Author's Note: Hi everyone! This is not, unfortunately, the sequel for "Reliance" that I promised - that one will be significantly longer. This is more like a teaser. Takes place 25 years after "Reliance", and you don't really need to have read it for this story to make sense, but if you don't then you probably won't know who my OC-Renegades are.
Anyway. The real sequel, "Ties That Bind", should start going up some time next week. Until then, enjoy! Rated T for "minor suggestive adult themes" (mostly Botta's dirty mind).
At the mountain pass that separated Thoda Dock from the main rest of the continent, Botta and Lucien landed their Rheiards and began to approach the resort on foot. One thing they'd learned when surveying Sylvarant was that vehicles that ran on magitechnology were already getting scarce, even though it had only been twenty years since Lucien had had to give up his repair business.
Botta had picked Lucien to help him decide on a location for the Renegade bases mostly because he was the only other one who knew anything about Sylvarant, but it wasn't as simple as picking a spot and going for it. No, the ideal location would be somewhere with a weak dimensional barrier that corresponded to a relatively unpopulated area of Tethe'alla. Yuan had pointed out that it didn't matter where the rift came out on the Sylvarant side, because they could always just disguise their base as a Desian facility once a few hundred years had passed and it was time to build human ranches again. He said he could control the locations of the new ranches to some extent, so Botta had agreed not to worry about the Sylvarant side. However, they still needed to find a good weakness in the dimensional barrier, so here they were.
It wasn't very hard work, just time-consuming, but when Lucien had candidly suggested they take a short break at the Thoda resort, Botta had readily agreed. Botta hadn't visited the hot springs in almost sixty years and it would, he thought, be a good opportunity to see how it compared to his more recent visit to Tethe'alla's Kharlan Hot Springs.
"I wonder how they're getting across the channel now," Lucien mused as they approached the complex of shops and hotels visible even from the pass. "You can't just sail over – well, I could, because I have Wind magic, but this particular stretch of water has always been very calm. When I first came here, they were using gasoline-powered vehicles, but they made a lot of nasty smoke and nobody really liked them."
"When I last visited, we rented a rowboat," Botta remembered. "There were other options, too, but I have never minded physical labor."
"We? Who'd you come with, sir?" Lucien grinned up at Botta from a mop of (currently) purple hair.
"My mother. We went on several pilgrimages when I was young, like the Book of Martel advises." He smiled in reminiscence. "She just liked to travel to see the world, I think, but I was always secretly looking for my father." And he'd never found the mysterious elf. Botta wondered if he was dead, but his mother had always refused to say.
"At least you had one parent, Lord Botta," Lucien teased. "I had to grow up in Desian Day Care. Not good times."
"Things could have been worse," Botta agreed.
As they approached closer, Botta noted that the Thoda resort was much as e remembered it, even after all this time. Central to the complex was a House of Salvation, but there were also several large hotels and a busy open-air market. "I've only stayed in the House of Salvation," he admitted to Lucien. "Should we make reservations in one of the fancy hotels?"
"Definitely," replied the younger half-elf. "See that blue one right on the beach? That's Undine's Rest, my favorite." He shrugged. "Or, it was twenty years ago. Things may have changed."
They hadn't, apparently, changed too much. The carpets were starting to show signs of wear and it didn't seem to be terribly busy, but Botta was able to secure them a suite of rooms without any trouble. The hotel clerk did stare at them a little bit – half-elves hadn't been common at any time in Botta's memory – but business was business, no matter what race it came from.
Lucien asked for permission to go poke around and see what had changed, so Botta let him. Sitting in the hotel room, Botta wondered idly if he should try to contact Yuan and ask if he wanted to join them. Why not? If he's busy, at least he won't complain to me about not being invited. Botta wasn't sure if his boss liked hot springs – he'd never seen Yuan voluntarily enter a large body of water – but everybody liked hot springs, right?
He shrugged. There was only one way to find out.
Botta made his way over to the House of Salvation. The Book of Martel said that Cruxis watched over the entirety of the world, but it was just as easy to send a message from a place that was sure to be monitored. Early on, the Renegades hadn't built much in the way of communication tools, so when they had an important question for their often-absent leader they used coded messages sent from the Church's prayer system. The priests wrote the prayers in their books, which were cleverly disguised transmitters connected directly to the Central Kharlan Computer System. Cruxis monitored the prayers and occasionally caused "miracles" to happen, keeping the people's faith in Martel alive. Most of the prayers, however, were ignored. Yuan had suggested using certain key words to alert him that the Renegades needed help, so whenever Botta needed to talk to his boss he prayed for "the beloved of Martel, the ancient hero". The priests thought he was praying for the Soul of Mithos, so it didn't sound suspicious. Yuan's computer had been specifically set to catch that phrase and tell him where it had come from, and Yuan would visit that area as soon as his duties allowed.
It was an ingenious idea, but Botta wondered if there were ever any honest prayers using that code phrase that tricked Yuan.
Mission accomplished, he decided to walk around for a bit. Would this be a good place for a base? He couldn't say for certain, but Botta thought it might be too crowded. The dimensional barriers were necessarily thinner around the seals to allow mana to be transferred from one world to the other, so their best chance was probably going to be close to one of the seals. He frowned, staring off at the landscape. That forest north of here might be a good place….
Botta suddenly yelped as someone tapped him on the back. Spinning around with a venomous glare, he was mildly surprised to see Yuan smirking behind him. "Sir! That was fast."
His smirk widening, Yuan said, "Hey, I miss you guys when I'm stuck up there all the time. Nothing urgent, I hope?"
Botta shook his head. "Ah, Lucien suggested we take a short break at the hot springs and I thought you might like to join us.
"Hmm," Yuan pondered. "Well, it's not like I have anything better to do. Things have been pretty slow upstairs recently, though with all the Desians cooped up in the Tower of Salvation we're constantly having to mediate fights and sabotage…." He trailed off, and then shook his head. "Better that we have to put up with it than with the alternative, though."
Botta nodded. The alternative to Desians beating up and killing other Desians was Desians beating up and killing innocent people.
"Anyway, have you been over there yet?" Yuan nodded toward to island. Botta shook his head. "Well, I can only hope my presence won't start drawing the monsters out of the Temple. They tend to think of 'Lightning mage' as 'food'."
Botta chuckled. "The elementals from the Balacruf Mausoleum didn't seem to bother me when we surveyed the surroundings, sir."
"We can only hope," Yuan muttered.
After a quick stop at the hotel room, the two Renegade leaders made their way down to the docks. Lucien was there, arguing heatedly with some human about the design of a boat. Yuan flashed a grin at Botta, who rolled his eyes. The kid was an engineering genius, but he didn't have a whole lot of patience for what he considered "inefficiency".
"Yes, of course you could use coal to power the paddle-wheel, but then it will make the coastline black from all the smoke, the native insects will either die or become mutated, and it will smell horrible! It's much cleaner to use self-propelled vehicles." He continued ranting while Yuan and Botta waited for him to notice them. Finally, after admonishing the other man to "think carefully and design something better, or you're going to hear it from me in a few years", he turned around in a huff.
"Sirs!" Botta could see the gears in Lucien's mind switching over from engineer-speak to regular language. He bowed, blinking a few times. "Lord Yuan? If you'd like to join us, I can use magic to power a boat and get to the geyser much faster than by travelling on one of these things," he offered, gesturing dismissively at the small steam-boat stationed at the dock. "A few years of mana decline and already they've lost so much…."
Yuan nodded. "I'd appreciate it. Do they still have those little grottoes where you can go if you don't want to enter the main pool?"
"I think so, sir. Let's check it out." Lucien gestured towards a small wooden boat and, once the three of them were settled, pointed at the docks. "Aqua Laser!" he yelled, propelling them forward with a sudden jolt.
"You could have given me more warning," Yuan muttered.
"Yes, and you always give me warning when you grab me and jump off a cliff," said Botta drily.
Yuan sighed. "Insubordination," he muttered as Lucien guided the little boat to Thoda Island.
An attendant at the men's dressing room assured them that there were indeed still private grottoes for a small additional fee. Yuan handed over the money to reserve one, and they each went to change out of their clothes and into the (Botta though) woefully inadequate towels provided – though, he supposed, it didn't really matter if they were going to be in a private pool anyway. His recent experience at the Kharlan Hot Springs had shown him that humans liked to stare at half-elven bodies, which made him a little uncomfortable.
Lucien, who stood out in any case because of his height, declared he wanted to stay in the main pool at first and see if anything had changed. Botta nodded to him and then decided to knock on Yuan's door to see what was taking him so long. "Sir? Are you okay in there?"
"Ah, I'm sorry," said Yuan, slightly muffled. "Just a moment. I'm wearing four layers of armor, you know." Finally he came out, form still covered by his cape.
"I hope you're not planning on wearing that in the hot spring, sir," said Botta dubiously.
Yuan blushed. "No, but…well, I'll show you when we get there."
Trying very hard not to think about anything at all, Botta led his boss over to the enclosed grotto. He sighed and closed his eyes as he entered the hot water, muscles relaxing and tension disappearing in an instant.
"There," said Yuan. "This is why I was wearing my cape."
Opening his eyes, Botta nearly laughed. He'd completely forgotten that Yuan had a Cruxis Crystal embedded in his chest. "May I have a closer look, sir?" Botta had never really seen Yuan's crystal except in quick flashes, and he was curious if it superficially resembled the Exsphere set into his own flesh.
"Of course," Yuan said, "but I didn't want everyone staring at me."
Botta smiled and then floated over to Yuan, examining the crystal and complicated-looking Key Crest. Botta's own Key Crest was barely larger than the Exsphere itself, but Yuan's spanned a good hands-breadth across his chest. "Is it so large because you have a Cruxis Crustal, sir?"
Yuan leaned back. "No, it's large because technology has come a long way in thirty-five hundred years," he said. "In those days, it was more a matter of guesswork than science. See," and he traced a line of angelic script, "this part isn't even inhibitor ore, it's just decorative. And this part up at the top, you see where it's silvery instead of goldish? That part's a lot newer than the rest – it was broken at one point."
Botta nodded. The Elven Storyteller had said Yuan was paralyzed by grief and gladly nullified part of his own Key Crest to inhibit his emotional response when telling the story of the Kharlan War, so Botta guessed that was what the silvery filaments represented.
"This water feels great," Yuan said after a minute, so Botta stopped poking his Key Crest and relaxed. "I should really get one of these installed up in Welgaia."
"Don't bother, sir," retorted Botta. "We'll figure out how to put one in the new Renegade Base and use it to lure you down all the time."
"Ha! I'll hold you to that, then."
And after that they were silent, enjoying a well-earned rest.