“You’re quite right Thomás. We should make a decision soon.” Gyselle looks at Corti, Tarian and Thia in turn. “I think we should camp here tonight. Try and gather as much of this stuff as we can haul back.” Gyselle pauses for a moment thoughtfully tapping her finger to her chin. Then points at Thia, “Unless you feel well enough to ride. Though I really think you should rest.” Gyselle moves over to Thia and makes a big fuss about making sure she is comfortable and doesn’t need anything to eat or drink.

Corti grins back as Thia nudges her, taking the compliment and happy to see the artificer's liveliness, however slight. She'll help to gather bark as best she can, checking on Thia each time she brings an armload of bark back to the pile.

Corti is tying together bundles of bark when she catches Thia's request. Hurrying over to the artificer, and somewhat glad that blushing isn't a problem she has to worry about, Corti takes a seat near her and picks up her lute, "Why, I'd love to." She settles into one of her old setlists, switching out some of the louder songs for more peaceful folk songs and alternating between singing softly and just playing. 

She slows her playing as Thomás speaks. She nods at Gyselle, "I agree." She glances at Thia as she gets situated, then around to her friends and the lancers, "I don't think traveling without rest would be good for any of us." 

“As lovely as getting back in the saddle sounds, I don’t think now is the time. We’ve pushed these horses harder than they were ready for, and they need some rest.” Tarian nodded toward Thia. “That and our resident alchemist has taken it upon herself to run a test of the cure for what you’ve got back at camp, so we need to wait here where we can get more ingredients if necessary.”

Or, well, I guess that’s close enough to the truth. Close enough for what they need to know, anyway.

“Miss Gyselle, if I could have a moment of your time; I need a word with you about our patient.” Tarian stepped close to loom over Gyselle, and gestured away from the group.

When the two had stepped far enough away that Tarian was sure no one would hear, Tarian sat down on the soft earth and leveled her gaze at Gyselle.

“I’m not sure what to make of you. You’ve patched up Thia and exposed her to this poison. You got my team into soldiers’ tents after Arceneaux said she’d kill us for doing exactly that. And you helped find and make a cure for the poison. So, while I don’t know if I can trust you yet, if this cure ends up working, you’ll at least have my respect and my thanks, and I’ll have your back in a fight.” Tarian reached out for a handshake.

Gyselle extends her own hand to shake Tarian’s. She holds it for a moment to long. But not overly so. 

She looks at Tarian, then back over to the group by the fire. Opens her mouth to say something as she looks back to Tarian ... Silence stretches on for a few moments and she closes her mouth and hangs her head. More silence passes.

Eventually she begins talking to the ground. “I ... I, don’t know what to say. Th th thank you.”

Gyselle then makes her way slowly back towards the others almost like she’s in a daze from what just happened. 

Having decided to stay the night, you start making camp and light a small fire to make some tea and hot food. Thia is resting, no visible improvement yet, but she joins into the music and the somehow more serene atmosphere, now that the first part of your mission to get silverbark had been accomplished. Setting up a watch schedule, together with the lancers, you slowly bed down for the night, hoping to get some rest before riding hard for the pass tomorrow.

Gyselle sets up near Thia to keep an eye on her during the night. Constantly checking on Thia during her turn for watch. She tries diligently to not wake her, but has a feeling she might have anyway. 

Thia would have curled herself up as close to Corti as she could to listen closely to her tune. She’d have lay her head on her lap if it wouldn’t interfere with her playing. It gave the artificer’s mind something to focus on and to lull her into a rest. In her sleep, she sensed the presence of another, but was not roused awake enough to register her carer.

Borderlands:

As you wake the next morning, a low mist is hanging in the undulations of the barren ground and broken earth before you. On the horizon, you see dark rainclouds rolling in. Despite the bleak outlook, you all got a good nights rest, and even Thia looks a little healthier than she did yesterday.

You eat a quick breakfast before packing your gear and the silverbark strips and saplings, and start to ride hard for the pass, partly to get back to the camp as fast as possible, and partly because you want to avoid the rainstorm. Despite your best efforts though, around midday, heavy rain starts to pour down, soaking you in minutes. Thia, you start to shiver again, though this time most likely from the cold rain.

As you push past the tree line, you see several small rivulets having formed and running down the mountainside and flowing into the barren valley below. Although these streams are only a foot or so deep and rarely wider than five feet, the wet stone and low visibility make for treacherous going.

Do you want to push on, get off the horses and guide them on foot, or hunker down and wait out the weather?

-------------------------------------

Arc, work on your contraption has progressed rather nicely, but the engineers struggle a bit with the complex inner workings of the machine, as the rough plans you drew are too intricate and the interplay of the different pieces to important to leave up to chance. You look forward to a day of experimentation and construction, after you've done a bit more administrative work than you'd liked the past two days. You can't help but remember a saying your grandfather liked to use: "Amateurs, they dream of strategy. Professionals, they deal with logistics."

At that, a saying of your mother's comes to mind as well: If you work hard, you deserve to play hard too. It was time to play.

Not wanting to risk the health and safety of her current patient. Gyselle suggests finding a cave or similar shelter from the elements. Yes, the silver bark does need to make it back to camp. Assuming it’s the item we need, but sliding off a cliff would only complicate things further. And presumably take longer to get back to camp. 

Intelligence: 10

Arc, as you're assembling the various gears and crankshafts, you're starting to play around with some cantrips and start to test out some theories. Your experiments so far had shown that cantrips inscribed on mechanical parts imbued them with beneficial properties. Now so far, you had written the runes in such a way that they took the necessary magical energy from the driver of the vehicles, which worked even if they had no arcane training. But as you're playing around, you hear the thunderstorm in the East and you get a sudden flash of inspiration. You take one of the bolts you smithed, and you inscribe a runic form of your shocking grasp. As you're done, you can feel the sting of the energy pulsating out from the bolt. You're amazed by this and remember your early lessons on metallurgy and magnetism with Tiberius, and you build a coil out of some copper wiring and after attaching a string to the now- magical bolt, you repeatedly lower it into the spring and lift it back out. As you suspected, as the bolt is lowered into the coil, nearby nails and even some heavy tools fly towards the coil, and as you pull out the bolt, they drop to the floor.

Excited by this new discovery, you go about completely reworking the propulsion system of this vehicle, and instead of relying on a handcranked mechanism, you are planning to have two of these bolts set opposit each other, with a free- spinning wire loop linked to a third bolt with a slightly modified version of the wording to produce a constant charge attached. The right hand bolt is attached to a lever which requires a driver to lower it into the coil first. Once you're done with your experimental propulsion, you lower the right hand bolt, and to your joy see the metal loop start to spin rapidly. Having proven the concept, you now go about creating a sturdy and purpose- built version of this in the town smithy, to provide for a fully automated propulsion that doesn't require steam! You're quite certain that what you discovered here would also be of great interest to the Rail Company. For that matter, the discovery, if marketed correctly, could even allow you to launch your own branch of Cannith industries: vehicles for transportation powered by the Automated Repulsion Cell, or new engineering tools, like automated drills. Even ships and trains might be modified! Truly the possibilities were endless!

With the new form of magical technology in hand, Arc couldn't help but break into a grin. He had found it, a way to undermine his father. Manpower was fine and all, but he had found a way to harness energy. That's all that manpower really was, energy to achieve a task. If he could form his own branch, independent of his father, he could make a case to stop his proposal to the Generals to steal the Warforged's free will, and allow himself to continue his own observation of their "soul". He could continue his dream!

The young nobleman clenched his hand, muffling his own excitement, and brought another hand to his face, forcing the smile to die down. He couldn't let his emotions get the best of him, not before anything could come of it. He needed to keep this quiet and form solid prototypes to display as a case for investors and the government. That made this first prototype all the more important. He half wondered for a moment how the others from his little party were doing, and their reactions to his new creation.

Still, it was a passing thought and he quickly put it away in favor of focusing on his work.

Taking care to disguise the momentous breakthrough, you implement the necessary design changes yourself, and work throughout the afternoon and well into the night on a sturdy set of coils and enchanted bolts. Once finished, you set to installing the new invention onto your vehicle by candlelight, and taking care to make sure that no one is paying too close attention to your work. You are setting up all of the pulleys, levers, gears springs and clockwork all throughout the night, and you barely notice the sunrise. Only once a you engineer brings you a bowl of grain porridge made from some of the barley that the villagers offered the soldiers, do you look up from your work, the machine complete.

Do you wish to test it, or wait until your friends are back?

Arc, just realizing how long he had been working, would cover up the creation and go to rest, awaiting his party's return.

In the mountains:

ALthough soaked through by the rain, you all find a small cave and wait out the rainfall. Thomàs made a small fire to warm some tea, brew up some more of the silverbark for Thia, and to allow you all to dry out your wet clothes and put on something a bit drier. While no one is ready to admit it, the storm gives you all some more time to rest, which after four days of hard riding and in Thia's case doing so while being ill, is a welcome change. Late in the afternoon, the rain starts to turn to a drizzle.

"Looks like it's clearing up. If we ride into the night, we can make the peak. And from there it's a two or three day ride to the camp, depending on how far they marched."

Gyselle wonders outloud, “Are we prepared to deal with those animals we saw on our way to get the silverbark? If we decide to ride during the night? Seems risky to me.”

Holding her tea in one hand and rubbing her eyes with the other, Thia would quietly add in her thoughts. "Thinking back to the portion of the path we lost one of the horses, I'd have concern about the integrity of our route. Specifically any mudslides that may have, or could occur." Blinking away the static, her eyes would refocus. She wondered if there was anything they could prepare in advance to help them through should they experience the obstacle. This is where the alchemist would refer back to Arc's work their last rainfall.

Studying your notes, you remember that Arc had imbuedyour cart with a special incantation on the wheels. You believe that it was a longstrider incantation, and you wonder whether you might be able to imbue the horseshoes of your mares with the same incantation, if you rested a bit more.

“Well, I’d certainly trust a horse’s eyes over mine at night, but if we’ve got hungry predators in the dark, it’d be the blind protecting the weak. And these horses are in no shape to run, and the ground is in no shape to let them.” Tarian rubbed her face a bit. “But the camp needs their cure, and the longer we take, the worse things are going to get. We can’t afford to make a lot of stops for the weather.”

Tarian looked toward the sky. “I don’t see any great options here. I’ve thought about it, and even the best idea I’ve got even I don’t think is very good. I’ll lay it out, though: we could split the group. Take one, maybe two of the strongest horses, and that’d get two or maybe three of us to the camp faster. No stops for weather, only rest if necessary. Thoughts?”

Gyselle ponders Tarians suggested course of action, rhythmically tapping her lips with her forefinger. “I suppose I should be one of the ones to go... if that’s what we decide I mean. I don’t like it anymore than you do Tarian. But out of everyone...” she looks between the Lancers and the group, “I have medical training and experience.” There’s a pause while she considers how to continue, still tapping her lips.

“I could either make a copy of Thia’s notes... or take the originals back to camp. Though I suppose the next question is who would come with me... if we think this ... the best of the poor choices facing us currently.”

As she finishes she looks optimistically at Tarian. Hoping that she finds her words encouraging. She also looks over to Thomás, wondering if he’ll volunteer to accompany the group that rides on ahead... alone