The tall grey horse with white dapples frowned as he came to the next ravine. He'd never come to this edge of the map before, but his friend had asked him to help her out this weekend. He activated his equestrian bond with his partner and said, "This section of the desert edge is like a maze. There are dozens of ravines cutting into it from the dwarven mountains but not a single one has had a trace of water in it."
Terri replied promptly, she was always prompt, "Salty says that Quin is still certain that the sand cats have access to an open stream somewhere."
Ranma spun on his hind feet and surveyed the slope behind him. "I'm going up the mountain, to see if I can get a better view," he told Terri.
Profession wise, it was obvious when he began receiving his Noble Steed quests that he ought to team up with Terri, but at first, he just couldn't bring himself to.
'Living Jade Empire' had become such a powerful influence on his life and how he thought about the most simple interactions he had with people in his daily life these days, that it was hard for him to look at Terri's 'if it's cute I must pet it, record it, and play with it' mentality without cringing.
The statuesque red headed paladin did everything at 100%. Her flaws were her virtues, her enthusiasm could be infectious or annoying. But it wasn't until he heard her talking about her hobby that he realized that there was a lot more to her than she showed.
He'd suddenly realized that for all his newfound appreciation for the small forgotten kindnesses that people showed to each other every day, in nearly equal proportion to the small cruelties they inflicted, he'd been too focused on judging people by those small actions. Terri talked about making the world cuter, loved cute things, and her small actions were so noisy and vibrant that her large actions went unnoticed.
Unnoticed by most people anyway. Justin and Quin had known her better, and now Ranma did too. Terri's Paladin, large, beautiful, and protective and powerful, was an illustration of her heart. Her hobby was making plushies for children in hospitals from their own drawings. Ranma knew that he would have cried every day if he'd tried to do such a thing.
He made a nearly vertical jump to reach the viewpoint he was aiming for, and his hooves slid in the loose rock for a moment, but he gained purchase and finished his climb successfully. He surveyed the edge of the desert laid out below. Something twinkled from within a dark shadow farther south and he told Terri, who had not pestered him with chatter while he made the climb, "I might have spotted it. Four ravines south of you, something twinkles once in awhile and there's a stand of trees where that ravine enters the desert."
He saw the two girls climb out of the ravine they'd been following. The powerful paladin in her white and silver gleamed in the harsh sun, while the elven archer in her brown and cream blended into the sand. They seemed to move painfully slowly, but he knew that it was an illusion created by the distance.
He used one of his skills, Heroic Leap, to jump down. It allowed him to leap farther than any real horse could have, and yet still land impossibly lightly when his feet hit the slope below. A moment later he trotted back into the desert sand.
Using their equestrian bond, the two of them could flank enemies perfectly, because they could always tell where their partner was. Ranma moved south quickly, leaping the wide ravines that the girls would have to climb in and out of to cross.
Quin and MatchlessMinion were farther north and east, deeper within the crescent slice of desert that currently existed in the world. Ranma couldn't pinpoint their position, but he trusted them to have covered their designated search area. Quin had Justin's magic carpet for faster travel, since Justin had to work, but it could only be used 3 times per day.
Terri cursed, and he scolded gently, "Language."
"Nobody else can hear me when I'm talking to you," she replied.
"So you're just cursing me?" he teased.
"I'm cursing to you because I just found a stone bird, and I don't want to scare Salty," Terri snapped.
"Why would a stone bird scare her?" Ranma questioned blankly.
"It's half eaten," Terri complained.
Ranma changed course and galloped toward the two girls. "Don't come here," Terri warned. "If we get stoned you have to bring help."
He slid to a halt and tossed his mane in a gesture of frustration. "Mirrors should work, right?" he suggested.
"Do you have a mirror on you?" Terri asked.
"No, but your armor is pretty reflective?" he suggested.
--
Terri asked SaltySiamese, "Can you use your vision skills while looking at the reflections on my armor? I think there's a basilisk in the area."
SaltySiamese stiffened, which scared Terri for a moment, but then she nodded. "I think I can, I've used other reflections before."
Terri closed her eyes trustingly, and waited with her sword held ready.
"Found it," SaltySiamese announced at last, after circling the paladin several times. "It's got a hole about 6 meters away at about 9 o'clock for you. I could try an exploding arrow? But if I miss…"
"Try it," Terri instructed cheerfully. "If you miss, I'll attack. And if it gets us anyway, Ranma, Quin, and MatchlessMinion can try to get it before we have to revive."
SaltySiamese kept her eyes locked on Terri's armor and turned her character's body enough that she could raise her bow and fire in the direction she'd calculated.
Her skills combined to let her hit the hole, and her arrow exploded, but when she turned to look she met the gaze of the small white crowned lizard that had popped out of a completely different hole beside her. "5 o'clock!" she screamed as her body started turning to stone.
Terri didn't even open her eyes, she spun and leapt and used one of her most destructive attacks. The ground in front of her shattered like a stick of dynamite had been set off. The basilisk lived through the initial blow as it was tossed into the air, but one of the larger rocks caught it as it came down again and crushed it.
"Lucky!" SaltySiamese shouted as the petrification dropped away from her limbs.
Terri finally opened her eyes and looked. She couldn't see any sign of the basilisk, until SaltySiamese dashed forward and lifted the small boulder off of its tiny body. It was only a couple of handspans long, and it looked like a little snake with tiny legs underneath.
"It might be worth something, if we take it with us, but, ewwww," SaltySiamese complained.
"I'll get it," Terri said calmly, and reached forward to scoop up the remains and toss them into her storage.
--
Behind the two girls a sand cat huffed and complained, "They're not even going to eat it?"
The cat beside it flicked her ear in the equivalent of a shrug.
The two cats sauntered away, but then came to a halt as a tall grey horse with white dapples cut them off.
"We've been looking for you," Ranma told the sand cat.
The cat pretended not to understand and stopped to wash its ear.
Quin and MatchlessMinion arrived a few minutes later to find SaltySiamese covered in scratches and Terri grinning as she held one small adorable sand cat in each hand.
Ranma had already given up. The wild paladin who shared his equestrian bond might never learn to act like a civilized person around small cute fluffy creatures. All he could do was try to hurry their release. "You've been leveling up that new skill that lets you talk with animals right?" he asked Quin hopefully.
"Ask them if they can turn into cat-girls like the rumor," SaltySiamese demanded of Quin.
Quin sighed and repeated what he'd said before, "I can only make it so they understand me, I can't force them to answer. Why did you have to make them mad first?"
MatchlessMinion tucked his little paws behind his head and said, "Someday you'll learn not to ask these things."
Terri said scornfully, "Obviously because they are too cute to resist!"
"Look at those cute round little faces!" SaltySiamese agreed.
"Just tell them we'll get them released if they tell us what we want to know," MatchlessMinion advised.
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***** Extra Long Author Note *****
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No mid week extra chapters for awhile. It's not that I appreciate your support any less, I'm just struggling just to maintain daily output right now so I'm going to drop my goal again (which used to be an extra chapter at each 100 powerstone mark) from 10 to 8 chapters a week.
I started this project last October, so it's been over six months of daily chapters, and I'm obviously not going to get contracted when I'm already between 2/3rds and 3/4ths of the way through the story. It would have been cool. I did hope along the way, especially after you readers started keeping this story consistently in the top 200 ranking! But I knew from the beginning that I am not a great storyteller, and I feel from the comments (and lack of) that my struggle to keep up lately is also resulting in chapters that are falling flat.
Thank you for your patience, thanks for reading, and I hope you'll enjoy the direction I plan to take the story in the end. I also hope you'll be able to look back afterward and think, " Ah, now I see the little fragments that led to this," instead of, "wait, what happened all of a sudden it went..." 😂 We'll see, just going to take a little longer, in the hope that it may be more amusing along the way.