Val had stopped in a motel not only to rest for the night, but also to give herself the chance to discover her next destination. With her eyes closed, Val focused her thoughts to reimagine the way that Ross had gone to sleep somewhere in this same building, three months ago in midsummer.

The walls of the motel room stayed around her, but some of the furniture spun and rotated to face in a different direction. This other room that Ross had stayed in looked nearly identical to hers, except orientated the opposite way as though Val gazed into a mirror.

Her presence shifted from off of the bed and back to where her invisible form had stood close to the doorway at the end of her last vision. In her old place on the bed, the sleeping form of Ross now lounged over the blankets in the exact way that Val had arranged herself in her own room. The lights remained on to deter any unwanted bloodsuckers from having a meal of him.

The darkened sky behind the curtains of Val’s time lightened to dawn in Ross’s room. The onset of light brought with it the blaring of the alarm on his phone.

With a groan, one hand tapped it off and slapped over his forehead. As more of a laid-back sort of guy, springing to his feet after a couple hours of sleep did not happen to be his forte. Val knew this about Ross, yet he was on his feet and out the door within fifteen minutes. He always was a morning person, after all.

It was time for them to head to a bus stop. Already, Val knew this would pose a problem for her own travels with Foofy, given that she could not take a dog on a bus. To figure out the path she would indeed take, she would follow Ross nonetheless.

Going on this goose chase grated on Val’s nerves, if she were entirely honest. If Ross could sense her presence—he had even talked to her the previous night—why could he not just sit down for a good hour and tell her everything that she needed to know?

Whatever that deal had been with their mother, Val would not put it past the realm of possibility for some kind of mystical power to bar him from doing so, just like how she had been prevented from seeing the entirety of that vision. Even when things had been normal before he had left, Ross always acted with a bizarre amount of restraint in sharing his ill-gotten knowledge of the future.

Looking into the past did not shackle her to the same constraints of fate, destiny, and all of that which Ross had tried to explain to her back then. Therefore, Val supposed that she simply grumbled out of her ignorance, but she would grumble nonetheless.

After a bus pass purchase, some sitting on a bench, and the passage of time, the bus rolled up to pick him up. Like that, Ross headed even farther west. The bus that he had gotten on took an intercity route. The entire area of the South Pen was a tightly knitted network of cities, Brillion City being the second biggest and also closest to the mainland. With its location on the western coast, Altis Point made for an access point to the sea as a major port city.

If Ross headed to Altis Point, that could only mean one thing: they would need to cross the ocean. While not an impossibility, it seemed unlikely for the Summit of Ascension to be located anywhere in Altis Point itself. Much more likely, they would need to travel to another continent and search in a foreign land to reach the Summit.

The division between Brillion City, Altis Point, and a number of the other cities blurred together, making the South Pen area a sprawl of the urban centers that might as well have merged them all into one massive city. While the distance between Brillion City and Altis Point was not too terribly far, the constantly busy roads made the trip longer than it had to be. Needless to say, the multi-lane highways turned into a nightmare when rush hour struck. For now, before the general populace’s commute to work, the bus made good time based on South Pen standards.

Once in Altis Point, Rosamer switched onto some local bus lines, having to buy a different sort of bus pass to make this journey as well. By now, the roads filled up with stopping and starting cars, making traffic slow to a crawl. Thankfully, with much effort on Val’s part, she sped all of this insufferable travel up to fly by in a blur of movement.

Time slowed to its usual pace when Ross took the first steps off of the bus, onto Altimus Pier.

Before gaining sight of the beach, Val’s vision filled with a sea of people. The tourists bobbed about in colorful clothes, as varied as the people who wore these articles of clothing. Altimus Pier was the most famous boardwalk and beachfront in Altis Point, and so too, a favorite tourist destination. Back when Ross had made his way here, it had been the middle of summer, the peak time for vacationers to make a trip to the beach. The bustling crowd reflected the season.

Ross joined the crowd and melded in with the flow of people which headed closer to the promised sand and waves. While he may have tried to become one with the crowd, his dark and stuffy, semi-formal clothes always stuck out easily for Val to train her vision on him. Ross strolled about this tourist hotspot until he stopped at one of those rest spots for tourists. There, he made use of the help desk.

“Hello,” he said to the lady at work there. “I am looking for a good place to buy a souvenir before I head home—preferably something handcrafted by the locals, here in Altis Point. I have heard of some magical things being made by a master craftsman being sold as souvenirs.”

“Ah!” the young woman at the help desk exclaimed. “You must have heard of Lady Margus’s talismans! She is the finest saleswoman of all magical trinkets in the city. That sounds exactly like who you are looking for.” The employee gave directions on where to find this Lady Margus and sent Ross off.

For a split second, Ross’s little speech to the employee almost made Val do a double take. He better not intend to head home right away with some bogus magical souvenir. That trinket would be a fake, because the only people who could imbue enchantments into objects were those with magic themselves. Upon another moment’s thought, this all made perfect sense.

Lady Margus must be more than some con artist who sold overpriced, albeit cute junk to gullible tourists—much more. She could be a demigoddess or minor goddess herself, acting as a guardian to the Summit of Ascension. In that way, Ross would be heading home indeed, to the true homeland for all people with divine blood.

While Val’s spiritual form in this vision became energized with excitement, Ross had arrived at a section of the boardwalk that expanded into a plaza of rose-colored bricks. Overhead, a large gazebo shaded the area, making the colors of the sun, the sand, and the ocean waves all seem more vivacious for those looking on from beneath the gazebo.

A small, but giddy and fascinated crowd gathered around one vendor who had set up her wares here. It seemed that Ross had found the person who he sought: Lady Margus, saleswoman of possibly phony, but also very possibly real magic.