TIME July 31st, day 20 LOCATION The Last Hope, further south
BACKGROUND:
Orcs and loggers had called an uneasy truce over a starving deer and a poisoned forest. The real Last Hope – the current one – was still a day’s ride further south.
WHAT HAPPENED
The loggers’ camp thinned out as the Agents rode on, the heat climbing along with the humidity.
Arriving at the gates of the actual Last Hope, three self-appointed toll collectors tried their luck; the Agents simply rode around the palisade and in through the southern gate instead, leaving the toll uncollected.
The town had an inn, a stable, and – more usefully – Sheriff Kincaid, a transplanted Agent out of Talismonde running the local law.
He pointed them toward Mirela at the Cutters Inn for a guide into the interior, along with a warning about Jaxx’s employer and the odd truce the local orcs kept with the loggers – a strict, almost ritualised balance of retribution rather than outright war.
The Cutters Inn smelled like sweat, beer, and Twitch in roughly equal measure. Mirela, a fixer with more charm than scruples, had exactly the guide they needed – Saul, one of the native Ndege, currently mid-argument over a logic riddle involving a rope bridge, a chasm, and a burning forest.
Raven solved it before Saul could, costing him a bet with Mirela but earning them a free guide south to Arn Griishank in the bargain.
Provisions sorted – mules in place of horses, kukris for the undergrowth, netting against the insects – they noticed a customer ahead of them at the general store shaking and sweating despite the mild weather, nursing what looked like an infected shoulder wound.
He left in a hurry the moment anyone showed interest in it.
Saul led them out of Last Hope into Green Hell proper the next morning, carrying nothing but a backpack of his own while the mules bore the Agents’ kit.
The jungle made its impression fast – heat, biting insects, a chorus of animal calls that occasionally sounded uncomfortably close to human screams, and rain that never quite stopped.
EXTRAS.
THE CHASM RIDDLE
Saul’s bet with Mirela came down to an old logic puzzle:
Four travellers need to cross a rope bridge over a chasm in the dark, one torch between them, a wall of forest fire closing the gap behind at sixty minutes out.
The bridge holds two at a time, and any pair can only cross at the slower one’s pace – the four in question clocking in at 5, 10, 20, and 25 minutes apiece.
Raven had the answer before Saul finished laying out the rules, costing him his own bet with Mirela and earning the Agents a free guide south to Arn Griishank.
- The five-minute and ten-minute crossers go first together, torch in hand – ten minutes gone, moving at the slower one’s pace.
- The ten-minute crosser carries the torch back alone – twenty minutes gone.
- The twenty-minute and twenty-five-minute crossers go together – forty-five minutes gone.
- The five-minute crosser, already waiting on the far side, brings the torch back one last time – fifty minutes gone.
- The five-minute and ten-minute crossers make the final trip together – sixty minutes on the nose, and all four are across with the fire at their backs.
The trick, as Raven laid it out for Saul, is never sending a slow crosser back alone once they’re on the far side – the two fastest do the shuttling, so their time gets spent twice while the two slowest only ever cross once, together.