An Unexpected Twist

“Oh, I’m picking something up,” Estelle excitedly reported about forty minutes into their hike. It had been somewhat slow going and John was somewhat grateful that they had found something this close to their landing site. Between their relative inexperience in cross country hikes and the terrain being uneven and broken up by tangled roots, John guessed they had only traveled a mile or so.

He could only guess since the gadget Estelle had produced to help them make their way back to where they started was more like a waypoint than a measuring tool, only letting her hone in on its direction.

‘At least Candle’s enjoying the wild,’ he thought as the fox spirit bounded ahead of them, near the edge of her tether. She took to the woods like she had been born there, running around the roots and jutting stones with ease. The energetic spirit even managed to help them find more traversable routes over the uneven ground. It didn’t hurt that the time spent summoned allowed her rank to increase.

“Anything your scanners say about it?” Vivian asked, brushing a lock of hair away from her flushed face.

“Just that it’s a strong mana signature,” the witch answered. “Seems like it’s too muddled for Sky to pick up anything concrete.”

“Whatever it is, it seems to be coming from the stone,” Verida added. “I can’t get a better read on it and if I didn’t have Estelle’s direction as to where it is, I might not have sensed it.”

“S-should we send the drone out and hang back?” Kiera asked, nervously fiddling with her fingers. “Just to make sure there’s n-nothing bad around it?”

“That’s far from a bad idea,” Senka said, patting Kiera’s head affectionately. “We have the option, so why not use it. Better safe than sorry.”

“I can have Candle go too if there’s a safe spot in range for me to stand,” John added. “She just hit Rank 2 so I’ve got thirty meters to work with.”

“Sending our cute mascot out into danger? How could you!” Beth protested overdramatically, even miming like she was about to faint from the scandal of it.

John laughed at her antics. “I’m sure Candle’s more than able to handle it. She is from the forest originally. Isn’t that right, girl?”

The fox spirit energetically weaved around John’s legs as he fed her their idea. Communication with her was an odd experience, he had decided. There was a lot more pushback from her than his elemental spirits, which made sense, but John could incentivise her with pats and get far more complex things done with her since she had more of a mind.

For the next few minutes, they marched towards the thing the drone detected in relative quiet. Once they got close, Estelle began to fiddle with the controller as they stopped, a break in the trees just visible ahead of them.

“Got the spot on camera,” she announced, turning to the rest of the party and presenting the display from the drone’s camera. Sky-Eye hovered above a rock-filled clearing, with spires of stone and large boulders strewn about haphazardly. On the far side of the clearing stood a nearly sheer cliff face that stretched about one hundred feet up. The rocks, both the ones on the ground and comprising the cliff face, were a dull grey except for veins of something that looked like crystals gleaming in the sunlight running over their surface.

“Well, I’d say those crystal bits are likely the source of what we’ve been picking up,” Vivian surmised. “And it doesn’t seem like there’s anything around.”

“Still going to send Candle in,” John said. “Can’t tell if there’s some kind of effect those rocks are putting off or if it’s just ambient energy they’re putting off.”

John moved towards the clearing with Candle in tow. Before he made more than a few steps, Anita stopped him.

“I think I can help,” the eager girl said, holding up her hands. From her fingertips, white fungal growths grew out like a root network. “I can send these out to feel the mana.”

“Suppose more eyes, or mycelium, on the task can’t hurt,” John remarked. “If anything starts coming back to you, um, let go of those and get back. You can do that right?”

Antia nodded then knelt down, giving John a good look down at her cleavage, and pushed her fingers into the soil. John tore his eyes away from the mushroom girl’s boobs and jogged closer to the clearing, then ordered Candle out into the clearing. The fox raced out, slowing only once she reached the border.

The spirit sniffed the air before she cautiously trotted out into the open. Nothing happened. John glanced back at Anita.

“I’m just feeling the mana coming from the rocks,” she reported. “It’s a lot more… gritty than the mana running through the forest back home.”

“That makes sense,” Verida spoke up, walking up to them. “I imagine a stronger earth source without other factors would feel differently.”

With nothing detected by Anita and Candle unaffected by anything, John cautiously got closer and shot off an Observe at the nearest rock.

Lura-Quartz Rock
Common
A sandstone rock with plentiful deposits of mana rich lura-quartz. Said quartz is charged with earth mana and holds it in a relatively stable state.

“Observe’s clean,” John called back. “Anita, you can stop the mushroom scan. I think we’re good to approach.”

Anita nodded, a pleased smile on her face, and she got up, brushing her dirt covered fingers off on her pants. The rest of the party ambled forward and Estelle landed Sky-Eye on a bare patch of ground in the clearing. The witch eyed the Observe display.

“Lura-quartz, huh? Not exactly the rarestest material, but I think there’s a decent market for it,” she said as Vivian began to research the mineral on the Auction.

“It’s got a low sale price, but it’s better than not having one at all,” the redhead stated. “Means we’ve already found something useful.”

“Not sure getting an abundant product is going to be a good carrot to get the dwarves or anyone else we found in the mining business,” Senka remarked.

“Well, hopefully there’s more goodies in the ground,” John said. “We just need to figure out how to get to it so we have proof.”

“No convenient quest or update to help us?” Beth asked.

John shook his head. “Nothing since the business quest yesterday. If I was a game dev, I’d have the update happen once we actually find something and it'd unlock some kind of resource gathering system. Since we’re looking to hire people to do the digging, we’re probably not getting anything like that.”

“So we’ve got to dig ourselves to find stuff the dwarves would later dig more out for us?” Anita asked. “Are you sure we shouldn’t have brought shovels?”

“I think we’d need more than a few shovels to get something concrete,” John said. “Like a pickaxe. Or explosives. Not sure if Fiery Pursuit has enough oomph to do anything against the rock.”

“Probably not,” Vivian chimed in, still looking at her phone. “The lura-quartz’s earth mana will enhance their toughness.”

“Wonderful,” John sighed. “Well, we can take some of the smaller rocks just to have some evidence and poke around a bit to see if there’s any sign of more minerals. Then we just have to mark this as a location to check back in on and move on to see if we can find anything else.”

“I can help with the marker,” Verida said. “A tree grown with my direct aid will be something hard to miss.”

The goddess strode to a relatively clear patch of ground and knelt down. She dug a small hole with her hand then placed a seed into the depression and shifted the dirt back over it. Verida took a step back and pressed her hands together in a prayer like fashion. A green and golden aura surrounded the goddess before flowing out and into the ground around the buried seed.

The ground shook slightly as the seed rapidly developed, sprouting out of the soil in a twisting manner as branches spread out from the trunk. It was the same color as the World Tree, though the luster of its golden bark seemed duller and it was far thinner.

The display of Verida’s magic faded once the tree was about four feet tall and she nodded, turning back towards the rest of the group with a pleased smile.

“There we go,” she said in a satisfied tone. “Now I can pinpoint this place without any issue.”

Kingdom Update
Regional Tree Planted. Lura-Quartz Field Marked. Schematic for Waygates added to Kingdom Management System. Create one at the World Tree Clearing and one at any location with a Regional Tree to establish seamless passage around the Kingdom.

“Well, that solves the travel issues,” John said as he pulled up the building interface. “We’ve got Stargates now.”

“I feel a bit silly,” Verida remarked. “We could have gotten this sooner if I had planted a tree in the village.”

“Eh, they weren’t so far from the clearing that we needed a lighthouse,” Beth piped in. “But now we know so we can do that later.”

“How much is it going to cost us to make these gates?” Vivian asked.

“Getting to that right now,” John responded. “Here it is.”

Waygate
A ring of woven wood keyed to the Pruzonia World Tree and its lesser brethren grown by the goddess Verida. Allows for instant travel between two points.
Requirements (per gate): Weaver Wood (50 lbs), Attuned Geodes (7)

Weaver Wood: The weaver tree is one of the many varieties growing in Purzonia’s forests. Its wood is highly flexible and receptive to mana.

Attuned Geode: A multifaceted crystal noted for its ability to synchronize to many mana signatures at the same time.

“Well, at least one of these is something here, somewhere,” John said, looking over at Verida.

“I am familiar with that tree,” she revealed. “There are a number growing not far from the clearing, so access to what we need would be limited to the effort needed to fell them.”

“Why do I have the feeling the geodes will be in the mountain?” Aeolia bemoaned.

“Why do things keep coming back to digging today?” Beth added a smirk on her face. She looked over to Estelle. “You got anything that could pick out these rocks?”

“I could re-tool the scanner to send out a pulse of mana with multiple elements,” the witch mused. “That should cause some kind of reaction we can track. Then I could use whatever we find to better calibrate something.”

“Think you can do that in the field?” Vivian asked. “If there are geodes in this area, I’d hate to just leave them undetected when there’s a chance we could get at least some idea of where they’re buried.”

“I can give it a try,” Estelle said thoughtfully. “I do have some tools on me and it should be as simple as tweaking the alignment of some of the mana gems to get them to send out elementally charged pulses. I just need a good flat bit of ground to work on.”

Before they could find a suitable patch of ground to serve as an ad hoc work station, the rustling of foliage drew everyone’s attention to the treeline. From the underbrush, a goblin stumbled out into the clearing. She looked worse for wear, the homespun clothing torn, revealing scratches to her green skin; thankfully, none of the exposed skin seemed to be heavily bleeding. Her short hair was a mess and full of twigs and leaves.

She frantically looked around, and when she realized they were there, she stumbled towards them, quickly saying something in her native tongue. Vivian, Estelle and Anita were about to race towards the wounded goblin, when Kiera spoke up, “W-wait!”

“Kiera, what…?” John tried to ask but the bluenette was quick to add, “I don’t recognize her. I n-never forget a face and I’ve seen e-every one of Teri’s people.”

That revelation gave everyone pause, even the goblin stopped her unsteady approach, which set off more alarm bells in John’s head. Teri was the only one of her people who understood them, so how could this one know Kiera had raised doubts about her origin.

‘But, how could someone get into the Kingdom?’ that question was the only thing giving John a reason to doubt Kiera’s assessment of the situation. Surely, it had to be that Kiera had just not seen her.

‘That still doesn’t explain how she ended up this far from the village,’ Senka remarked. ‘We had to fly over thirty minutes to reach this far, then hike for around an hour.’

That was something very damning and it seemed that everyone else seemed to be coming to the same conclusion, tension growing as concern bled away into caution.

The unknown goblin stopped her approach, her **** expression smoothly morphing into a grin.

“Well, ain’t that a lucky turn,” the goblin said, in perfect English, adjusting her posture into something more confident and self assured. Her disheveled hair lengthened before turning a shocking shade of bright pink, then the locks twisted until they were styled in twin buns with bangs framing her face. Then her worn and torn clothing dissolved into a black mist, giving everyone a brief glimpse of green breasts before it transformed into black dress of gothic design, with puffy sleeves and a long skirt.

To finish her transformation, she began to rise into the air, floating in place about a foot above the ground. She flashed them a wicked smile, cupping her chin with her hand.

“Let’s see if your luck will hold out!”