"Oh god dammit," I muttered, staring at the sandstorm on the horizon. "Well, guess I was wrong about this pce having b weather, huh?"

  "I'm guessing the bck cloud on the horizon is a bad thing?" Emily asked.

  "Yeah, that's a sandstorm," I said. "Like a regur windstorm, except there's a lot of loose sand on the ground that gets picked up and thrown around, thus making it extremely inadvisable to be out there during one."

  "Aren't we ihough?" Emily asked.

  "We are, and it is the case that there really is not that much out here that o be avoided, so we could hypothetically just keep driving through it, but..."

  "But you're stopping anyways?" Emily said.

  "Mhm," I said. "Because the engine has to su a lot of air to run, and I don't want to risk it sug in sand. So I'm just gonna... Kill the engine, shutter the air intakes, and we're just gonna wait this o. And while I'm doing this, would you mind running ag Talia for me? Oh, and tell her to put on her desert gear, too."

  "Okay," Emily said, standing up from her seat. "Be careful."

  Talia was just wearing her usual tank top and skirt when she came into the , whereas I was already wearing my desert gear.

  "Talia, e on," I said. "Put on your desert gear, please."

  "Alright, alright, rex," Talia said, pulling the loose white jumpsuit out of her cleavage. (I had, in fact, mao make her a copy of Duchess Melody's own cleavage-mounted bag of holding, and Talia had fallen deeply in love with it, both from practicality and from just how enamored she was with her own boobs.) "Sandstorm, huh?"

  "Eyup," I said, nodding my head. "I'm gonna help you put up a quick weather ward to keep the worst of it off of us, but the edge of the storm is already almost here, so..."

  "Got it," Talia said, nodding as she suited up.

  Our desert gear retty standard for Adventurers, albeit with very new modern materials substituting for what used to be some pretty expensive entment. The main piece of the gear was a loose-fitting jumpsuit with ied gloves and boot-covers, made of pure white fabric that was very tightly-woven to prevent fine-grained sand from getting inside. On our heads, we wore tight-fitting hoods of the same fabrid then on top of that, we wore fully-enclosed helmets with big, full-faced visors that were traditionally made from ented gss, but on ours were instead made from a lighter, less-brittle material called polycarbohat was synthesized by alchemists from mineral oils. Ihose helmets were some ented speaking stones, so that we could keep talking even in the r winds of a sandstorm. And holding the whole thing together was a deeply voluted system of fps and zips and buttons, all aimed at keeping sand from slipping in through gaps in the cloth.

  "Alright, let's do this," I said, casting a modified shield-bubble spell on the door before opening it. This particur shield-bubble was, ultimately, quite simple: it blocked sand, because otherwise opening this door would let sand into the cab, and I didn't want to spend hours boriously ing sand out of the cab, nor did I want to burn that much magicka on ing it the fast way, especially when I could just block the sairely for less magicka.

  We climbed out of the van quickly, shutting the door behind us, and immediately got to work on marking out a quick five-point ward array. I used Are magic to create a more solid physical structure from the sand- just a simple 'sand to gss' transmutation, which didn't really make gss per se due to the sand here being ri iron rather than just simple pure white quartz sand- and Talia used Primal magic to anchor weather wards to the more solid structure.

  Now, as it turns out, walking on deep, soft, shifting sand was really hard, and seeing what you're doing as a cloud of flying bck sand is desding upon you is also really hard. I had no idea how long we were out there, but it was too goddamn long, and only ohe st point of the ward array was plete did I finally feel like I could breathe a sigh of relief.

  "Okay," Talia said. "We've got a pocket of safety against the sandstorm, now. Or at least, we're not gettied with sand nearly as hard anymore."

  "That's something," I muttered, before sighing. "Ugh. Fuck a duck..."

  "There's something weird about this storm," Talia said, frowning. "Even in a desert, there's a sort of ambient background glow of Primal magic- it's everywhere, after all. There's a little bit in every raincloud, every gust of wind... but there isn't any here. It feels just... devoid of magic."

  "Huh," I grunted out. "So what do you make of that?"

  "Holy? No idea," Talia said. "There's just... I literally do not uand how that could happen. Maybe there is some Primal magi this storm, but it's just so weak that I'm not notig it?"

  "Well... Keep a," I said, furrowing my brow. "Hopefully we don't have another sandstorm tomorrow; I really don't end more time than I have to out here in this stupid desert."

  "I hear ya," Talia said. "My curiosity has been more than satisfied, I think."

  "Let's just... get baside, a out of this desert gear," I said, sighing deeply. "Fuck, I hate sand..."

  "Motherfucker," I muttered, ohe sandstorm had passed.

  "What is it?" Faith asked, turning to look at me.

  We were all outside, cheg the exterior of the van- thankfully, my toughening charms had held, aher the paint nor the gss were unduly damaged by the sandstorm. The engine, however, was a different problem.

  "There is sand all over this goddamn thing," I said, pulling out a wire brush and beginning to scrub sand out of the intake shutters. "Worse, there's sand all ihis goddamn thing, and I 't start it back up until after I've ed all the sand out."

  "What would happen if you tried anyways?" Faith asked.

  "There's a lot of moving parts in this thing, and the grains of sand would get between moving surfaces and scratch 'em up real bad, until suddenly the tolerances are shot to hell and this thiher locks itself up or rattles itself apart," I said. "So, y'know. Nothing good. Ugh, this is going to be my whole day..."

  "Anything we do to help?" Talia asked.

  "Holy? No," I said. "There's not enough elbow room here for more than one person to work on this engine, and none of you are maists, so... I mean, you sit nearby and provide moral support, but I wouldn't bme you for not wanting to sit out here in the desert for the hours it's gonna take me to the goddamn engine properly."

  "Moral support it is," Faith said.

  "Oh, and Emily? I'm sorry, but we're going to have to skip tonight's hypnosis session."

  "It's okay, Joseph," Emily said. "I be patient too. Take your time."

  I sighed, taking off my jacket; the long, loose sleeves were just too much of a risk around the moving parts of an explosive engine. Once I had the jacket off, I passed it wordlessly to Volex, a ba with the wire brush.

  "I hate sand," I said, to nobody in particur.

  "So I've heard," Volex said idly, perched on the frame of the van, but still suffitly out-of-the-way that I had room to work. "So... How're you feeling about the girls so far?" I could feel a flicker of Occult magic pulse outwards from her, and I could evehat it was just a simple privacy charm.

  "You'll have to eborate," I said, turning to g the rest of my adventuring party, who were sitting on upside-down tin buckets because we didn't think to buy camp stools. The sun was setting, and while I had responded by busting out a simple magical work-light, they were responding by busting out a magical log to have a little campfire- that log would never burn to ash, but it would also never burn particurly hotly, either; it was o have, but if we wao really cook something, we would've needed more logs.

  "That's what I want you to do," Volex said. "Just... Give me a minute of talking about your overall impression of eae. Start with Talia, since you've knowhe lo."

  "She's my friend," I said, shrugging. "Our personalities are patible, we both think the other is funny and siderate and a good friend to have, and we also both think the other is very attractive. We pn to be life partners food long while, but are also aware that, y'know, circumstances and people do ge, especially early on in life while we're still figuring ourselves out. Maybe I will marry her and have kids with her, maybe I won't. It's all in flux."

  "Fair enough."

  "Emily's nice, but still kinda shy, and hasn't fully e into her ow," I said. "I'm hoping that being around elven peers for long enough will make her start ag like a real half-elf, but until then, it's hard to think of her as anything besides a cute, shy girl who I have to look after."

  "I'm pretty sure you think she's more than just cute," Volex said, smirking. "You've got the hots for little miss Redwater, little man."

  "It's not my fault I know she's gonna turn into a milf," I muttered.

  It was a isception that elves, beiually youthful-looking, had a preference for humans who were also youthful-looking. And while it was true that a few elves were like that, the far more on opinion was that visibly-older humans were in fact hotter than humans who looked like they had just graduated high school. It was novel aic- the same reason so many humans had a weird thing about elf ears, and teo draw elves with longer ears than we really had.

  The upshot of this attitude was that an elf c a human iwenties was not, in fact, a creepy old man who wants a wife who's still young aiful, but, more likely, a oisseur of the middle-aged and perhaps even truly old, who was simply getting in early, before someone else married her.

  Volex simply ughed, high and sharp.

  "Anyhow," Volex said. "What about Faith?"

  "Faith is... plicated," I said. "Before the War, she'd probably have just straight-up moved in with me and Talia by now, and we'd be calling her part of the family. But... Well, she introduced herself to me as a Padin, and the bad blood runs deep. It seems like she's slowly realizing that she's in the wrong, here, but... She's still holding on, because she feels like she has nothing going for her except being a Padin, and she'd have nothi if she just let go."

  "And what would you tell her to do?"

  "I'd tell her she's eighteen years old, and I am the weird one for already having a vocational skillset," I said dryly. "I'd also tell her to try praying to The Mother fuidance, because she's closer to what Faith used to think Padins were all about."

  "I see, I see," Volex said. "And... you haven't told her this... why?"

  "I don't want to push her," I said. "Ugh. Finally got this stupid engine back together... I want to never do that ever again."

  Volex disappeared into a puff of smoke, flowing baside the van and back up to her reliquary, still in my jacket's pocket, and with my jacket likely being hung up in my room, allowio drop the engine hood bato pce.

  "Alright!" I said, raising my voice a little and popping Volex's privacy charm. "The engine's fixed. Y'all roasting some sausages?"

  "Eyup," Faith said, holding out a long, wood-handled metal skewer with a nicely-browned sausage link speared on its twin tines. "You hungry?"

  "Ravenous," I said dryly. "Ugh. This stupid Mount Fate bullshit better be worth it."

  "Hey, actually," Faith said, as she passed me the skewer, and then began preparing another one. "What's your pn for the future, anyhow? I know there's something in there about unis, but... What's yoal, after you graduate?"

  I hummed quietly, my mind drifting as I asked myself, 'what did I want life to look like when I was thirty?'

  "...Well," I began slowly.