Jace was laying on his back, staring at the blue sky, as a wooden sailboat, a yacht, rocked under him. He had created the yacht out of 3 large fern/trees. The actual name for the plant was something like a “Wollamba” plant. But he found the name so silly he called them fern/trees in his head. The plants created a strange type of wood. It felt a little like cork or bulsa. It was light and almost springy. However, when it was dried out it became solid and strong as oak, without any of the weight.

Processing the trees was simple. Now that he grasped magic circles it was simplicity itself to transform the giant fern/trees into workable materials, then form those materials into a boat. He ended up transforming the fronds/leaves into a heavy canvas like material, for sails. The bark/fir on the plant was simple to transform into lines. He actually formed the boat’s main hull out of one single tree, simply carving it into shape with air blades. He designed it on the model of a J/24. Well that was his intention, ultimately he didn't have a model or diagram of one so it was mostly memory. Without a way to make accurate measurements he was fairly sure his yacht was a bit larger then a real J/24. Making the ballast on the keel was simple, stone did a solid job for that, in fact he felt he had improved on the design for the J/24 by lowering the center of mass on the keel. One of the most well-known problems with these boats was the counterweight was too high, making them capsize if handled wrong. By lowering the weight to the bottom of the keel he figured he probably massively improved stability.

He experimented with the wood and pressure treating before creating a circle for his needs. He found if he pressure treated the whole thing by encasing it within an area of pressured air 10,000 x current air pressure transformed the wood into a strange thin material which was almost as hard as steel, pretty much waterproof, and inexplicably maintained its absurd levels of buoyancy. Of course this transformation was probably due to some other circles he made with the intention of preventing damage from the pressure treating to his boat's hull. It was only afterwords he realized he might have accidently transformed the material into something boardering on a magic item.

He created his own pier moving stones about into the bay, he carefully formed it and then used some magic circles to reinforce it. Then moved the boat into the water. He assembled the rigging and mast/boom when it was in the water. Overall he was happy with his new boat. If he had any complaints it was that he couldn’t figure out how to create windows which he’d trust to keep water out from the cabin under the deck. He was able to make a foot pump for water, but he really didn’t think he needed it. He was pretty sure the boat could be filled with water and continue to float. This wood was incredibly buoyant. So buoyant he had to increase the weight of the keel to make it float right.

His anchor was basic. He remembered seeing a history channel show about old Chinese naval technology which showed their anchors as being donut shaped stones with a rope through the hole. He made two. They did a great job keeping the boat in place. He also made a small rowboat out of the extra materials, it was little more than a large dugout canoe

He was surprised it only took a day and a half for him to have everything ready and take it for a sail. He even used spell circles to reinforce his new boat and make it mostly impervious to real or imagined threats. The whole process was incredible training for his magic use. The amount of power he controlled leapt by leaps and bounds. He figured he had made the leap from channeler to grand channeler to wizard level in the two days spent making the boat, he remembered how much power Kay’lin had let out when she tested at wizard, he was at least that level now.

Though to an outsider he might look like he was taking his ease, laying on the deck, staring at the sky, he was actually working on a small black stone in his hand. It had taken 10 separate magic circles to make the stone create a resonance with the pulse within him. That was only the first part of what he needed to do. It wasn’t enough to help these girls FIND the pulse so they can use it. They needed to feel the pulse as well. That step was proving problematic. He had tried layered timed magics to simulate the pulse, but in the end human perception isn’t that accurate. Within a few hours the object he was working on would no longer be in time with the pulse.

As a result, he was working on increasing the resonance. He wanted the resonance to be so strong that they could feel the pulse themselves. This was troublesome.

There were a lot of troublesome things lately. Sam’s pregnancy for one. That created complicated feelings in his heart. He knew this was coming. Yet he’d be lying if he said he wanted it to happen. When he left Earth roughly 6 months ago having kids wasn’t in his future plans. He wasn’t even sure he wanted kids at any point in his life. They seemed like they were loud, messy and basically dominated your life for 20 years in your prime. He wanted to go to college, get a degree and job, buy a house. Marry the girl of his dreams, Jenn at that time. Build up some wealth, then maybe start having kids when he could afford it.

When he started having sex with Sam, he was half out of his mind from being backed up sexually, and frankly, he was pretty lonely. She was warm, nice, human companionship. He still felt a dependency on her. Really he still hadn’t found anyone he could trust like he learned he could trust Sam. There was no one else he was comfortable talking to and be himself. He certainly loved her in a way. But it wasn’t romantic love. At least he was pretty sure it wasn’t. He knew the longer he kept doing that with her the more likely she was to be pregnant. He had worried about what a pregnancy would mean.

Of course now he was confronted with the reality he realized how much he was lying to himself these past few months. At the time he told himself easy lies, like he would take her and the baby with him when he went back to earth. Or if it took years to go back, it wouldn’t hurt to have a family. That excuse was his dependency talking. He even had darker thoughts that the high infant mortality rate here made it unlikely she’d carry the child to term. He hated himself for even having those thoughts.

When she told him she was carrying his child he wasn’t too surprised. He did a good job at the time grasping onto the small strings of happiness he felt. Most of it was happiness she was beaming at him, to Sam having a baby was verification she was a woman with value. He knew that was how human girls were raised here, so for Sam this was huge. He was sure she was conflicted about it too. He knew a little of what happened to unwanted babies, or babies birthed by young slave girls without protection. He never hid his intention to go home to her. It was pointless to hide it. She wasn’t stupid, she was probably smarter than he was. Trying to hide his desire to go home would have been pointless. So he was touched knowing how hard it must have been for her to tell him. While tightly grasping on to whatever thin positive feelings he had for this unwelcome event, in order to share in her joy and calm her fears he realized he would now have to figure out how to go to Earth with Sam and the baby. A boy. For a moment while he was standing there, holding Sam in his arms while he forced himself to be happy about this news, an image of his father came into his mind. The image was of him standing in front of his father holding a baby son, with Sam at his side.

His knees buckled at the emotional impact carried by that one stray random thought. He was surprised to realize he had buried his face between Sam's breast with tears falling from his eyes. There was a crushing pain in his chest, all that pain all that fear he’d never see home seemed to have been unleashed in that moment, he was forced to look straight at everything taken from him and it was soul crushing; however, it wasn’t just fear and pain he was feeling, he felt an urgent desire. He realized just how much he wanted to hold and protect this small child. How much he wanted to show the child to his father. After the tears started to fall he didn’t have to try to look happy in front of her. He really was happy.

Of course he was also frantic and terrified. This was not a safe place to have a child. Verna told him the baby would have the curse. She could tell it had the curse even though the child was too small and young to even show. He needed to learn what the curse was. How it was. He never really put any serious thought into curing the curse. That was a task well beyond him. But now that he knew his son would be born with it, the curse itself was something he needed to know about.

That was how he learned about the moon tattoos. Yet another troublesome thing. The moon tattoos were the mark of those people “truly and seriously” cursed. The first people with the mark were those involved in killing the old Grey King. The mark apparently halved something called the “life flame” inside people with it. Your life’s flame as he had learned was your vitality, and longevity. Basically people with the mark were twice as susceptible to pretty much every disease and plague. They also were half as likely to get better. On top of that they were half as resilient to injury, and took twice as long to recover. Finally, almost no one with the mark lived past the age of 40, most passing around 30. When he heard about the mark of the moon (It was Verna and Sam who explained it) he couldn’t help but feel a distinct panic rise up inside of him about it, the idea that Sam was already basically halfway through her life was horrifying to him. The mark was even more terrible then that. Apparently it affects anyone on this world who render help to humans, for immortal races like the Rock Devils and Dragons the mark would mean an end to their immortality and a swift race into the grave. He now had a greater understanding why Verna was so careful about what commands she'd follow and which ones she would not.

The fact the moon mark wasn’t just for this life but for your next 100 generations of kin made it imperative to the other races to cut those members of their race off from the rest. So they made laws which cut those people out of their population by selling them as slaves to other races. When he learned all of this in total, he felt an almost overwhelming and numbing sensation of hopelessness. This was a curse so powerful even the dragons dared not interfere. It had been shattering families and friendships for centuries. It had corrupted humanity into this almost unrecognizable existence just a half step above being animals. All because one dragon was killed.

What kind of God would be so petty as to do that?

He hadn’t just been working on making enchanted objects, and boats in the past few days. He was also studying the gods of this world. A fourth troublesome thing. He was surprised by how little anyone knew about them. At least the human sources seemed to think the gods “popped” into existence some 20,000 years ago. But there are almost no records of how they came into being or why. He spoke with Verna about them and received some nominally useful information. In Verna’s approximation the gods were incredibly powerful beings, roughly twice as powerful as a grand sorcerer. At least that always seemed to be the way the dragons saw it. Killing a god was possible, at least the dragons seemed to think so, as there once were far more than the current 8 gods. Of the 8 gods currently in existence Elis the “Sun” god was considered the most powerful. He was supposedly stronger than the next two strongest gods combined, but Verna admonished him not to worry about that. Because the next two strongest gods were Elis’s strongest allies. They were the moon goddess Vigelli and the god beneath the earth, the patrons of the gnomes Gnash. The gods themselves generally did not get along with each other, and with the 3 strongest gods on one side and five unaffiliated gods on the other, there was no power struggle in the heavens. Everyone basically followed Elis’s lead.

He gave up on the stone he was trying to enchant and tossed it into the ocean. Obviously that method would not work. He hopped up and pulled up the anchors. Pulled in the lines from the fishing poles, not a single bite. Maybe the fish or serpents or whatever lived in these waters were too smart for Earth style fishing? Maybe it was the wrong bait? Or maybe it had something to do with a certain watcher he had today. The fifth troublesome thing on this beautiful sunny day. He raised sail and made his way back toward the shore.

On his way back in he noted the large dark shape a few hundred yards pacing him, like it had all day. He wasn’t sure what that thing was, but it wasn’t aggressive. It showed up not long after he dropped anchor and had lingered just on the edge of his notice all day. He remembered that huge dark shape he saw on his first day in these waters. He wasn’t sure if this was the same creature, but whatever it was, it didn’t seem hostile. Something hostile with that much size probably could have swallowed the boat whole, like something out of that bible story.

In the end he lost track of that shadow after he anchored and secured the boat for the night. He rowed in to the pier almost putting those troubles out of his mind, and made his way back to the keep. There was just two weeks left till those girls would have to return to their lives of fear.