Chapter Four-Hundred Sixty-Nine |
I don’t think I can keep my nose out of all the prep. It’s one thing to try to not think about pink elephants, but it’s another to try to ignore them when that’s all anyone is talking about. At least the ravenkin’s connection to me is a lot thinner now, so they can only get the vaguest idea of what I’m thinking about.
I guess all that practice trying not to think in Teemo’s ears will pay off in me not giving anyone too big of an advantage. If my ravenkin and scions want to know what the delvers and dwellers are planning, they’ll have to figure it out themselves.
Which they’re more than happy to do. The competition isn’t official yet, but everyone knows at least vaguely which side they’re on, and are planning accordingly. My enclaves are already trying to crack down on my denizens wandering through, ushering them out of sensitive areas, instead of mostly ignoring them.
They even know about the wyrms and rockslides, and though they’re harder to weed out, I think it’s good training for my denizens to have to learn how to deal with people who know how to find them. Poe is leading the intelligence efforts, with Leo and Zorro happy to help, and it’s fun to watch the methods start to get refined already.
My enclaves are focusing on getting crafting materials, wanting to make sure their gear is at least comparable to what the experienced delvers are going to be bringing along. Said adventurers also seem to be after good loot, with a lot more either hitting nodes or dressing their kills for materials. Everyone wants to look the part of the serious adventurer, and I’m all for it. Not only will it make the competition more interesting, it’ll also help them be ready for the raid on the Betrayer.
I’m also slowly releasing more of the anti-lifedrinking belts. They’re still only for harder encounters or more hidden chests, but if they were rare in those before, they’re more like uncommon rarity now. I’m not even worried about hurting my antkin enchanters, as they’re getting buried in orders for the enchantment on all sorts of gear. Not everyone can replace their belt, so there’s still plenty of room for my antkin to make an impact there.
And for my side of the upcoming competition, the ravenkin are also scouting out where they want to hide the keys. The forest and tree are great candidates of course, but there’s two other places that I think could be great for the keys: the worldfruits, and the labyrinth.
The first will require them to perfect the wingsuits. They’ve all experimented with sheets and cloaks by now, and while all of them are excited to do more, most of them recognize they’re not really cut out for creating them. Still, there’s plenty of weavers and clothiers in the enclave to experiment.
I think the spiderkin are aware of the suits, but instead of trying to sabotage them, they’re working on countermeasures. A variety of bolas looks to be their best effort so far, but they haven’t had a chance to really test it out, so they don’t know if it’ll work as well as they hope.
Honestly, I think it’s the kind of problem the delvers will have a better answer to than my dwellers. The worldfruits are going to be ripe for abuse by aerial harrying, and I have to imagine most experienced delvers have something for a situation like that, but we’ll have to see.
The labyrinth will also be fun for my birbs if they can use gravity to trip the traps. I expect to see more than one group disarm a trap, only for a birb to trigger the mechanism more directly with a well placed gravitic push. Delvers will need to learn how to actually get out of traps, instead of only avoiding them.
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An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, sure, but sometimes traps happen, so it’ll be good for the delvers to know how to get out of them, too. I haven’t seen too much in the way of shrinking or phasing, or other ways to get into or out of places. Maybe the delvers don’t often learn that sort of thing, or maybe it’s harder than it seems like it should be?
I might just be too used to having Teemo and his shortcuts to get my denizens where they need to be. I have seen a few shadow affinity folk slip through those, but that’s about it. Either Staven will have a potion or something to introduce to the delvers, or I’ll have to float the concept past the antkin alchemists to see what they come up with.
I might want to do that anyway, come to think of it. I doubt the Betrayer is going to have nice wide corridors for us to waltz down. He might be the effective final dungeon, but I doubt he’s going to be some wide open crystalline cave or sprawling gothic cathedral. We might be looking at something closer to underwater caves, but possibly filled with magma instead.
Ugh, I hope not. That’s going to be just another of the things we’ll need to try to scout out, once Order and them find where it is. I even let my attention slip sideways, wondering if they have anything to tell me, but my little slice of the night sky is as I left it, no notes or map to be found.
If it was easy to track down, someone might have done something about it already.
I check in with Doppler and the others out looking for some stagnation, too, and things seem to be going pretty well there. As far as Doppler can tell, they’re officially off the maps, so Yvonne has slowed the group down a bit. Not only does she need to add to the map, but it’s also smart to take it slower in unknown territory.
They’re not in proper snowdrifts, but I think they’re in at least some version of a taiga, though the trees are gigantic, like redwoods that have needles instead of leaves. Days and nights still seem to be mostly normal, so they’re not getting into arctic territory for a while yet, if that’s even a thing here.
I’m pretty sure this place has normal planets and moons and such, but it’s not like I can go up high enough to look, and I don’t remember the math or other experiments people used to prove the Earth is round, either. Anyhow, they haven’t found anything too nasty way out there just yet.
It makes me wonder if the stagnation is still asleep or something. The flows don’t exist that far away, with the few weak currents they spot looking like things from other subterranean dungeons of one variety or another. Part of me wants to try to recruit them, but I don’t think they’ll have the time to get ready to actually provide any help before we need to go.
Yvonne hasn’t had anything to really say about this sort of stagnation, so I take the time to look through Doppler and Rocky’s eyes to see if there’s anything to learn. Thankfully, there is.
I haven’t had too much of a chance to look at local stagnation, but I did catch a few glimpses of the weirdness around the Maw, and this stagnation is a lot different. With the Maw, the stagnation felt like it was actively refusing to do anything, a rigid resistance to change. The mana way out here, though… feels like it’s stagnant because of momentum. There’s a lot of mana just kinda laying around. Rocky notices me watching, and he does a few simple exercises. The mana directly around him moves well enough, but the mana I can see in my territory always seems to flow along with the movements, creating larger flows.
But out in the middle of nowhere, the mana takes a lot more effort to get moving. If the stagnation around the Maw was actively fighting, this mana lazily does what it has to, then settles down quickly. Rocky even has Pul do some practicing while they walk, and I can see how adventurer magic works differently from that of my scions and denizens.
Pul still doesn’t create big waves in the general mana, but he does make little warm spots. Rocky can then grab those and start to make actual movement, though the sheer mass of the mana around them makes the energy bleed away pretty quickly.
Still, I think that’s going to be a vital thing to keep track of when we go after the Betrayer. Delvers definitely put more energy into the surrounding mana than my scions do, but my scions are much better at actually controlling what energy is there. It’s looking like the competition with the delvers and dwellers is going to be a good dry run for the Betrayer. We’ll need to work together to either break the stubborn stagnation, or to motivate the lazy stuff.
Hopefully they’ll find a knot way out there so I can get a better look at the hard stagnation and how it reacts to being messed with. I’m not paranoid enough to think the Betrayer planted all the knots around the world, but he definitely knows how they work, and seems to know how to use them.
If I know how to untie those knots, it’ll make it a lot easier to unravel the Betrayer once and for all.
