Casimir did not like sailing. Not because he got seasick… anymore, or because he had anything against boats or the ocean or anything like that.

It was just boring. You couldn’t really train much, as mana binding generally requires one of three things: space, a catalyst, or ambient mana. The first is just absent on a crowded ship, the third will piss of the sailors if you use it, and the last one… well, it’s not easy to come by.

So you couldn’t train anything that spent mana, because you can’t get that mana back unless the captain allows it, and Casimir didn’t quite pay enough for that kind of consideration. Well, he had some mana potions he could use in a pinch, but if he had a valid reason to use it the captain would likely allow him to replenish. So, useless.

Still, he did find something to do. “You made an error here, you added six instead of seven to the fourth gear.” Faron groaned as he cleared his slate. “The rest of you got the right answer.”

Teaching the kids the number puzzle that kobolds use to lock their doors is honestly a lot of work for only a little bit of benefit, but he’s still annoyed with them for interfering and it’s something they can do while on the boat.

“Teach, can we do something else?” Peter whined. “We’ve been doing nothing but math for hours!” Technically two hours was worth a plural, yes.

“Fine, you big babies.” Casimir conceded. “You’ve managed to mostly remember how to solve them, so it’s just a matter of practice. I’ll give you a new puzzle every hour. Solve it correctly and you can spend the rest of the hour doing whatever.” He writes down a fresh one. “Here’s the one for this hour.”

As expected, Illivere was the first one to solve it, doing so within five minutes completely in her head. He noticed a chunk of mind mana was used to do so, but accepted the answer and left them to their own devices.

As Casimir wandered up to the top deck, the ship lurched slightly, speeding up. “Captain!” Casimir shouted. “Is that the Depths current?” The Ancient Deepdweller’s edicts forbade any travel on their waters except for very specific trade lanes, but also used magic to create quite fast currents on those lanes to compensate for the modest tariffs they charge for passing through. Spirit magic was weird sometimes.

“Aye!” The elf shouted. “We should be at the checkpoint within two hours. Have your coin ready!” As part of the payment for the stop, Casimir had agreed to pay those tariffs, as well as the docking fee they’d charge to let the boat wait for his business. Steep, but Casimir didn’t want to wait for a second ship for the next leg of the journey.

Casimir maneuvered around the various other elves that were the crew and made his way to the Captain. “Have you ever docked at the checkpoint before?” Casimir asked.

Captain Coastspear chuckled. “Don’t you worry about me, boy. This old salt knows the proper courtesies.”He jabbed his thumb towards the door belowdecks, where Casimir’s students were leaving to get some fresh air. “I’ll make sure the swabbies stay out of trouble while I’m at it.”

How old was he, anyway? One of the ways one can discern how old an elf was is by seeing the condition of their oldest tattoos, and in some cases, the designs of the tattoos betrayed an older elf’s age. Elves started gaining signs of age at about age ninety, so Coastspear was probably not that old, as he still looked to be in the prime of youth. He did have a rather faded tattoo around his right eye, so Casimir estimated the man at about seventy, give or take ten years.

Business handled, Casimir decided to watch his students lose their money to the elven sailors in a card game.

“You told me you were good at this game.” Peter accused Faron, placing a pair of fours, horns and swords.

“Pass.” said the first sailor.

“I said I knew the rules to this game.” Faron corrected. He put down a pair of eights, jewels and horns.

“Pass.” Said the second sailor, the only girl in the game.

The third and final sailor, who played the initial pair of threes, hummed as he placed a pair of Knights, arrows and staffs.

Peter slapped down a pair of queens, arrows and horns. After it was confirmed that he had won the trick (an easy thing, there was only one queen left and it was the highest card), he put down all but one of his remaining cards. “One to five, in staves.” He eagerly looked at the other players, the men immediately motioning for him to continue, before moving to play his last single card.

“Not so fast, boy.” Said the lady sailor. “Five to Knave in swords.” She placed the five, six, seven, eight, and knave one by one, eagerly drinking in Peter’s devastated expression. “With knave to king in horns for the win.” She said, laying down the knave, knight, and king and then waving her empty hands.

The rest of the group threw their cards into the central pile as the girl collected her winnings.

Casimir sat down as Peter stormed off, having lost all seven hands he played. “Deal me in. We have nearly two hours till we get there.”

“Do you know how to play?” Faron asked.

“Yeah, it’s not that hard.” Casimir said as he picked up his hand of twelve. This hand was pretty good! He put down the ten coppers that appeared to be the bet. “Who’s got the low card, and is raising the bets an option?”

“Me, and no.” said one of the sailors, putting down a one through four, including the crucial one of arrows.

“Pass. “Pass.” “three to six.” And so it went…

----------------

The checkpoint of the Depths, and the sole structure that reached above water, was an enormous coral tower, shaped into a singular lighthouse. This lighthouse was then surrounded by extensions of coral forming docks, warehouses, offices, a few taverns and inns, all told if you folded it out into a normal coastline it would end up about equivalent to a small but prosperous harbor instead of a four-mile diameter complex.

What kind of business is done here? Pretty much just boring dockyard stuff. The officials inspected cargo, levied tariffs, kept records, and in a pinch you could buy overpriced supplies. The cities below didn’t have much need for goods from above the waves, but ‘need’ never really stopped ‘want’ from demanding exotic luxuries, or things that were just cheaper to get on dry land. So there was some trade going on even if the Ancient Deepdweller would probably like it better if there wasn’t.

“Name?” The bureaucrat asked, helpfully in a trade tongue rather than the tonal screeching that their normal language was when used out of water.

“Casimir Toomes.” Casimir responded, and the bureaucrat etched the name onto the document. Paperwork was usually made of glass here, mostly opaque and stained white before being magically coated in a thin secondary layer of colored glass that was scratched through to show the letters.

“Duration of visit?” The bureaucrat had a fancy title, Steward of the Razor Shoals or something was the translation, but he was just a border guard.

“One day. The end of tomorrow at the latest.” Casimir replied.

“Purpose?”

“Visiting a friend.” Casimir replied.

The bureaucrat hummed as he stared at Casimir, as if he would suddenly crack under his baleful gaze. Or he was just cranky about his gills drying out. Much like Anima was the leading nation in wizardry, the Depths was… debatably a nation, but was a clear winner in the field of spirit magic, as each and every resident held a druidic pact with the spirit court that ran the place. It allowed them to live underwater under the protection of the powerful spirits, in return for toiling to maintain the society’s existence. “...Acceptable. You’ve already passed inspection for contraband, so everything appears to be in order.” He took his etched seal and slammed it on the glass tablet that was the temporary visa, magically shaping his symbol into the appropriate spot. “Now go away.”

Now equipped with the talisman of not getting eaten by whichever giant sea beastie is on smuggler watch today, Casimir made his way to his students. In his absence, they had decided to practice Trick Cards, the card game that Peter lost most of his loose money to. The name sounds better in Elven.

“Now, with a fifteen card hand, you’re going to have fewer single card tricks.” Faron explained. “But it’s not that much different from twelve or ten card hands. Twenty card hands get old really fast, don’t bother playing with three. Now, who’s first?”

Illivere played a pair of ones, including the arrows card. Before Hanna could play whatever she had in her hand, Casimir interrupted. “I’ll be gone for the day, have you got a room in this inn yet?” He asked.

“Yes.” Illivere replied.

“Great.” Casimir said. “If Captain Coastspear tries to shove off without me, tell one of the bureaucrats that you thought you detected senseweed being brought on the ship. That’ll tie him up in inspections so I’ll have time to return. If I’m not back by then, get everyone’s stuff off the ship before it leaves.”

“Got it, Teach.” Peter replied, saluting sarcastically.

“Just keep an ear out for his sailors. As long as they’re still drinking and whoring, he’s not leaving. If he starts calling men back to the ship, start worrying.” Casimir said. With his instructions finished, he moved towards the checkpoint’s Water Gate.

The Water Gate was an interesting bit of enchanted infrastructure. Casimir did possess and equip a set of gear that made adventuring in deep water possible, a thorough combination of exotic materials, enchantments, and a few specialized curses making movement through water approximately as effortless as movement on land. However, that didn’t change the fact that the Depths was, all by itself, hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean.

What the Water Gate did was create very high speed currents that could be used to travel to and from the settlements within the Depths. Like most regions managed by spirit courts, most of it was wilderness, with only beasts, spirits, and monsters inhabiting them. They usually forbade the kind of infrastructure necessary to make a proper city, limiting settlements to sizes small enough that it could be largely self sufficient.

The drawback was, as one might expect, that the enchantments didn’t really do anything to make the passengers survive the currents. Residents could merely invoke their spirit pacts to survive, but otherwise you had to use pretty expensive enchantments to survive the rushing water while navigating manually instead of just letting the spirits guide you.

After a quick check of the map, Casimir just dived in without a second thought. He had those enchantments, after all.

----------------

Gemvent was one of the more remote settlements, in water so deep the sun’s touch was a forgotten memory. Despite this, the place shined as bright as any bazaar at high noon, the volcanic vents and veins of crystal combining with the potent accumulation zone of mana the settlement was founded on made the water itself glow with light.

Seeing the various people of varying levels of fish-like traits was interesting, and they were just as curious to see an outsider. Sure, they pretended to keep going about their business, the children that kept following him out of sight along with how everyone slowed their work as he passed gave that game away.

Eventually, he found himself at one of the region's signature coral structures, as despite the crushing pressure, there really wasn’t any architectural challenge that couldn’t be fixed with well applied magic. While it was technically possible to speak underwater, Casimir instead sent out a pulse of mind-aspected mana to announce his presence.

The entrance to the coral structure remained shut for several moments, but eventually opened. Walking inside, Casimir swam into the air bubble that his friend maintained for her library. “Hana!” He yelled. “It’s good to see you again.” Idly, he took control over the mana-rich water and moved it back into the pool he emerged from. Nice and dry.

Hana was an elf, her mocha skin just as dark as before despite living without the sun’s kiss. She wasn’t smiling to see him, but if she was annoyed or irritated, she did an admirable job of hiding it. As was noted in her letters, her legs had been replaced, her lower body now consisted of a series of bright red octopus arms with green hashes, each twice as long as her elven legs and thrice as strong. They moved as if they had a mind of their own as she approached Casimir, which was appropriate because they did. As she settled in front of him, the arms shifted in coloration to blue with red rings. “Casimir.” She said dryly. “You mentioned sensitive news that couldn’t be trusted to the post? Out with it.”

“One moment.” Casimir said. Taking out the crate he had lugged all of the way here, he set it down and opened it up. “First, a gift. Two amphora of condensed monster cores for your garden.” Quality-wise, it paled in comparison to what she could get locally, but the reason monster cores were used was because of the wide variety of mana types that were all jammed together. But ‘wide variety’ was not ‘all types’. “They should be rich in metal mana, and I know that’s not easy to find down here.” Casimir added. He was initially going to sell the kobold cores, but when he was thinking of what to bring to help smooth over bad feelings, he remembered that little factoid.

After one of the tentacles opened the sealed amphora and allowed the faint scent of mana to leave for examination, Hana relaxed a bit. “Well, thank you for the consideration. That will be excellent for the kniferoots.” Admittedly, the plant was pretty delicious once you removed it from the inedible core, and alchemically it was supposedly great for blood replenishment potions. Despite that, Casimir still thought that deliberately growing a plant that turned into a monster at the slightest imbalance of their growing environment to be the height of madness. After a quick hug from her upper body, Hana became serious again. “Now, on to business. What did you need to tell me?”

“Revenants.” Casimir said. “Luci and Magnus aren’t as gone as we thought they’d be. I don’t know how.”

Hana stilled. After a beat, her extra arms stilled as well. “But that’s impossible.” Hana eventually said.

“Saw it with my own eyes.” Casimir said, shrugging his shoulders. “I said I don’t know how.”

“We have to do something.” Hana said after a moment of thought. “They’d do the same for us.” Luci would, anyway.

“I’m on it.” Casimir said assuringly. “Came here to tell you in person, and while I know you can’t leave anymore, I do have some leads, but some extra resources to help track the walking corpses down wouldn’t go amiss.”

“...I have some things I could part with.” Hana said. “Most of it’s at my warehouse, so we’ll need to take a trip.” She gave a sly grin. “Besides, I still need to meet your students.”

“I expected as much.”