“We will accompany you then, as your guests.” I accepted Dura Firebringer’s suggestion after a moment of consideration. There was a part of me that was cautious, maybe paranoid, because of the look on her face but a long-honed instinct within me was smelling a chain-quest, an opportunity to advance the power of my group some more. In a way, the night-raid had been an eye-opener, even a reasonably large battle with an accompanying quest had merely given me about a full level. On the other hand, the previous weeks of travel had given me a lot less, mere percentages from some overzealous critters that thought to attack us in the night, nothing that could even be called a fight. Even the possibility of a proper quest-hub, with a few quests that could be done in a single area was enough to make me interested, very interested. And then there was the promise of information on a “place of power”, which I hoped to be another dungeon, maybe even something similar to the Deadmire, the swamp filled with undeath.

“I’ll be delighted to show you our settlement. While it might not be able to compare to the large cities of the world, it is a wonderful place to be. I’m certain you will enjoy your stay.” Dura replied, her smile growing even more obnoxious, something I hadn’t thought possible. She looked too delighted, the look on her face making me unconsciously step closer to Sigmir. Mentally, I made a note to watch my back and keep an eye on ways to escape at all times. Maybe I should make a greater effort to learn shadow-walking from Rai, he had discovered it on his own and as of yet, I had been unable to replicate his class’ abilities.

It was at that point that the talk between Dura and myself was interrupted by an orc needing some guidance, making it obvious that Dura had her own duties to attend. We said our goodbyes, learning that the orcs were planning to spend the day in the valley, fully looting the centaur-camp, sorting the loot and making sure the former captives and the wounded were ready to travel before starting their journey back to the Brighthollow-settlement in the morning.

Given that we had just accepted to travel with them, we would have a day of down-time as well, something rather rare for my party. Normally, we relied on our powerful bodies to ignore the normal necessities of travel, at most taking it slow for a day or stopping early if there was hunting to be done.

“So, what are we doing now?” Sigmir asked, as we were walking away from the bonfire Dura was using.

Her question mirrored my own thought, making me wonder just what I would do with the day. Part of me wanted to truly understand what I had done during the night but my foggy memories weren’t really useful there.

“Before anything, we should tell Adra and Rai about the new plans. I think they might enjoy having a relaxing day off.” I replied, when I almost stumbled as an idea hit me. My memories might be a little foggy but at the end of the day, everything I was doing was recorded by the capsule my body was lying in, recorded for potential streaming-material. And that was without considering that I had given Pantheon a heads-up that they might want to take a closer look at the battle, that there might be good footage for promotional material. So, when memories were blurred, maybe recordings were not.

“Lenore, would you stay with Sigmir?” I mentally asked, getting an affirmative answer, before asking Sigmir to talk to the other two and quickly shifting into my Hallow. I felt my idea was a good one and couldn’t wait to see just what had actually occurred, not just the fragments I remembered.

Logging out of Road to Purgatory was becoming a little disorienting, the differences between my game-avatar and my real body becoming more and more pronounced. Even the information gathered by my avatar’s senses seemed sharper, crisper, filled with so much more information, that the real world felt a little flat, at least for a few minutes until I got used to it again. Reaching for my tablet, I made a note to write that into one of my beta-feedbacks as a point of concern. If I was having problems with that, I didn’t want to know how it felt for someone who had chosen an avatar with a drastically different body-plan, a centaur or maybe some sort of spider-based or insectoid race. Just the amount of limbs would have to be strange.

Before looking at my footage from last night, I decided to take care of the most mundane tasks of house-keeping, at least once I’ve showered. That simple act helped me to shake off any lingering disorientation, maybe it was the tactile response of washing myself and feeling just where my body was, bringing my proprioception back into line with itself or something like that. Or maybe it was just the water running down my skin, a sensation I hardly ever felt on Mundus, or it had to do with the temperature of a warm shower. Whatever it was, it tuned my mind from Morgana back to Samantha, from Dark Sorceress and magical researcher to gamer and Forensic Accountant.

Dried off and dressed, I made myself some food, veggies with sauce and rice, a simple meal, while pulling up the official Road to Purgatory-webpage, looking for new material. I didn’t have to look too closely, it was one of their top-posts, just below a compilation of Arena-Battles, mostly featuring Clavran, some snippets of musical performances, enhanced with quite a bit of magic, and a sermon, praising Tyr and lauding him for allowing them to defeat an incursion of Undead. It showed me once more that my experience was but a tiny snippet of Mundus, that there was so much more out there that I hadn’t even heard about, that there were countless stories to be experienced and told, that I was just one of many. It certainly managed to rouse my desire to stand out, to show the world what I could accomplish, that I was more than just the role of Titania I had played for years.

But for now, the video Pantheon had made was sadly useless to me, sure I was able to see some of the effects of my magic first hand but that didn’t really help me. Knowing that it had worked as I had hoped, maybe even quite a bit better, was great but didn’t tell me how Lenore and I had accomplished it.

Letting the video continue in the background, I connected to my capsule, pulling up the footage that was recorded from my point of view, looking for the correct time-stamps. Finding them proved easier than expected, simply because there was a period of darkness following them, when I had rested my eyes, leaning against Sigmir. I had certainly not fallen asleep on my feet, being held up by her, after conjuring up my magic.

From that point, finding the section when we had started to sneak up on the wolves, quickly dispatching them with ruthless efficiency was done quickly and I settled in to watch what had happened after. I remembered seeing the singular centaur and putting her to sleep before merging with Lenore and from that point, things got blurry.

I was a little surprised when the recording changed at that point, shifting from the usual first-person to a third-person, following the gaze of the being Lenore and I turned into. I had to stop the recording for a moment, to take the thing in, shaking my head in wonder. It was obviously a merge of both Lenore and myself, taking the general body-plan of a humanoid but adding a lot of avian features. Feathers preserving my modesty, and hiding what sort of plumbing the merged being had, sharp, bird-like claws fully replacing the feet and hands that were more human than bird but tipped with similarly wicked claws. A short, stout beak that looked like a merge of a mouth and human nose, which it kind-of was but turning the face into something monstrous. Overall, it reminded me of Samodiva, the monstrous avian Sigmir and I had faced relatively early in our journey, on the slopes of Mount Yugid.

Shaking my head in wonder, I continued to watch, fascinated by the actions of our merged form. Carving magical formations into living flesh was nothing new but the magic wielded by us seemed to be both sharp and crisp, an amalgamation of magical abilities with runic mastery, all combined into a deadly whole. It was quite fascinating, but largely uninformative at least until the centaur we had been dealing with was covered in a cloud of impenetrable darkness. Not that the actions we had taken were boring, it was just the old problem that I had no way of truly understanding what we had done. Seeing vines similar to the ones used by my accessoire was interesting but how I had conjured up those vines of silvery-stranded darkness, I had no idea. But the blackness, that was unexpected and interesting. Especially when the merged form stepped back after a moment, giving a bow of respect.

Sadly, I was left with even more questions when the cloud simply dissipated, leaving behind nothing but a whole but dead body, the centaur’s wounds somehow healed in death. Just what had happened there and why had Lenore and I reacted how we had.

Shaking my head, I continued watching, but there was nothing more to be learned, leaving me with more questions than I had before looking.