Chapter 62: Reclaimed Ground

It was a feast. Everyone brought food from their own homes, and they built a few more fires just to have room for everyone to cook. There were several kinds of bread, sausages, a kind of spiced grits with little pieces of meat in it that someone cooked into a creamy consistency over the fire, and even several desserts.

Arthur had started getting used to the sheer mass of food young demons ate. Their daily calorie count would put small whales to shame. And the energy went to an overall active lifestyle and system skills. After a long walk, setting up camp, and various games, the devastation that fell on the food was something he’d remember forever.

A few other games came after that, but none lasted particularly long. Instead, people milled around, had conversations, ate, ate again, and generally just hung out with each other. It was beautiful. Arthur didn’t even know if they realized his plan had worked, but it had.

And best of all was Mizu. He glanced to his side to see her sitting there not-so-daintily eating her second sausage, this one cut up into the spicy grits, which she was shoveling down greedily with a spoon.

She loves her food, Arthur thought. But whatever tension and stress that was plaguing Mizu had now fully dissipated, washed off at some unknown point by the jokes, fun, and general camping-induced joy she had been thrust into.

“Where’s Onna going?” Arthur asked.

“Looks like she’s going to ask Chuck how to throw a dagger better. I think she probably likes him,” Mizu said.

“Really? She said that?”

“No. But if she wanted to get better at throwing daggers, she’d ask Ern or Spiky.”

Arthur watched as Onna got Chuck’s attention, who in turn seemed surprised and pleased. The dagger quickly became a prop while both of them pretended to care about the lesson instead of the interaction itself.

“Oh, huh. Well, good for her. I’m glad for them.”

“You think he will… like her back?” Mizu looked doubtful.

“Oh, probably. Onna’s pretty great. And I’m not sure she’ll give him much choice, anyway.”

“True. It’s like Itela and Karbo. I think she probably told him how that would go.”

“Or you and me,” Arthur said with a smile.

Mizu mirrored the smile.

“You aren’t supposed to know that. I was supposed to have been subtle.”

—

The day was, overall, a rousing success. Nobody was injured, everyone had fun, and by the time the light was dying most people were visibly exhausted from all the activity in the thin mountain air. Arthur spent some time making some hot cocoa, which he passed around, and they sat down to tell ghost stories.

The hard part was that, shockingly, the demons had no concepts of ghosts at all. It wasn’t a thing in their mythos. Which meant that actual, literal ghost stories were out. And while scary stories were a thing, oral scary stories weren’t. Arthur did his best.

“And finally, she had enough. She screamed until her boyfriend drove the carriage onward, as fast as possible. He thought it was silly, but when they finally stopped and he got out, he found a gold hook hanging from the door!”

“That’s… Arthur. That’s not even scary. How could the hook rip out? He could have just run to keep up.”

“Look, I’m trying to share a deep cultural tradition here. It’s not my fault that you don’t have cars. Or radios. Or ghosts. Or… you do have making out in the woods, don’t you?”

“I hope so,” Milo said, before getting elbowed in the ribs by Rhodia. “What’s that for? It’s half the reason we came on this trip. It’s on our written itinerary, for the sake of the gods. Ow!”

After Arthur gave up on the scary side of things, the others had plenty of other stories to tell. Everyone had a story or two of some kind of heroism, where the hero saved someone, helped someone, or otherwise solved a big problem in a dramatic way.

Ern and Chuck both came from multi-generational lines of warrior classes, and both had stories of some grandfather or uncle who had stumbled on some terrible beast in the wild, strove against it, and managed to come through alive through terrible odds. Rhodia had a surprisingly funny story about a potter relative who had to create dishware on short notice for a wedding, only to find the bride canceled the original ceremony in favor of one with a brand-new surprise fiancé who wanted kebabs instead.

Everyone had something. Mizu’s story about an emergency trip made by her grandfather to revive a distant, necessary well for a town in crisis went over well. Lily’s half-remembered family favorite about a merchant who found himself without funds to get home unless he could sell a load of low-grade iron ingots to a town without smiths did just fine. And then it was Milo’s turn.

“So my dad, he’s going exploring, and the kicking off point is a small village named Arnt. He told me the whole village is only there because some absurdly high level warriors wanted to live next to a dungeon they liked particularly well. Otherwise, it would be too far out to be safe. And he’s going there by wagon, right? A wagon that, besides him, is hauling dried wine.”

“Dried wine?” Arthur whispered to Mizu, questioningly.

“Wine without water. They boil it out to make it cheaper to ship. It’s stronger.”

“Anyway, the wagon driver is a good guy, and he’s got plenty of dried wine, and they decide they could, in theory, take a glass out of each barrel without anyone noticing. They talk about doing that for days, without doing it. And then, on the last night before they get there, they do it. He said there were more than twenty barrels and they took a glass from each one. And dad can pack it away, but not like the wagoner. The wagoner was so good at it, dad said that that man had a talent for it. And at some point in the night, dad stops remembering things, and next thing you know he’s waking up in Arnt.”

“Hung over?”

“Absolutely hung over. So hung over, in fact, that he’s embarrassed about it. The wagon driver cooks him a massive greasy breakfast to help, but then dad leaves because he doesn’t want the town fathers to see him looking like he does. He figures he would say goodbye on the way back. Anyway, he’s out there for a month, in the wilderness, running from beasts, scaling cliffs, all that. Making detailed maps of everything. But he’s not getting experience like he should. He was expecting a couple of levels to different skills, and the system just won’t give them.”

“Oh no,” Mizu said.

“What?”

“Just listen. I can tell what’s going to happen.”

“So he forges onward through the toughest terrain known to man, working out the entire grid he planned to walk, and at the very end of things, he’s at the farthest point he intended to get to in his exploration, way out past where anyone has ever been. And he sees a town. An entire town, in the middle of unpopulated nothing.”

“Was it un-towned people?” Lily asked, suddenly interested.

“No. Not at all. Too orderly for that. Too many things you could only get from cities, and the town is too small to have made all of them. It’s a town that shouldn’t exist, out there where nothing should be. And he goes in and…”

“Here it comes.” Mizu’s eyes were twinkling.

“And he asks what town it is, and it’s Arnt. Because even though the wagoneer was good at drinking, he still got pretty drunk. And in his drunken stupor, he took them an entire night and most of a day’s ride in the wrong direction. They went into land that had already been explored, and dropped dad off in a completely different town. Dad’s been this intrepid explorer re-mapping known territory for an entire month, and not getting experience for it because you don’t get experience for that, as an explorer.”

“And so it was just a bust?” Arthur asked. “It’s funny now, sure, but he must have been heartbroken.”

“That’s the thing. As soon as he’s had everything explained to him and he’s moaning in disappointment on the floor of some small-town mayor’s house while everyone is trying to comfort him, he gets an achievement. It’s Reclaimed Ground, or something like that. He showed it to me once. It’s like the system thought it was funny, too, and had mercy on him. It wasn’t as much experience as he should have gotten, but it made his map making better in a couple of ways that would help in places people had already been, that sort of thing. And he got a story out of it, which is the main thing.”

And then it was time for s’mores. Arthur explained the basic process to everyone, handing out chocolate, crackers, and marshmallows to everyone. Not a single person managed to conceal their doubt about them, but went along with it anyway, dutifully roasting their marshmallows over the fire until the first of the batch was done and they took initial cautious bites.

“Oh, hell. That’s good,” Milo said, his mouth still full. “It’s almost entirely sugar, but it’s good.”

Everyone agreed, demolishing what Arthur had thought was a plentiful stock of marshmallows, chocolate, and crackers in several rapid-fire rounds of smore-making. And then it was time to sleep.

Smores were the last thing that Arthur had planned for the trip. They had been camping, and had done at least most of the camping things he considered tradition. People had fun. Most of them weren’t going to love sleeping on the ground, but nobody really did. That was just the price you paid to camp in the first place.

“You did a good job,” Mizu said, snuggling up on the log. “And look at that.”

She pointed upwards, and he saw stars, thousands and thousands of literal stars almost clogging the sky. There was no Milky Way, whether because this world wasn’t in a galaxy in the same way or just because he wasn’t looking in the right place. But that that didn’t matter. He could always Spiky about that, later. In the moment, all Arthur wanted to do was enjoy the moment.

“I don’t know any of the constellations.”

“Well, that,” Mizu pointed at the sky, “That crossing shape, that’s The Duel. And the one that looks like a tree is The Balance.”

“Are they all named after concepts like that? I think on Earth they were mostly animals or old heroes.”

“Most of them. But not all. See that one?” Mizu pointed out an especially bright assembly of stars directly overhead. “That one never goes away with the seasons. You can always see it. People say it’s always watching.”

“What’s it called?”

“It’s The Bear.”