Montage!

**Juniper trains in a hotel room.**

## Synopsis

Upon reaching level 10 in ***Bone Magic***, Juniper discovers ***Power Tapping***, ***Speed Tapping***, and ***Endurance Tapping*** (as opposed to pulling all traits at once). In total, it takes him eight hours to maximise ***Bone Magic*** at level 12—triple the primary stat KNO—and fully remove his ***Broken Bone***. In the process, he devours hundreds of gunzel bones and gets a feel for the tradeoff between the rate of pulling from a bone and the total amount pulled. By the time he is done, Fenn and Amaryllis have claimed the big bed in the hotel room.

Juniper stays awake, thinking about the Risen Bile's attack on the bathhouse. He thinks that their name is terrible—perhaps deliberately so—and that the men he had killed were weaker than he expected from the display of magic in the baths. He tries to get answers from the game layer's exposition by obtaining a new quest, but fails. He writes down everything on his character sheet and tries to decide where to put his two unspent points. On a second page, he writes about what he had created as a DM that could be related to the game and to Aerb.

Fenn wakes up and opens the window for a second. Gunshots are audible from outside. Fenn asks about the list and notices that Juniper has written down Fel Seed; her reaction confirms that Fel Seed exists in the world. Juniper doesn't elaborate on the context in which Fel Seed was invented, and instead asks if he was killed. According to Fenn, he's still alive, sitting on his throne in the City of a Thousand Brides.

When Juniper says that Fel Seed should be consuming the world, Fenn explains exclusion zones to him to answer why that isn't the case. This principle is the answer to the question of how many of the things he came up with are incorporated into Aerb—anything sufficiently nasty, capable of destroying or spreading over Aerb, gets proactively confined within an exclusion zone. Fenn says that—of the things Juniper has written down—Fel Seed, Nightsmoke, Parsmont, City of Lasting Blood, and Glassy Fields are exclusion zones. However, some things on the list—like the white spires—are benign, while others—like Teeth City—are unfamiliar to her. Amaryllis wakes up and says that there are fifty-three exclusion zones, by a conservative count.

Amaryllis looks at Juniper's character sheet and gets to thinking about how to optimise Juniper. Over the course of a week, Juniper maxes out all of his skills except for pistols, rifles, and horticulture. He learns that getting to level 10 in a skill sometimes unlocks a virtue, and sometimes doesn't. He also learns that skills are capped at three times their primary stat and five times their secondary stat. With ***Parry*** at level 10, he gets the virtue ***Nascent Blade-Bound***. He also unlocks "Hardened Knuckles" at Unarmed Combat 10, "Ambidexterity at Dual Wield 10, "Range Finder" at Thrown Weapons 10, and "Structural Assessment" at Improvised Weapons 10. He also grinds his social skills, increasing ***Romance*** and ***Flattery*** to level 6 with Fenn's help; this process proves fairly awkward, as she is an incurable flirt.

Aside from training, Fenn and Amaryllis try to make him less ignorant about Aerb. They give him some common knowledge about the cosmology of Aerb, the mortal species, different types of magic, and the Empire of Common Cause. Juniper asks as to why the Lost King's Court still has so much power—considering that forge frenzy randomly happens for each person at the same rate and assuming that the population is growing. Amaryllis clarifies the matter by telling Juniper that the population was twenty billion during the time of Uther five hundred years ago, and is five billion in the present day. From this, Juniper draws the conclusion is that the world is very grim and dark—but that his intended purpose in the world might be to banish that darkness.

During lulls in the fighting and looting that keeps occurring in Barren Jewel, Fenn and Amaryllis gather food, water, and weaponry for the trip to Caer Laga. Fenn brings the party a sword, the void rifle that Juniper left outside the city wall earlier, a new dagger, and replenishes their supplies of bones and arrows. Together, they climb over the city wall and set off.

## Featured characters

* Juniper Smith
* Amaryllis Penndraig
* Fenn Greenglass
* Fel Seed *(mentioned only)*
* Uther Penndraig *(mentioned only)*

## Quotes

“He’s real. This world has a Fel Seed.”

“You don’t believe the legends? Or wait, you have that broken brain that thinks it invented a lot of the details of this world from whole cloth. So you think that you thought up Fel Seed? In what context?”

“It’s a long story. Is he -- was he killed?”

“Nope. Still sitting on his throne in the City of a Thousand Brides. Not sure if that particular part of your brain survived your stroke, but he’s not someone we talk about in polite company.”

—**Juniper** learns from **Fenn** that the worst thing he has ever thought of exists on Aerb.

“Um, it’s like Chernobyl, which is a place on Earth where there was a horrible accident. People who went into the heart of it would suffer from horrible cancerous growths and then die, or maybe just be killed outright by the poison there.”

“And the thing that keeps Chernobyl from spreading is the exclusion rule, right? The whole world would become a Chernobyl if not for that.”

—**Juniper** and **Fenn** misunderstand each other's worlds.

“First things first, I think that we should train up Joon.”

—**Amaryllis** invokes a montage scene.

“Thaum-suckers aren’t mindless. They’ve got a cunning to them, makes them dangerous. But no, they’re probably not going to be swayed by telling them what beautiful blue eyes they have. Me, on the other hand, I’d be more amenable.”

“Your eyes are green.”

“And how beautiful are they?”

“Your eyes are … I could get lost in the beauty of your eyes, the way they seem luminous in the morning light, and when I see you smile, and that smile touches those elegant eyes, my breath catches in my throat and my heart hammers in my chest.”

—**Fenn** coaxes some flattery and romance out of **Juniper**.

“During the reign of Uther Penndraig, five hundred years ago, the hexal population was twenty billion. Today it’s five billion.”

“Seems to me that people need to start fucking more. At least, I heard that was how babies were made.”

“Sex doesn’t help if people use prophylaxis. And it’s a complicated issue even beyond the question of whether the replacement rate is high enough. The exclusion zones are a problem that keeps getting worse and there are singular events which cause dips in the world population that we never recover from.”

—**Amaryllis** tells Juniper the grim details, with commentary from **Fenn**.

“Aerb is dying.”

“Well *that’s* a leap. Celestar, now there’s a place that died, if you need context for world death.”

—**Juniper'**s conclusion is not shared by **Fenn**.

“It’s not clear whether it’s dying or not. The overall trend is downward. Optimists feel that the final graph will be sigmoid, with a long period of stability before the First Empire, a period of instability, and then a second long period of stability.”

—**Amaryllis** takes an optimistic middle ground.
## Notes

* Juniper learns ***Bows*** merely from touching Fenn's bow, and practises with a store-bought bow, but the skill he reaches is left unsaid.

### Continuity notes

* The ***Broken Bone*** affliction was obtained back in chapter 3.
* Fel Seed was first mentioned in chapter 3, and again in chapter 4 and chapter 7. It's only now that Juniper gets proof that his creation made it into Aerb, and that any clue is given as to what Fel Seed might be.
* The White Spires, meanwhile, were mentioned in chapters 4, 7, and 11. They won't crop up again for a good while.
* Juniper saw Celestar with his own eyes in chapter 7.