This Quest is Bullshit - Chapter 151

Chapter 151 - Getting the Hells Out of Here

The party traveled through the night.

It was Wes’s idea, originally, to forego a night’s sleep or two for the sake of building distance between them and She Beneath the Earth on the off chance Carly had lied about or misevaluated how long she’d need to break out of the control room.

Of course, he’d made the suggestion as they first mounted one of spiral roads up and out of the giant cylindrical pit that marked the lost city.  It wasn’t until the party finally stepped out from under the griffin’s nest to find the orange of sunrise coloring the toxic mist that they realized they already had traveled through the night.

They kept moving.

While Eve and Reginald had the luxury of natural wakefulness—though the drake would likely sleep for a fortnight upon their return—and Lumy didn’t sleep at all, the others were not so lucky. Preston kept himself and Wes awake through liberal use of Stamina potions, a practice which conjured memories of their first foray into the Dead Fields, when Wes had to stay awake for almost a week straight to burn the poison out of the air around them. At least this time certain death didn’t await them if the fire mage passed out for a few seconds.

Taking a Stamina potion through a tragedian’s diving mask was an endeavor unto itself, requiring Wes burn away an area of smoke under Art’s watchful mind, remove the clown mask, and chug the green brew as fast as he could before the mist swept back in. It made for a nice bit of adrenaline to help keep everyone awake.

Art had it best. Small and well-balanced as he was, the young trellac slumbered happily on Reginald’s back as the party trekked on. Twice Wes tried to do the same, only to wake up rather uncomfortably after slipping off and landing hard on the ground below.

As if in an effort to further mirror their original trip through the Dead Fields, the party only called halt when they reached a familiar pool of water nestled against the mountainside. They had to pick up supplies they’d left at Drathis’s cave anyway, and the mist-free space made for the perfect spot for a well needed night’s sleep.

Reginald, no longer able to fit through the underwater entrance, napped outside with Lumy and Art on watch while the others ventured in.

Eve took the opportunity to play with her new toy.

She hadn’t tested it completely, but over the course of their travel she’d confirmed that any items she stored with the Ar-gold crown absorbed did indeed remain incorporeal whenever she dissociated. Even better, they remained with her as her cloud-of-Mana self drifted around. The entrance to Drathis’s cave proved her first chance to actually use that feature.

While Preston had long sprung for a waterproof pack to keep his potions and Wes’s cooking supplies safe, Eve decidedly hadn’t. Fortunately enough, if she packed and folded it over itself in just the right way, Eve’s bag would fit in her storage space. Stuffing it, her coins, and her chess piece inside, she just needed to dissolve into a cloud of Mana, float comfortably into the cave, and reform her body to make it inside perfectly dry.

Wes and Preston did it the easy way and simply dried themselves with a bit of fire magic. Eve’s method was more fun.

The first thing Eve noticed as she looked about the cave was the mound of dirt and simple gravestone where once had been the giant carnivorous plant that’d tried to kill her. The epitaph, carved with gorgeous care, simply read: R.I.P Planty.

On the other side of the cave, as far away from Planty’s grave as physically possible, stood a series of wire racks where Eve expected to find the mistler hides Drathis had said he’d dry for them. He did a bit more. In fact, not a single hide hung from the racks.

A full suit of armor did.

All three of the adventurers took a moment to stand and stare in shock at the beautiful simplicity of the craftsmanship, the perfect symmetry of the cuirass and leggings, and the artful layering of the shoulder plates. Eve’s jaw dropped.

Preston furrowed his brow. “So um… since when is Drathis an armorer?”

“More importantly,” Eve said as she walked up to the display and ran a hand over the fine leggings, “if he’s capable of this kind of craftsmanship, why does he dress like he just left the sewer?”

Wes shrugged. “I’m just gonna follow my usual advice when it comes to Drathis and not question it. He does what he does.”

“Well it looks like he actually bothered to explain himself this time,” Eve said as she reached the breastplate to find a sheet of parchment stuck to it. “He left a note.”

“Ooh.” Preston blinked. “What’s it say?”

“Good question,” Eve replied as she scanned the missive. “His handwriting’s atrocious.” She flipped it over to find yet more illegible text on the back side.

Instead of getting the sleep they both so desperately needed, Wes and Preston spent the following hour sitting in a circle with Eve as they tried to decipher two full pages of the rough squiggles that Drathis apparently thought passed for handwriting. By Ayla he’d written a lot.

Most of it remained a mystery to the adventurers. Eve found a section she could’ve sworn said something about getting Planty as a way to fight the loneliness he’d felt after the party had escaped the Dead Fields, and that with Planty’s death he’d realized he needed to find his people, but Wes was adamant that exact paragraph was actually a recipe for stewed skyswallower. They agreed to disagree.

Of the long and tragically unreadable letter, only a single part proved understandable to those present, mostly because it’d been written larger than anything else. At the very end, a single sentence stood out.

One last thing. Before you ask: it was class knowledge.

The party got a good laugh out of that one.

Letter aside, before they could finally sleep, Eve enlisted Wes and Preston’s help figuring out the various straps and buckles involved in trying on her new armor. It fit perfectly, the hardened leather contouring to the curves of her body as if it had been made just for her. She realized it had.

Before she could think better of it, Eve voiced her question to the others. “So… how did Drathis get my measurements for all this?”

“Class knowledge,” Wes and Preston answered in unison, mischievous grins on their faces.

“I mean, sure,” Eve said, “but we all agree class knowledge isn’t a real thing right? How did he know?”

“We did stay here for months,” Preston offered. “Maybe he got them then?”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “Without my knowledge?”

“Maybe he’s just really good at sizing people up,” Preston said.

“Or,” Wes followed up, “you might sleep less, but you did sleep some nights.”

Eve shuddered. “I’m going with Preston’s explanation,” she said flatly. “I’d rather not think about Drathis taking my measurements while I slept.”

Wes grimaced. “Actually, yeah. Good point. Forget I said anything. Maybe ‘class knowledge’ just is the best answer.”

With that wonderful thought on their minds, Wes and Preston settled in to sleep for the night while Eve, new armor and all, dissociated into a cloud of Mana and drifted out of the cave to give them some privacy. She joined Art and Reginald as they slumbered, leaning back against the cliffside in the same spot she used to during their prior stay. At least this time she had a sleepless Lumy to keep her company.

This particular night, Eve forwent her one-sided conversation with the phantasmal remnant to instead spend the time experimenting with her crown and new ability. First and foremost came the mechanics of the Ar-gold storage.

She’d already known, of course, that she only had access to the storage space while the Ar-gold was absorbed within her, thus forcing her to choose between storage and the powerful enchantments on the crown. Similarly, as she’d walked she’d found that the 1.94 cubic feet of storage meant a literal cube. Even if the total volume of her pack were smaller, while the straps were out it was considered too big to fit. It made adding her bag a huge pain.

On the more convenient side, she could slip in smaller items from anywhere on her person with only a thought. She’d spent a solid hour on their walk just mentally moving her copper pieces between the storage space and her pocket, never touching them directly in the process. She’d gotten pretty good at it.

For the first hour of the night, Eve tested various use cases for the storage space. The most immediate was figuring out what happened if she rematerialized the crown with items in her storage. The answer was rather convenient. Everything simply returned to her person in the same position it’d been stored in. If she stored her chess piece from her pocket, it returned to her pocket. If she stored her pack in a bundle in her arms, it and all the objects in it returned there—often to fall to the ground if her arms weren’t poised to catch it.

She tried storing some water from the pond, only to find that it left her soaking wet the moment she removed it again. Eve thought to store some of the toxic mist, but without a way to make it any denser, 1.94 cubic feet of the stuff wasn’t particularly useful.

Eve couldn’t quite tell if her final discovery with the crown was an inherent property of it or somehow linked to her recent upgrade to Ethereal Manifestation, but she found that if she dedicated a significant amount of focus as she rematerialized the Ar-gold atop her head, she change its appearance.

Any onlooker might’ve been some combination of scared and remarkably entertained to watch her flip from an ostentatious bejeweled crown to a golden bucket hat to a top hat she managed to stretch to almost four feet tall. Lumy, her only audience, simply flickered purple.

In the end, Eve settled on a comparatively unassuming golden hair clip. Constrained by its apparent minimum size, the base of the clip actually stretched across a significant chunk of her scalp, but her mess of chestnut hair did an admirable job of hiding it. If anyone looked too closely, they might wonder why an adventurer in plain-looking leather armor wore a glimmering gold and ruby clip in her hair, but the whole glowing-eyes thing tended to draw attention away from such little details.

She spent the rest of the night messing around with Ethereal Manifestation, primarily testing the limits of what it considered a ‘minor change.’ Much to her chagrin, extra arms were right out. She could, if she focused very hard, grow a pair of white, feathery wings, but her class’s definition of minor limited them to about three inches long, not exactly flight-ready.

As far as actually useful applications for the skill upgrade, Eve found two. The first would almost certainly prove a boon when she next found herself in Pyrindel—she could disguise herself. As it turned it, it only took a few slight changes to the structure of one’s face to become nigh unrecognizable. It couldn’t stop her eyes from glowing, but that was a problem for another day.

The second use was pure vanity. From removing blemishes to styling and recoloring her hair, Ethereal Manifestation had become a cosmetic powerhouse. Better yet, because it actually changed the physical form of her body rather than covering it up with an illusion, she could effectively stop hair from growing or spur it longer. Eve grinned at that one. No more would she have to pester Preston for free haircuts.

Finally, and this one was entirely for fun, Eve found she could rearrange the lines of Mana that ran along her skin. They’d always shine bright while her pool was overloaded, and she did rather like the dragonscale pattern they’d taken on after she’d joined the Dragonwrought, but the freedom to change them showed promise. She could already think of a half dozen ways to make fun of Wes by scrawling messages and images into her skin with the Mana lines. She spent a whole hour practicing.

As sunrise once again colored the horizon, Eve sat back in comfort and let the couple sleep in. They’d earned it.

Only four hours after dawn had come and past did Wes and Preston finally emerge from the pond, dry themselves off, prepare to reembark on the journey home. The adventurers knew they weren’t far from the way out of the Dead Fields, and once they escaped the fog they’d be free to fly back to Dragonwrought Hold at high speed.

Eve trailed the party as they walked towards the pass, allowing a smile to cross her face as her thoughts meandered. All in all, the journey had been a profitable one. They’d earned new levels, new abilities, three immensely powerful Ar-gold artifacts, and, hopefully, a bit of information. She’d even picked up a badass new set of armor she could hardly wait to test out a bit more.

So, on she walked, a pack full of loot, a bar full of exp, and a mind full of possibilities.

One quest down, on to the next.

Next