Larelle suggested a few activities to give us a better sense of one another’s abilities, along with getting to know one another. We would still cover ground and move toward our eventual destination, the improbably named Glumpdumpkin. We would also range out with the Rangers, pull guard duty with the Guards, collect materials with our Healer, me, and maybe do some wizzing, with our Wizard and Sorcerer.

  Drat had gruffly refused Larelle’s suggestion that he take some of us out for some stealthy scouting. He then rolled his eyes, walked off in that direction, and disappeared into the underbrush.

  “What a mushroom,” Regina said, giving me an elbow.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What a fungi.”

  I threw back my head and ughed aloud. “That… was actively terrible. I love it.”

  The first group I was assigned to was Regina and Isabelle. Both had requested to go out on assignment with me. I leveled a ft stare at Regina and told her with my dead expression that we were not about to attempt to put the moves on Isabelle.

  This meant ranging out away from the main caravan while another pair went with Tara out in the other direction. We would swing wide around in an arc and meet up around evening.

  “We’re not worried about Nakamamon attacking us?” I asked.

  “Why would we?” Isabelle asked. “Regina here knows where the dangerous ones are, and I have a shield.” She held up her shield as proof, and wiggled it, I guess to make me believe in its existence.

  The terrain started rolling here, and the main bulk of the party appeared and disappeared several times in the distance: Muppin with the vast majority of supplies on his back, Larelle and Ivy on guard duty, Trent still gging behind and sulking. Chrysta and An had gone out with Tara today.

  For a long time we traveled in silence, each absorbing the world outside the HQ. It was a vast expanse of magic, so how could we not? I also turned my face to the sky. No pnes overhead, no car horns or freeway rush in the distance, no police sirens. Real, actual silence. Nothing but the whooshing wind making the grass sway, and the occasional Nakamamon poking its cute head out of the grass before chirping and bounding away.

  Tweedle Dee bounded ahead, hid badly in the grass, and leapt out at Regina when we reached his position. Regina allowed the adorable fox to knock her down and lick her on the face, then leaned into the pets and scratches administered by Isabelle and myself.

  “It sure isn’t SoCal,” Isabelle said, peering into the distance. “It isn’t Mexico, and it definitely isn’t Korea.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “You’ve been to Korea?” Regina asked. Dee made a questioning noise that got her giggling.

  “One parent from California, one from Korea.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said.

  Isabelle didn’t respond, but smiled without much mirth. Her parents… perhaps they were no longer married. Perhaps one of them wasn’t in the picture anymore.

  “What’s so different here?” I asked, already knowing the answer for myself. No suburbs here. The world was natural, not cut apart by roads and constantly bring at you to try to get your attention. No, it was bright and rexing, a vacation for every moment I wasn’t taking hours to mix up cures. It was like those videos of African sunrises, where the sun is monumentally huge, but the whole pin below, and the trees, are silent and still.

  “The quiet,” she said, shrugging. “And the distance. Korea’s close. Busy. Crowded. There’s always people around you, at all times. Here I can get away from people, you know?”

  I knew. Here I didn’t have to py arbiter between my parents and my sister, or fix all of Sarah’s problems.

  “Mexico isn’t much better,” she said.

  “Hang on, what?”

  “My father is Mexican American. I’m pretty much a mutt, you know?” She ughed again, but I still couldn’t sense any genuine feeling.

  Her body was going bright sky blue and cotton candy pink, with thin threads of shining silver curling up in there, little spirals and curlicues.

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” I said. “Being a whole lot of things is better than being pin old white bread. And you’ve seen things I’ve never seen.”

  I gnced over at Regina, who was waggling her eyebrows like I’d never seen before. Either it was the effect of the magic, or she was really good at it. I had to force myself not to ugh, and not to roll my eyes.

  Isabelle shrugged, smiling. “I can speak Korean, and some Spanish.”

  “Then you’re a nguage and a half better than me.”

  We spooked something with a shing tail at one point. A slicing bde of a tail came whipping up out of nowhere and up in a wide arc. Just like a downed power line, it was sudden and unpredictable, and I would’ve gotten it bad if Isabelle hadn’t suddenly surged forward with a glowing shield held before her. The cable sshed against her shield and threw out hissing sparks. Isabelle hissed and gritted her teeth, bracing against what looked like a ton of force. The strike sent her skidding back several inches.

  But only for an instant. A moment ter, and a huge bird had taken flight, taking its thin metal wire of a tail with it. The tail streamed out something ridiculous, like fifteen or twenty feet behind the silvery wings glinting in the midday sun.

  All of us just stared after it. The glints continued until eventually the bird nded somewhere else in the grass a good distance away.

  Silence continued to hold us, until finally Isabelle looked at me. “You’re not hit, are you?”

  “N…no,” I said, though I had to look at myself. The wiry tail on that Nakamamon bird looked like it could’ve sliced my leg off and I wouldn’t have noticed it until now. “You… you saved me.”

  “We’ll call it even,” she said, and extended a hand down to help get me to my feet. Then she pulled me into a hug.

  There hadn’t even been a check at all. No chance for me to dodge the thing. Maybe I would’ve gotten a Durability check before being torn apart, but maybe not. I was so gd I never needed to know.

  “Thank fork,” she muttered into my shoulder. “You’re okay.”

  Regina had moved around behind us, and was now mouthing words. I actually did roll my eyes this time, which caused her to shrug. No, I wasn’t going to try seducing Isabelle, not here and not now. No chance of that. I was pretty happy with my current level of extremely hot dies, thanks much.

  Isabelle released me and looked my body up and down. In my periphery, Regina was fpping her arms madly and gesturing like crazy. She was probably miming butt squeezes and kissy faces, so I focused on Isabelle instead.

  “That didn’t get though your shield power?” I asked.

  “Knocked most of my mana out absorbing all that damage,” she said, “but no. Jeez, I don’t know what I’d have done if you got hurt on my watch. Ugh, you’re the leader and you hired me even when you weren’t supposed to.” She groaned. “I wasn’t supposed to bring it up. Ivy told me not to. I’m such a babo.”

  I gave her what I hoped was an easy smile. Truth be told, I was amped up on adrenaline and freaked out a lot of other creatures might attack us. “I don’t know what that is, but it doesn’t sound like you’re being kind to yourself. Anyway, don’t worry about the team. You’ve already earned your pce here.”

  Isabelle smiled gratefully. Still holding me by the arms, she looked me up and down again, confirming that I was still unharmed. Only then did she let me go. Regina’s pouty disappointment disappeared as soon as Isabelle turned, and she grinned.

  We spent the next number of hours ranging and talking, with a sidetrack over to grab some reeds from a river we found gurgling nearby. Regina showed us the sign we’d been missing of the silvery-tailed bird Nakamamon.

  I learned that Isabelle’s Physicality was already at 8, with a Durability at 6, though she barely had any Ingenuity to speak of. Meanwhile Regina boasted that she had straight 5’s in everything. Isabelle didn’t look like a physical powerhouse until the split second moment you needed her to save you from a cutting bde. That moment was when she transformed into a muscle mommy like Larelle.

  Grassy meadows turned into copses of trees interspersed with clumps of bushes and foliage, where tiny mice-like things ducked out of sight. Regina halted us in the middle of our journey, and we waited as a snake as big around as my thigh slithered away into the tall grass.

  “That thing was pitch bck,” Isabelle said with a shudder.

  “There are so many different kinds,” Regina said. “I hadn’t encountered the metal birds before. I would bet the snakes prey on the birds and we spooked it.”

  She took every opportunity possible to brush her hand against every part of me she could touch. A hand squeeze here, a shoulder or butt squeeze there, brushing off dirt from my shirt here, patting me on the lower back there. Every time Isabelle turned her back, Regina would fsh me a wild grin and get her hands on me somehow.

  I definitely liked it, despite the possibility we could get caught. I think that drove Regina to go even harder. Though she wasn’t pleased we weren’t getting freaky and adding Isabelle to the mix, she sure did enjoy this as a substitute.

  Only once did we have another issue: when a mushroom the size of a rge house suddenly sneezed out spores. Regina had been ranging ahead at this point, making sure there weren’t any other hidden creatures ready to ssh me in half with their metal tails, or any other defense mechanisms they might have.

  Once we were done with the ranging, a disappointed Regina marched off to rejoin the main bulk of the team, and Isabelle waved a thankful goodbye my way.

  The next ranging that happened involved myself, Tara, and this time Chrysta.

  Tara spent almost the whole time talking about herself. It was a welcome relief after having Regina trying to shove me between Isabelle’s legs.

  As for Chrysta, the ice ghost hovered nearby. She slowly rotated around in a rge half circle around us. Tara was supposed to scout the way toward Glumpdumpkin and the other towns with silly names, but she only wanted to tell me literally every detail about her life.

  “My brother got into drywalling because it was the only way to keep my dad from decring bankruptcy,” she started.

  “Is that so?”

  “And he had a girlfriend for a while, they got along really well… or so we thought! As soon as my brother went into drywall she turned into an awful hag. She broke up with him less than a month after that. She was trying to pressure him to go into something else. She wanted an engineer, a dentist, a doctor, a wyer. She really wanted that cash and that prestige.” She made a raspberry. “Pfffffbbbb, gold diggers. Gross.”

  I barked out a ugh. “Yeah.”

  “Even worse than that, gold diggers who have pretensions that they’re something they’re not.”

  I couldn’t disagree with that.

  “I was kind of annoyed when he started dating one of my best friends from school, but, you know, she always had a crush on him. I couldn’t really do much about it. He’s the breadwinner, you know, and so that gives you a certain amount of say with what you do with your life.”

  Blinking several times, I took some time to process. I really liked Tara’s energy, even if it was a bit much, but some of the stuff that came out of her mouth. Wow.

  “So enlighten me as to what your other siblings are doing right now?”

  “Oh! Right. Well, I’ve got an older sister, Bethany, who works with old folks in a care home…” She continued to talk for nearly two hours. I learned all about Bethany (she was married, had just had her second child, wow, and wanted to be a nurse but couldn’t hack it), followed by Tara’s younger sister Danielle. Dani, being youngest, had tried to act spoiled for a while, and hadn’t gotten very far with that since their parents weren’t doing well financially.

  “She’s been pretty bummed out that she doesn’t get the kinds of phones and computer and car that her friends at high school do. But we kept telling her to study, study, study, you know? If you’re smart, you can do anything.”

  She stopped and turned to me slowly. “Know what she wanted to be?”

  “What, like an Insta influencer?”

  Her face transformed into one of sheer astonishment. “How did you… did somebody tell you already?”

  “Nope. Good guess.”

  “Ugh! She can’t make money off that garbage. And you know, I’m worried that all the money I’m funneling back into my parents so they can make payments on the house and not get evicted… maybe I shouldn’t. People need to get themselves together, you know? They should do the work themselves.”

  I considered my mother, frail under the thin hospital sheet and the tube running into her nose, supplying her with oxygen. How just that little mound of cells in my mom’s body had overwhelmed her, my dad, and then me. Only Sarah hadn’t been affected, and that was because my sister was colossally self-centered.

  “Anyway Danielle is probably gonna end up being a friggin gold digger, or film for XXXfans. Ugh, I’m really gd I’m stationed up in the Arctic Circle where I don’t have to watch any of that happen in real time.”

  I ughed at the cover story they’d given us. The portal… the portal had been all the way out in the middle of nowhere. In a little cave, on a nondescript mountain, in the vast expanse of wilderness in the middle of Aska. We really were up there, doing our part.

  She stretched her hands over her head and yawned. I was treated to a show of her belly button as the short cropped shirt rode up. The way her skin was going metallic bronze was awesome, like she was one of those living statues in the big cities.

  The yoga pants were blue gray today, a color that shouldn’t really have done anything for her, but it somehow really worked. I got to see every muscle movement in her legs and in her butt. It was frankly incredible. Tara was like a pro tennis pyer here.

  I was pretty sure the system, and Physicality in particur, was making all of us into more perfect physical specimens over time, but I got the feeling Tara had started out pretty darn beautiful.

  “Ugh, all this walking gets me tired. I wish we could slip out and you could rock my world.” She grinned and leaned in. “Too bad we have this deadbeat chaperone.”

  “You’re bad,” I said.

  Chrysta joined us a little while ter. Tara greeted her warmly before ciming the need to scout ahead and get the y of the nd out that way.

  “What is a deadbeat?” Chrysta asked when she was gone.

  This is Christopher’s mouth working open and closed in extra embarrassment and shock.