Kaldalis just stared in the direction it went.

“What?” Haldir asked from behind him, just now scrambling into the opening of the fissure. “Did you say something?”

“Yeah,” Kaldalis called back. “There was something in here. A little fuzzy weasel-looking thing. I think I saw one before.”

“About yea big?” Haldir said, holding his hands roughly the right distance apart. “White face? Black tail?”

“I’d have called it beige instead of white, but yeah,” he confirmed.

“That explains it,” Haldir said, “that’s an enhydra. A common pest you’ll find anywhere within spitting distance of the sea. They gather shiny things for their nest, but they’re fickle as anything. They discard things almost as fast as they pick them out. I’ve heard them described as aquatic magpies, but with a shorter attention span.”

“Oh.” Kaldalis laughed. “Have to admit, I was worried. It was a little biped, so I was afraid it might be something scary. Or something intelligent.”

“Well, they’re more complicated than a common monster. They sometimes collect charms, which you can shake out of them if you catch one.”

Kaldalis paused at that, his eyes darting to the fissure the creature had vanished into. He hadn’t had a taste of any new gear since day one.

“So how do you catch one?” he asked.

“Persistence, usually.” Haldir shrugged, turning back towards the entrance of the tunnel. “They’re impossible to actually fight properly. Even if you were higher-level and had a taunt ability, they shrug off any threat generation and run when confronted. When I was a kid in Baimer, we’d make games out of it. We’d all see how long we could chase one for before we had to go back home for the night. Nobody I knew caught one, but there was always a story of a guy who knew a guy who heard from some kid that it happened.”

“What about adventurers? Adults, I mean,” Kaldalis asked, crouching down and trying to get a better view inside the fissure. It was pitch black within, and he couldn’t tell if it was one foot deep or ten. “How do we catch one when we see one?”

“Kind of the same. Usually persistence.” Haldir scrambled his way back down towards the mouth of the cave. “The traditional way is to corner it, which obviously you can’t do in a cave full of holes in the walls. Traps can work, but you have to be right on top of them. Given enough time, they’ll figure it out and you’ll come back to a tripped trap and no enhydra to show for it.” He straightened up and gestured out towards the ocean. “Are you coming? I imagine we can spread the word about this cache of junk in case anybody is looking for anything, but we’ve got to get these ingredients processed if we want to keep to the expedition leader’s timeline.”

“Yeah, in a minute,” Kaldalis said, looking around. The cave was surprisingly tall, with the craggy stone ceiling maybe fifteen feet up. “I kind of want to try something.”

“You know, we have a saying for adventurers who waste their time chasing impossible tasks when they could be doing something more productive,” Haldir said in a quiet tone. “We say they’re ‘hunting enhydras’. So don’t waste all day on this, alright?”

With that, Haldir was gone. After a moment there was a splash of the other Vathon hitting the water to swim away. Kaldalis weighed his options, and resolved to not waste more than a few minutes on this. He had a pretty good idea of what his plan was going to be, and he stood to gain a little bit by enacting it whether or not he got a new piece of gear out of it.

He started by activating his new Jump ability. Nothing immediately happened, but he had the mental sense of a buff on himself. The description of his character page told him that it improved his jumping ability. He looked up at the ceiling, and carefully tried what he interpreted as a short hop.

The hop was about as high as he intended it, only getting a little ways off the ground.

He was confused and disappointed.

On his next attempt, he tried to jump as high as he could.

This was a mistake.

His legs rocketed him up into the ceiling. If he hadn’t had his hands outstretched to try and reach for the nearest uneven edge that looked like he could grip, he would have slammed face-first into the rock. As it was, he had to catch himself before he broke his nose. There was a moment of panic as he barely stopped himself, and then a moment of scrambling before he fell back to the cave floor.

Kaldalis took a moment to consider what he learned. The big thing was that the increase in jump height affected only his maximum jump height. He could still make short hops, and he assumed that with practice he could get whatever level of precision he needed on his jumps.

He resolved to use some of his spare time to get that practice. Perhaps, with time, he could get enough precision to pull off some crazy stunts.

As it was, he had some ideas of things he could do with just height alone. He needed to find a way to leverage this ability in combat. It had a relatively long cooldown, but he could imagine more than one prospective application.

For now, though, he jumped up more carefully, metering his distance and reaching the apex of his jump right next to a crack in the ceiling wide enough for him to get a grip and cling. He shifted for a moment, finding another opening he could fit a foot into to support himself. Once he was comfortable, all he could do was lurk in wait, watching that opening for the enhydra to emerge again.

After a minute, he felt the jump buff drop off of himself. He was only about ten feet off the ground, so he wasn’t too worried about jumping down from here without it.

Then again, he wasn’t sure if jump height would affect something like that.

Additionally, he didn’t know if there was fall damage in this game. He’d have to look for something tall to jump off of later, when an unexpected death wouldn’t be too much of a setback.

How would he get that aplomb back anyway?

Kaldalis tried to focus on the cooldown of the ability, becoming accustomed to being aware of the timer ticking down. After a couple of minutes, the ability came back up and there was no longer a tickle in the back of his mind for it.

After a couple more minutes, he was about to give up on the hunt.

Haldir had said that the creatures were clever. It was probably hiding just out of his vision, waiting for him to leave. Possibly even staring right at him from the shadows.

Perhaps Haldir’s view was wrong as well, and they weren’t just animals, but were intelligent people. Maybe not capable of communication, but smart enough to have object permanence. Like some kind of fuzzy neanderthal. Perhaps he could ask the researchers if they had anything about them. He had to remember that in a game like this, it was possible that some NPCs (or players?) might have incomplete information, and could tell him things that weren’t true.

As he considered that, he wondered if it wasn’t possible that there was a larger conspiracy, and the researchers might have a league-backed interest in presenting any living thing that wasn’t one of the playable races as a monster. Perhaps that was what the main plot would be - he might have the option to reach out to these poor creatures, make peace, and fight for their recognition and rights against a centuries-long system of-

A beige face poked out of one of the crevices in the wall, and Kaldalis silenced his inner monologue instantly, as if afraid of it being overheard.

The enhydra emerged from one of the other openings, not the one it had dove into. Kaldalis suspected that behind the wall was a maze of little burrows and tunnels for the creature to use to evade predators. As it sniffed the air, Kaldalis tried to hold his breath. If it noticed him, it would dive back into its hole and not emerge again. He had to wait until just the right moment.

The shredded seaweed bed of the den rustled faintly as the creature took a few tentative steps out, peering around with its beady eyes and wiggling whiskers. It didn’t look up and see him, though, and after a bare moment of examination, it gave a snort, apparently satisfied with the search.

That was when he struck.

Kaldalis dropped straight down on top of the critter. There was a squeak of terror and a few seconds of brief struggle before the critter was pinned to the floor, with Kaldalis’s hands holding its arms too tight to its sides for it to bring its tiny clawed paws to bear.

“Gotcha!” he said. Seeing the fear in its eyes, he suddenly felt slightly ghoulish, having pounced on this creature like the predator it had feared him to be from the first.

It robbed him of the brief feeling of victory. Wasn’t he just wondering if they were victims in all of this?

He was about to apologize to the creature - however silly that might have been - when it suddenly squirmed in a way he didn’t expect. In a flash, it shot out of his hands like a bullet. Instead of fleeing back into the tunnel, the fuzzy critter flung itself with impossible speed out the front of the cave, hurtling out into the ocean.

Kaldalis blinked for a moment, stunned at the display. It was fast. Not just like a sprinting animal fast, but like a bullet train fast. Cartoon with a mouthful of habanero fast. ‘Gotta Go Fast’ fast.

He suddenly felt foolish for believing he could ever catch something that could move like that. No wonder Haldir saw it as impossible.

There was something still in his hands, though. As he looked down at it, he could see it wasn’t a creature. It was an item, and as he held it up, he could see it was a little disc of dark metal with a jewel set into it and a ring of wood around the center, making it look kind of like a tiny CD or DVD.

It was a charm.