World Tree MUSH

    Far from the burning sands of Motabia there exist a veritable wealth of worlds that are very different from the desert planet. There's a staggering variety out there for the visiting. Plains, forests, mountains, oceans, rivers, swamps, volcanic plains, tundras... the list goes on. The possibilities defy belief.
    The dreamlike possibilities are the rich breadth and depth of worlds out there. The reality is that Alys Brangwin got lost because the jackass magician she's travelling with decided to up and vanish on her, as he is wont to do, and left her stranded out in the middle of...
    It's not really quantifiable as nowhere, because there's trees here, and plains, and a river, which is probably more water content than she's ever seen short of Aiedo's municipal cistern.
    If it were any other situation she might be admiring the delicious alienness of it all.
    Instead, there's a campfire set near one of the big trees. It's burning merrily, and nobody seems to be paying it much of any mind, although there's a familiar oiled leather rucksack, one of the only possessions Alys took with her from her home. Hmmm. Its owner is probably somewhere nearby.
    That's a pretty big tree, and it probably has a commanding view of the landscape. Which is, in fact, why Alys decided to scale the thing. She's got herself tucked on the highest crook she can safely reach, arms folded over the rough bark, scowl plastered in place as she scans the horizon for signs of her erstwhile travelling companion. He's out there somewhere.
    Discerning ears might pick out the sound of muttered curses. Virulent ones. A string of unbroken, unrepeated cursing that would do the saltiest sailor proud... but Alys mutters them very quietly, under her breath, simmering and waiting.
    The bastard's got to come back sooner or later... right?

     Of all the infinite possibilities in creation, the myriad array of worlds and their wonders, the one thing Alys probably never counted on was that Rune didn't abandon her on purpose. It's not like he *wouldn't've* - Rune has an extremely bad habit of disappearing at random and almost unpleasantly critical times - but for exactly once in his life he didn't mean to. He'd been spat out in the middle of some kind of insane city, a city unlike anything Algol had to offer in its modern day, a city like something out of the old dreams that danced in his soul when he slept, a city with spires of steel and silver under siege. Rome had been a cornucopia of chaos for the young incarnation, a whirling mess of everything going on at once, and as hard as he'd searched for Alys there, he hadn't been able to find her. 

     It's actually pure random chance that he stumbles across her now, but he'd never let her know that. 

     Rune just sort of sits down perpendicular to her, against the trunk of the big tree, his scepter clutched in one hand. 

     Two fingers peek around the edge of the tree in a lazy salute. "Hey." 

     That's it. There's no 'I'm glad you're okay' or 'I'm sorry for vanishing'. There's just a simple "hey", an acknowledgement that she's there and alive, and that he's there and alive. 

     He's probably in for it, but that's fine. She'd feel better about being able to hit him. About knowing that he's physically present, and that she's not dreaming. 

     Alys wasn't a huggy girl. And if Rune offered her an apology it'd just sound lame. Sound like an excuse. Sound like he was making up reasons he left her. Better to just embrace it. It'd let her get her anger out of her system and then they could get back to figuring out the lay of the land.

    There's a few seconds of silence, in which the sorcerer's voice could have been imagined. A trick of the wind, or a restless mind. Some stranger, far across the vibrant plains.
    Maybe she didn't hear him.
    Spmething dark hurtles down from the top of the tree, where she had somehow missed his approach over the plain.
    "You son of a /bitch/!"
    Nah. She heard him.
    The branch she'd thrown clatters harmlessly away, followed by a blur of black, red, white, and wild chestnut hair as Alys drops to the ground in a crouch. A fist whiffs inches from his probably-smirking face. "Don't you dare leave me out in the middle of nowhere like that /again/! D'y'hear me, you... you arrogant...!"
    Shes gotten angry at him before, but not like this. She's so furious she's shaking; can't even string words together. Then again, he's never left her in other /worlds/ before.
    Surprisingly, she doesn't hit him. She stands there shaking in her rage, looking like she's about to hit him, but... not yet. "What the hell were you off to this time? You could have left me a /note/! It would have taken you /five minutes/ and instead you leave me wondering where you've gone, no idea whether you're /alive/ or /dead/ or--or--"
    Ah. Right.

     Rune just sort of watches the branch miss. He watches her hit the ground. He's actually not smirking, for once - it's probably the only sign on his face that he didn't do it on purpose. The usual smugness isn't there. There's not any REPENTANCY, no, like, 'oh I feel bad about this,' but there's no smug and self-righteous smirk. The fist comes an inch from clocking him. 

     He's still just sitting there while she vents at him. She's shaking. His fingers drum along the sceptre distantly as he watches her, as dispassionate as he can manage. He plays with the front of his bangs for a moment as she peters off, like he's thinking. Then, he shrugs. 

     "Rome, apparently." 

     "Where were you?" He offers. "Here? Seems like a nice place for a hunter, right? Probably plenty of food, too. Although I guess after all that sand you wouldn't know where to look." 

     Rune releases the lock of his hair and shrugs again. "Did you find any work?"

    Throwing the branch is really more out of catharsis than anything else. Its shape is all wrong for throwing, not at all aerodynamic. Alys is good at gauging throwing weapons. She might not be able to use them as efficiently as those slashers, but she can do surprising damage when she throws a simple rock. She's got an impressive arm on her for being so young.
    The fledgeling hunter flares her nostrils at Rune's answer. Rome? What the hell kind of answer is that? That doesn't sound like any city she knows, and whatever it is it doesn't even sound like it's from Motabia.
    ...Irrelevant! He left, without saying anything, and now he's back, and she's furious, and...
    Where were you, he asks, so casually, so...
    She almost looks like she might use the slashers at her belt on him. Her face almost matches her tunic when he implies she'd be helpless out here.
    Oh, that's just too much.
    For a brief instant Alys is pretty sure she's actually seeing red. It's one thing to hear something like that said, like pretty metaphor, but she's sure for an instant that the green field is red as blood for a few seconds, and she can hear her heart thundering in her ears, and...
    Her fist flies out before she has the chance to think consciously to stop it. It's aimed right at the right side of Rune's jaw.
    "You abandon me without a word and the best you can come up with is to ask /me/ where /I/ was? Seriously?!" Her voice rises almost a full octave on the last. The effect might be ominous if it didn't crack at the same time. So annoying. But she's too angry to care at the inconvenience of the potential vulnerability. Way, way too angry. "You have the /gall/ to come back here and--"
    Did you find any work? Alys spins on her heel and faces her back to Rune, fists clenching so hard her nails bite into her palms. She draws in several deep breaths, though, and once she's noisily exhaled the last of them, she turns back around.
    Once she doesn't feel like eviscerating him any more, that is.
    "Yeah." She thumbs back upriver. "Up in the mountains. Some yokel needed some vermin cleared out. So I did. A few hours' work; probably a few hundred meseta if I'm doing my conversions right."

     There's the punch. 

     Rune doesn't *break*, he's not *that* weak, but it does get him clean in the jaw. He tilts to the side, his hair falling down slightly over his face to cast a shadow over his eyes. Good. She'd probably calm down, now. He hadn't actually meant to drop that bit about her being helpless - he'd meant it to be sympathetic, a fish-out-of-water syndrome, because he'd been the same way when he'd arrived on Motabia and found all that damn sand everywhere - but it came out that way anyway. Of course it did. Of course he couldn't just...*say* something like 'I'm glad you're alright.' 

     Stupid asshole. 

     Rune brushes his fingers through his hair as he sits back up. He can taste some blood. She probably knocked something loose. He'd get it healed later. He wouldn't spit, that's for damn sure. He just swallows, the taste of copper and liquid and sharp tanginess settled on his tongue. When he's sure he can speak without any blood dripping out of his mouth - coincidentally, about as long as it takes Alys to turn back around - he says, "Oh, good." 

     Rune stands up, tucking his scepter under his cloak. "That's probably enough for an inn or something. Then we can plan our next move." 

     "I," Rune sticks his hand into his pocket, then extends it, "Found a dropped coinpurse. Couldn't find the owner. Tried." He tried real damn hard, too. *Real* damn hard. "But there's enough in here that we should be able to eat a decent meal, and if we run into them later, I'll return it and pay them back what we take out of it." 

     "Funny money, though." It's just a Roman wallet, from modern-day Earth. "I wonder who thought of the shape. Seems worse than a coin pouch."

    "What?" Shaking her hand out, Alys frowns when Rune comments on saving for an inn. "No. There's nothing out here. I've been walking for hours from the mountains where I had that job," Alys points out. "/H-o-u-r-s/." She stretches the word out in that way only a budding sense of sarcasm can. "We'd be hiking until midnight just to get back."
    "And it's probably just a single crappy storage hut that hasn't got holes in the roof, anyway." She shrugs, leaning back against the trunk of the tree, sliding down until she can sit. "And then they'd charge us too much for that. No, we're saving this. At least some of it. I want a hot meal the next time we hit a real town. Something that's not dried, salted, smoked, or otherwise preserved. I'm sick of things that taste like sand."
    Heh. He found a dropped coinpurse and couldn't find the owner. Isn't that a coincidence? "Too bad." She's probably even less convincing about it than he is, awful opportunist that she is. If it were up to her, she'd look, but only cursory; and then those funds would be reappropriated. He comments on the money, though, and she leans over to squint at it. "...That's weird. You sure that's worth something, and not just some useless junk someone handed you?"

     "Alright, then." Rune shrugs and sticks the money back in one of his ephemeral wizard pockets. "We'll save it for a meal. Then again, I'm not entirely sure it's even safe to eat here. Place is weird. Money is weird. Food might be weird, too, come to think of it." 

     He tries to grin, but not so wide that he reveals any blood that might still be on his tooth. "Maybe your hot meal'll come to life and try and eat you or something." 

     "Anyway. Where even is the next town over? The only city I've seen was under attack from some kind of giant worm, so I didn't really get a chance to ask about food. And that's where I picked up the money. I'm pretty sure it's money; it has numbers on it, probably marking how much of it there is, and this thing seems like a coinpurse, but..." 

     He waves his hand in front of his face as he shoulders his scepter. "Well, if it'll take that long, we can talk about it on the way to your job. Might as well help out. Who knows, those vermin might turn out to be sandworms or mantises."

    "Don't care," the fledgeling hunter grunts, folding her arms and leaning back against the trunk. Her eyes slide back to Rune slowly, blue crisp and dark as an autumn sky. "Long as it's not hardtack, it doesn't matter. It tries to eat me, I kill it and collect the bounty."
    If only things were that easy.
    "Miles. That way." Alys flicks her hand dismissively towards what might be south, or maybe west. "Way over that way."
    She turns, squinting at him. "What? No. No, I /finished/ that job, lughead. In the time you were off wandering around in Rome. Wherever that is. Haven't had crap for luck finding anything else since, either. I'm almost out of food and I haven't seen a living soul in a day." Maybe it's his imagination, but her right hand twitches at that; just a reflexive twitch of the fingers.
    Not that Alys has ever breathed a word about it, but signs for an observant wizard point to the fact that she /really/ doesn't like solitude. At all. That probably explains his violent welcome.
    "Might as well tell you about the place, though. Might be we can circle back. They might have another job for us, if we're lucky. Maybe some more of them things popped up while I was away." She glances back to Rune, frowning as she picks up the rucksack and kicks out the campfire. "C'mon. We can start back to it. Too open here. Don't like it."
    ...She's walking, anyway, whether he does it or not. "Yeah, uh, no, they weren't sandworms. Wish they were. Thought the damn things were gonna kill me, but I was able to get up a tree. /Trees/," she adds, somewhat explosively, throwing her arms out wide in a gesture of incredulity. "Who'd have thought? This place is so damn weird. Where's all the goddamn /sand/?"

     "Oh, I see." Rune pauses. 

     His stomach rumbles. 

     "Sorry. I haven't actually eaten since we got separated. I guess I'm still catching up a bit." There it is - the first indication that it wasn't /his/ decision to dump her and run (yet). It'll probably be the only one. But it's one. "They had a sandworm in Rome. It wasn't exactly a sandworm, but it was close enough. There's a lot of Hunters here, Alys." 

     "Yeah. Trees." Rune stops to touch the one they're leaving, thoughtfully. Another memory from another life flashes through his eyes, and he twitches his lips in an irritated motion before turning away to join Alys. Steel, sky, and tree. Why did this new place remind him so much of things he never knew, but knew once upon a time? "Maybe it's terraformed. Motabia used to look like this, too." 

     "According to legend, I mean," he adds hastily. "So what were these monsters that drove you up a tree, anyway?" His smirk slides into place. "Were they that scary?"

    "You're a damn liar," Alys points out, jabbing an accusatory finger at Rune. She squints suspiciously when he mentions the last time he ate. "How come you gone so long without somethin' to eat, anyway? Been almost two weeks. Or maybe you're just bad at accountin' time."
    Maybe it's a grudging acknowledgement of his unspoken indication. If it is, it's probably the only acknowledgement she's going to give. Alys is all bristle. Maybe there's a little sentimentality deep down there somewhere, but it's something she actively stamps down. It's a survival skill.
    Maybe she's still glad to see him, though; glad to see the insufferable git hasn't gotten himself killed.
    They had a sandworm in Rome, he says, and she scowls, spitting over toward the side of the road. "Did they? Dammit. Figures. Sandworms, now, those I know." Everybody in Motabia does. Especially the dirt-farmers that live out in the sticks. "Well. Sounds like you got to have fun. I just spent a couple days wandering around. There aren't any /maps/ out here."
    She misses his moment of reflection at the tree. Her eyes are forward, on the road. He mentions maybe it's terraformed; that Motabia looked like this once upon a time. "Quit yankin' my chain, Rune. Still pissed off at you," she adds, half-turning as she walks to yank a slasher from its holster and jab it at him, the curve of its blade silver in the moonlight. According to legend, he says, backing down. She still squints at him suspiciously, but she doesn't pursue the argument.
    Her head tilts, and her eyes narrow somewhat dangerously when he hassles her about the monsters that treed her. "Hell if I know. Bigass things all covered in hair. Big black nose. Little round ears. Sound like a sandworm with indigestion or somethin'. Village yokels called 'em 'bears.' Had two of 'em. Man-eaters. Guess they don't usually, but somethin' got in these two." She stretches, indicating with her arms how huge the beasts were. "Never seen anything like 'em. Weird-lookin' things," she adds, shaking her head. "Only thing I could get for sure was to go for the eyes, and I had to do that from above. Damn shag coats on those things are so thick you can't even punch a blade through 'em. Had to bleed 'em. Get their eyes. Cut their throats. Oh, that was fun," she adds, sarcastic, bristling at his familiar smirk. It is, despite all of her fuss to the contrary, something of a relief to see. "Like to see you do better, though. And no cheating with your damn magic, either!"

     Rune stares at her for a moment. 

     "Two weeks?" He asks. It's the second sign that mayyybe this wasn't entirely on purpose, the second little break in his genuinely-in-control appearance. He recovers masterfully, sweeping his staff over his shoulder, and says, "Magic" by way of a thin explanation. That sounded like it was true, and if she claimed it wasn't, well, he could just shrug and ask how she knew. Easy. 

     "/Bear/?" Rune repeats, pursing his lips at the word. "Weird name." 

     He watches her stretch her arms, up on her toes to demonstrate the size. He considers this for a moment as she describes how they fight. Shag coats too strong for a blade. Claws. Sounded not dissimilar to something on his own homeworld of Deszolis, but the atmosphere here wasn't nearly that cold. Why would something like that exist here? Maybe it was a dangerous place, and all this beauty was just skin-deep. That wouldn't surprise him. He knew a lot of things like that. 

     "No thanks," Rune replies, waving his hand over his shoulder, "If I wanted to be a muscle-bound idiot I would've been born into a different place. Evidently my soul wanted me to be a wizard, so here I am." 

     The level of cynical bitterness he manages to keep out of his voice is impressive, but some of it leaks through anyway.

  "Quit bullshittin' me, Rune." One of Alys' slashers thuds into the dust perilously close to Rune's boot. She wrenches it back into hand as she passes it a pace or two later, casting him a violent look as she does. "I know better. I might not know how that magic of yours works specifically, but I know it ain't no damn catch-all. Even if you'd rather have me believe that."

  With a metallic /snick/ she returns the slasher to its holster. They're complicated-looking weapons, although she makes tossing them around look easy. Her skill will probably be even better, someday. She's shown no inclination towards picking up a different sort of weapon.

  Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

  "Weird name, weird creature. One of them things would snap /you/ in half like a toothpick, that's for damn sure." Alys gestures dismissively. Maybe the idea of him being snapped in half isn't so bad right now. She's not over being pissed off at him just yet.

  She turns, squinting at him at the bitterness in his tone.

  "The hell are you on about? We don't choose where we show up. We just do." Alys shrugs. "I sure as hell didn't choose to watch some two-bit brigand slaughter my family. Probably wouldn't even be a hunter, I think. Dirt-farmer, maybe... better off as a hunter, though. Better money, that's for damn sure."

  She's pretty bitter about that initial abandonment, too, and she doesn't even bother trying to hide it. Hm, maybe that's why she about ripped Rune's head off.

  "Leave me alone like that again, though, and I swear I'll kill you in your sleep, and don't think I couldn't do it." Alys glares, irritably raking wild hair out of her eyes. "Didn't even know if you were alive or dead. What was I supposed to do, sit tight and hope you showed up at the exact same place? /Ughh/." It's a sound of penultimate disgust. "/Wizards/."

  Not that it's really anything more than anecdotal. He's the only wizard she knows.

  Grumbling, she stuffs her thumbs into her belt as she walks, since she lacks pockets to put her hands in. "Where are we going after this, anyway? I'm gonna guess you don't have any sort of plan at all. Typical."

     Rune remains silent on the natures of bears and souls. He has no further thoughts he wishes to voice about furry horrors, nor does he wish to dwell overmuch on the nature of birth. Instead he shrugs and waves his cane over his shoulder at Alys. "If you have to know, we've only been separate a few hours for me. Less than a full day." 

     "How was I supposed to know that you've been here for two weeks? Do you even remember what happened?" His eyes flick over his shoulder at that; he's watching her carefully, curiously, almost probingly. There's something about that question that's more than just a simple inquiry - like he's looking to see a particular response. 

     "I don't know. We should probably get the lay of the lands first. They seem to be a bizarre quilt. If we're going to find enough work to eat, we'll need to know where work even is. I don't think hunting /bears/ is going to provide for long."

  "Ughhhh, I said quit bullshittin' me." Alys doesn't even bother to look over her shoulder this time, gritting her teeth and grating her words out between them. "I don't know what you've been up to while you've been gone, but it's been two weeks, and whatever you were off fartin' around doing, /I've/ been trying to find some work in this godforsaken place."

  "It's too goddamn /green/ out here," she adds, in a more subdued grumble under her breath. "The hell is up with all this grass? Where's the sand? Where's the sandworms? I could always pick up a few meseta killin' those nasties off for some dirt-farmer."

  Grumble, grumble. She hooks her thumbs back at her belt and trudges on through the temperate night. It's too temperate, in fact. Deserts should be cold once the sun goes down. This place is actually kind of pleasant, and that somehow makes things worse. At least, it makes her a lot more cranky.

  That doesn't seem to take much even on the best of days.

  "Quit lyin' to me," she adds, more softly but no less angry. "Two weeks. I ain't gonna believe time itself is out of whack. Look here."

  She fumbles with one of her slashers, the one she hadn't drawn on Rune. Its leather-wrapped hilt has a fine line of very precise cuts in it, probably done with the other blade; small notches against the pommel to mark the passage of days. "See? I've been keeping track."

  "So don't gimmie that load of crap." The slasher is shoved back into its holster with another metallic /snick/. "I went into a cave. I think it mighta been east of Aiedo. Wasn't the one leading to Birth Valley, though. In fact, I don't really remember this one, but some poor bastard wanted a sandworm dead, so I had to go find where the thing holed up. When I came out of the cave, I wound up... here."

  Drawing the slasher in an effortless movement, she points back down the road she'd come from. "Can't find that cave, either. I don't know how to get back to Motabia. Because I'm pretty sure this isn't Motabia."

  There's not nearly enough sand. Or sandworms.

  "Why?" She narrows her eyes at him, suspiciously, holstering her weapon again. "And why're you looking at me like that, anyway?"

  Lay of the land. It's a good place to start. A reasonable place. But the fact that Rune suggested it makes her even more grumpy about it, which in and of itself is probably predictable. "Uh huh. Well, I can tell you there's a village toward where we're headed, and there's not much else. This place is boringly empty, here in these lowlands. I was gonna go west. At least, I think it's west. I can't even tell any more." Alys blows out a frustrated sigh. "Everything's all /wrong/ here."

     "A few hours," Rune replies calmly, flicking his eyes back at her again. "And no more." 

     He flips out a piece of paper. "I've been keeping track, too." Sure enough, the same adventurer mentality - markings on a notepad. But they don't match up in the slightest. "If it's been any longer, then it was while I was unconscious. For me, we've been separated for a few hours at most." 

     He turns away from her and sets his cane down in the ground. "Curiousity, that's all. I was wondering what you remembered about the event." The Esper stops to look around, looking at the green thoughtfully. "Stop complaining for a minute and look around. This clearly isn't Motabia, and it clearly isn't anywhere on Motabia. You figured that out inside two weeks. But you're so focused on being angry that you haven't put together the larger picture." 

     "We aren't on Motabia. We may not even be in Algol. Moreover, we may not be able to /get back/ to Algol." 

     Rune holds up three fingers in that authoritative way. "We need to figure out what we can find out, where we can find food and jobs easily, and where we can find a means back to Motabia and Algol. We need a base of operations to work out of, or at least a place with reliable enough monetary flow and information flow that if we hang around, we can make a reasonably comfortable living for a while." 

     "Calm down. You know this. You're pissed and not thinking clearly. Once you pull your slasher out of your ass you'll realize that we can save arguing for when we've gotten set up."

  The more she listens to him, the more Alys Brangwin realises she's actively losing her temper. That's probably because her urge to shove a slasher through his smirking face is fading away, and replaced with a kind of strange becalmed clarity.

  Blue eyes flick over the piece of paper, but it's a cursory and dismissive glance; she glances back to the haft of her own slasher, frown deepening at the screamingly obvious disparity between the two tallies.

  What in the hell happened to them? Why is he coming up with a few hours, and she's got somewhere closer to two weeks of tally-marks? It doesn't really matter, in the end; they're here, and not there, and it looks like no force on heaven or earth is going to change that unless they make some kind of metaphysical breakthrough.

  ...Well. Unless Rune makes some kind of metaphysical breakthrough. She's never had much of a knack or care for the mysteries of the universe. It isn't that she isn't smart enough to understand, but more that she's more... well, impatient.

  Someday she'll mellow a little, but today is not that day.

  Alys folds her arms, and the jut of her lower jaw suggests she's feeling stubborn as a mule, but he'll know he got through to her. She's not trying to bash his brains in with the haft of her slasher. It's a start.

  There's a flare of anger when he tells her to calm down and put the pieces together, but it gives way to a flicker of uncertainty when he says there might not be a way back to Algol.

  "Sooo... we need to find a village. Something better than that podunk settlement up the hill. Eh, I wasn't really looking forward to killing more bears anyway. Those things are so much more trouble than they're worth." The last observation is mostly under her breath, given in a grumble.

  She snorts at his last admonishment, glaring in a way that suggests she might be thinking about how best to give him a new and improved smirk; one that runs from ear to ear. "Promise?" It's a sarcastic retort, and she can't really help herself. He's right, though. "Yeah. Fine."

  Several steps in silence, broken only by the sound of dust grinding underfoot. She is, at least, grateful for comfortable boots. That'd been one thing she'd been adamant about. "So. Aside from trying to sound like you know any more about this than I do... you got any ideas, Mr. Magician?" Alys shoulders her rucksack more securely, the contents jangling and clattering. "Or are we just gonna wander aimlessly? I think we're better off cutting away from that place up in the mountains... too far out of the way, anyway."

  Turning while pacing, she points, off to what might be the north. "When I was coming back down the mountain the first time, I thought I saw a river way off that way. Big one, too. If this place has any similarities at all to Motabia, we're gonna find people where there's water. It's probably better than picking a random direction. Might be closer than going back up the mountain, anyway. And where there's people, there's gonna be a settlement or two. Maybe enough to find some real jobs."

  Alys trudges on in silence.

  "But you're still a jackass," she observes, sweetly.

     He can't help but smirk at her jaw-set expression. He does know. He can just tell. Brute forcing people with logic is what he does best. It's how he gets away with being so smug. She's seen him to do it to people who aren't her, and it's no surprise that he should do it back to her, too. 

     "Well, there's Rome, but it seemed to be under attack, and I'd rather not make a base in a city under assault. Plus, it's large, and easy to get lost in." Rune shrugs. 

     He says nothing at the /promise/. Rune knows better than to make any sort of promise. to anybody. Instead, he lets the conversation flow forward. "Other than Rome, no, I honestly don't. I met a few people who might be able to help us out, but I don't know where to start to find them. We may have to find some common ground, split up, and search to cover more ground." 

     He's quiet for a moment as she suggests the river. After a moment, he nods. "That's probably a better idea. Let's do that, then. Civilizations on water and all that." 

     He starts walking with her in a similar silence for a while. He lets her take the lead; his face is twisted in thoughtfulness. After a long, /long/ time, he finally speaks up again. 

     "I'm glad you're alright." 

     It's true. But it'll also probably disarm her anger. That's more important right now.

  Hunter and magician have been travelling together long enough to know one another's expressions, and he probably knows that although Alys is furious enough to spit nails, a lot of it is just furious bluster. Despite her cursing and her threats and her facade of being furiously angry, Rune is one of the very few friends she has. In fact, he's her only friend.

  Maybe that's why she was so furious when he up and disappeared on her. She hasn't had very many of them in her time, and people have an unnerving knack for vanishing on her.

  Alys trudges in silence for a few minutes, but it's hard to say what she might be thinking. Her expression's gone impassive; unreadable, for one usually so prone to wearing her heart on her sleeve.

  When she finally circles back around to their current predicament, she finally shakes her head, some of that wavy brown hair falling in front of her face. A flick of her wrist clears it from her eyes; her hand lingers a moment to adjust the slender gold circlet around her forehead. It's one of the few nice things she has, although she's never said where it came from.

  Those blue eyes flick down to the side of the road, and without ever breaking stride, she stoops down, plucks a blade of wild barley, which at least looks somewhat similar to some desert crop or another, and starts chewing on the end of the stalk. "Nope." Her dismissal of Rome is off-handed. "Don't wanna go somewhere under attack. Might not be any shortage of work, but no pay's worth risking my neck that bad."

  She chews on the stalk thoughtfully, silent. He met a few people who could help them out. That's good to know. She'll have to shake descriptions out of him later when she's feeling more amenable.

  "Uh huh. I think--" She checks herself from whatever she was about to say, and her head twists to glare at him. There's a flicker of that irrational fury just below the surface at his entirely sensible tactical suggestion.

  It's not very sensible to her, apparently. "No. No way. I ain't splittin' up again," she growls, jabbing him in the shoulder with a forefinger. "How in the hell are we supposed to /find/ each other again if we part ways? We won't. Not with this much ground to cover. You know how long I had to walk just to find that bump in the road of a village in the mountains? A long-ass time. I thought I was gonna starve along the way. That's how long I had to walk. And I been hungry before; that don't usually bother me much."

  She walks a few more paces in prickly silence.

  For a few seconds it almost seems like she might not say anything else. When she does, her voice is so quiet it might be lost in the tread of her boots. The anger fades away, and she looks somehow diminished, though her posture never changes. She almost seems like she's about to say something.

  Then Rune says something that flat-out doesn't register for a few seconds. She turns and looks at him, though she still doesn't say anything. Alys just stares, for several paces, never breaking stride.

  Eventually she looks back forward again. For a moment it seems she isn't even going to grace it with a reply.

  And then she abruptly swerves, not enough to actually cut him off, but to companionably nudge him on the shoulder. Maybe even knock him off-balance, because part of her is still feeling a little petty that way, but there's no real malice in the gesture at all.

  "Yeah," she says, quietly. "I'm glad you're alright, too."

  She'll get her sanity checked later. Right now, she's just happy not to be left alone to her own devices, again. That's happened far too much in her short life for her to be wholly comfortable with being ditched. When people ditch her, it usually means they're dead, in her experience. Usually violently.