Ember of Invention

Both of his friends looked back at him, hearing the tone of his voice.

“Wait, are you serious?” Humphrey asked, his face shifting to confusion.

Lindle shrugged, not entirely sure himself as the thought simply came to him just then. “Well, we could, couldn’t we? If I want to be a wayfarer, I might as well start early.”

Humphrey, who Lindle was just now realizing he hadn’t told about that detail, looked even more confused. “Now you’re going to be a wayfarer? Isn’t that what Soarians call adventurers?” He glanced at Thalia, who just watched the two of them curiously, but seeing that she didn’t seem confused either, looked back at Lindle. “Make this make sense to me.”

“Okay… um… So, after the raid is over, I’m going to leave Glacerhine. I want to push my class, and I just really can’t do that in Glacerhine, you know how slowly crafters here level up compared to everyone else.”

Humphrey looked like he wanted to protest, but he grudgingly nodded at the point. “Well… damn… But so, are you just going to run off fighting monsters then? That’s not crafting.”

“Yeah, maybe? I don’t know how much XP I’ll get in combat compared to crafting, but battle crafters do exist out there. But it’s more the opportunities that leaving will have, my class seems like it’s really really broad, if I stay in one place making the same kinds of things, I’ll stagnate.” He shuffled a bit. “Besides, I kind of want to do it, exploring with the adventurers was kind of fun.”

Humphrey sighed. “I really shouldn’t have helped you, those Soarians put ideas in your head.” He crossed his arms. “Okay, fine, I guess I get it. But back to the first thing, how does that lead to us being an adventuring party? Just because we’re hunting monsters as a group it doesn’t make us adventurers.”

"We could do more than just hunting,” Lindle suggested.

“Like what? Taking quests from our neighbors?”

“We could, we could try exploring dungeons too. I know the rangers keep maps of where they are across the Reach.” Lindle was picking up a bit more steam now.

“I’m pretty sure we’re all a bit low-level for that, especially you.”

“But taking quests and working our way up to the weakest ones would be the fastest way to get XP, I want to be as high level as possible for the Raid anyways, I’m going no matter what level I am at the time, but the higher level I am the safer I’ll be.” Lindle reasoned.

He could see that Humphrey wasn’t a huge fan of the idea, but he wasn’t saying no outright. He just didn’t like the association adventuring had to him. Glacerhine occasionally cleared dungeons when they were along migration routes or were too close to groves, but adventurers had their own way of dealing with dungeons that maximized the benefits in their party formations. The raid coming up was actually a lot more similar to how Glacerhine did things compared to their traditional methods.

“I think there are some holes in our party we’d need to patch first in that case,” Thalia spoke up.

“You’re going along with this?” Humphrey questioned.

“Why not? I want to see where Lindle goes with this. It sounds fun, and we’d both benefit from the XP too.”

Humphrey crossed his arms even harder, before groaning in surrender and falling back. He still didn’t say yes explicitly, but he stopped protesting the idea.

“What kind of holes do you mean?” Lindle asked Thalia, ignoring the grumpy ranger.

“Well, aside from the obvious that we’re only three people, and most adventuring parties are four at a minimum?” Thalia stated, to which Lindle nodded.

“Well, I know you need a rogue to deal with scouting and traps, a caster for spells that can deal damage and deal with more complex problems, healer support to act as a force multiplier and a frontline who can occupy a monster’s attention and fight it head to head.”

Lindle nodded again and checked off the boxes in his head as she essentially described Rosato’s party to a tee. “We don’t need to follow the classic party build exactly, you’re correct that we need to be able to at least fill those roles, but I think all together we can cover most of them.”

“Mhm, that’s right, but I think we’re a bit too generalized though.”

“Huh?” Lindle was a bit confused, and Humphrey looked up from his sulking to listen too.

“Well, Humphrey has the least issues, he can do most of the things a rogue needs too, he can track and scout, and he’s perceptive enough to find traps, but he doesn’t really specialize in it as much, but he can deal decent damage with his bow and has a few spells, so it works out okay.”

Humphrey nodded at her assessment of his class, everyone was a bit different based on their Feats and the Spells and Techniques they knew even with the same class, but she was fairly accurate.

“Between the two of us though, we need to be the caster, the healer, and the frontline.” Thalia continued. “I can be the caster, and I have some healing magic. I’m not really sure what you do, but your potions kind of at least let you work as a support and healer, and you can debuff things with them and [Hunter Gatherer] sometimes too. So we sort of compete for the same jobs, but the real issue is that we don’t have a good frontline.” Thalia outlined.

“You can wildshape in beasts to fight directly though right?” Lindle asked though he felt like she was baiting him into helping point out how many different things druids could do. She saw a bit of his expression and covered a quick smug smile.

“Yeah, I can, but if I’m a beast, I can’t cast spells.” She pointed out. “I can only do one or the other, and it’s risky to not have both roles being filled at the same time. To be honest too, just because I can wildshape, doesn’t mean I’d be very good at it either, I don’t get any Skills for keeping monsters occupied, or a lot of Techniques. I could probably maul something, but it’s not the best for fighting in a group.”

“Since when do you know so much about adventurers?” Humphrey asked with a raised eyebrow.

“My grandma talks about them sometimes. She says she hung around a group of them for a while when she was younger and traveling.”

“Really?” Lindle was surprised, he supposed the lifestyle fit Madam Holly, but he had never heard anything about it before, all he knew about her before meeting the woman was the various ways she had fought Apex monsters in the Reach and defended the village during migrations.

Thalia shrugged. “In any case, I think we need at least one other person if we want to do any dungeon delving.”

“That makes sense,” Lindle agreed, “but the three of us are enough for hunting some wild monsters. I can make us some magic items and we could track something down.”

They both looked at Humphrey, who sighed. “Yeah, I can see if anyone’s reported anything interesting that we could hunt down. I wasn’t ever opposed to hunting, just making a damn adventuring party.”

“But you’ll do it?” Lindle pressed.

“…Fine.” Humphrey relented.

Thalia and Lindle shared a high-five.

“Wonder where we could find someone that would work as a fourth.” Thalia mused to herself, to which Lindle shrugged.

“Do we have to keep talking about this?” Humphrey said. “It’s supposed to be Lindle’s birthday, we should be having fun, we don’t have to figure everything out right now.”

Lindle figured Humphrey had a point. “That’s fair.” He looked at Thalia, gesturing out to the True Grove around them. “What else can we do here?”

Thalia grinned. “Oh, there’s something, the older druid apprentices showed this to us.”

She walked up to one of the trees, excitement clear from the way her raccoon tail and ears twitched with energy, putting a hand up to the trunk. Thalia seemed to whisper something under her breath.

Lindle and Humphrey exchanged looks as they stood up and waited curiously, before pausing as they felt a gust of unexpected cold air. The cold wasn’t something either of them were unused to, but the True Grove was remarkably warm compared to mostly everywhere else they had ever been, so the change was jarring.

Lindle looked up in shock as he saw dense snowfall around them, the ground around them filling with snow as it covered the plants and trees around them, and as quickly as it came, the snowfall stopped, leaving a layer of white powder.

“What the…” Lindle said, looking around.

Thalia shook some snow out of her hair. “I asked the Grove to let in a little bit of the snowstorm, so I could do this.”

They looked at her confused as she reached down before she suddenly scooped up some snow and nailed Lindle with a snowball before he knew what was happening. As Lindle spluttered and wiped the snow from his face, Humphrey blinked and looked at Thalia.

“The circle lets snow inside the grove for snowball fights?”

“Yep, though the elders ask we don’t spread that around, apparently we have a reputation to maintain, the True Grove will clear it out soon after we’re done.” Thalia cheerfully answered, scooping up another snowball.

Seeing the danger faster than Lindle had, Humphrey dove for cover, the snowball splattering against a tree. Now recovered, Lindle ran for cover too, picking up some snow along the way. She might have gotten him by surprise, but Lindle and Humphrey were veterans when it came to the village children’s most popular pastime, even if he hadn’t participated in an impromptu snowball fight in years.

“Total combat rules?” Lindle called out. Unlike their improvised stealth game, there was an etiquette to be followed here.

“Of course,” Thalia said, pulling out her new wand. “All Skills, Spells, and Techs allowed, no teams.”

Lindle and Humphrey looked at each other from their respective pieces of cover, there wasn’t any teaming, but considering she had started the game off with a cheap shot…

Lindle activated [Throw] and they let loose at the same time, the first volley aimed directly at Thalia.