Victor

  All right, I'd had some time to rest but now it was time to get down to business, once more unto the breach. I was at the adventurer's guild casually perusing the quest board. Let's see here, Grimdark Forest lay some forty miles northwest - eighty on a round trip. Yeah that was gonna cut into my gasoline reserves real quick if we didn't prepare for a long outing. The princess and Meli were going on a supply run while taking Mal to get some equipment.

  I hadn't driven my Cadillac in over a month and I was getting a hankering to hear that engine roar, to feel the vibrations under my seat, to think "yeah, that's the sound of freedom." I hoped that I'd at least have enough gas to get me to a place where I could find some kind of solution to the fuel problem. Anyway, now wasn't the time to be thinking about this. The reason I was thinking about the direction and distance was because I was fixin' to see if we could get some work on our way there.

  Grimdark forest pretty much took up the entire northwest corner of the map of Cara, since at some point it turns into "The Deep Grimdark", within the wilderland; even the Darkborn Elves don't live that far in. There was a castle along the road east of the forest and a town to support it, presumably for border defense. The way things were lookin', I'd got the size of Cara Kingdom pegged to be about the size of the old French County of Toulouse or maybe bigger, and the shape was different obviously. I remembered grandpa and I drove in a rental car about 80 miles, Albi to Carcassonne, but that's probably more like 60 miles as the crow flies, I think: that's the distance between the Caer Caradon and the harbor town of Port d'Azune.

  Huh? What quest is this? Oh. Oh! Horse runner? This…I didn't know that was a thing! That changes everything! Sweet! More on that later.

  But anyway, anyway though, what was important was to compare the towns along the way to the locations, check to see if they'd be worth a detour. Yes, all right, I'd found at least one delivery quest to that area: boy will they be surprised when Red Lightning comes in faster than a misunderstood mouse! Incidentally, there was one official quest that never made it to the board - yep, the queen had actually had all of the paperwork done; or at least a scribe had. She didn't have to but it was nice to get some guild progress while we were at it.

  It was a copper rank quest with the following parameters: root out the Black Order cultists within Grimdark Forest. How, you ask, were we even eligible, with our average rank being iron, you ask? Simple: we were going to recruit a temporary party member at either Ara Lahee, or in the town of, er, I forgot to ask its name, ah, Northbrook. Shoulda known; it's up north, and there's a brook. A temporary party member could be anyone within one rank of our own average: wood or tin, incidentally, and couldn't be some random uninitiated jabroni, but thankfully border towns were supposedly full of low-rankers seeking parties to glom onto. Well well, that's three things we can do on our way there, not too shabby - two deliveries to Northbrook, and our main goal!

  Sure enough, when I returned to the inn, the others had already returned, oh wow! Mal went and had a complete makeover - well, I mean, a costume change. His hair was still just kind of lazily combed with a middle part, and the stubble was gone from his cheeks and neck, so really he'd just been cleaned up a little. Judging by how he was looking over himself in the princess' hand mirror, he seemed to like the results. But as for his new outfit: he was wearing a long wine-colored vest-style gambeson over a black shirt with those little shoulder puffs (these had a red trim), black travelling breeches, and fastidious black boots. In this getup he'd almost look like a noble out for his first adventure were he not slouching; no, really, he would look regal if he just stood up straight every once in a while! Ah, he also had a leather belt and a fine looking thin-bladed sword hanging from it; it looked like it was more of a thruster than the princess' saber. In addition to that, he was also wearing a dark gray traveller's cloak and a leather baldric where he'd stashed some throwing knives. Ohh right! We were going to need a few days to get that special weapon I wanted made for him.

  "Lookin' sharp and ready for adventure," I said.

  "Yes, I suppose so," said Mal, "I found that these colors suited me the best. Ah, that libidinous lapine lady wanted to put me in a black riding cloak, but the thought of wearing a black hood ever again makes my stomach turn - that was Fayd's style, you see."

  "I can see that, but there's an argument to be made for reclaiming the style."

  Mal nodded, eyes closed thoughtfully, "very well. Once we have put a stop to him, perhaps I shall take his cloak as a trophy."

  "Ha, and maybe you'll get lucky and the cloak'll be a magic one."

  "Could very well be, he is a member of the Circle of 13 - from what I understand they're supposed to be the mastermind's loyal dogs, the way they speak of him. Being a man of some import he may have some magical equipment," he spun around, arms spread, and laughed, "which is also what the milkmaid said of the baron!"

  Equipment. I crossed my arms and gave a light smirk, I loved it when we got an idiomatic match like this. "Nice. Some time soon I reckon we gotta compare notes on the wordplay our languages are capable of. That way we can really bring on the snark."

  He did that cross-legged bow again, arms wide, "I shall look forward to it. So come, come! Let us now take stock of our supplies!"

  I was glad to oblige. All right all right, so if we were committed to using the Cadillac like a carriage on this trip we'd save on gas, but the trip would take longer, and I'd like to impress our clients with our speed. The hitch is that while our horses can pull the Cadillac, the Cadillac can't return the favor. In other words, we would need to come back by whichever means we had chosen or sell the horses at the other end - which would suck because we'd grown attached to our chestnut stallion and gray dappled mare with long black hair. Mine was called Whiskey, and the princess had named hers Sparkle.

  They weren't exactly Clydesdales, but they were sturdy - the princess called them heavy warsteeds; so I guess they were somewhere between a destrier and a draft horse in terms of strength. In fact she'd guessed that they'd once been draft horses who, after having been stolen, were retrained into cavalry horses. I'd actually picked mine because of how much the color of his coat reminded me of a horse I'd ridden in the scouts who had once been a wild mustang. Either way we were taking the Cadillac, the trunk space was too damn useful to not use it in some way, and we could do some fancy driving work in an emergency.

  However! At least for this trip, since we knew we were going to a town where there'd be stables, we had another option! All we would need is to rent some draft horses in Northbrook, turn them in at the adventurer's guild, pay a nominal fee, and the stablemaster would post a bill for a "horse running" quest.

  The objective of a horse runner is simple: move a horse, or horses, from one place to another; I confirmed with Juliette that, yes, indeed, there were usually some horses for temporary use in most towns and cities. Man, this was never a thing in my old world; I guess having "adventurer" as a profession was a game-changer in this regard, too. I had to wonder if they had something like the Pony Express at this point but if they didn't maybe I could corner the market on it, heh.

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  Well the reason I bring all this up is because I had a lot of things purchased for the road this time around and we'd need the car to move it all, and now we knew we could cut our gas expenditures in half this time. Hoo-rah! All right first, we actually had enough money now to where we could each afford our own tent - easier to manage, I thought. The princess and I already acquired one each, and we got Mal his own today. For this journey, we'd only need to find lodging in Northbrook for the first night, but I wanted to stop and grill as usual; it's Red Lightning tradition!

  I noted the cost of Mal's other gear, too, and moved to the next item which was his special toolset; picks and probes and the like. Those came in a convenient leather foldy thing. Three backpacks, ten iron pitons, one hammer, one crowbar, two sleeping bags, my very own handy shadbard, two new torches bringing us back up to five, thirty units of iron rations, some fresh food to eat on the road, and meat to grill. We actually still had the rations left over from our stakeout, but I wanted to be crazy prepared.

  I'd taken stock of my ammo too - I'd mostly not been using my rifle, except for that successful deer hunt we had on one of our quests, that took one shot, sixteen rounds of .308 expended. As for .45 I'd used eight rounds during the battle of Barber Hill, four shots to buy us some time to escape during that nightmare of a fact-finding mission, and none since then. Twenty rounds down, eighty to go, but I'd count them later just in case. I was being very stingy with my ammunition, it was like living in California or something - but it wasn't like I was gonna be able to get more. Having settled that, we paid for another two months in advance so we could still store some things and not have to resettle later. Eventually I'd want us to buy some kind of land as a base of operations, but that would have to wait.

  The very next morning the four of us, oh, did I mention that Meli was tagging along for the drive to Northbrook? Yep! She's not an official party member but she did want to help us a bit, and she wanted to check out some things in town - she was bringing her own camping gear and was planning on minding the Cadillac while we traversed the forest on foot.

  Mal and Meli's eyes both gaped open, their jaws dropped, when they beheld the glory of Red Lightning's signature crimson chariot. Yep, I hadn't brought her out in so long that Meli hadn't even so much as laid eyes on her in the carriage house. The princess stood besides the passenger door, I smiled at her, somewhat expectantly.

  She gave a curtsy, "o party-leader of Red Lightning, o brave-lord and elf-friend, o hero torn from the heavens: I, Illiana Verissa taelAnaura, fourth princess of Anaura, doth humbly request that she be granted permission to ride shotgun!"

  I laughed, "gladly, o madam healer - ah, forgive me, your royal highness Princess Illiana."

  The princess giggled, "we had been incognito for so long that I was glad to finally be able to use my proper name in public again, and to hear you call me princess openly, too. Though, lady healer and its variations were starting to grow upon me a fair bit." Without another word she hopped in and got buckled up - yeah she missed this, too.

  Mal said, incredulously, rolling his eyes and his wrist both, "pray, hie thyselves to a bedchamber already. Also, what is shotgun, anyway?"

  "It means the front seat," I said, "and there is a fun story behind it, we can talk about it on the road."

  Mal shrugged and took the seat behind me, while Meli strapped herself into the seat behind the princess. The explanation of the seatbelt was easy enough for them to learn quickly. Rideshare passengers have zero excuses if people from a vaguely medieval world could use them. I turned the engine on, eliciting a cry of "goodness" from Meli and a genuine-sounding if bland "interesting" from Mal. I had the princess hand Mal the CD wallet, whom I told to pick any old album - he chose the band named after an alabaster serpent. Great choice. There were even more surprised cries as the music started at full blast.

  Oh these two are so innocent, they ain't seen nothing yet. Once we were outside the west gate, the princess cast her usual spells, got back inside, and we were off! Meli and Mal wore expressions that suggested both fear and exhilaration; now that's what I call a reaction. Yes! That's what hundreds of horsepower feels like. Go west, young man, ah, the first delivery stop, a town known as "Haroldhill" - named for the somewhat large hill nearby. The foothills led to a mountain range, beyond which was a country called Andalon but I wouldn't learn a whole lot about that place until much later.

  Meli said, near out of breath, "What a rush! That were a mighty shockin' surprise, sug! My poor lil poochiba?ana ain't never been ready fer a sudden ac-celleratin' like that!"

  Mal said, "I have absolutely no idea what that means, and I don't know if I should even ask."

  I don't think Meli heard him, even with them long ears.

  "That said," he raised a finger, beaming, though I wasn't sure if he was still masking, "that music was something else! I'd love to hear more songs along the same line. It was quite stimulating - really got my blood pumping!"

  Meli, hands clasped, said, "Yer right! It sure feels like that music was composed with the inten-shun t'get cha in the mood fer some lovin'!"

  Well, she wasn't wrong. I laughed, and promised to play some more.

  The four of us grabbed the items in question from the trunk, brought it to the unsurprisingly surprised recipient - how these quests worked is that we let him touch our chips and say "I solemnly swear that these adventurers have delivered my goods" - just kidding, the guy signed a slip. Pattern magic didn't cover everything, you know. After making sure that neither Meli nor Mal was gonna have a heart attack we pressed on.

  The total trip took just over an hour to complete, delivery included because we didn't even really need to follow the road - some day I would need to find out if I can prevent damage to the car, and to us, so I could do some serious airtime stunts. A hundred and sixty miles left, more or less - urgh.

  After securing rooms at the local Inn, Jewel Eye, we set up my grill outside of town and had a little ol' cookout. Still bereft of a smoker, I could at least grill everyone a good dry-rubbed steak - the same sort I'd made for the princess on our steak-out; oh everybody's a critic.

  The steaks were a big hit - Mal complimented the food but it didn't help ease his usual malaise - ah sure it gave him a little pleasure in the moment and likely dulled the ache a little, but, I reckoned it'd be a while before he felt whole again, if ever. Gotta have faith though!

  Meli's reaction, however, was positively, um, over the top, shall we say. Yeah she looked less like she'd just eaten and more like she just got ate, know whatta mean? Dinner being a success, we split our duties for the remainder of the day.

  While the girls settled in I took Mal to the local branch of the adventurer's guild to try and find that temporary ally of ours. Gah! No such luck! Oh sure there were solo adventurers, but none of them wanted to go to Grimdark Forest itself - not even for a royal request! The three actual full parties already had other business elsewhere and were just looking for an on-the-way delivery like we - ooh - here's a delivery from here to the Dark Elf village - yoink! There was one gold-ranked fellow there, randomly, but well, he was too high rank to join us officially, and he was fishing for an escort quest towards Port d'Azune. This was fine, this was all right; I decided. The temporary party member was only for the sake of formalities - completing the mission was the main thing.

  Mal was ruminating about something at length, then he said "you know, we may just need to wait until we've reached Ara Lahee. They have some formidable warriors, and we could use one to balance our skillsets. Many tend to be guild-registered adventurers which would be a bonus."

  If there were this many dark elf adventurers I suppose that explained how the princess could have met some without ever having been to their forest. He was right about skillsets; one mage/priestess, one ranged attacker / support spellcaster, and one mixed attacker who could fight on the frontline but didn't have heavy armor. Yeah, yeah, a heavy hitter could work - someone with a sword and shield or a really big sword, or an axe even. Hm I had no idea what sorts of weapons the darkborn favored, but I supposed I would find out. The writing on the wall.

  I shrugged, "all right. Come then, let's rejoin the girls and have a pow-" I turned pale, "- a strategy meeting."

  That done, we returned to the Inn, Jewel Eye, and after a brief discussion we decided to hire someone in Ara Lahee. Night fell, night passed, we supped some breakfast. Meli showed us off, and she even said the friggin thing.

  "Y'all come back now, y'hear?"

  I didn't even get a dirty look from Mal and the princess, we were too busy waving. We set out early and before long the road brought us to the very edge of Grimdark Forest itself.