"The trip there should take a week." the ship captain explains to Nirou, who had come up to the deck to ask. Nirou had been a bit nervous to bother the man, but luckily he didn't seem annoyed by the inquiry. "We can't go our full speed on the river, so it'll take us two days to get to the mouth where we'll moor for the night. After that, we'll spend three days hugging the coast until we hit Cape Kandina. Me and the crew will get all rested up that night, then we speed across the open ocean for forty-eight hours straight. We ride the Alsanamid Current and get to Mayaladi real quick."

"There's an intriguing bit of history behind this route that I've learned." Laska chimes in from beside Nirou, as she had accompanied him to the deck. "Five hundred years ago, King Alsanamid of Anjdrahm used a spell to create the current that bears his name as a permanent fixture in the ocean. Back then, the southern islands were independent kingdoms of their own but were always in danger from constant Beastman attacks. Alsanamid created the current so that they could quickly be provided with reinforcements in case of attack. After this show of good will turned into an effective defense, the island kingdoms all agreed to become part of Anjdrahm. The General told me about it some years ago. I've always found the link between gifts, politics, and the physical world itself to be fascinating above all else." Laska's excited tone turned somber as she shifted from explanation to introspection. "A single fateful tribute can change the course of history, as I've come to well know."

It wasn't often that anything someone said got her down, but when it did happen it was her own doing more often than not. A consequence of her rambling habit, Nirou supposed.

For the duration of the trip, everyone more or less got into a routine. Keeping up on training was vital, since a fight was certain. The male half of the Four Winds trained together, with Ajandi following his captain's lead the whole time. Nirou was honestly surprised to see it go so well after all of Captain Rashen's complaints about disrespect. Either they were just an exaggeration or something about this hands-on interaction made things run much more smoothly. Rashen and Ajandi could be seen every day sparring, most often in the form of the Captain pummeling his subordinate with a flurry of punches. Ajandi could dodge or deflect most of them, but even the ones that got through didn't seem to do any lasting damage. The guy was pretty tough. Then again, the Captain probably wasn't going at full strength anyway. Nirou couldn't imagine that he'd so carelessly endanger his team member, he's not that type of guy. His true strength was still yet to be seen.

While Hamid and Kishaldam would occasionally spar together themselves, most of the girls' training was done individually. Kishaldam would tend to go find an empty room so she could train in private. Nirou passed by a couple of times and glanced at her hanging upside down from a rafter by her legs doing sit-ups or practicing her kicks against a sandbag dummy, but she would glare at him and get him to quickly keep moving. Hamid on the other hand was content to work out right in the common room they had set up, no matter who was present at the time. She would pull huge chunks of ice out of one of her bags and do weight training until she got tired, and then go right for a drink before doing it all over again.

Nirou and Laska kept up with their asymmetrical training from before, with Nirou trying to get a single hit on Laska's sword with his own. Despite his best efforts however, he didn't see any improvement yet. It was only a short time though, so he didn't let it get to him. He would keep doing sword swings on his own to improve his strength and speed, just as Laska did herself.

Since it was technically his most significant distinction, Nirou also wanted to keep training to get better with his blessing. He wasn't sure it was going to be much use on this trip, but the more precisely he could control blood, the less he had to worry about messing something up when he did. He knew that if he did end up hurting someone with this ability while trying to help, he might never get over it.

"Laska, I was going to practice with my blessing." Nirou spoke quietly as they sat in a corner of the common room. "Should I go find some place with no one around? Or just do it right here? Do we want them all to know yet?"

The girl gave Nirou a brief incredulous look, with her eyebrow lowered. "You don't have to ask me for permission, you know. It's not like I'm your master. You're not my employee, I'm not paying you. We're equals. If you want them to know about your gift, then that's your right. If I wanted it to stay hidden, I would have asked."

Nirou suddenly felt very foolish. "I was just... worried about whether or not hiding it would have been beneficial for any plans you might have had."

"Thank you for your concern, but it's alright to do as you like when it comes to this." Laska smiles to try and counteract her earlier reaction. "I'm glad you have that kind of thing in mind, truly. It's a sure sign that I'll be depending on your help."

Nirou didn't fully absorb Laska's gratitude, as he was still mentally stuck on the fact that she wasn't even considering having him do anything about the knowledge of his blessing one way or the other. It was out of concern for any plans she may have had, that was true. But it was also because he didn't immediately know what to do himself. Equals, she said. Nirou didn't feel like her equal, he had almost exclusively been following her lead the whole time he had been here. But was that her being bossy, or him needing to be told what to do? He assumed that it was probably the latter.

Putting all that out of his mind in order to focus on something productive, Nirou drew a little bit of blood and started moving it around in the air to practice his precision. He was still slightly uneasy about cutting himself to get blood, even after doing so a dozen times now. However, his control also let him block the wound back up right away. In reality it was no worse than giving himself a paper cut. Which to be fair, he still found unpleasant. But he could manage.

As always, Hamid was lounging around in the common room between her training sessions. So naturally she would be present even with the rest of the Four Winds off doing other things in other parts of the ship. Nirou figured that he would get some looks while moving blood around though the air, but Hamid was watching more intently than he expected. It actually made him too nervous to practice properly, and he stumbled through his training for a while until he was eventually interrupted.

"What rank blessing is that?" Hamid asked, as she rose from the spot she had been sprawled out on the floor. She approached Nirou, though her eyes remained fixed on the blood suspended in the air. Judging by her neutral expression, Nirou didn't think she was the same type as Laska. She wasn't excited purely out of curiosity's sake. This seemed much more like a passing whim.

"I-it's, uh... It's five stars." Nirou stammered. The topic was now on him instead of her means to chill beverages, so he didn't have the confidence to just speak without thinking like he did then. He was sure she had come around to insult him or something, since that seemed to be one of her favorite pastimes.

"Well aren't you lucky?" Hamid snickers. "The Captain is the only one of us with a five star gift. Yours should be impressive, right? Is it just this, moving blood around?"

"W-well, yeah." Nirou instinctively agreed, his behavior molded from years of being talked down to. Though he realized that he should at least try to make a case for himself. "I did only just get it. With some practice, I'm sure I could... uh, do some cool stuff. It's not just my blood either, I can move the blood of other people, or even animals."

Hamid remained unamused until Nirou mentioned that he could move the blood of other people, at which point she became genuinely interested. "So you're saying you could move my blood?" she asked.

"Y-yes. I could." Nirou replied, still nervous. He recognized that he was more psyched out about this conversation than he had any right to be, yet his efforts to calm down had been futile so far.

Hamid raised her arm to be parallel to the ground, then brought her other hand up to her forearm. With a quick swipe of her finger across her flesh, blood began to spill. Nirou was dumbfounded at how she did this, as her nails didn't look nearly sharp enough. Before he could be bothered to think about it much longer however, his focus turned to the blood itself. Before any could actually drip down onto the floor, it all froze into a sort of blood icicle still attached to her arm.

"Try to move this." Hamid casually demanded. Nirou came to realize that rather than simple curiosity, what she's actually interested in is testing their abilities against one another.

Nirou put his own blood aside for now and focused on his new task. However, he ran into trouble. To begin with, he had trouble getting a feel for the blood right in front of him. Part of his ability had been having a sense for blood, but it was difficult in this case. Freezing it seemed to confuse his sense. He tried moving it despite that difficulty, but proved unable. The blood-cicle remained in place. Nirou had no option but to assume his ability was only meant to work on liquid blood.

Hamid had been wearing a smug grin throughout the attempts. "Not working, huh? Well, it happens. A higher tier blessing can get countered by a lower tier one. You just have to accept it." The woman looked far too pleased with herself for her line to have convinced anyone. However after Nirou had given up, her grin disappeared. She wasn't satisfied with this. It was boring. So she figured that she would throw the guy a bone while also hopefully doing something interesting.

"Hey, I'm gonna unfreeze this blood." Hamid told Nirou, wresting back his attention. "Then you try to fling it at the wall. I want to see if this works."

Nirou was in that sweet spot of too demoralized to argue, but not demoralized enough to give up on the whole thing. He did as he was told, watching the blood instantly return to liquid and then using his ability to toss it through the air towards the nearest wall. As the blood traveled, it froze once again into sharpened blood-darts before sticking into the wood of the ship.

"Hey, that's pretty cool." Hamid whistled, impressed with herself. "I guess they kind of work together after all."

It did slightly raise Nirou's spirits to see the synergy after his ability had been shut down so hard. He looked back to see Laska watching the sight from her seat, pausing the reading that she had been doing in favor of the more immediately interesting event.

"If I come up with anything else, I'll tell you." Hamid waves to Nirou as she goes back to laze on the floor. "Keep practicing so I can use one of these in a real fight sometime."

It wasn't how Nirou expected it to go, but he thought that maybe the two of them would be able to get along somehow after all.

In addition to training his body and his ability, much of Nirou's time was dedicated to training his mind. Specifically, reading practice. For a couple of hours every day Laska would tutor him in Firstscript, drilling him on the meanings of certain characters. At Nirou's insistence, she also focused on Secondscript for part of the time. Nirou wanted in particular to be able to read the names of people and places when they came up, so it was important that he internalized Secondscript as quickly as possible. Fifty phonemes was a lot, and they were written in a very odd way, but he kept at it. Studying was at least always something he had been decent at.

On the fourth day of the journey, they were still travelling down the coast. During Nirou's studies, Ajandi sat down next to him. He watched as Nirou would look over some written lines Laska prepared, trying to puzzle them out.

"Learning to read? Isn't that boring?" the man sighs. "I don't know how to read, and I'm doing just fine!"

"You are the only one of the Four Winds that stubbornly remains illiterate." Kishaldam chimes in from her corner of the room. "Even Hamid learned once her caste was raised. It's only proper that you should gain knowledge suitable to your status."

Ajandi leaned over to look past Nirou and stared at her with a severely unamused expression, a frown the likes of which Nirou never expected to see on him. "If it's boring, I'm not doing it. I don't want to waste my life doing boring things. I want to have fun. In fact..."

Ajandi got up from his seat and went over to his bag. From it, he pulled what looked like a big hacky-sack. A ball slightly smaller than a soccer ball, stuffed with seeds or sand or something like that. He held it up with his one free hand, and called out to Nirou. "Let's play Taljit!" the man insisted. "I'll show you how fun it is! Your brain could probably use a break anyway, right?"

Nirou was always terrible at sports. And not merely due to his build, he had always had poor coordination in general. But recently he had been moving much more than ever before. Maybe he wouldn't be so bad this time? Beyond that, Nirou found it hard to deny Ajandi's request. The guy was too sincere to not even give it a try.

Nirou got up and left his studying for the time being, standing next to Ajandi and observing the ball. "So, how do you play Taljit?"

"It's really easy!" Ajandi insisted, his face lighting up. Nirou could tell this was probably a rare occasion. "The word 'Taljit' means 'pole ball'. Each side has a pole with a flat part on the top that they defend. You have to land the ball on top of the other side's pole to score. But you can't use your hands! You have to kick it, or use your knees, or your head! There's lots of stuff you can do."

It made Nirou think of a cross between soccer and basketball. However as soon as the rules were explained, he began to regret capitulating. "I don't know if I can really do this... I'm not very good at these games, after all." He was doubtful that he could even raise his legs high enough to hit the ball.

"We'll play with easy rules, it'll be fine!" Ajandi smiled as he tossed the ball up and down in the air. "We don't have the poles anyway, so we can just use tables. They're shorter than the poles are supposed to be, so even a new player can do it. And I'll go easy on you! I don't get the chance to play Taljit much when we're out on missions, Hamid won't play with me and the Captain is usually busy training or something else. Kishaldam stopped playing with me because she won too easily. She said it was boring. I'm not gonna make her do boring things."

"She was... too good?" Nirou asked, surprised. Kishaldam didn't seem like the type to get into sports.

"She's known as the legendary 'Legs of Fire'! The best Taljit player in Rajandra!" Ajandi enthusiastically praised his teammate. Nirou glanced over to see the girl in question burying her beet red face in her book, trying to disappear in her embarrassment.

"Alright, let's start!" Ajandi announced, calling Nirou's attention back to him. "I'll start with the ball. You try to take it from me and score!"

Nirou quickly looked around and saw a table behind each of them that Ajandi clearly intended to be used for the game. He wasn't confident that he could accomplish much of anything, but he could at least try. Maybe he would do better than he thought.

Ajandi dropped the ball from his hand to his knee, hitting it into the air. He stepped forward and kicked the ball as he passed, making it fly right by Nirou. With better reflexes he could have stopped it, but he was totally unprepared and missed it entirely. The ball landed right on the table behind him, meaning Ajandi scored right away.

"Hmm... Sorry, I'm still trying too hard." the man apologized and handed Nirou the ball. "Why don't you start this time?"

Nirou took the ball and tried to repeat what his opponent had done. He dropped it right over his knee, then attempted to bring it up to hit the ball. It was a failed endeavor, as he could neither move his knee fast enough nor get it high enough to actually hit the ball. The ball grazed the side of his leg as it fell to the ground.

Ajandi didn't say anything, but his expression clearly conveyed the pity he was feeling. Nirou picked the ball up again and kept trying. After a few times he was hitting the ball regularly, but he wasn't able to follow up at all. The ball didn't go high enough for him to use his body or head. He wasn't coordinated enough to bring his feet around to kick it. Even after a few dozen tries, Nirou was no closer to actually being able to play this game.

"We'll play again after you practice more!" Ajandi said, taking the ball from a tired Nirou after he reached his limit. "It really is fun, trust me! I should have known it would be hard for you, since you never played it as a kid. But let's not give up! I promise we'll play a real game someday."

Nirou was panting to catch his breath, and the notion of doing this regularly was not helping in that department. He stumbled back over to the table his study materials were at and got back to his reading practice, happy to get the break from Taljit. At least he was able to keep at it for longer than he expected.

After spending the night on the cape, the ship set sail across the open ocean. Riding the current, the crew would work for two days without rest to reach their destination. Nirou was a bit unsettled to spend so long with nothing but the ocean and the sky in sight beyond the vessel he was on. The idea that people would spend months in this state on longer voyages was crazy to him. However it was another thing that he'd rather get over if he could, so on the last night of the trip he made his way up to the deck to see if he would be able to take in the appeal.

Stepping out into the open air brought on a certain chill that he hadn't expected. With the coolness of the night and the wind rushing by from the speed of the boat, it was a world of difference from the daytime. It was actually kind of refreshing, since it had only been getting hotter as they traveled south. Nirou observed the crew out on the deck as they kept everything in order, making sure the ship stayed on course and whatnot. Staying up all night was sure to tire them out, but it might make the rest once they hit land tomorrow that much sweeter.

As Nirou stepped to the edge of the deck to look out over the ocean, he heard someone else come up from belowdecks. "Taking in the sight of the ocean at night while you still can?" Laska's familiar voice called out to him before joining him by the railing. "It's a fine night for it. Just look at that beautiful moon."

Nirou looked up and got his first real good look at the moon in this world. It was full tonight, shining brighter than the old moon he knew ever had in his memory. Though he supposed it could have been some sort of light pollution thing back then that made the moon in his world seem less bright. This moon also seemed noticeably bigger. But he had no way to be sure.

"This is the first full moon since you've arrived here, isn't it?" Laska notes, thinking back. "I wasn't able to keep track of time very well while I was recovering, but I know that the moon was full before then. So it was after the sixteenth, and now we're back to the sixteenth and the full moon again."

"Sixteenth?" Nirou could obviously glean that she was talking about the days of the month, but the confusion was from what that had to do with the moon. "Do you always keep track of the moon phases? Is that a common thing here?"

For a moment Laska looks like she's about to be surprised in the way that one might be at someone else missing the obvious, but she stops herself. "In this world, the moon phases align precisely to the days of the month. The new moon is always on the first, and the full moon is always on the sixteenth. Is it different in your world?"

"Yeah. Our moon goes through a cycle in twenty-eight days, and all the months are longer than that. So you can't keep track of days that way." Nirou explains. He thinks about what other kind of discrepancies this may indicate, and makes sure he asks while the topic is at hand. "How many days do you have in a year? We've got three hundred and sixty-five. With an extra one on a leap year."

"Leap year?" The term threw Laska momentarily, but since she understood what Nirou was getting at she put the nomenclature aside. "We have thirty days in every month, and twelve months for a total of three hundred and sixty days in all. It's all very neatly structured. It only seemed natural that way. To hear of your world having something as simple as the calendar be so chaotic is not something I expected. I suppose there's truly nothing I can take for granted."

Nirou could only think of what a neat and convenient year that was. Could something like that really happen naturally? Maybe that priest was telling the truth and this world really is meticulously created. The evidence seemed to be piling up all the time.

"If even the most simple of things is different between our worlds..." Laska sighed as she voiced her thoughts. "Then we could spend our whole lives talking about it all. I'm sure I would even stay interested the entire time. But I can't afford to be content with just that. I have things I need to do. However... I hope you'll still stimulate my imagination from time to time."

"Sure. No problem. Anytime." Nirou replied, unable to come up with anything better. He was distracted. The kind of thing she was talking about hit home too hard. He's exactly the kind of person that would have been content just sitting around and hearing about interesting things. He wasn't the kind to go out and do things himself. He never had that kind of willpower. He couldn't help but admire Laska, who kept moving forward towards her goals despite being even more interested to learn new things than him. It made sense that his first reaction was to agree to do anything she said when he thought about it like that. Maybe he was hoping some of that willpower would rub off on him. It was certainly a justification that he was more comfortable making to himself than just letting it be because she was a cute girl. Which was still true, naturally. The soft moonlight shining down on her only made that even more clear. But he wanted a better reason than that, or he would feel even worse about being here.

The two of them spent a few more minutes in silence appreciating the scenery before heading back below decks and turning in for the night. The next day, their boat arrived at the island of Mayaladi and their week long trip was over. But their actual mission had yet to truly begin.