Jo Burnham and Eric Clausen stood above the tree line at the edge of the tablelands. The area around them was rich with alpine communities and contained a variety of shrubs. Further up the flatland behind them, lichen-growing rocks dotted the plain. They'd pitched their tents on the flat and level ground just on the other side of Baxter Peak, where a small overhang looked over the west end of the surrounding lake. They weren't in walking distance to any drinking water and all their natural windbreaks were at least eight hundred feet below them, but they were prepared for their scouting exhibition.

Jo was crouched beside Eric. They were dressed for the bitter weather - they wore black, long-sleeved compression shirts and windbreakers under thermal Carhartt jackets with dark gray hiking pants that they could detach at the knee to convert to shorts. They both wore waterproof hiking boots, scuffed from use and muddied from the trek through the wet paved portaging trails.

Numerous pillars of smoke from the surrounding campgrounds billowed up against the darkening sky, torn by the ragged opaque lobes that clumped together in a field of mammatus clouds. The foregrounds that surrounded the lake below were empty and in shadow. The mood seemed wistful and elegiac. The sight from where Jo and Eric stood was an inviting one, yet it seemed as though, between the current time of daylight and darkness, that the air was holding its breath. It was something to endure at a great distance away.

The two of them looked out over the scenery below them. It was mostly covered by the low vegetation. Eric looked through a pair of night-vision binoculars, his cockpit sunglasses perched on top of his head. They were golden-framed, the lenses rose-tinted and expensive. Jo didn't know why he'd brought them. He was just going to lose them again, but she supposed again stressed his vocabulary of wealth.

"What do you see?" she asked him, playing with the fine hair on the back of her neck, twirling the short strands around her finger. "Are there any afturganga or hamingja?"

Eric's eyebrows were pinched together, either in concentration or because he wasn't satisfied with what he was or wasn't seeing. "No," he said, raising the pitch of his voice slightly. "I see families making s'mores, stargazers, and a... a circle of nudists doing, playing, smoking? I dunno." He took the binoculars away from his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his other hand and exhaled a heavy sigh. "Jo."

"Yo!" Jo stood up so fast, she heard her knee joints pop the same time the goggles that hung around her neck smacked her in the face. She held out her arms to balance herself.

Eric wore a smug grin. "Nice."

"Ugh..." Jo used her sleeve to scrub at her face. "So no monsters, no suspicions. What are we going to do now? George isn't going to like our no-info report."

Eric brought the binoculars back up to his eyes. "I didn't say anything about no suspicions. Look at this."

Jo took his binoculars and looked through the eyepieces. The night-vision turned the darkness a green-scale depiction of high definition. Eric directed her gaze where he wanted her to look. What she saw were three people sitting around what she presumed was a bonfire, but because the canopy of the surrounding trees were blocking most of her view of them, Jo couldn't get a very good look.

She gave the binoculars back to Eric. "They're only kids," she said. "What of it?"

"You can't really see it with the night-vision, but they're burning green fire." Eric put away the binoculars in the pocket of his jacket. "You know what that means, right?" He gave Jo a side glance.

Jo furrowed her eyebrows. "Greek fire. Greek demigods. Look, if they've got that shit, it's gonna burn like a bitch. We should bring incendiaries." Eric arched a brow and Jo shrugged. "It's just a thought."

"Maybe," Eric said and looked over at the shadowed greenery below them, a small prominent green glow just off by the lake's shore. "How do we want to do this? It's not like we can just walk down there and into their camp."

Jo pulled her goggles over her head and strapped them back on, adjusting the strap so the cushions around the lenses fitted comfortably around her eyes. The mesh of the night was colored in rich molds of oranges and yellows, acting as an improvised night-vision of sorts.

The night was a brutal chill. Every breath was seen at every convenient sigh. When Jo retreated to hike up the tableland towards their campsite, Eric followed suit and repeated his question in a more demanding inquire.

"How do we want to do this, Jo?"

"We're on orders from George, so we'll do what anyone would do with xenophobia." Jo side-stepped between two boulders.

Eric made a disapproving noise in the back of his throat. "I know what you're doing," he said, "and the answer is no. We aren't just going to murder a few kids so you can get a closer look at that Greek fire. Besides, what would George think when he saw that we brought back something of Grecian heritage."

"Okay, well, first of all, Eric, Greek fire was manufactured and used by the Byzantines, which was part of the Eastern. Roman. Empire. It never began with the Greeks, but they were the first to record its existence."

Eric made a sharp exhale, a sneer at best, and grabbed the back of Jo's jacket collar to force her to stop. "So you're going to steal something that the Romans created when you know, as well as I do and rest of camp, that it's going to cause a huge fuss between the Greeks, the Romans, and us?"

Jo snorted a laugh. "You're kidding, right? Stealing something like that isn't going to do any harm to anyone."

"Stealing won't be the problem, but I know you. You aren't planning to leaving them unscathed. That would do a lot of harm to everyone."

"Says who?"

"Says the treaty Ull and Alvíss had to sign and the demands we had - have, might I add - to assent to."

Eric and Jo exchanged daggered stares, their gazes never wavering. That was, until Jo shouldered Eric's hand off of her shoulder and turned around. Their pitched tents were just in sight. The fire they'd smothered out was no longer smoldering.

Jo walked to the closest tent on her right and unzipped the entry flap. Inside was a make-shift bed, a sleeping bag spread out across a waterproof ground mat with a pillow to match. There wasn't much but rugged carpeting made out of numerous blankets and an unzipped backpack with most of its contents strewn about on top of the sleeping bag. A quiver and bow were on the ground by the pillow, the arrows lined together neatly nearby. Jo saw the bow and ducked in to grab it.

Eric stood hunched at the tent's entry. "This is a bad idea."

Jo slung the quiver's strap across her chest. "Then why aren't you stopping me?" The fletching of the arrows stuck out of the quiver, the bow's grip clutched in the palm of her hand. "Look, I'll be back in two shakes and a quiver. It'll give you time to let off some steam."

"Gross," Eric deadpanned.

Jo shrugged and shouldered back Eric. She teetered her head left and right with the palm of her hand, hearing those satisfying pops. "This is going to be so good," she crooned to herself.

She took the trail back down towards the tablelands and made forth, trekking down the steep slope towards the forest below, and then finally to the krummholz-formed white pines by the lake's tree line of its beachy shore.