"I need a crystal," Oliver finally explained, after far too much time faffing about and talking about irrelevant background like the reason his lines were slightly wavy, the person who figured out the way they needed to wave, and what that person's mother's favorite breakfast was.

"Yeah, I knew that," Alyssa grouched. She was trying to not let her mood get too spoiled, but Oliver was really trying her patience. "But it doesn't tell me much I can actually use. What kind of crystal, and I hope you've got something for how I can find one, unless you want me to just wander around for a year looking for shiny things."

"Any kind of crystal," Oliver shrugged, then thought better about it. "Okay. Technically, if the crystal is super magical, like it's constantly crackling with lightning or on fire or it's floating in midair, then it might not work. Floating is probably fine, actually. Glowing is almost certainly fine. It also needs to be at least the size of my fist."

He balled up his fingers to illustrate, and Alyssa raised a skeptical eyebrow. "So you're not expecting something precious."

"Quartz is honestly ideal," he shrugged, "It's the Center for Crystal, and while I'm not expecting the first thing you find to be lab-grade or anything, the less random other stuff I need to deal with, the better. That's obviously not always the priority, but right now, it is."

"I don't know if you've noticed," Alyssa skeptically pointed out, "but there aren't exactly a lot of big crystal deposits around here. You can say what you'd like as much as you want, but it's not like you just find gems lying on the ground."

"Not back home, you don't. But they're just rocks. They could appear legitimately anywhere that you find rocks. It's just back home, everything shiny was long claimed by past humans because we're really just magpies with better grip strength."

Alyssa frowned, "Isn't 'magpies with better grip strength' describing wendals more than humans?"

"That is a fair point," Oliver stroked his scraggly beard. "But there aren't any of those here either. So the odds of finding a big chunk of quartz lying on the beach isn't that terrible."

"That better not be your plan."

"It might be? I tried divining for where Crystal might be found, and the clearest answer I got was about a place 'untouched by human hands yet passed through by human feet.' My range isn't that great at the moment, not for something this niche, so it can't be too far away. Also, I think what's going on is that one of us probably passed close enough to a crystal that a bit of its mana caught on us like a cobweb, which we then brought back here and-"

Alyssa cut him off before he could go prattling on and on, "What, it's somewhere that we've been? Are you sure that your spell is working? The only place I can think of that might have any crystals is that one cave I was in, and I... oh."

"Caves are decently likely to have crystals in them, even back home. If that's where you think you're liable to find one, I could create an additional light-tablet to help you find your way."

"Oliver."

"Hm?"

"Stop talking."

"Why's that?"

Because I want you to forget this before I feel like an idiot. "Because I know exactly where to go, thank you."

"Is something wrong?"

Alyssa startled. There was no way Oliver picked up on her idiocy, right? He was as dense as a brick. Denser, even! The bricks around here weren't even that dense!

"You never thank me. Did you break something?" he narrowed his eyes at her. "Are you hiding that you broke something and are trying to distract me?"

"Nope! Nope. Okay, I know what I'm going to do now byeeeee."

Alyssa quickly beat a retreat from the accusatory gaze of the [Erudite Enchanter], and did her best to not compound her embarrassment by squawking in an undignified manner when the edge of the platform proved to be a half-step closer to her than expected, sending her plummeting four stories to the stone below before she was ready.

And she stubbed her toe as a result.

Ow.

Alyssa's latest trip back to Shelter was the easiest one yet. Sure, she still needed Henrietta to carry her across the river to get started, but she remembered the way well enough as to not constantly need to climb trees to ensure she wasn't headed in the entirely wrong direction, and a presumed additional level or two in [Leafstep] made the trek itself that much easier.

Then there were the additional factors of just... getting more used to The Jungle. Yeah, it was an untamed and absolutely wild woodland which had never once seen an intelligent creature carve its way through the shadowy understory, but that didn't mean it wasn't, at its core, just another forest. Certain trees made for good climbing or walking on their branches, others didn't. She could identify the plants with hidden thorns by sight instead of touch or by magic. She knew which kinds of mosses would cause her to absolutely lose her footing, and which provided even better traction than the surrounding dirt.

She also managed to find a relatively recent track laid down by some passing megafauna, which helped. There were a few different species of those around here, droopnoses and bigfaces and mossmanes and legmoose, with all of them making for good eating if they were close enough to First Tower to be properly hunted. This wasn't one of those times, of course, but they still trampled shrubs and broke off branches in their wake, and that made her already-rapid transit all the faster.

It wasn't exactly as fast as just running down a paved road, or something like that, but it was more fun, so... tradeoffs.

Eventually, the megafauna trail veered off to the side, so she needed to forge her way through the underbrush once again, but for all that it took her so, so much longer to fight her way through that than it did to follow the already-trampled vegetation, she didn't need to go very long before she - very nearly literally - ran facefirst into the rocky wasteland that Shelter had once been in.

She only avoided doing so thanks to a bit of last-minute twisting, her arm reaching out to snag a nearby trunk and divert her momentum to the side. It felt like her arm was nearly yanked out of its socket, but by the time she'd realized the light was a little weird not because of a few bushes or a half-fallen tree she'd need to duck under, she didn't have much time to consider her options beyond just stop.

But as per usual, nobody was around to see her being cool.

The border between the forest and the weird rocky wasteland surrounding Shelter was just as stark and just as alien as it had been right after the wild magic storm that had birthed the rocky wasteland had subsided. But that wasn't to say it was the same, exactly. Though she no longer saw any traces of the golden energy that had transfigured the landscape drifting around, they clearly had kept up their work nonetheless.

Where before the stone and dirt had sat perfectly flush, now the rock distinctly sloped up, like the base of a mountain or cliff that was nonetheless only six feet tall. It looked like something from underneath was trying to push the rock upwards, and that it was continuing to do so even now, long after the storm had subsided.

With her heart now beating somewhat more slowly with it having come to terms with the fact she hadn't, actually, ran headlong into a rock wall, it wasn't hard for her to pull herself up to the top of the short cliff and get a better look around.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Fortunately, there were still plenty of the reddish-purple crystals she'd been looking for around, sticking out of the ground at random angles, and she breathed a sigh of relief that whatever terraforming had been going on hadn't changed that. But where there had previously been a mostly-stable stone surface, now the entire area dipped and curved a lot more, with random holes in the ground and snaking depressions in the stone that looked a bit like someone had just cut the top half of a tunnel off and left it exposed to the air.

A few golden cubes jutted out of the ground here and there, and while Alyssa was pretty certain that Oliver needed transparent crystals for his magic, she did think that they looked a lot like pyrite, and that she needed to not forget that they existed when she returned.

Pyrite had iron in it, and they could really use iron right now.

For all that the rocky red landscape appeared so odd to her eyes, there was still plenty of creatures wandering around. For the most part, they were pretty small, but when she looked to her right, towards the ocean, she caught a slight glimpse of a small mountain of crystal ambling around on crab legs. Without other things to anchor her perspective to it was hard to gauge its size, but 'at least as big as a house' seemed like a safe guess.

She wasn't planning on getting a closer look. Not without more levels and skills, anyway.

Instead, she started looking around for crystals to gather. She had her reed gathering basket, and she pulled it off her shoulder, took a deep drink from the water jar within, and started looking for rocks she could toss into the same bag as her fragile ceramic waterbottle.

Ironically, most of the crystals around here were too big for her purposes, but that was likely just selection bias on account of the big crystals being the easiest to see. There wasn't a ton of loose rocks around that she could overturn in her hunt for a 'fist-sized' crystal. She did have Oliver's copper chisel, so she wouldn't have to resort to banging rocks together if whatever she found was embedded in the rock, but it wouldn't be easy even with that. She'd already tried it on some of the crystals themselves, using one of the few loose rocks around as a hammer, and hadn't managed to so much as scratch them.

It was only when she got closer to the cliff that she had some luck. Though the place she was at was nowhere near Shelter itself - or if she was, it had changed so much she couldn't recognize it - the same river that ran by it flowed along the base of the cliff there too. It bore little resemblance to the creek she'd first identified as a good place to set up base, but that didn't matter now. What did matter was how much more crumbly the red stone under her feet was compared to everywhere else. It didn't help her find a crystal that was small enough, but it did give her reassurance that she'd be able to pull one out when it came down to it.

She followed the river - upstream, because that would bring her away from the giant crystal-crab - keeping her eyes peeled for anything a bit shinier than usual. That meant she got to watch as the river widened out somewhat and turned around a 'corner' in the cliff, taking it out of her view.

Once she rounded the corner, her eyes lit up. Just a few hundred feet away, the river ran far more level with the 'main' stone, with a waterfall connecting the two heights. Her first instinct was to get to the waterfall and then climb down, looking around the pool at the base of it to find her crystals.

Then she realized that was stupid, because the spray kicked up from the water would make it basically impossible to do that safely.

[Leafstep] it, maybe? she mused. The problem with that was landing in water would definitely make her skill weaker. It was Wood, Air, and Force based, and while she hadn't been limited to just plants for years, and Force didn't care what she was landing on, the Air part of the skill would have some trouble cushioning her fall when she was jumping into water, even if it was only a foot deep. Normally she got around that by ensuring the skill activated before she hit the water, but given her goal was to avoid slipping, it wouldn't work for her. At least, not until it was strong enough to let her walk on water directly. There were a couple of places with dry ground, but nothing more than a few inches wide, none of it really suitable for her

Wait...

The pool at the base of the waterfall wasn't super clear, with a good number of plants obscuring just how deep it was exactly. But it was pretty obviously at least five feet deep, and it wasn't like her movement skill would do nothing for a water landing.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Alyssa took a few steps back and gave herself a running start, then straightened herself out for the cliff-jump into the water below. She ended up going a bit faster than she'd intended, and had a slight moment of panic when she thought she might overshoot the pool and run into the stone wall on the other side... but that turned out to be unfounded, and she landed with a bit of a muted splash firmly lost in the general turbulence of the waterfall.

Two quick strokes brought her to 'shore,' and while Alyssa didn't have the steadiest footing on the pebbly rocks that the river flowed over, it was less than a foot of water and it wasn't running that quickly. Looking downstream, she could see where it picked up so much steam with the sharp bank, but here it was entirely resistible.

After a quick check over of herself and her things - she refilled her water bottle and shoved the chisel into its security loop a little more firmly - she started looking around at the riverbank underfoot for shiny things.

It didn't take her very long at all to find the first crystal, which made her extremely content, but it was only the size of a finger so she tossed it in her bag and kept looking. A couple more of a similar size came next, but in due time she found one that was the size of her arm, but she proved entirely incapable of extracting that one from the water. Because apparently, she was just useless. Jacob would have had no trouble getting it out, probably. Henrietta wouldn't have even thought of it as a challenge, just pulling it out of the stream and be done with it. Who even knew with Clark. Oliver... eh, maybe Oliver couldn't have managed it, which was at least a slightly comforting thought. He was the kind of person who actually had too many brains, not enough everything else.

Of course, that just left her with not having enough everything else to actually make a difference here.

As time wore on and she continued to have no luck, Alyssa started to get wearier and wearier. The water was slowly making her calves burn from the resistance, and there was absolutely no shade, meaning that while her feet and ankles were almost numb from cold water flowing over them for hours. Her head and shoulders were burning from constant exposure to daylight. Her fingers were numb and cold as well, fumbling more and more of the rocks she was overturning in her hunt, and as a result squishing her fingers more and more. Her muscles burned, her fingers ached, and her mood soured more and more.

Her rations had also been soaked by her little dive into the waterfall pool, and she was quite annoyed that her dried meat hadn't dried itself off within her bag like she'd thought it had. She'd had enough rations to last her two, maybe three days, but now she didn't really trust it to last that long.

Clark really needed to figure out some better form of preservation than just 'hang-dry it and make it jerky,' or they needed to figure out some better way of keeping things dry, because if it was taking her this long to find something basic, what would it be like when she needed to go on an actually long trip to find something for their crafting? Foraging tended to take too long when speed was a priority, because time spent looking for food was time not looking for a magic crystal or a special fungus or a particular animal or whatever.

Everything hurt.

Why the hells had she signed up for this stupid Expedition, anyway? Everything was miserable, none of it was fun, and she was stuck here for a decade, just being a useless idiot, hanging on like a limpet. She was supposed to be a grand hero, finally living up to her 'potential' and effortlessly delivering people from great evil. Not... this.

Whatever this was.

She couldn't so much as find a stupid rock. Even Clark was more useful than she was right now. Freaking Oliver had started off with an actually, completely and totally useless class and he was already doing great things. That was her job, she was the one that was supposed to do great in the wilderness.

Alyssa kicked the water and stubbed her toe on a protruding rock in the process. She couldn't even be angry right, apparently. She ripped the offending rock out of the riverbed and threw it as hard as she could against the far wall, startling a bird into flight when she nearly hit it.

A glimpse of something really shiny underneath the rock she'd just thrown caught her eye.

It was probably nothing, same as all the other ones, but what did she have to lose anyway?

She nudged the rocks around it away from her foot, preparing to dig up something the size of her forearm... though screw it, she could lug back a rock that big. Drop something big in front of Oliver, show him for not specifying a maximum size if he complained, let someone else mess up for once.

But instead, she found a rough gem approximately the shape of an egg, if an egg was actually a tumor, that wasn't quite as large as her fist, but was a lovely, deep blue color, just translucent enough to reveal stunning depths within it. She looked at it, her anger melting away, then a tired but triumphant smile gripped her face.

"Yeah, you'll do."

Numb fingers scrambled around the shiny rock, and while Crystal wasn't an element she could feel particularly well, it definitely looked the part and was the right size. She slipped it in her pouch, swallowed her last bit of jerky, and waded her way to the edge of the river. Then she looked up at the cliff, realized just how dead her arms and legs were before she started climbing the sheer rock wall, and died a little inside.

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