[Ignite]

Wood twisted into itself, bringing forth the red flower from deep within itself, and Fire sprang forth. The flame was small at first but didn't stay that way for long, eagerly consuming the fuel they'd left out for it and growing and growing rapidly, spreading into the tower's overall structure like a starving man at a noble's banquet.

Alyssa stepped back as her little flame grew too hot for her to want to remain near, and she retreated to where Oliver - that wonderful, wonderful man - and the others stood and watched.

"It is more boring than I expected," Clark commented after a bit, and Alyssa unfortunately felt herself agreeing. Yeah, smoke was starting to curl out of the ventilation holes at the top of the tower, but that was kinda it. The little section of fire they could see through the doorway at the very bottom didn't say much about how the fire kept spreading inwards and upwards.

"You don't need to stay," Oliver pointed out, "I'm just here to make sure something doesn't go wrong."

"What if it does?" Alyssa needled him.

He shrugged, "Lots of sadness, probably. Unless it's fixable. Then panic."

A few seconds didn't help her to figure out a good response to that, so instead she abstractly agreed and meandered a bit off to the side, trying to spot a few more angles from which she could appreciate the flames licking at the interior of the tower. She didn't succeed very much before a groaning and creaking from the interior indicated that the first floor had probably been weakened for some of the fuel inside to shift.

Oliver tensed, but relaxed shortly thereafter as a flaming pile of debris didn't push its way out from the inside of the structure.

A few more minutes didn't yield anything new and exciting, and Alyssa pretty quickly got bored. She was the first to leave the site, but she guessed that Clark would probably follow her soon enough.

A good chunk of Mana was consumed as she dropped down to the main settlement area of First Tower, [Leafstep] having grown strong enough to keep her safe even without mid-hop breakpoints. If she went over the cliff riding a fourgle again, she... well, she might still get banged up because [Leafstep] primarily protected her feet, and it was only because she was awesome that she got it to extent to her hands without a subskill. But so long as she landed feet-first, it wouldn't even be notable.

The soup pot was boiling, which she'd learned wasn't a desirable state for it, so Alyssa carefully grabbed its handles and maneuvered it so that it was a bit further off the heat-grate than it had been. Then, she grabbed the ladle and a spare bowl and scooped herself some of the soup, making sure to get some of the chunks of meat as she did so.

The food, just like always, was rather bland. Normally, she didn't have that much trouble finding possible spices, but without any kind of antidote-type magic available to them, they didn't want to take chances. After all, anything that stood a solid chance of being really flavorful would have small traces of Poison that would cause her to steer well clear of it while foraging. Or Dream, she supposed, but that would be the wrong kind of flavor.

At least their resident noble brat was actually good for something, even if it wasn't providing healing. Her arm had been sore for days after the first fourgle fight, his stupid cleaning magic not able to do anything for any injuries that weren't immediately visible.

When the tower is working, Alyssa privately promised herself, I'm going to put everything into Recovery, so I can just heal myself.

Mmmm. But Dexterity would be so much more useful day-to-day. She didn't feel clumsy with only four Dex, but that was more the System's function to prevent stat dysphoria than anything about her current capabilities. [Leafstep] had been very obviously been working far harder than it normally would need to, compensating for her lack of physical surety.

But Strength is something I really could use, she wryly thought. Everything else is already taken by the others, and I'm just too weak.

At the same time, Strength wasn't a Major Stat for [Ranger of Far Lands]. She'd be getting basically half value for all of her levels if she dumped points into that over Recovery, Dexterity, or Resistance. It was a real pain that Cohesion was a minor stat for it. Having none was really limiting how well she could properly use her skills, but only getting half an effective point in it per free point she assigned to it would hurt. That would be the real trick to actually having use, but it would be hard to get to a good state.

But maybe it would only take a few levels' worth to work? Last time she'd tried combining [Leafstep] with [Ignite] she'd gotten so close to it actually working, so heck, maybe a half-point was all she needed in general to get her back to the point where she could tinker again?

Maybe once that was working, she should see about dropping a few points into Skill, too. She really could stand to pick up a few more tools for her toolbox. She needed something of value, freaking Clark couldn't be better at this than her.

Maybe a sensory skill? She'd had at least a dozen, depending on what you counted, before the Jump. [Follow the Scent] was an Air-based skill, and it seemed likely that she could re-unlock it just by tracking something with her mana sense.

A flash of movement caught her eye, and Alyssa looked up from her soup to see four gleaming eyes hidden in the shadows between the kiln and the spire. She picked up a pebble from next to her and threw it at the petalfur to chase the little fox-thing away. It wasn't exactly a nuisance, but none of them really wanted it around, for all that it kept lingering around for the past... week or so? Her halfhearted throw landed well away from the critter, and its eyes slowly moved to where the stone had landed then back to Alyssa, mocking her poor aim.

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"Oh, screw you too!" she cast around for a better rock than the last one she'd used, but by the time she'd found one and looked back up, the petalfur's eyes had vanished back into the shadows. She glared at the puddle of darkness it had been hiding in, but it didn't reappear. She tossed the stone where it had been anyway, but it just clattered against other rock and fell out of her line of sight.

A small clatter of rock behind her caused Alyssa to jump, only to notice Jacob behind her. He raised an inquisitive eyebrow, and she fought back a blush, "It was the petalfur. It was slinking around trying to steal food again," she explained.

Jacob didn't really acknowledge her statement, instead sitting down with a sigh onto a smooth rock that Alyssa suddenly regretted not having been sitting on herself. "Would you mind?" he asked.

"Huh? Oh," Alyssa took a moment to realize what he was asking, then grabbed a ladle and another bowl and measured him out some food as well, then took a seat on the next-best rock around the cookpot.

Jacob blew on the steaming bowl and took a sip from the side, then grimaced. "Quite hot."

"It was boiling not that long ago. I needed to pull it off the flames a bit."

That time, Jacob did acknowledge her response, and drummed his fingers against the side of the bowl in what almost seemed like a rhythm, before taking a satisfied sip accompanied by a nod.

Really? Well... she supposed she shouldn't have been that surprised that the actual veteran among them knew how to use cantrips, but that still meant it was yet another thing she wasn't bringing to the table.

She regarded the older man somewhat warily, ready for him to ask her some question about her own magic, but the longer he did nothing of the sort, the more she relaxed. Soon, she'd get her magic back properly and then everything would be great again.

She hunched over a bit more, sipping her soup.

Everything will be great soon.

"Ride!" Henrietta's voice called out from near the base of the spire, and Alyssa perked up, vaulting over a few rocks to return to the walled-in area of First Tower.

She skidded to a stop in front of the seemingly-surprised Commander. "You called?"

"I did. Oliver needs you."

Alyssa tapped her foot and gave Henrietta a look. She wasn't accepting something as vague as that for orders. After a moment, she relented. "He needs a focusing crystal for the tower, he's discovered."

"Just a crystal? Any more details than that?"

"There's a reason I simply said Oliver needed you."

Alyssa reluctantly muttered her agreement and, after confirming that Oliver was where she expected he would be, scaled the Spire and made her way over to the tower itself. The man she was looking for wasn't at the base, but she thought she caught a glimpse of him up top, so she began to scale the walls.

It had taken nearly two days for the fire inside the tower to fully subside, and even now it was so smoky inside that they hadn't even started to try and clean it out to make it into a building for their use. Since it had subsided, Oliver had been all over the whole thing, examining the runes carved into the outside wall and sagely running his fingers over the surface like he was also a tactile mana-feeler and not just someone pretending to be profound when they nodded at the air while saying things like, "Hmmm, yes. The Exoflums are sevenine degrees off the proper lexicon, I will need to stick a plum totem in the ground three paces away to correct this."

A ladder had been made for the outside of the tower, firmly affixed at both the top and the bottom, and Alyssa started climbing it. Because the entire construction was like forty feet from bare-stone foundation to the very tip of the dome, no single reed was long enough to serve as a pole, but they'd managed to nest multiple reeds on top of each other, stacking them like cups to extend the maximum reach. It was unwieldy, but considering 'mobile' was the exact opposite of what they wanted from the ladder, that was hardly an issue.

The wind whipped around her once she was just a few feet off the ground. Not that the spire itself wasn't windy, but something about being on such a rickety construction always made you extra aware of the way that each and every breeze tugged on your body and threatened to wrench the slick reeds out of your grip and send you plummeting to the ground below.

Oh, how terrifying.

Unfortunately, her sarcasm failed to squash the tiny piece of her mind that had a problem with strong winds on high places. Logically, that was her ideal setup, but no matter how many times she jumped off hundred-foot-cliffs, falling off them still remained something she wanted to avoid.

Maybe she could figure out some way to blame her mother. Or perhaps that would be too cliche.

She managed to reach the top without incident, only to feel the wind even more strongly, and this time it was pulling on the entire reed construct that had been erected at the very top of the tower. A platform roughly ten foot square, just barely resting atop the highest point of the dome and attached as firmly as they could manage, still shook slightly in the wind.

Oliver was sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed at the very center, on top of a small circle of dry clay inscribed with symbols.

"Eflumuscazafigilisthmtihvmaijdfijkierrrrrrrm," Oliver said in rapid-fire gobbledygook. Sure, it was great and powerful magical chants needed to bend reality to his will or something, but after enough time listening in, the mystery had been long stripped away, leaving only an extremely goofy set of sounds coming out of an incredibly serious-looking mouth. Maybe that was the real secret as to why mages liked to work in towers. That way, nobody could hear them make a sound like a deflating balloon.

She had to hand it to him though, it was a very good deflating balloon impression.

But silly noises or not, you didn't interrupt anyone mid-cast. He'd notice her presence soon enough, and then she'd be able to get answers to what she wanted.

The view from here was incredible, at least. They absolutely towered over the forest, and Alyssa could easily see the ocean as it stretched off into infinity, the cliff by which Shelter had been built, the giant tree and several others like it, the random hills and rock spires she'd investigated on her way here, and then places further away from the ocean wherein the terrain dipped up and down in so many hills, mottled shades of green giving The Jungle an appearance not dissimilar to ripples along the top of the ocean, with the tree-covered jagged hills in the distance taking on the appearance of so many waves.

Looking down the coast, her view was still shrouded by fog, but at other times when the visibility had been better, she knew that the green carpet stretched on for miles, until some more red rocks and a bit of an inlet from the ocean cut off her sight-lines.

And it all just felt so, so wild. Alyssa took a deep breath and closed her eyes in thought. She wanted to take a moment to properly enjoy being on this world, where she could truly, properly appreciate the good about this world, to chase away the annoyances and inconveniences.

Of course, Oliver chose that moment to notice her and speak up.

Brat.

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