Cal ran Trigger around the edge of the town. He said it was to scout for enemies and get a lay of the land, but I think he just wanted to run him.

  That horse was fast. They seemed to really get along.

  I let Ladybug wander. I was sort of hoping the horse would get lost, and we’d have to get by on foot again. I’d gotten really good at hoofing it, and the belt made the extra weight feel like nothing.

  Unfortunately, Ladybug was frustratingly attentive, and surprisingly affectionate. After eating some grass, and running around for a bit, she liked to return to nuzzle me for muzzle and ear scratches. Which I obliged because I’m not a monster.

  “I have an extra brush,” Rachel said, tossing it to me. I actually caught it. How’s that for 14 Dexterity?

  I brushed the stupid monster. She seemed to appreciate it.

  Rachel had a sheen of sweat on her brow.

  “Oh, did I miss helping with the raft?”

  “Nah, just went for a run,” she said.

  We made our way through the ruins in search of good wood, materials for the raft. This meant searching through the houses, the dry places.

  Up against a wall in one such place was a shiny copper cog. I knelt down to pick it up out of the grass shooting up from between the floorboards, and noticed a coiled spring. Both looked fairly free of rust. So it must not have been out here for a long time. I spent a couple more minutes searching for anything else, but that seemed to be it.

  “What’d you find?” Rachel asked.

  “Ah, nothing good for the raft,” I said. “But this seems interesting.”

  I held up the shiny cog.

  “Huh,” Rachel murmured. “Looks like it’s in good shape.”

  “Wonder what Berryhop will say?”

  “We need to get some wood.”

  With the help of the belt, I was able to break into buildings fairly easily, smash doors, push through fallen and rotted furniture. Not a huge amount of quality construction materials at first, but slowly, surely after an hour or so we had a tidy pile of wood.

  By the time we felt confident we had more than we needed, Berryhop arrived with the sketch, a small charcoal drawing on a piece of bark. We had early lunch at the edge of the cliff overlooking the lake and the tower, while the horses drank water and ate some oats.

  “Where do you think that thing came from?” Bernadette asked. “Looks alien.”

  “Egyptians had obelisks like that,” I said, “and smooth pyramids. And they were notably human. Could just be really old.”

  “Yeah, yeah smartass,” Bernadette laughed. “But that thing looks way different than anything else we’ve seen.”

  “It probably is,” Rachel said.

  “I don’t like it,” Cal added.

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?!” Berryhop said, chewing on a biscuit. How she handled those things was anyone’s guess. It was like eating talcum powder.

  “Out here,” Cal said. “With the horses and the grass, and where I can see the places threats come from. Towers have secrets.”

  “Oh my god!” Bernadette laughed. “So dramatic.”

  “Hmm,” Cal replied.

  After our break, we got back to work. Cal and I did the heavy lifting. Bernadette tried to help where she could, and mostly worked on tying and finalizing things. Rachel had to quit working early, on account of her arm. Even the repetitive movement of tying the ropes seemed too much. Berryhop rubbed an ointment on it that seemed to reduce the swelling.

  During our water break, I asked Berryhop what she thought about the copper cog and steel spring.

  “It’s enchanted, lightly,” she said, “even a couple days out here in the dewy grass should show some amount of rusting of patina. Looks as new as when it was made. See the shine? That’s advanced metallurgy. Probably has some amount of chromium in it, but it’s not plated.”

  “What do you think it’s from?”

  “Hard to tell! Isn’t that neat?!”

  “Hmm.”

  The only thing I could think of that anything remotely as complex as this was the gun that assassin had used at Caer Vortigern, that crossbow I’d seen at the Battle of Greenvalley Village, and the robot guy at Mark’s library. Was his name Billie?

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  If that last thing was the case, what the hell were robots doing out here? Had they fought? Who?

  We got back to work, and in time, we had what looked like a functioning raft. The only real problem we had was how we would get up to the tower. Any attempt we made to find a design for a ladder that rose 25 feet into the air but didn’t topple the raft seemed doomed to failure.

  I rustled around with one of the saddlebags as they debated design elements. Currently, it was making large pontoon struts that stabilized the raft. I carefully emptied a bag and replaced it with rocks until I felt that it was something like 40-50 pounds.

  Then I found a good empty area, spun around in a circle, and shotput the bag into the air. It sailed far far into the air, and then smashed through the roof of a dilapidated house.

  “What the hell was that?!” asked Cal.

  “Was that one of our saddle bags?” asked Rachel.

  “What a throw!” exclaimed Berryhop.

  Bernadette just smiled.

  “That was how we’re gonna get to the tower,” I said.

  “You’re finally gonna throw me?!” asked Berryhop.

  After retrieving the saddlebag, we debated the finer points of how this was going to work. We briefly considered Bernadette as the projectile, as she could spiderclimb, but we weren’t sure that I could get the distance right with my strength alone.

  Berryhop seemed excited by the idea. I briefly considered the moral implications of throwing her, whether this land had a history of ‘dwarf throwing,’ but if Berryhop wasn’t upset by it, neither was I. Again, the context seemed important. We were doing this as a way to get to an important quest, the other thing was about drunken antics, and degradation.

  In moments, we had the raft on the lake.

  It floated well. Cal and I paddled. It was slow going, and the tower loomed as we made our progress.

  “Wish we had a Wizard with us. You know, Braelyn could probably fly us up there in a jiffy,” Cal said.

  “Well, Braelyn isn’t here is she?” Rachel replied.

  “She said it’s 20 gold worth of diamond dust to teleport to us each time,” Bernadette said.

  “You heard that, huh?” Rachel said, shading her eyes against the sun.

  “20 gold doesn’t sound like much,” Cal opined.

  “It’s insurmountable when you think you’re debasing yourself with my company,” Rachel stated.

  Berryhop put her hand on Rachel’s good shoulder.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Thank you, Berryhop.”

  Either I missed a lot of Rachel and Braelyn’s conversation, or Rachel had interpreted things very wrong last night. Welp! Can’t be helped.

  As soon as we entered the shadow of the tower, Berryhop began spreading the adhesive on her hands and forearms. Bernadette took over rowing, and I started stretching my shoulder.

  “You’re slacking,” Cal said.

  “No I’m not!” Bernie shot back.

  “See, we’re turning!”

  I ignored them, and tried to see if I couldn’t spy a balcony or something. There! A black emptiness very much like a door or a window. Hard to tell with the scale of this thing.

  Berryhop finished tying the rope to her waist, and I settled her onto my hand. I steadied her with my other hand, just above her waist. With her womanly, but scrunched proportions, none of this seemed very dignified.

  But again, if she was comfortable with this, so was I.

  She nodded to me in the affirmative. We were determined not to make this weird.

  “You ready?” Rachel asked.

  “Here we go,” I said.

  I spun, then shoved Berryhop up into the air with all I had. I fell to the raft, and just managed not to roll off.

  When I looked up, there she was, stuck right on the side of the tower.

  She screamed.

  “You can do this!” I yelled back.

  “Why did I let you talk me into this?!”

  “You’re doing great!” I yelled.

  “You’re so heroic!” Bernadette yelled next.

  “Keep rowing or the rope—” Cal warned.

  Bernadette cursed.

  I kept looking up at Berryhop. She was slipping. She screamed, then fell. I briefly looked at Rachel, who looked back at me like ‘are you stupid, catch her!’

  She wasn’t going to make the raft. Good. Wait. Not good. If she missed the raft she’d fall into the lake. I leapt from the raft. She hit the water. I made it to her, and let her climb onto my back as I dog paddled back to the raft.

  “You okay?” I asked, as we both lay on our backs.

  “No! That was so dumb! Why did I let you talk me into that!”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “Maybe I need to increase the strength of the adhesive.”

  “Can you do that without getting permanently stuck?” Asked Rachel.

  Berryhop smiled wide.

  “We’ll find out, huh?”

  After some castings of my Little Tricks to dry us off, Berryhop mixed in some more crushed mushrooms to her adhesive mixture. We both took a moment to steel ourselves, then we tried again.

  Berryhop got on my hand. I spun. I threw. And there she went again.

  “It’s working!” she said, once landing.

  “You can do it!” I yelled back.

  “You’re kicking ass, Berryhop!” Bernadette yelled too.

  Berryhop screamed in enthusiasm.

  Bernie and Cal rowed to keep the rope from getting too taunt. Berryhop stayed on the side of the tower. After some scrambling, and a lot of rowing, Berryhop made it to the black square of the opening.

  She was gone for some time.

  After what felt like an hour, but what must have been just moments, the rope began to pull taut, and the raft approached the tower.

  That couldn’t have been Berryhop. Even on the water, this raft was too heavy. So who was it?

  A flurry of hushed conversation broke out. Then, a rope ladder descended, and there was silence.

  We decided that Bernadette would go first. If things went south, she could run along the side of the tower. She climbed the rope ladder with only a bit of twisting in the wind. When she reached the top, she disappeared into the blackness.

  Those seconds where she was gone and I waited for her to reappear seemed like an hour. Sweat slicked the sides of my body.

  Then she popped her head out, and shouted down, “It’s okay! It’s just a bunch of Billies! And Berryhop is here too!”

  “Good!” I yelled back.

  Bernadette disappeared, then reappeared, “She just got distracted by them!”

  We all climbed the ladder.