Uncertain of what to do next, Kaldalis stalled. He had a few hours he could kill before it was early evening. Leaving right away and then having to crouch and hide in the jungle for hours until nightfall didn’t sound like fun.

Who knew what he’d run into.

Most likely the Infernal Horde.

And dying to them alone once was bad enough.

Sure, he was stalling. And he knew it. But Kaldalis just didn’t want to risk it.

He wondered if he could find someone else to come with him.

After about an hour of wandering the encampment looking for familiar faces, he realized that it was a lost cause. It seemed that, by design or by coincidence, the only people he recognized were those he knew were NPCs.

He wasn’t going to drag an NPC out with him.

Taking an NPC on a mission that would likely keep him out in the jungle all night was dangerous. If they were attacked by something in the dark and overwhelmed, an NPC would be permanently dead.

Having that on his hands was too much for him to bear.

He’d rather get ganked by a syncoresi alone than be responsible for Heluna’s permanent death. The only reason he’d considered Haldir was because he’d proved himself competent enough to hold his own. No other NPC he’d run the dungeon with had measured up.

The biggest mystery was if Onirioago had been behind it all.

Had she somehow gotten all the confirmed PCs in the encampment out of town or otherwise committed to other plans? How could she have done it?

Kaldalis wondered if maybe she had phased him out onto a server state separate from everyone else. It was especially troubling after talking to the quartermaster and learning - indirectly - that the expedition leader was keeping an eye on him and had manipulated things even before approaching him with the quest.

He wasn’t going to say it outloud, but he didn’t like or trust the expedition leader. Before this, of course, but more so now. Something about all of this was off.

It stunk.

Kaldalis just didn’t know how or why.

With a sigh, Kaldalis paced in the center of town. He had a few options from here. The first was obviously to wait. If he was willing to sit around and stare at the encampment’s main gate, eventually someone had to show up. And if he was willing to keep asking, eventually someone probably wouldn’t have other plans for the evening.

Unfortunately, that was unlikely to bear fruit.

The big problem was that he needed to keep the quest a secret. What was he going to say that could convince a stranger - basically anyone besides Balrim, Myrin, and Haldir - to risk their neck and their night’s sleep to help him catch a random fish he couldn’t tell them anything about? And what if one of the people he asked happened to be another fishing enthusiast? How could he avoid failing the quest requirement to keep the secret?

The second option he came up with was probably worse.

He could just keep Onirioago waiting until his friends came back. She was likely to raise a stink as soon as she found out. Not just because of the delay, but because he was going to bring people along while dealing with her precious secret. It wasn’t for nothing that she’d gone through the trouble of watching his fishing progress, isolated him on the perfect day at the perfect time, and then ripped all the help out of his reach.

If he tried to circumvent her carefully-laid plans, there was no telling how she might react.

It left him with only one option.

He was going to go out into the jungle alone and hope for the best.

Once he realized he’d been backed into a corner with only one way out, he involuntarily started to relax. He had been so anxious when he thought there was a solution that he just wasn’t seeing, but after breaking it down piece by piece and finding that he wasn’t stupid, he was actually trapped, it was out of his hands.

There was nothing he could do, right? Then why worry?

He just had to run the maze laid before him, as unpleasant as it was going to be.

With that settled, he elected to make his way out to the beach. He still had some questions about how lures worked, and also an absurd number of pale perch to catch. If he was diligent, maybe he could kill two birds with one stone.

Catch two fish with one lure? Bait two hooks with the same worm?

Kaldalis shook the rattled thoughts of idioms from his brain. It was just before mid-afternoon after all his hunting, and the far end of Forturns’ floating dock was just barely being lifted off of the sand by the tide as it came in. Perfect time for fishing.

He started with one of the cheap spoon lures. Kaldalis was certain he didn’t want to lose the expensive one, if that was a possibility. Casting the line out and sending the little glimmer of metal into the water gave him a sense of trepidation, but his anxiety was pushed aside in the name of curiosity. He wanted to understand how lures worked while he was still within walking distance of a replacement. And while he wasn’t burning time in a rare fish’s spawn window.

After a few moments, something hooked his line. He went through the familiar motions of whittling down the fish to keep it on the line. It was a delicate dance, but he was a seasoned veteran at this point.

Or at least as much as he could be at his current level.

A little while later, he knelt down and pulled a new sort of fish from the water. It was a shoenosed salmon, and the description indicated that it was a prize catch for cooking.

Kaldalis examined the fish a bit before he tucked it away. He would deliver it to the cooks later. Maybe they’d really enjoy it.

With a smile, he threw his line out again. And again. Rinse, lather, repeat.

After going through the motions of a few more casts and reels, he realized he didn’t notice an appreciable difference between fishing with lures. Kaldalis had caught a couple more salmon along with some of the other fish he was familiar with. About half of his casts caught a spiky-finned littoral scorpion, and he hooked himself one mighty battle for another wrathful cod.

But no pale perch.

He stuck with the spoon lure for another hour or so. After the reminder that guild credits were valuable, he wanted to hand more fish over to the cooks to build his stockpile. He also enjoyed the struggle that the cod provided, keeping his skills sharpened.

After a little while, he felt comfortable with the lures.

Or, at least, comfortable enough that he wanted to get back to more pressing work.

Putting a normal hook back on his line, he baited it with cured roe in a practiced motion and put the line back out in the water. From then on it was business as usual, and he felt himself zoning out. By now, there wasn’t anything that would bite on roe that he wasn’t familiar with.

He could call his shots by their behavior while reeling them in.

Pale perch zig-zagged in a panic, but wore down fast. Littoral scorpions flitted back and forth in wide and even arcs, growing faster and more frenzied the closer they got to the dock. Red blennys tried to swim straight away from the shore, their angle curving to one side slowly as their stamina ran out.

There was another fish that grabbed the roe now, though. This one moved erratically in circles, and while that made it predictable, it had considerable stamina. He was excited and curious as he reeled in the first of them.

It was the fish he needed for the quest he’d picked up that morning. With yellow and black scales down its sides, it looked almost like a bee as a fish. It was called a banana chromine, and he needed five of them for the quest.

After about forty more minutes, he had his five banana chromine, as well as a baker’s dozen more pale perch.

He stopped keeping track of the others, since they weren’t important to him.

Kaldalis looked around after catching the last banana chromine. It was still only late afternoon, and he could tell the town was still empty. So he just kept going. No new quests had popped up in the camp on his minimap. Might as well use the time to chase his pale perch quota.

It wasn’t until early evening that he called it. He had amassed fifty more pale perch - a really good haul for a single day. Curiously, Kaldalis noticed that after he fished up his last of the chromine, they stopped showing up. He’d really wanted to stash a few in his inventory in case the fishing quests cycled somehow, but no such luck. It seemed the system only provided the number of fish needed for the quest.

He wondered if that meant that catching his ten thousand pale perch would spare him from ever hooking them again. It seemed possible; Foturns reason for giving him the quest hadn’t been out of a need for them, but explicitly for culling their number. Dropping them off the table of possible catches might not be out of the question. Then again, if Foturns gave the same quest to other aspiring anglers, it might be to Kaldalis’s benefit to keep catching them to trade them with other players to make up for his neglecting the game’s other skills.

He made his way to the mess hall tent and turned in the banana chromine quest to the cooks, as well as handing them the other cookable fish he had. Between the cod and the salmon, he got fifty more guild credits, which was a pretty substantial bump, compared to his current stockpile.

The salmon were indeed very valuable, then.

His total number of guild credits was now two hundred and ten.

Turning in the quest, though, earned him a pleasant little fanfare. Even if it was all in his head.

He had finally pushed through to level ten.

That meant two things. First, a nice increase in his stats. Second, his skill cap increased, meaning he could start working towards level fifty in spear and in fishing.

He supposed, then, that meant he should head out into the jungle. He’d find practice in plenty out there. Especially since he was venturing out alone, and looking for a rare fish.

One more trip around camp first, though. He wanted to be sure that no familiar faces presented themselves to be his escort. Just to be sure.

Fifteen minutes later, he dragged his ass out of the main gate of the camp, and, with plenty of aggravated grumbling at his inability to slip out of Onirioago’s trap, entered the jungle.