Explorer of Edregon

“Oh look, you’re conscious again! Way to not die in your sleep!”

Vin rolled his eyes as Scule leisurely walked into their apartment with his hands in his pockets. He was the last member of the team to arrive, and he nodded as he hopped up onto the table and looked between everyone. “So what, is this the plan for how we’re all going to get the hell out of here while the getting’s good?”

“This is the plan for how we’re going to save Terra and the couple thousand lives living within it,” Vin corrected, frowning at him. “I just got done speaking with Spur about John and his premonitions. He told me he already chatted with all of you about the situation, which is why I asked if we could all have a quick meeting of our own. Can you guys fill me in on the details? Spur was a bit too busy.”

“The short of it is, John foresaw Terra’s destruction at the hands of the sixth wave, but it’s not necessarily set in stone,” Shia explained, petting Reginald as he snoozed in her lap. “The council has been trying just about everything they can think of, rushing plans they had in place for the future and coming up with all sorts of new ones, just to see if any of them end up changing John’s prediction. The defensive rituals on the walls… The moat dug around town, which I still think is a hilarious concept, by the way… It’s all to try and change whatever is going to happen in two days’ time.”

“So John really couldn’t see anything more detailed than ‘we’re all going to die?’” Vin asked. “I wanted to talk to him, but Spur asked me to let him rest. Apparently his Capstone is incredibly draining and they’ve been making him check it every time it’s come up to see if the latest thing they tried doing actually made a difference.”

“Technically, he wasn’t able to see even that much,” Lumel admitted. “His premonition was just that Terra specifically was going to be destroyed. Myers found me and asked me for specifics on how many people I could feasibly teleport at a time and how quickly, so I’m pretty sure they’re debating trying to evacuate the town rather than let everyone die with it.”

“Sounds like one of those self-fulfilling prophecies," Scule snorted. “Maybe Terra ends up getting destroyed in the first place because we evacuated it instead of trying to defend it. Wouldn’t that be hilarious?”

“Phil came to me and requested I try swapping up what I was teaching my Slayers to see if that would have any effect on John’s premonition,” Alka chimed in, crossing her arms as she leaned back in her chair. “The focus on Slayer training is already to be prepared for anything, so that didn’t really work.”

“Bill and I nearly killed ourselves the other day attempting to rush a new concoction he’d been thinking about starting soon,” Scule said, shaking his head at the thought. “You know what’s probably the most important field of crafting to not rush headfirst into? Alchemy. You know, the one famous for people blowing themselves up.”

“Witherson and Alice even asked me to try and work with Mary to devise a new magical plant we could grow around the town to strengthen our defenses,” Shia said. “They’re really trying everything they can think of to change John’s premonition.”

“Okay, this might be a silly question…” Vin said, praying everyone else just had a lapse of judgement and this whole situation was a mistake. “...but did anyone actually double check that John was telling the truth? The man is afraid of his own shadow. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was either blowing this whole thing out of proportion or simply lying for some reason.”

“Myers confirmed it via truth-gem, and Sherly grilled him with her Investigator skills just to be safe. They even let Jim have a crack at him,” Shia added. “He’s telling the truth.”

“Jim? The guy who runs the entertainment tabloid?” Vin asked, surprised to hear Spur brought even him in on this. Sure, he was the only other Investigator in all of Terra, but he was a bit of a jerk and not very pleasant to be around. “They must have really been hoping John was lying.”

“It certainly would be preferred to all of Terra being destroyed,” Lumel said quietly, looking downcast. Vin’s heart went out to the poor pulmon. She’d already effectively lost one home, and moving into Terra had been a big step for her. If she was forced to pick up and move yet again, he had no doubt it was going to hit her particularly hard. “The issue is we have no idea what’s coming,” she continued. “Everyone is trying everything they can to change the future, but nothing seems to work.”

“So we’re going to be attacked by something with the capability of razing Terra to the ground,” Vin muttered, scratching his chin in thought. “I mean, the last two epic monsters we faced would have done the same, so this isn’t really that different.”

“For all we know it’s not even an epic monster that’s going to destroy Terra,” Shia pointed out. “It could be some entirely unrelated threat. Broken branches, it might not even be the monster wave at all!”

“Wouldn’t that be perfect. Some wandering giant steps on Terra and destroys everything, and then the monsters for wave six show up and attack,” Scule snorted. “Sounds appropriate for our luck.”

“I’d like to try fighting a giant at some point,” Alka said. “I think I could probably climb up its legs and do some real damage before getting thrown a few miles away.”

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“Focus, guys, this is serious,” Vin said, looking around the table at his friends. “I know we like to joke around, especially when we’re stressed, but we’ve got potentially less than forty-eight hours before the entire town is destroyed. What haven’t we tried yet?”

“That’s largely the problem, everyone has already tried everything they can think of,” Lumel said.

“Okay, so we start getting even crazier,” he decided, wracking his brain for some method of saving the town. “I know we wanted to keep them largely a secret due to the potential fallout of their barrier magic, but if we don’t know what’s coming… what if we went to the neilans for help? Temporarily, of course. Maybe their barrier could keep out whatever is going to happen?”

“Already checked in with them the other day,” Shia admitted. “Even if they were willing to leave their fragment, which they most certainly were not, I got them to admit they wouldn’t be able to construct their grand ritual in time. In fact, it turns out their grand ritual largely only works because of how flat and boring their fragment is. Seeing as this one hasn’t been extensively terraformed, I don’t even think the ritual would work if we wanted it to. Though naturally, they refused to admit as much.”

“Okay… Oh, the dwarves and their armor!” he said, lighting up as he suddenly remembered the deal he’d struck with them where they’d provide the Earthers with metal armor in exchange for magical flowers that could survive the intense conditions of the Crater. “We still need to collect it from them!”

“Shia and I took care of it when you were on your dream journey,” Lumel said, shaking her head. “Whatever is coming is going to destroy Terra regardless of how heavily armored the warriors are. Though the magical flowers are doing excellent, you and Shia really did a great job with those,” she added with a small smile.

“Well that’s good,” Vin said, digging deep for anything at all that might turn the tide that Spur wouldn’t have already thought of. “...Our gem of resurrection? I don’t really know how that would change anything, but it’s the only thing I can think of that the council doesn’t know about, and it’s just been sitting in my Dimensional Sheath all this time. They couldn’t have factored it into any potential plans.”

“We had the same thought, but none of us could think of any way that would really make a difference,” Shia admitted. “There’s just too much we don’t know.”

“Trying to prevent the town’s destruction when we don’t know what’s coming is impossible,” Scule agreed. “We probably would have been better off if John just never even told us in the first place!”

“I have to agree with Scule, this is pointless,” Alka said, pushing her chair back and getting to her feet. “I’m wasting valuable time I could be training with my Slayers. Let me know if you guys end up having some bright idea or something changes.”

With that, she walked out of the apartment, leaving the rest of them to silently struggle on their own.

“She is right about one thing. We’re getting nowhere like this,” Shia admitted. “I’m going to go talk to Erik and see if he has any ideas. Giving him all that epic monster meat from the last wave granted him a truly massive boost of magical power, even if it wasn’t enough to fully solve the dryads’ problem. There’s a chance he might be able to intervene and do something.”

“I’m going to go throw random things in a pot and see what Bill and I can’t come up with once we’re truly desperate,” Scule decided. “He told me the other day that necessity breeds innovation, and I thought that sounded pretty smart. Granted, that was right before we both nearly melted our faces off attempting to create a super-acid. If it wasn’t for my Magical Bond passive letting me borrow Reginald’s defensive abilities, this beautiful face would be no more, so maybe necessity just breeds danger. Still, I’ll do what I can.”

“I’ll head into the Underside and see if there’s anything new I can learn down there,” Lumel stated. “I never even considered trying this before, and I highly doubt it’s possible, but if I could figure out some way to manually trip whatever runic formation the Gods have in place to warp everyone from Edregon’s surface down into the Underside, maybe we could use it as a last ditch effort to evacuate in the event the town is going to be destroyed.”

“Those are all great ideas,” Vin agreed, giving his friends warm smiles. “Thank you guys for trying so hard for everyone of Terra. I know you’re only honorary Earthers, but it means a lot.”

“Are you kidding? I got my name on a plaque outside this house,” Scule snorted as they all got up. “I’m not letting anything destroy that so long as I’m still standing. What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure yet,” he admitted. “Probably start by checking in with John myself. Then maybe I’ll run over to the Bands’ former fragment and try using the shrine of rebirth to commune with the Gods again? If whatever is coming is truly powerful enough to wipe out the entire town, maybe they can give me something to work with.”

Or even pull a string or two to help, if we’re really lucky… Unlike the rest of the team, Vin was aware that there was something special about Earthers. Right before the God of Contracts had silenced her, the Goddess of Benevolence had let slip that it was crucial for Edregon as a whole for Earthers to be alive and scattered across its surface. He still had absolutely no idea why that was the case, and he couldn’t bring it up to his friends for their opinions with the invisible divine chains binding him from the contract he’d been forced to accept still in play, but that had to mean something. Seeing as all the other Earther settlements had been largely destroyed from the beginning, it sounded like Terra was the last true bastion of these critical Earthers. If they were really as important as the Goddess made them out to be, surely they wouldn’t just let all of them die in one fell swoop.

“Going to the Gods is a pretty good idea,” Scule agreed. “Honestly, you guys should have one of your crafters build a temple or something for them here. It would probably make a lot of people happy.”

“Tell you what, if we manage to figure out a way to save Terra, I’ll tell Witherson she should focus on that next,” Vin said. “Though I doubt the Bands are going to want to worship anything other than the statue of rebirth.”

“Maybe we can remove it from above the prison and bring it over here,” Shia suggested. “Terra has to have plenty of crafters skilled enough to pull that off by now.”

“Maybe I’ll ask the Gods if they’re cool with their statue being moved when I run over there,” Vin said, holding the door open for his friends as they all headed out to their individual tasks. “Though first, I need to have that word with John.”