“What do you think you’re doing?”

  Apollo had been waiting for them, ready to spring his frustration on them when they emerged from the office. Horse was out here too, speaking with a cinderling off to the side.

  At least he didn’t wander far, Pan thought.

  “Do you have any idea what that- that creep convinced you to agree to?”

  Pan didn’t feel nearly as confident and casual as Athena looked as her brother quailed in their perceived lack of common sense.

  “Yeah, actually,” she replied.

  This brought him from down from incredulous to a placid expression of disbelief. “Oh really?”

  “Accountability. A deadline. Concrete goals,” she counted on her fingers as she listed the qualities, “This is the first time we’ve actually had concrete goals.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Have you not been paying attention? I’ve been doing all the work, driving us, maintaining any kind of direction or momentum,” she retorted.

  Apollo scoffed. “Yeah? So what?”

  She gestured all around. “And I’m kind of tired of it. A clear direction and stated objectives are, honestly, a huge relief.”

  “But we already had a goal,” he complained, frustration seeping back into his tone.

  She wagged a finger in his face. “No. Not once have we had a goal that I didn’t assign us.”

  “Arctus-“ he started, but she cut him off.

  “Arctus isn’t on our side. He’s vague and unhelpful and I think we’re actually worse off if we listen to him.”

  Pan, already small, tried to make himself somehow smaller as the siblings had it out with one another.

  “But he’s our guide,” Apollo said.

  “Yeah,” she said sarcastically, “says him.”

  Apollo crossed his arms and stayed silent for a moment. Then he said, “Alright, I’ll grant you that. We already said we couldn’t trust him. But he’s all we’ve had so far on direction.”

  “Exactly.” Athena gestured back at the office they had just left. “And that’s why it’s such a relief to hear someone with clear expectations for us. We forfeit a little of what we make, and in return we get some actual management and guidance.”

  “Athena,” Apollo said with a sigh, “he just-… that guy in there-…”

  “Wait,” came another voice. It was Trace, the stick-chewing hangabout they had talked to before encountering Triumph. “You all didn’t actually sign that chaff he shoved at you, did you?”

  Apollo’s eyes shot wide. He gestured grandly at the cinderling skeleton as if making a point to Athena.

  She waved it away. “Yeah, so what?”

  “There’s no obligation. That contract is something he’s been pushing on people since he hunkered down in there. Trying to get stuff from us we get direct from our enrollment.”

  Apollo looked confused. “What do you mean? It sounds like-…”

  “I mean,” the skeleton said, plucking the stick from his teeth, “the rewards come from the card, not from the office. You earn a rank, you get the rewards. Simple as that.”

  This time, Athena looked surprised. But only for a moment.

  “Come on, Pan. We’ve got to get those hobbs hanging around Deadwood.” As she started walking away, she said over her shoulder, “Apollo, Horse, if you want, you can come too.”

  Suddenly Apollo looked sheepish.

  Horse spoke up from his conversation with the skeleton he was talking to. “Actually, I’ll stay here dude. You uh… you go on without me for now, yeah?”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  ****

  Pan, faun, Cursed - Cards in deck: 40

  Cards in hand: Hex, Stoneform, Rose Thorn, Fumble, Ditch

  “I guess this is where they get the wood for the buildings in Gravestone,” Pan said as the group approached the Deadwoods.

  On their way out of town, Pan had taken the time to add the Life Drain basic attack to his deck, bringing his total up to forty and effectively lowering – if ever so slightly – his chance of drawing a curse. His deck had shuffled and his hand had refreshed, and he now had five cards in his hand. He had sighed when he drew them. They were all cards he had seen before: Hex, Stoneform, Rose Thorn, Fumble, and Ditch.

  He was additionally relieved to see Ditch in his hand. It meant he could permanently get rid of a card.

  Hex allowed him to target something, and for the duration of the debuff they would both take whatever damage either took. It also dealt a little damage at the offset. It had no hold ability, for which he had scoured the card’s long-text description.

  Stoneform turned him into a stone idol for a duration, about which the long-text was mysteriously silent. He was skeptical about this one.

  Rose Thorn he remembered from their fight with the Nightmare creatures, at least superficially. He had never read the description of the card the first time, which he immediately corrected. The card pictured a corridor of nasty metal-looking thorned stems, which radiated about a white rose bleeding a single drop of blood. The card had a hold ability. Whenever he took an instance of damage, he would discard a card from his hand at random. When the card was played, he would take an instance of damage for each card less than his maximum action count.

  That sucks, he thought, but then thought about the pain-sharing with Hex. There might be a synergy between these two.

  Fumble discarded his hand and drew two cards. A net loss of cards, but useful in a desperate situation.

  Finally, Ditch allowed him to Evaporate a card in his hand, and then Ditch itself Evaporated.

  “Those are trees?” Apollo said beside him as they stood before the Deadwoods.

  The forest, much like the town, was not a green or leafy affair. The gnarled trees, as dark as the volcanic stone from which they grew- No, they’re not growing from the volcanic rock. That’s not the right term. They’re emerging, or they’d erupted, from the surrounding rock.

  Here and there were old, ragged stumps, evidence of a logging industry nearby. That, or very determined beavers.

  They appeared to be outcroppings of the volcanic rock itself, with how rough and craggy their bark was.

  “I can’t imagine any plants growing in these tunnels,” Athena mused. The ubiquitous glowing crystals clung high on the tunnel walls and to the ceiling, bathing the rock-like trees in their sullen, waxy light.

  But it seemed to Pan, from the large pits which dotted the ground and to a certain point up the tunnel wall, the crystals had completely dotted the surfaces in here. The ones on the ceiling were simply too high up for people to easily dislodge.

  The wind slid towards them through the trees, bringing with it the smell of ash and sediment. There was no sign of any monsters.

  Athena took out the wanted poster the caterpillar had given them. It hadn’t gone into her inventory like the cards did.

  “He said he wanted fifty of these hobbs killed,” she said. She compared the poster to her Corps membership card. “But this thing says I only need to kill ten monsters to rank up.”

  Her membership card mirrored what Pan’s said. Probably because we’re the same rank, he thought.

  “So we’ll probably rank up a couple of times,” Apollo reasoned.

  “Do we need to kill a hundred hobbs?” Pan asked. He indicated himself and Athena. “You know. Since there’s two of us who took the job?”

  Athena shook her head. “Probably not.”

  “This place is much less inviting than that grove,” Apollo commented.

  Athena grunted, then took off to weave through the trees.

  “We should probably agree on some kind of signal in case we get separated,” Apollo suggested as he and Pan followed after her.

  “It’s easy,” she said back at him. “If you get lost, shout ‘Hey! I’m lost!’”

  “But what if we’re out so far that the others can’t hear?”

  She shrugged. “You’re a big boy. You figure it out.”

  Athena had never been particularly warm to Pan, or even been particularly warm around Pan. But the argument she and Apollo had over signing that contract had turned her even colder than normal.

  I wonder if going after these hobbs is the right move for us right now, he wondered.

  Apollo paused briefly to consider a tree, making a gesture, lining it up to another tree. He went to that tree and repeated. He called out to Athena, who was striding confidently ever further into the woods, “I heard about this trick where you establish landmarks while travelling so you can maintain a straight line. Because people tend to travel in circles when they don’t have a clear direction.”

  “That’s nice,” she said idly back at him.

  Pan recalled something he had gotten out of the Block & Tackle pack. He pulled a card from his inventory, the Chalk utility card, and it turned into a three inch cylinder of waxed chalk.

  “We can use this to mark our way, Apollo.”

  “Oh, quick thinking.”

  Pan made an X on a tree Apollo had just set up as a straight-line landmark. “I’ll put them on the side where we’re travelling, so when we turn around to leave, we just follow the X’s.”

  Apollo clapped once and nodded. He called to his sister, who was determinedly weaving through the trees and out of their line of sight, “You hear that, Athena? Just follow the white X’s to get out!”

  “Will do,” she called back.

  “Man, she just doesn’t let up does she?” Pan said, hoping distance and the trees were muffling his voice.

  “She’s always been like this,” Apollo sighed, “She always needs to be in control, but when she is she acts like it’s so much work.”

  “Which of you is older?” Pan asked.

  Apollo grinned. “I am. But only by a year. Would you have guessed it?”

  Probably not, Pan didn’t say. This was because there was a large crash that deafened him. The ground had trembled slightly, too.

  “Athena!” Apollo called, racing to catch up to his sister. Whatever caused that crash, Pan thought as he fought to keep up, it wasn’t a hobb.