An looked at his hand, up at me, back down at his hand, then back up at me.

  “Do not go sticking your hand in a god again. That is an order.” I threw my hands up in the air. “I can’t even begin to understand my life. I just said that sentence and not only did it make sense, but I didn’t feel silly saying it.”

  An chuckled, then stiffened and fell back onto the variable-colored grass. His eyes rolled back in his head and his face went sck. A thrill of terror went through me watching him convulse and shake uncontrolbly.

  “Fuck,” I muttered, “Fuck fuck fuck.”

  I dropped to my knees and tried to get a Diagnosis check to come up, but nothing happened. This was well beyond—

  “Y-you’re not s-s-supposed to s-swear,” he muttered.

  “Huh?”

  He hadn’t stopped shaking, but it was all from ughter now. His hands had gripped his sides and he was rolling back and forth on the dirt.

  “You’re not dying instantaneously from the touch of a corrupted god are you?” I asked ftly.

  He ughed harder.

  “You think freaking me out is funny?”

  Wiping the tears away, he nodded.

  “Well it is. But it’s still a dick move.”

  ***

  About a half hour ter I was staring at a pile of logs cut down to build a rge raft. Larelle, Chrysta, Ivy and Isabelle were engaged in a contest to see who could get the most, and it looked like Ivy was close to meeting Chrysta, even though the ice ghost Nakamamon had all kinds of arms and all kinds of axes.

  “Boss man,” Cinzy said, sidling up to me. Fairy Poppins was out now and fluttering around the logs, tapping on them like a dragonfly ying eggs on the surface of the water.

  “How’d you sleep?” I asked.

  “Fitfully,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “I’m hel excited about meeting these people. Flumpdumpkin, can you believe it?” She giggled, the sound almost equal in adorableness to the look on her face.

  I confessed, grinning and chuckling, that I could not.

  The logs touched by the fairy Nakamamon began to shudder, and Tara had no trouble picking them up under one arm. These should’ve weighed hundreds of pounds, but instead seemed to weigh little more than a sleeping bag or a rolled up tent.

  “I wonder what the Flumpdumpkinites will be like. Or the Saxwhacketers. I’m imagining blobs of getinous ooze with big googly eyes and dopey smiles in Flumpdumpkin, and a bunch of anthropomorphic birds in Saxwhacket… each one has a saxophone that they use to py a game like croquet. What, why are you ughing?”

  When I finally stopped myself, I shook my head and blew out a loud sigh. “We will have to be ready to keep a straight face when the day comes where we encounter these people.” Honestly, what they were doing employing people in their early twenties with this kind of work, I could not begin to imagine.

  Near the water’s edge, Tara used some kind of Ranger ability to coax the boogie wood to straighten out. The wood creaked and groaned like the ice over a ke beginning to come apart. However, slowly but surely, the wood went ramrod straight.

  Cinzy waved a dismissive hand. “Nah. I’ll have them eating out of my hand in no time. That’s a promise.” When I gave her a thumbs up, she shrugged. “I need to start earning my keep around here. Everybody’s been working really hard so far… except Drat. I wonder about that guy.”

  “You’ll have plenty of work to do,” I told her. “Just so long as you don’t pull the kind of stunt An just did.”

  “Oh, Regina put him up to it. She’s got it out for you, you know?” She grinned. “I don’t know what you did to annoy her but you should apologize.”

  I probably hadn’t fulfilled my quota of deep dicking she seemed to require, the horny little minx. As if on cue, I locked eyes with her, where she was in the middle of stripping the bark off the trees and turning it into a crude rope. She was giving me a pouty look and I loved it.

  “What?” I called out.

  “Just waiting for the squishy little Healer and the even squishier little Bard to start pulling their weight in this expedition,” she called back.

  “Don’t make me order you to work quietly!” I shouted.

  “Someone has just made the shirt list!”

  “Well,” I told Cinzy, “I guess that settles that.”

  “Yeah.” She giggled. “Now it’s even worse than before.”

  “She’ll get over it.” Now it was my turn to wave a dismissive hand. She better have gotten over it. I hoped she’d get over it. A pit of fear opened up in my guts and made my body run cold. If Regina really was upset with me I didn’t know if I could handle it.

  “So I wanted to talk with you about the town when we make it.”

  “Great.”

  “Well, you and me will be in this together, okay? We’re going to have to work closely when we arrive.”

  “Oh?”

  She beamed another magical smile at me. Bards, I was coming to believe, were dangerous. If they could just influence your mood, they could really wreck some havoc on society. Civilizations could easily be id low by somebody like this. A Bard with the power to convince you could be an apocalyptic threat.

  I stifled a ugh.

  “I’ll need to know your intentions, pns and needs anytime we speak to the leadership of the natives. Chrysta tells me they have a small ruling council called a Shagnasty.”

  I lost it.

  After another good ten minutes the Guards gave up their game and Ivy colpsed on the ground, heaving, while Isabelle called her an idiot for trying something so stupid. Chrysta seemed to be winded also, floating down to the ground and lying beside the tree she’d been about to fell.

  Tara and Regina recruited Isabelle and Drat to help sh the logs together. The request had come in to use Trent to arrange the logs, and hold them in pce using earth. He had, of course, jumped at the suggestion. It seemed like he was trying hard to get back in the team’s good graces after the lunch boulder incident.

  Cinzy discussed how often we would meet, and how best to arrange time for going over reports, drafting requests, and how often to meet the town leadership. She seemed ready to drain the vast majority of my time.

  Just after lunch the raft was decred ready. It was a glorious thing, some thirty feet square, made of trees with their bark stripped and then shaved down almost square. They fit together exceptionally well, and I was amazed the whole project came together in a morning.

  “Okay!” Regina yelled. “Everybody aboard!”

  Muppin was loaded aboard first, and all the supplies that weren’t already shed to her back. Tara and Regina tied those on as well, in a ring around the enormous lumbering rock creature, in a way that gave anyone else a bit of a wall so they didn’t fall off. Afterwards they had the Guards on, and then the squishies in a ring in the middle.

  “There’s a web of rope all around Muffin,” Regina expined, guiding An’s hand directly up to the mesh of rope they’d created. “You’re tied to it by this bowline here, but you hang on to it anyway.”

  Then she moved to Cinzy and helped her, unnecessarily in my estimation. Cinzy told her she’d keep her hands and arms inside the ride at all times until it had come to a complete stop, and that she would enjoy her ride on America’s Roller Coast.

  Regina then gingerly took my hand in hers. With our super sexy Bard watching. The sensation of her smooth, warm hand gliding up my wrist electrified me. “Okay team captain who’s on my shirt list, you are going to want to hold on here, and then here.” Once I was holding on, she swiftly tied knots around my wrists and looped them around the mesh net.

  “Um, excuse me,” I said, watching Cinzy smirk. “I don’t want to be tied to this thing.”

  “I’m afraid that’s too bad. And if it somehow capsizes, you’re going to have to learn how to breathe water fast.”

  “This is what I get for being mostly useless?”

  “There is one thing you’re good for, and you can’t do that on the raft anyway,” she said. Another thrill of terror shot through me. Surely Cinzy could figure out what she was talking about and get that this banter was all an act. She wasn’t stupid.

  When I turned a terrified look her way, she lit me up with another glorious smile. “Tough luck, I guess.”

  Isabelle strode over on her totally healed leg, scowling. “As the person whose job is to keep people from being injured in the first pce, I have to use my Guard veto power and save poor Christopher.”

  “Poor Christopher is in your debt,” I said, and stuck my tongue out at Regina.

  “You just wait,” Regina said darkly, and headed off to strap An and Trent in.

  Christopher Fletcher who prefers to be known as Fletcher, Larelle said, you should know that the Rogue known as Drat but whose real name is Michael Kondrat is not in the area.

  “Regina, Tara, have we lost somebody?”

  A quick head count had them both frowning. “Where is that fifth squishy punk?” They went off to check the trees, but somehow Drat had reappeared by the time they were just about to head in. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next, he was just seated on the other side of Cinzy.

  He leveled a stare at me, expecting me to give him shirt for causing a slight dey, but the look was also bored. It was like he was daring me to micromanage him. And although it was annoying, he hadn’t technically done anything wrong. He was filling out his role on the team, and he was back where he needed to be when it was time to move.

  Cinzy let out a loud whoop that had to be magically enhanced, because both Tara and Regina were some two hundred feet away at the trees. Still, both of them jumped and whirled.

  “He’s right here after all,” Cinzy said in a much quieter voice, but the received thumbs up, and they returned.

  “What’s the range on that?” I asked.

  About 500 feet was the answer, though she was looking forward to the second level version of the special ability, because she was hoping to get better range out of the deal.

  With everyone on board, Trent got us moving by having the dirt lift the raft and push it out onto the ke.

  We now had six oarsmen, or oarswomen anyway, since they were all Guards and Rangers. Regina was put in charge of the rudder, while the four Guards each had a huge oar.

  For the time being, however, they unfurled a makeshift sail and attempted to use the wind to get us across.

  Guanelzi was indeed vast. As the shoreline receded further and further out, and gradually disappeared, the ke seemed for the moment like the only thing in the whole world aside from the sky. Big puffy clouds zily inched by behind the thin sheen of ambient magic, so they turned a variety of colors over the course of the next hour or so.

  The Nakamamon were everywhere. There were fish ones, jumping out of the water or putting a fin up out of the water. Several dinosaur adjacent creatures poked long necks above the surface to watch us pass. Enormous pancake-like creatures simir to Rafael the sky manta kept pace with us, and flew out of the water a few times to get looks at us. At the end of the first hour, a bulb of pure water and nothing else formed in front of the raft, and two rge basketball-sized spheres sat where eyes should be in the biggest octopus head I’d ever seen. It seemed like we’d crash into it, and a cry went up to Regina to alter course, but we never got closer to it.

  I ended up getting another achievement soon afterwards.

  Achievement: 25 Nakamamon encountered

  How many different varieties will you find? Will you ever encounter them all? Only time will tell.

  Reward: +3 skill points

  Those spheres fixated on us, slowly traveling the length of the raft and its occupants, keeping a good twenty feet away from the raft the whole time. Whatever it thought of the raft, we had no idea, but it finally vanished beneath the waves some ten minutes after it appeared.

  “I love it so much,” Cinzy said.

  “Me too,” I replied.

  “I don’t know why… I feel like I should maybe be terrified of a gigantic head and the eyes, but instead it’s just awesome. Look at this: blue skies, a little chilly, sweater weather is awesome, honestly, and blue seas. There are weird jellyfish creatures here and there, flying fish Nakamamon, some strange cluster of seaweed that looks like it might have eyes… What else could you ask for?”

  “Peace and quiet?” Drat said rather than asked.

  “Oh stop being a grumpy Gus and enjoy something for once,” Cinzy shot back.

  “If I do will you promise to stop talking?”

  She just rolled her eyes and leaned over into me. I could smell her now, and somehow she had a whole bouquet of good scents. I smelled buttered popcorn, for one, caramel, for two, chocote swirling in with coffee, and the scent of oncoming rain showers. Together they should’ve smelled overpowering at least, but they were perfect for some reason.

  I just chalked it up to Bard stuff and mented not reading the entire Pyer’s Handbook in cy or wood form.

  “I’m gd you’re not a grumpy Gus,” she whispered, with a hand on my knee.

  “Me too. Seems like a lot of effort to be that dour. I’m looking forward to our date,” I told her quietly, earning another big, warm smile.

  “I sure am gd we’ve got smooth sailing so far,” she went on.

  “Ugh, why’d you have to do that?” Drat asked.

  “What?”

  As if on cue, just waiting for us to spit at fate and Lady Luck, the whole ke shuddered and lifted up off the ground.

  “You had to go spit in her face,” Drat said in his usual ft tone.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about!” Cinzy shouted now.

  The transition from surface to air wasn’t quiet. It came with a roar of running water, even though the raft only teetered slightly back and forth. I thought we might go sliding off as the ke changed into a dragon and rose into the sky.

  “Imagine you’re driving down the road,” Drat yelled. “Smooth sailing. The moment you say ‘oh, we haven’t run into any traffic yet, bam! That’s the moment you piss in Luck’s coffee and she gets on your case.”

  Cinzy turned to me. “Is he an insane person?”

  “Oh wow, normally the grocery store is really busy this time of day. We must be lucky!” Drat went on in a high pitched female voice imitation, before dropping it. “And just like that, the grocery store fills up, and when you get to the registers or the self checkouts they’re completely rammed. Babies crying, Karens compining about how their coupons should work, businessmen loudly on their phones and everything.”

  “Well I. Am. Sorry!” Cinzy shouted over the roar of water. “I had no idea I had insulted Lady Luck, because obviously I didn’t believe in such bullshirt!”

  We did start to slide downward, the whole raft tilting to the left while to our right a massive column of water as big as a high rise formed into a worm shape. Larelle jammed her oar into the water and tried to use it as a lever, which worked for a good ten seconds before the oar snapped.

  Finally Garnet fshed. The huge reddish crystal dipped into the water and the whole raft froze where it was. Trent was also holding his hands out, eyes closed with a look of utter concentration. Sweat began beading on his forehead immediately and went dripping off.

  This is Christopher taking flight on a ke.