"So, tomorrow's not gonna have mu the way of sery," I said, setting a big tray oable. "We're gonna wake up bright and early, refit the van with tracks instead of wheels, and then we're gonna drive through the Bck Desert until we get to the other side."

  " we stop in the middle so I look at the sery?" Talia asked as she grabbed the biggest bread roll- I hadn't divided up the dough super precisely, because while I was a maist, that just meant that I uood just how much of a pain in the ass chasing precision was and relished opportunities where I could just shrug and eyeball things and it'd work out fine.

  "I mean, sure, but we won't stop for very long, because yon bored real fu' quick," I said with a shrug, sitting down and grabbing some food for myself. Dionight was a big pot of beef stew, which I did not anticipate we would finish tonight; the idea here was, once we'd eaten all we could, we'd then put it in the refrigerator to keep it fresh, and tomorrow, whenever we got hungry, we'd just put the pot ba the stove a some more stew. "It's the world's most desote desert. Bck sands, very rare pnt life, and hardly any animals. There's more life in a single public toilet than there is iire Bck Desert."

  "Ew," Faith said primly.

  "It's kinda like the o, except even more b, holy," I said idly. "There's this one exge from one of Uncle Frederick's books that's always stuck with me- this guy is trying to bee a sailor because he wants to see the world, and the captain tells him to go look over the side of the ship and tell him what he sees. The guy says it's nothing but water, all the way to the horizon, and the captain said..." I cleared my throat. "'Aye, you'll find all the world looks that way from the deck of a sailing ship. Now that you've seen the world, d, do you find yourself still drawn to sailing?'"

  "That was a stupid versation," Talia said. "The whole rest of the book was all about a bunch of iing things happening at sea."

  "Well, yes but no," I said. "And it definitely doesn't scuttle my point. For one, most of the iing things came from the people on the ship iing with each other- the sea itself was just the reason why all these rge personalities were, essentially, locked in a room together. And two... The iing parts that did e from the sea were in the form of storms and a sea monster or three, depending on how you t. And I said the Bck Desert was even less iing than the o, and the eaningful weather a monsters are definitely why."

  "What about sandworms?" Faith asked.

  "Sandwhat?" Emily asked.

  "Sandworms," Faith said. "They're these giant predatory worms that crawl beh the sand and excrete a magical spice. They're blind, but they sense vibrations in the ground from miles away. You gotta walk without rhythm, or you'll attract the worm."

  "Those aren't real," I said dryly. "Uncle Frederick made them up for a story he published a hundred and fifty years ago."

  "...Oh," Faith said quietly.

  "Ugh, that story pissed me off so much," Talia muttered. "Desert-adapted creatures are smaller than normal, because bigger creatures are at a bigger risk of overheating, and they take more food to stay alive. Now, there are snakes in the desert, and a lot of them are ambush predators who hide beh the sand, so you've gotta watch your step, but it's not a 'walk without rhythm' type thiher."

  "How many snakes do you expect to see in the Bck Desert?" I asked.

  "...Maybe one, if we're lucky," Talia admitted.

  "More if we aren't?" Emily asked.

  "No, zero if we aren't," Talia said. "Desert snakes aren't adapted for taking down prey as big as a humaing bitten by one is gonna hurt, but between you, me, Faith, and Joseph's little regeion amulet, we should be fine."

  "Regeion amulet?" Emily asked.

  "It's a long story, but..." I hummed. "...Well, hell, we've got time."

  By the time I finished reting the events of the statue hunt to Emily, with a few interjes from Talia and Emily for the parts I wasn't there for or had simply left out for reasons they disagreed with, we had finished our meal, and were now sitting on the couches around our little coffee table. Each couch was sized for three people, or one person ying down across them, and we also had two armchairs, making for a total of eight seats.

  Across from me, Talia was id out oher couch, with Faith sprawled atop her, the two of them casually cuddling in a way that told me, even if I really wao get rid of Faith, it would be very hard.

  And sittio me on our own couch was Emily, who was fidgeting a little.

  "And then the day," I said, "I got a letter from your mom, walked up to the pace, and you were there for the rest of it." Aside from the part where Duchess Melody cheated on her husband with ahe same age as her own daughter, but I wasn't going to say that out loud.

  "I see," Emily said, nodding slowly.

  "...So, what's up?" I asked.

  "I, um..." Emily trailed off, blushing a little and looking away... and, tally, looking at Talia and Faith, who were just casually cuddling.

  "I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you want a hug, or some other kind of affe, but you're not sure how to ask for that," I said. "Well, gratutions, Emily: you live with elves, aend to be pretty casual and open with physical affe."

  "...thank you," she all but whispered, before turning and tg onto me like a pleasantly well-padded limpet.

  I hummed quietly to myself as I returhe hug, turning to face her and swinging my legs up and onto the couch for the optimally fortable cuddling position. Perhaps I was just letting my libido get ahead of me, here, but... Was there any e talking Emily into my bed? And, well, if there was, why would I do that? I mean, okay, obviously Emily is already a very attractive and curvaceous woman, and therefore almost precisely my type physically, and given what her mother looks like, I'm optimistic that she's only going to get even hotter for the few decades, but even with all that, there was more to a long-term retionship than 'you make my dick hard; I touch your boobs?' There was also the question of personality, and...

  ...Well, so far Emily seemed like she was still in her 'shy around new people' phase of our acquaintance. Just because we were more-or-less stu a house with each other for the better part of a week doesn't mean I'd already gotten to know her, what with me spending most of our waking hours up front in the cab, driving the fug van rather than hanging out with Emily and talking.

  I sighed, which Emily did not eveely uand the cause of.

  "Is something wrong?" Emily asked.

  "Hm? No, no, don't worry about it," I said, shaking my head. "Just realizing that this roadtrip isn't giving me as much time to hang out ao know you as I'd like, but... Well, we're gon Mount Fate soon enough, and we just spend the wo months sitting around doing nothing but talk all day if we want to. It's no big deal; I be patient."

  "I could sit up front with you in the tomorrow?" Emily suggested. "We could talk then, if driving doesn't require too much of your attention?"

  "Should be fine," I said, nodding. "The Bck Desert isly a hugely plicated terrain, driving-wise; I pretty much just have to check the pass every on a while to make sure we're still going north. And... thank you. I appreciate that."

  Thankfully, smart design choices when designing the van were paying off here; using a touch of telekinesis and a bunundane, metal jack-stands to lift the van high enough I could work on the undercarriage took all of five minutes, because I'd maet where exactly I'd put the jacks in my workshop. From there, I did spend about an hour removing the wheels, folding bae of the bodywork- which was slitted and hio allow exactly this- and installing new wheels that the tracks would ride on, but that was still pretty fast for something that would take all week to retrofit to a different ented caravan that wasn't designed with this in mind.

  So, about two hours after dawn, I handed in my parking ticket to the valet, and began to drive my van straight north towards the Bck Desert.

  "So... I've been w," Emily said. "How do we know Demon King Paimon's cult is still destroyed?"

  "Well, we don't," I said. "There's always someoupid and greedy enough to try rolling the devil's dice, and while Demon Kings have sharply limited resources due to Hell being so depleted, the fact of the matter is that five hundred years is a long enough time for Paimon to have accrued enough resources to kickstart a new cult."

  "Oh," Emily said.

  "However," I tinued, "we be reasonably certain that Paimon's cult is still destroyed, simply because we probably would've heard about it by now if it wasn't. Demonic magic is destructive stuff- literally, powered by the ive side of vital essehe ohat causes decay ah. Wherever demonic magic is being practiced regurly, people get sick, pnts wither, and animals start dying. There's only a small window of time between when a demon cult form and when they get noticed by an adventuring party and then immediately sughtered."

  "...Oh," Emily repeated.

  "So, we should be fine," I tinued. "Right now, we should be worried about the fact that these tracks are making us go only twenty miles an hour, and we've got a lot of desert to cross today. Anyhow, what do you do for fun?"

  "Oh, well, um..."

  "Right, Healer training," I said mildly, noddily. "Well, what've you been doing to occupy yourself for these past two days?"

  "Reading a lot of books, mostly. Thank you fing such a prehensive library, by the way."

  "It wasn't any trouble at all. My uncle was the one who made sure I brought it, really. So what're you reading currently?"

  "A book he wrote, actually," Emily said. "This one is about... giant lizards on the moon?"

  She tialking, and I simply listened, soaking up her voice.

  It was nice, and the time began to fly by.