pattern. No method to the puppy madness.

At the very least, the dog seemed unwilling to brave the water. Which was good. If he started swimming around, there was a risk of him getting tangled in Kaldalis’s fishing line.

In the late morning, after a few more hours of fishing, he decided to take a break. Kaldalis returned Ein to the pet menu, just in time to have his guilt come crashing back down.

What if he’d had Ein summoned while he was fishing at the lake? Perhaps the dog could have been an early warning system. Or perhaps the puppy’s presence might have kept Dalgaard awake, and they wouldn’t have been asleep or disoriented from sleep when Ara arrived.

Despite not wanting to let his guilt get in the way of Dalgaard’s emotional recovery, he found himself seeking them out. He just needed to know they were okay.

Hell, he just needed to apologize now that they’d had enough time for the shell-shock to wear off. It would do wonders for his own mental health.

But they weren’t at their tent.

It wasn’t surprising, since he hadn’t expected the kid to just sit around in a daze all day, but he wasn’t sure where to look next. All he could really do was check the normal crowded adventurer places and ask around. They weren’t in the mess tent, but Aurigeant was. Kaldalis knew the fellow fisher would know who he was talking about, since Dalgaard had said they had run in the same dungeon group with Myrin.

“I haven’t seen them today,” the finnian said, once Kaldalis had described Dalgaard in enough detail to make the connection. In traditional finnian fashion, though, Aurigeant declined to elaborate.

Kaldalis wanted to make small talk about fishing, but Aurigeant’s answer made it clear that any talk would be just that - small. And so he left him to his own devices.

The next place to check was the crafting stations. In the absence of quests, the area was a flurry of activity. A lot of people were working on the daily quests, but there were others just grinding skill or spamming charm crafts to try and get good attribute rolls.

There was a familiar face he could trust, though. Garyung, the sword-and-board bhogad, was basically a fixture in the crafting area now, helping provide materials and using his alpha player knowledge to give advice.

“Dalgaard?” Garyung said, scratching his chin for a moment. “The enby kid?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“I met them,” Garyung said with a broad smile. “Helped them get the gust daggers they wanted. Nice kid. Funny. Not surprised you’re looking for them. You two would get on like peas in a pod, right?”

Kaldalis tried to suppress a grimace as he nodded. “Have you seen them today?”

“Not today,” Garyung said after a moment of thought, “but if I do, I’ll tell them you’re looking.”

“Thanks.” Kaldalis sighed, unsure of what to do. “Well, I’m gonna catch lunch now, and probably do more fishing later.”

“If I see them, that’s where I’ll send them first,” Garyung said with a heavy pat on the back. “Don’t worry.”

Despite Garyung’s directive, he worried anyway.

Had Dalgaard gone back out into the jungle? Had they done something extreme and been pulled from the game by Monsoon? Had they just been teleported to a different part of the world? Did they get sent to some nebulous GM Jail for safekeeping?

Most likely, he was jumping to conclusions, and they were somewhere else in the camp that he hadn’t checked. Maybe they had put together a dungeon group to grind experience.

Regardless, he didn’t exactly have any option left but to go about his day.

He turned in his fishing quest to the cooks in the mess hall, and got himself a nice fish filet with roast tubers for lunch. It was a hearty meal, and after filling his belly, he decided it would be wise to return to his tent for a brief nap.

Kaldalis struggled to actually sleep - his mind still flooded by guilt - but he was able to force himself to lay still for a few hours, drifting in and out of daydreams. He hoped that might count towards avoiding the fatigue debuff. If Onirioago was delaying whatever was going to happen next for this long, she might start it in the evening, demanding another all-nighter from him.

It was mid afternoon when he decided he couldn’t lay around any longer. If it counted, the three hours now with the five hours he’d actually slept would cover him for eight total. If it didn’t, he wasn’t doing himself any favors by wasting the day away.

He tried not to be aggravated when he saw that nothing in town had changed. No new quests. No changes to the construction. The quest for the syncoresi major caught his eye again, but no roar came from the jungle. No charging throngs of bipedal monsters.

Nothing.

In the absence of anything else to do, he went to the dock to get back to fishing. He was almost at 500 pale perch (a full five percent of the way there!) and that felt like the only thing he could really make progress on at the moment.

After talking to Garyung, he almost expected to see Dalgaard out there waiting for him, but no such luck. Aurigeant was out there, though, and the pair fished in companionable silence.

After an hour or two, Aurigeant excused himself to handle other business, and Kaldalis took the solitude as an opportunity to bring Ein out again, letting the dog run around while he kept reeling in pale perch.

In the absence of other quest fish, his pickled roe netted him about twenty pale perch an hour. He noticed that fishing was becoming marginally easier, and attributed that to some skill breakpoint. Getting to 50 skill must have given him some hidden passive perk that caused him to drain fish stamina faster.

Either that, or it wasn’t hidden, but it was tucked into a menu he’d never seen. He could dig around for it, but time spent navigating menus was time not spent fishing. Kaldalis would deal with it later in the evening if he struggled to fall asleep.

The time flew by. Eventually, the rambunctious corgi seemed to find the end of his stamina, and instead of sprinting around, he settled himself at Kaldalis’s side, sitting down staring at the ocean with him while his line was in the water, and yapping wildly at the water whenever he was engaged in the fishing minigame.

Kaldalis was glad he had let the dog run out his energy. This was an adorable interaction between the pet and the fishing minigame, and if this was going to be a regular occurrence, it would be good motivation for letting the dog get some fresh air.

Eventually Ein fell silent even during the fishing minigame, and instead laid down on the dock and dozed off. His little paws twitched in his sleep, and Kaldalis decided to return him to the pet menu before he accidentally rolled off the side of the dock.

When he’d come out here the second time, Kaldalis had set a mental goal number of pale perch to catch, and had passed it.

And then he passed his second goal.

He just resolved to just keep on fishing. The sun was down when he was around five hundred and eighty pale perch, but he figured that six hundred was an enormous amount of progress.

A little less than an hour after sunset, he hit six hundred even, and decided he should call it a night. Catching almost a hundred and fifty pale perch in one day was pretty amazing.

“Two more months of this,” Kaldalis muttered as he put away his fishing rod, replacing it immediately with his spear, “and I’ll be done.”

He made his way back into the encampment for now. There was very little light as the larger moon - Kaskuh - had not risen yet, and he was reduced to his darkvision globe. Despite his limited vision range, it seemed obvious that nothing had changed.

Had Onirioago done nothing all day? He supposed this meant that he would have to confront her about it.

Though that would have to wait until morning. Even though he’d skipped dinner, he wasn’t hungry enough to risk the fatigue debuff by staying up late again. Or, at least, that was the story he came up with to tell Balrim and Myrin later. In reality, he knew it was because he’d rather do literally anything else besides confront Onirioago.

“...once you’re out in the jungle…”

It was just a snippet in the darkness.

Only a few words.

But he recognized the voice.

Of course it was her. He’d had a thought about being able to avoid her, and so naturally she was somewhere nearby, right outside of his darkvision globe. She was putting on her honeyed sexy voice like she had with him when sending him out for the deacon tetra.

He didn’t see her yet - he didn’t even know if she was coming this way - but instinct took over. Kaldalis dove between two tents and ducked down, kneeling low to the ground in the shadows there.

It was probably the most cowardly thing he could think of. He was eagerly throwing himself to his hands and knees in the dirt to avoid a conversation.

But it was Onirioago. He’d face his fear of her in the morning.

Right?

She entered his darkvision globe a moment later, leading a group of about a dozen people. From his position on the ground he didn’t recognize anyone else, but it looked like she’d assembled a full raid group. She was giving instructions as she passed him, and nobody seemed to notice him hiding in the shadows.

The instructions were very familiar.

She was describing the deacon tetra.

As the group left his darkvision globe, he scrambled to his feet as quietly as he could. If she was telling them about the deacon tetra, they were probably about to run off into the jungle. Was this just her giving out the same quest to people reaching similar fishing skill levels? Did this mean he could discuss the fish with them without breaking Onirioago’s rules? Could he make friends with a few of them and put their heads together to figure out the fish’s purpose?

There was only one way to find out.

Kaldalis made a break for the main gate of the encampment on the jungle side. At a full run, cutting across the smaller spaces between tents, he should be able to beat them there.