It had been two weeks since I woke back up. I had been working on getting ready to head after Lannah and waiting on the river to go down. Clean up and waiting was a bear. I was fine with the hard work, but I started to feel like a sitting duck while trying to prepare for the worst. During that time, I worked my butt off as much as I could to get ready.

Each night the rain would start and soak everything. It was almost like I was being forced to stay put. Which might honestly be what was going on. I checked on Lannah’s health at least once a day. There were a couple where I saw her health and mana dropdown. It was those times that I got angry and tried to climb out, only to slip and fall when I was just a few feet off the ground.

When I fell Blink, the ever-faithful was there to laugh at me. She could do this little wheezing laugh hiss thing while sending the feeling of humor across to me.

“Rock wet, hard climb no claws”

“Yeah I get that Blink! I just need out of here Lannah is gone and we need to catch up to her.”

“Fall hurt, wait dry,” She sent to me along with a chuckle and a picture almost of me in the mud.

“Fine, I’ll wait until it drys out but as soon as it does we are gone.” I said with just a bit of anger.

I wasn’t mad at her, just at everything right now. So I went back to finish the job that I was given by the sister goddesses that saved my life.

With the Hammer and dust collector, I made short work of expanding my storage room to the size needed for the Shrine. I had been given directions that form Order, I needed to build her Shrine to be evenly placed squares, triangles, or hexagons in a repeating pattern. For Chaos, it was slightly different.

It turned out that Chaos comes in many flavors, and she isn’t won that shied away from deliberately planned problems. Each one of her shrines was different, and so she requested that her side be decorated with repeating hexagons. This would lead people who thought they were giving an offering to Order to give one to Chaos.

As soon as I got done building the Shrine where my storage room had been, I got another set of instructions. This pop-up was a little odd. Where the others were all blue, this one, while still blue, had layered on its squares.

A PATH FOR THE FAITHFUL

Create a path that the faithful may follow for to my Shrine.

The problem that I had with this new request or perhaps quest was that any path I made to the shrine was a path to me as well. If it wasn’t raining, I would have laughed and said they could climb down, but that wasn’t the case. I might even have gone as far as building a rope ladder.

However, with the rain keeping me from being able to climb out and the floodwaters not going down, I had few options for this quest. I also wasn’t losing time as I couldn’t get out. I was, however, still taking time to get ready for my journey south to reunite with Lannah.

I wasn’t too pleased with the options I saw for creating the path for the faithful. I figured that I could either carve steps up to the top of the cliff or I could cut away through the rock and tunnel up.

If I did the cliff face steps, it would be much quicker but still subject to the rain. The stairs would also be visible to everyone passing by, so access to me would be much easier.

Granted, I wasn’t planning on staying once I got out, but I still didn’t want the orcs to just walk down the steps I made and kill me before I got out of here.

The other option of making a tunnel limited how much would be visible. However, it would take longer as there was just much more that I needed to do. It would keep me safer and would make the path dry.

I ended up going with the tunnel for safety reasons. I couldn’t start on it through the shrine because of the requirements of the shrine, so I started next to it. A new hole was going into the rock face.

By the end of my food, I had crafted my way off of my ledge. I had also learned more about magic than I would have if I was just off chasing after Lannah. In addition, I had a collection of odd items that I might never use again.

I had learned that I couldn’t turn stone to air. So first, I clung to how people did things on earth and made a dust collector. Then as I got further from the entrance, I found that it was too bulky of an item to use and too slow as well. Sure it was the most powerful fan I had ever seen. But, still, it didn’t do what I needed it to do.

Then when my cave sprung a leak, I played around and found that I could turn water into both fire and dirt. I couldn’t turn water into stone, but I could into soil. So I made tools that let me fill the cracks of water with clay, a type of dirt, and then turned that into stone.

I also found that I could turn dirt into water, which would serve me well as I traveled because I wouldn’t need to worry about water. However, for my tunneling project, I found that using the hammer to turn rock into dirt. Then I used a shovel to turn dirt into water. Then backing up and using a staff to change water to fire. It was the quickest and cleanest way to dig.

When I got my tunnel out, I was happy and ready to leave. I had my bag packed and would be going south. I stepped out of my tunnel into a clearing that the unnt herd would frequent when I got another popup.

This popup was so unlike the last one. The squares that textured the background were replaced with a shifting and changing non-pattern that would make a screensaver designer beg to learn how it worked.

Secure THE PATH

The dark gods’ minions roam the forest.

Do not leave the area until you have

Secure the path to my shrine.

The faithful must be clever

I was displeased. I had seen Lannah’s health drop by thirty earlier today, and there was nothing that I could do about it. I wanted to head south, but now I had a goddess, who I guessed was Chaos, telling me that I needed to stay around and obscure the path to the shrine. I even got an icon on my HUD that was a circle and a 5m.

I remembered back to my high school JROTC class. The First Sgt in charge of the class had been a Vietnam war vet. He talked to us about the traps and tunnels they had to deal with. While he never went into how things were made, he did talk about the covers they would have on the tunnels.

So I went to work building a hatch for the stupid tunnel that I didn’t want to make in the first place. I created the tunnel for the goddess, but I had convinced myself that I had been doing it for me so that I could get out of there. Yet, I was reminded that night when it didn’t rain that I had been doing their work.

Blink was happy that the stupid tunnel was finished because she was done with having the same food every day. She wanted fresh meat and was gone the second that I got the dumb tunnel open.

The only thing I got from her as she ran off was, “Bored hunt!”

It wasn’t until I had a trap door built and fitted into the tunnel that I realized that I couldn’t feel Blink anymore. It was just like when she ran off and leveled before.

“Crap, she went to the dungeon again!” I muttered angrily.

I had expected to be told that I had secured the path when I put the cover. However, nothing showed up telling me that the way was secured. No directions to do more; however, the icon seemed to stay there.

That night for the second time, I was going to visit the old shamans. I needed to know what to do to make Chaos happy, and I needed to know about the icon on my vision. I hoped they would know about the icon as I wasn’t in the mood to ask Sam.

I settled down to start my ritual when I felt well across the bond pain and fear. Blink was hurt.