[The alarm went off, it was 6 AM. Jason was ready to get to work around the farm. He had 39 starting actions]

[Tess’s Almanac: 14th day of Summer! 77 days until the Summer Festival. It’s looking like a lovely day today, though we are expecting showers to begin later this evening, and run into the next three days or so. If you have outdoor work to get done, now’s your chance!]

Jason rolled out of his bed and walked up to the window. Indeed, most of the sky was clear, but as he glanced off toward the horizon, he could see a darkening shadow. Today was his first harvest of the season, which meant that he needed to get to work. He jogged over to his wardrobe and dressed quickly, then jogged down the stairs. He waved at the kitchen as he past, then raced out into the yard. Still in his bare feet, several crabgrasses snapped at him, but he largely paid them no mind. Instead, he took Lady out of her stable and hitched her up, then went back inside to eat his breakfast while she got herself ready.

“Make me something good to harvest with.”

With a flash of light, something that looked like stewed cabbage appeared on his plate. It smelled rather like what he imagined dog vomit might smell like, and his nose wrinkled.

“Ahh… Something not good to harvest with.”

With a flicker, a plate of pancakes appeared in front of him. Now that was more like it! He gobbled down the meal, then rose and made his way back out into the yard. Lady had almost finished as well, and he soon had her hitched up to the harvester.

All things considered, harvesting crops was both Jason’s favorite and least-favorite job on the farm. It was fun, inasmuch as it was the triumph of his work. He had planted the crops, he had fought away the monsters that tried to eat them. With the harvest, he got to see the results of that work! The machine itself was almost quite a marvel, outfitted with whirling blades connected to the wheels. The faster Lady pulled the harvester, the faster they spun.

Of course, Jason had to stand just above these blades, which was the roundly terrifying portion of things.

The harvester whirred to life as Lady lumbered toward the gates of the field, bouncing and rattling across every single bump or pothole in the driveway. Jason was tossed back and forth as he tried to keep from being tossed into the blades and reduced to a pulp. The various monsters filling the driveway weren’t so lucky, and dozens of crabgrasses, razorgrasses, histled, and a long shrump were all chewed into oblivion. A few moments later, they entered the field, and the true harvest began.

Jason had planted the field to wheat, just as he had done every year before. He was considering trying out some specialty crops later that year, but for the moment, the older, familiar crops were easily the best ones to stick with. The golden grasses waved as wind rolled across the field, looking for the world like amber waves. Jason sighed deeply… And then the blades hit the wheat.

The machine did a number of things, starting with the simple cutting of the stalk. It then, though Jason didn’t know exactly how, separated the wheat kernels from the bits and pieces of stalk and hull, and blew all the excess material out the back end. This resulted in Jason being utterly covered in chaff dust, and he coughed furiously as they lumbered through the field. Still, it was quick work, and they covered slightly over half the field before lunchtime came. The sky was still darkening, and Jason quickly took Lady over to her post and hitched her up before jogging inside to grab a quick meal himself.

When he came back outside, he found Lady still lying there, rolling back and forth in the grass as she tried to clean all the chaff and dust off her coat. Jason couldn’t blame her there, and sighed deeply.

“Come on, girl.” He muttered as he walked up. “I know it’s not fun, but-”

“Howdy, neighbor!”

The voice didn’t belong to Jeremiah, and Jason spun in excitement as Tess came trotting up on the enormous black mass that was Angus. She hopped down, clad in her standard battle armor, and held her arms open wide. Jason threw himself into her embrace, and they hugged for a few long moments before they broke apart.

“Wow.” She glanced him up and down. “You’re so sweaty and dusty I think you might rust my armor.”

“Thanks. Really.” He muttered, then brightened. “You’re here earlier than I expected.”

“Guild business is still pretty slow.” Tess shrugged. “We’re still sorting everything out, you know, and… I don’t know. It seemed silly to wait around until evening. Figured I might as well come out and get a bit more used to life out here.”

Jason flashed a small smile. “Well, I’m glad to see you. I’ve got to get back out into the field, but you’re welcome to watch.”

“Would you like to use Angus for the last half?” Tess asked. “Lady looked pretty exhausted, and the rain looks like it’s coming earlier than we’d thought. You’ve only got three, maybe four hours before it gets here.”

Jason grimaced. Rain on a crop of ready-to-harvest wheat was a sure way to kill the yield of the crop. He nodded after only a moment. He had used Angus once before for fieldwork, and… He was strong. It took only a moment to get him hitched up to the harvester, and Jason soon had him back out in the field.

The blades whirred at a breakneck pace as the harvester was pulled through the field by Angus’s mighty muscles. All told, the rest of the field took no more than three hours to finish, and as they came whirring to a halt, Jason shakily stepped to the ground and shook his head.

“Wow.” He muttered. “If he can still work like that once we get married, I’ll be able to fully farm out my second eighty-acre patch, no problem.”

Tess shrugged and helped him get the harvester. “I don’t know why he couldn’t work, at least a bit. He wasn’t bred to be a workhorse, so I’ll need to check with the breeder to see how much he can reasonably handle, but he seems to hold up well enough.”

Jason inclined his head, and Tess kept speaking.

“Now get inside and take a shower. Come down to the kitchen table when you’re done, I’ll have things set up by then.”

Jason smiled and nodded again, then gratefully went inside. With the heat of the day, he had a thick layer of dust caked across pretty much every part of his body. The shower felt wonderfully refreshing, and he had soon changed into a fresh tunic and came back down to the kitchen, where, indeed, Tess had set up quite a spread of papers. Jason glanced at it all as he sat down, and let out a small whistle.

“This is… What is all of this?” Jason mused as he started looking it over.

“All the plans.” Tess grinned broadly. “If we’re doing this, we’re doing it right. Now, the specific plans will come later, this is just the preliminary stuff we have to get figured out ahead of time.”

Jason just chuckled and shook his head. “You know, I remember a time when you wanted to run off and just get married on the spot. Nothing formal, no big invitations or family or anything.”

“I think we’ve established that that didn’t work out so well.” Tess snorted. “Now, the first thing we have to decide is who’s coming to the wedding. The number of guests will determine pretty much everything else that we have to figure out.”

“True enough.” Jason let out a long breath. “Well… I have a large family. I can get you the exact numbers, but if all my siblings and parents come… Then my aunts and uncles will want to come too… If I had to wager a guess, you’ll looking at somewhere around forty or fifty just for my side, in order to avoid offending anyone.”

Tess nodded slowly, then bit her lip. “That works for me. Can you get me a list?”

“I’ll do what I can.” Jason chuckled. “Honestly, I think we’d be better off just to send an invitation to my mother and ask her who all will want to come. Then she can send us a proper list, and we can go from there.”

“And… Done.” Tess scribbled a note. “What’s your mother like?”

“You know? I… I honestly don’t know, at this point.” Jason shrugged. “I always thought we were close, at least as close as we could be. We weren’t quite like what you’d sometimes hear about in fairy tales, of course, but I never thought we were on bad footing at all. Over the last two years, though…”

Tess nodded slowly. “What did they say when you decided to come out here? When you found out that you inherited the farm?”

“They thought I was insane.” Jason chuckled. “I remember showing them the will, and they all thought it was a joke at first. My father sent out a letter to Summer Shandy asking for confirmation that my uncle had actually died, and I think we were all a little shocked when we were informed that the will was real. They all told me to just sell the thing, but… I don’t know. I decided to give it a shot.”

“And you haven’t heard from them since?”

“Not a peep.” Jason shook his head. “Truth be told, I told them I was just going to check the farm out, and if I liked it, I might stay. If I thought it would be impossible to handle, I’d just come back. Since then… I’ll admit, things got a little crazy after I first arrived, and I didn’t exactly send them anything letting them know how things were going, but on the flip side, they never sent a single letter. They never asked me how things were going, or sent someone down to check on me, or… Anything.” He sighed deeply. “It almost seems like… Oh, I don’t know. It feels like they see me now like they used to see my uncle. Just some lunatic who abandoned the family and who will never amount to anything.”

“Jason?” Tess raised her eyebrow. “I knew your uncle. You are nothing like him.”

At that, Jason chuckled. “If you had any stories, I’d love to hear them sometime. I know almost nothing about him. I know he was an outsider during his childhood, and that he moved away as soon as he could, and after that, crickets.”

“I’ll try to think up a few for you.” Tess chuckled. “He was a character. Not unpleasant, mind you, but not someone that we exactly cheered when he came to town.”

Jason sat there for a few moments, then nodded at Tess. “What about your family? You said a few weeks ago that you didn’t have any real family, but I’d love to hear more. If you want to talk about it, that is.”

Tess grimaced. “In complete transparency, I really don’t like to talk about it. That said, we are engaged now, so I suppose it’s time you get the lot of it.”

Jason nodded slowly, and Tess began.

“Like I said, I don’t really have any family. My mother and father were both warriors, traveling throughout the land delving into dungeon after dungeon. I don’t know a lot about either of them, but I do know that they had a similar group of friends, so they’d at least known about each other for a few years before they got together. They fell in love, and I think they even started planning a wedding. And then… I came along.”

Tess looked down at the table. A single drop of liquid fell from her eye onto the paper, and Jason reached out and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Once again, I don’t know much.” Tess continued. “As my mother became pregnant and was unable to keep dungeon-delving, she fell into depression. She set herself up in an inn that was apparently close to a bunch of dungeons, so my father was able to keep diving into dungeons to support the two of them. It was too much for either of them to bear. Neither could stand being in one place without moving around.”

Jason bit his lip in sympathy. “Then… Did they just drop you off when you were born?”

Tess shook her head. “They tried to make it work for awhile. They would go to new places and leave me with babysitters while they went off and fought, but that could only last for so long. Eventually, I started getting older and needed closer attention, and since I wasn’t exactly used to a great deal of supervision, I was apparently somewhat of a handful.”

“I can’t imagine that.” Jason remarked dryly.

Tess laughed softly, then continued. “Anyway, so it went. Finally, one of their friends took pity on me. She was a bit older than my parents, and didn’t think I deserved that sort of a life. She approached my parents about adopting me, and they readily agreed. We moved to a little town down in the south, far away from the dungeon routes that my parents usually followed, and that was that.”

Jason sighed, then brightened. “What about her, then? Could we invite her?”

“We could, if she was still alive.” Tess shrugged. Another tear dropped to the paper below. “When I was a teenager, she started trying to dungeon-delve again. She had missed being in the dungeons, and wanted to try it out again. The problem was that she’d been out of practice for so long, and tried to do the same thing she’d done years earlier, and…”

Tess couldn’t continue. She shrugged and leaned back in her chair, and Jason nodded slowly.

“And that’s why you try to protect everyone in the dungeon.”

“One of the reasons, I suppose.” Tess flashed a small smile. “Anyway, with her death, that really only left me with my brother.”

“Brother?” Jason blinked in surprise. “We’re going through all of this, you say you have practically no family, and you have a brother?”

“I was getting there!” Tess scowled at him. “It’s not like I’ve intentionally tried to hide him, it’s just that I haven’t really talked to him in years, and I’m not even sure where he is at that point.” She paused and sighed, then shrugged. “He was another dungeon orphan. His parents were killed in the dungeons, we don’t even know who they were. He’s about a year older than me, we think. Someone brought him to the woman who raised me, and she gladly took him in. When she died in the dungeons, too, he kinda… I don’t know. I’m not going to say that he went crazy or anything, but it hurt him really badly. He left, and while I’ve seen him from time to time since then, it’s going to be hard to track him down.”

“Well, we’re going to do it.” Jason declared. “One way or another, we’re going to get your brother here to be at our wedding. Who knows, maybe we’ll even convince him to settle down here in Summer Shandy?”

“That much, I doubt.” Tess sighed, then shrugged. “Still, though, I suppose that stranger things have happened. Weddings are always an interesting business, and you never really know how they’re going to turn out.”