Anything ~ 28!

Luke looked around in satisfaction as he counted the number of craters in the area. To the casual eye, this place looked like the site of a scattered meteor spell. The sand had finally stopped attacking him after he let it alone to suffer for a short while, so he returned to looking over the various plants that were growing in the area.

Not only the lotus coffins, but the other various plants that were arranged in groups a good distance from each other. He didn’t understand most of them, but he knew what their base forms were. In each group there was a huge mushroom that was constantly smoking, a small watermelon, tiny plants that he assumed were seedling trees, a single lotus coffin, and a ton of flowers. Each group was a solid fifty feet from the next one, which made Luke wonder if he had actually found the camp, or if this was just a workstation. “Eh. Andre will tell me.”

After putting the thoughts out of his mind, Luke looked around for any other attackers - human or nasty bug. What he found instead was the Bard, who stood there waving at him. Luke looked at the man, then around for whatever the source of the hallucination was. The wavering image of Zed shook his head, and his voice whispered into Luke’s ear. “Hi there, Luke! No, I’m not with you right now, but my party notification Mastery reached a new Tier. I can project myself to anyone in my party at a really huge distance now.”

“Go away.” Luke waved his hand through the mirage, trying to determine if this was caused by the plants he had been looking at. He’d need to sample them and see if-

“Luke.” Zed’s voice lost all its humor. “Now that I found you, I’m guiding Taylor over, so bear with it. Also, I’m here to warn you… lots of Ascenders are coming through the villages out here. Some of them look really official, most of them look… nasty. Mercenary, assassiny, sneaky-snake type. They’re all looking for us. Luckily for me, I’ve been here forever and everyone in the area loves me. I’m able to scatter the Ascenders without too much issue currently, but if you keep kicking up mushroom clouds of sand everywhere, it’s gonna be hard to hide.”

“The sand attacked me.” Luke grumbled angrily.

“Of course it did, you loveable crazy man.” Zed spoke like a doting father, then looked to the side. His mouth worked as though he was talking to someone, and he nodded before turning back to Luke. “Have you seen Andre? I haven’t been able to reach him.”

“Portaled out over there.” Luke jerked his thumb in the general direction of the Druid’s point of egress. “Looks like mana levels are creeping up.”

“Interesting.” Zed hesitated for a long moment. “Listen, Luke. Andre’s having a really hard time with all of this. I can normally soothe him through stuff, but I’m really busy working with all the border towns; I’m getting them ready to be farmers again. Once we have a solid ring of fertile land, we need to begin pushing people into there to work the land. That’s my task in all this, and I gotta tell you… convincing people to do what generations have warned against is abyssal hard. Great Potentia, but hard.”

Luke decided to go about his day, since he couldn’t escape the chatterbox. “Andre’s fine. I talked to him.”

Zed winced and glanced to wherever Taylor was. “Oh, no. How mangled is he? I can maybe find a healer-”

“He went home to take a nap, you windbag.” Luke growled at the Bard. “Have you seen any rocks around here? I really want to set up some defenses, but I have literally no materials to work with.”

“Wait for Andre, those flowers he’s growing are… multipurpose.” Zed shuddered at some memory. “He was just about ready to start forming a Grove, is what he told me the last time we talked. Remember how well that worked against the Chimera? Imagine one that he’s been working on getting ready for weeks. I think he just kept putting it off so that he could save all the people stacked up over there.”

“Wait. Save them?” Luke looked at the sunburned, partially mangled people with flowers growing out of their noses. “He’s tossing them into flowers. I’m almost positive they’ll never see the light of day again.”

Zed gestured grandly to the nearly empty expanse of the desert. “The other option is to let defenseless Ascenders sit under the sun while random murder-bugs appear to eat them. He’s doing what he can to make sure they don’t die pointless deaths.”

“Oh. That makes more sense. Waste not, and all that.” Luke nodded approvingly at the actions of the Druid. “Use every part of the person.”

“…Yeah.” Zed shook himself, then gestured to the south. “Taylor’s here, you two have fun out there in the heat and terrible conditions! I’m off to eat some fluffy bread.”

His image popped like a soap bubble just as the Mage arrived. She glanced at Luke, and raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow. “Where in the abyss did you go?”

“Found a Descender Scar. Got trapped there for five minutes.” He shrugged in annoyance and looked around. “Using these people was your plan. You sure you’re okay with doing that to Andre?”

“How did you…” Taylor stopped speaking as Luke smirked. “Ah. I just told you it was my plan. Got it. As for that Scar, did you close it?”

“Not yet.”

“Please don’t. When we grow the farmlands and such out, we should be able to set that place up to produce aged wines and such. It’ll allow the destitute people of this area to have a solid source of income, as well as becoming a draw for tourists and such.” Taylor nodded as an entire business plan was drawn up in her mind. “Aged meats, cheeses, and wines on demand? That’ll likely become the center for the very wealthy to visit.”

“We’ll be doing something else by then.” Luke reminded her just as a portal opened nearby. A much-refreshed Andre stepped out, and he waved at the others.

“Morning. Or whatever it is here.” He stretched and looked around with a frown before shaking his head and showing a rueful grin. “Ugh. Yeah, good call on making me go to sleep, Luke. I need to stay off those wake-berries for a while. Are we ready for a Grove here, or should we go elsewhere?”

“Here should be fine.” Taylor smiled at him in return. “Once we have a visible base, we should start drawing in more attackers. The more we capture, the faster we can restore the desert, right? We don't even need to feel bad about it because they were coming after us first.”

“I suppose.” Andre’s face settled into a carefully neutral expression. He lifted an arm and began moving it in swirling motions. Droplets of blood flung away from him, instantly being absorbed into the sand around them wherever they fell. From there, vast swaths of loose sand began swirling around them. Soon they were in a massive whirlpool of shifting sand, and Andre’s motions started becoming more complicated as the sand started joining together into complicated patterns. “I have to thank you for letting me fix that huge area that got poisoned, Luke. The land counted that as me performing a great service, and I was blessed with a new Ability.”

“Happy to help.” Luke chuckled as he remembered spraying poison across the Druid, as well as the huge area that the fish had toxified. “Really, anytime.”

“I’m going to officially request: please no.” Andre’s voice was calm as he continued his work. Soon the loose sand had joined together into a veritable terrarium-home of sandstone and quartz-glass. “Celestial algae, this takes a lot outta me. Speaking of, that algae the fish had in it is an amazing detoxifier. Probably wouldn’t have noticed if my face wasn’t melting off at the time.”

“Yeah. Sorry about the whole…” Luke waved a hand at Andre’s general ‘face’ location. “How’d you survive that one?”

“I couldn’t degrade any further.” Andre’s enigmatic reply didn’t explain the situation any better, but he covered the rest of what he would have said by switching away from the earth, and onto the plants. He chuckled lightly as the trees stopped growing only a few seconds later. “Oh right, I basically have no mana regen right now.”

His eyes rolled up into his head, and he fell onto Luke. The Murderhobo caught the top of his head in his left hand, and sighed as he let a drop of his already-dwindling mana-water splash on the floor. It rapidly expanded into a light fog that filled the newly-made building with a high density of power.

Taylor started breathing heavily as her skin cracked and began bleeding. “I think we need to discuss that unicorn horn you found.”

“Snail shell.”