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Koric and Felicity
(drawn by Brune, Summer 542)
Screen size (343K) / Full size (1.4 MB)
Koric's Journal
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Koric's Journal
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They have enough supporters that they will without doubt succeed, I think, and perhaps better them than some other group. But who is to say any group dealing with the 'brions has in mind the best interests of the community? I am sorely tempted to sit this one out, reminded as I now am of how much I hate these battles. They bring out the worst in so many people, including myself. I think I may just hide in the library and the interior of Umbrion's Island and hope for the best.
Some small news from Umbrion's Island...it seems as though the bridge builder Yaramal has collected all the materials he needs to build a bridge to cross the freezing river. Now he says he needs permits. Permits? I can only laugh. Perhaps the bridge will take us to the (apparently) quiet area surrounded by the river where we can take refuge during a hunt, or maybe there is a building there or clues about the mysterious Kizmia.
The new bridge will be built just next to the East entrance to the underground lyfe caves, which we continue to explore occasionally. Battling in such close quarters is a real test for our group, and we enjoy it. The only downside is that we can't find wood there, which we often need to build boats to exit the island. The lyfe fur we find there is also not very valuable any more, especially since cures are so cheaply sold by the witch sisters on the West beach of the island.
Many of our hunts lately have taken place during full moon days, when the lyfelidae are much, much stronger. At night, some Starbucks are strong enough to wipe out even out best fighters very quickly, but we have learned how to deal with them fairly well by coordinating. The problem is splitting up the group to get down our trees to the north half of the island.
Kudzu helps give us some flexibility. By hiding behind a wall near our trees, some of us can wait to ensure that the rest of the party gets down their trees, often several sn'ells away. We can act as an emergency rescue team if things go bad, and we can also coordinate our timing so that we all enter the caves at the same time in case the monsters there are particularly bad.
Since we are so close to the summer solstice, nights are very short, which means our fighters get their best experience in a fairly narrow time window. We try to time our hunts so that they occur mostly at night, but during late Spring and early Summer, long stretches of day hunting are unavoidable. We tried to make the most of it the other day with a rather small, powerful group, and it was great fun. We earned pretty good experience (by moving fast enough to kill lots of little things) and thousands of coins, and I can't wait to do it again soon. It helps to have some great skinners along like Mujin-kun and especially Felicity, who is nearing 200 skea ranks now.
Or maybe I should keep throwing comments out there and just stop with the bother of trying to justify them. Hey, nothing personal but you're a lying, hypocritical jackass. Sorry, mind's made up, you see, even though I don't know ya. But we can still be friends if you want. Want to come on a Valley hunt?
My recent travels on the water led me to swing by a place of a lot of turbulence and steam, the apparent volcanic buildup of a new island. It's exciting to think we might have a new and interesting place to explore soon, but I fear the geography will be similar to roughly half the islands we can already see from the water, the ones we can't seem to land on. Surely the drakes will enjoy this new source of heat and fire, maybe even move from their hard-to-reach lair in the heart of Fire Island.
The usual Umbrion's Island hunts bring me out of the library a few times per zodiac for coins, experience and lots of fun. On a recent trip, we found an albino maha for the first time in a rocky area on the north side of the island. My wife Felicity has had the good fortune to acquire two of these fine pelts during our many trips to the island, and she now doesn't know what to do with them. Sell them to the buyer who wanders the island? Turn them into an outfit? Sell them to another exile? Trade for something (perhaps berries, metal, bard parts, who knows)? If you have interesting ideas, you should get in touch with her!
I also came out a while back for our first Hunter clan hunt in quite some time. Rel'lim led us on a tour of Sasquatch Valley where we got through fairly easily, except for taking a couple of puddlehours to kill an Angry Mother Sasquatch. I guess we are a little out of practice hunting together, but that's sure to change in the weeks and months to come as the clan activity increases again.
My absence from my usual rescue stomping grounds in the forests surrounding town has caught up to me a little bit. The other day, I found that I could no longer see my way through the trees and into the Northwest Forest. It took me a little while to relearn this path, which I hadn't taken for many zodiacs.
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You can contact me at d.ingram@tcu.edu. I'm always interested in a good story or visionstone, especially of new areas few have seen before.