It was a quiet afternoon in the woods near the Tree Fort. The birds were calmly chirping their mellow songs and the early spring sun was slowly approaching the treeline. Finn sat calmly on a rock. He stared vacantly at the reflections in the water. He was slightly tired. He wasn't quite sure why he was tired. He'd been here all day, sitting on a rock, staring at a pond, thinking about stuff. His thoughts wandered here and there, faded in and out of existence. He thought about the pond, himself, the world around him. He thought about swords, adventuring, the small covered hole in the pile of boulders across the lake. He thought about his quests, the newly accumulated mass of gold and jewels sitting in his treasure room. Then he thought about what he didn't have. He didn't have many potions left in the cabinet medicine cabinet back home. He didn't have many fireworks left in his stash (Something that would have to remedied. One finds all too many uses for an explosion when crawling through a dungeon.). He didn't have any reason to be out in the woods at sunset, and he didn't have any reason to be anywhere else either. It's not like Jake could lecture him about what he was thinking when he was living with Lady like he had been for the past 6 months.
For the first time since he was 14, for the first time in 5 years, Finn had had a day that he could just spend doing anything he wanted without any plans at all, and he had spent it thinking in the woods. Realizing this, he decided that he should do something interesting before the woods became far less friendly and he would have to slice his way home through a mile of forest. He remembered his backpack. He remembered its contents. Last spring, Jake had decided Finn needed a hobby. He pulled out the sketchpad his bro had given him and the rune pen he got from a color wizard after they beat the tar out of him for trying to trap Lady in a crystal energy lens or some junk. He flipped through the sketchpad until he found a blank page and was just about to start drawing the scene when a loud blast sent the birds fleeing from the trees and he glimpsed the edge of a fireball over the treeline. Hastily shoving his belongings into the bag, he ran towards what he thought was the source of the sound, uncertain of what was to be found there.
When he arrived at the scene 20 minutes later, there was no doubt about what had caused the noise. A smoking crater 20 feet deep at the center marked the middle of a small field in the depths of the woods. A masked, black-haired figure had been tossed into a tree and what looked like a bag of scrap metal sat some 50 feet away from her next to a chunk of concrete buried in the dirt. Disregarding any possibility of a second blast, he ran towards the figure. Crossing the field uneventfully he reached the figure. It was a young woman. What she was doing out here was anyone's guess but he needed to get her out of here, she looked pale. Grabbing the small collection of intact belongings and shoving them into his bag, slinging the odd case she had over his shoulder, he picked her up and ran as fast as he could safely go through the dark forest towards the tree fort.
