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Previously on Saga of the Jewels…The life of seventeen-year-old RYN, bookish son of a wealthy landowner, changes forever when his hometown is destroyed by the EMPIRE and everyone he has ever known is killed. He discovers that the Empire are seeking TWELVE PRIMEVAL JEWELS which grant the power to manipulate different elements, and that his father had been hiding the FIRE RUBY. Ryn sets out to take revenge on the Imperial General who killed his family and retrieve the Fire Ruby, and along the way meets NUTHEA the lightning-slinging princess, SAGAR the swaggering skypirate, ELRANN the tomboy engineer, CID the wizened old healer, and VISH the poppy-seed-addicted bounty hunter. Together the companions decide to find all of the Jewels in order to stop the EMPEROR from finding them first and taking over the world. They have thus far succeeded in retrieving the Fire Ruby, borne by Ryn, and the Lightning Crystal, borne by Nuthea. They have now come to the land of FARR where with the help of the Farrian fighting monk HULD they have retrived the EARTH EMERALD, but Huld and the GOVERNOR of Farr might have other plans for it…EPISODE TWENTY-NINE: WE SHALL HAVE A TOURNAMENT“Well I must say I did not entirely expect you to return successfully,” said the Governor of Farr.They were back in his audience chamber on the summit of Shun-Pei, standing side-by-side a few paces away from his wide wooden desk. This time, Ryn noticed, two guards with shaven heads in green robes stood flanking each side of the desk, and there were two more behind them on the door as well.“It was rather difficult,” said Nuthea. “We had to fight golems, navigate a darkened labyrinth, herd some glow-worms, bypass a series of traps, and defeat an enormous plant monster... But we managed it in the end. Not least because of the help of your soldier Huld here.”Ryn sighed quietly. It had been a ‘rather difficult' experience. They had all been very glad of a good meal and a rest on Wanderlust on their way back here. What am I doing on this crazy adventure, again? Oh, that's right, I have nothing better to do, and everyone I knew from my life before is dead. Plus we're saving the world. I suppose that's quite important. Also, I get to stay around Nuthea.“I am sure it was very eventful for you,” said the Governor, scowling at them from underneath his large hat and behind the polished oak surface that separated him from them. “Show me then, Huld. I assume you have it?”“Yes Lord Governor,” said Huld. The hulking monk stepped forward, drawing something out from the folds of his brilliant green robes, and made to hand it to the Governor.“Don't give it to me, you fool!” the Governor snapped, his jowls wobbling. “Put it down on the desk! I'm not getting mixed up in any of this magic business, if indeed it is magic…”Huld bowed his head. “Yes Lord Governor. I'm sorry Lord Governor.” He placed the object on the desk and took a step back to return to his place in the line. Only, he didn't quite step back all the way—he stayed slightly further forward than the party.On the desk in front of him shone a small, brilliant leaf-green, oval emerald.“So,” said the Governor, “does it work?!” Not even a ‘well done', Ryn thought. “Does it bestow earth-manipulation?”“Yes, Lord Governor.”“Show me.”Huld hesitated a moment, then raised a hand, palm up, as if he was a schoolmaster gesturing for the Governor to stand up out of his chair.Instead of that happening, with a small rumble some of the mountain-earth in front of the desk of which the floor was composed rose up to form a pointed cone, much like a miniature version of the towers which made up Shun-Pei, before falling back to flatness when Huld lowered his hand again.He already seemed to be getting more proficient at earth-manipulation in the short time since he had touched the emerald. Ryn noticed the eyebrow of one of the guards stood by the desk rise.“Good,” said the Governor. He nodded. “You may leave now, foreigners.”What? Ryn thought.“What?” Sagar said.“Pardon me?” said Nuthea.“You heard me, Manoloian,” said the Governor, grinding his teeth. “I suppose I am somewhat grateful to you for helping to retrieve the Emerald, even though I am sure that Huld did most of the work for you, but you may be on your way now.”“But Lord Governor,” Nuthea protested, “do you not remember what we agreed? You said that once we had retrieved the Emerald we could take it to keep it safe from the Emperor of Morekemia!”The Governor snorted. “As far as I remember, I said nothing of the sort. Now leave.”“Hey!” shouted Sagar, hand going to one of his swords. “You're out of order, lard-arse!”Huld whirled round to face him immediately and raised both his hands.A rumble, the floor shook, and Ryn felt something press his hands against his hips and constrict around his waist.He looked down. Some of the earth from the floor had risen up and tightened around his body to trap him in a small mound. He wriggled against it, but it held him fast.On either side of him his companions had been trapped in five similar mounds, arms pinned to their sides.Not only that, but the four guards in the room had leapt in front of the governor's desk and now stood there crouched in battle poses, two with hands held out in strange clawed postures, ready to strike, two brandishing long curved swords with green tassels hanging from their hilts.Ryn thought this was a little over the top.“You scumbag!” Sagar yelled from where he was affixed in place by Huld's Earth attack. “You said that we could have the Jewel when we got it!”“To repeat,” said the Governor from behind his defensive wall of monks, “I said nothing of the sort. You asked to retrieve the Jewel, and you have, and now that you have delivered it safely to me, you may leave. Or suffer.”“But Lord Governor,” Nuthea persisted, still using the term of address that the Farrians favoured, “didn't you hear anything we said to you about the Emperor? He has learned of the Jewels! He is seeking them! If you keep this Jewel, it will only be a matter of time before the Empire attack you to take it for themselves, and who knows what damage they will do to your great nation in the process? They will invade you, occupy you, maybe even enslave you! The Jewel will be much safer with us, hidden on a travelling airship, and you will be safer for it too, if you tell the Empire that it has been sent away! We only intend to protect it and keep it safe from the Emperor—our intentions are noble.”For just a moment, Ryn fancied that he saw the Governor's scowl twitch into something else; a looser look of doubt.But then the scowl returned with a vengeance. “Why do you think it will be any better off with you than with us, Manolian? The Emerald belongs to Farr. Until you came along with your…abilities, we had hidden it so well that even we were unable to retrieve it.” He's contradicting himself, Ryn thought. A moment ago he said that Huld must have done all the work to get it. “We will keep hold of it now, and use it to defend ourselves. We will use it on our soldier-monks, who are loyal to Farr, and imbue them with the power of earth-manipulation, like Huld here.”Cid took a turn. “But my Lord Governor, why do you think that doing that will protect you? This Emerald is just one of twelve Jewels, and the Empire are seeking all of them. We only came to you first because yours was the next Jewel that we had good information about the location of. Who knows which of the others they have knowledge of, or perhaps have already found? Indeed, the first Jewel they got hold of, before we took it back from them, was the Fire Ruby, and many of the Imperials were given fire abilities with it. And earth is weak to fire!”This time the Governor went quiet for a moment and his tongue moved round behind his thick lips, as if searching for fragments of food lodged between his teeth.When he broke his silence he spoke to his ‘best monk'. “Is what this foreigner says true, Huld?”Huld turned his head to reply, but kept his hands up to keep the party held firmly in their mounds of Earth. “I do not know, Lord Governor. I have no knowledge of whether Morekemia have given any of their soldiers fire projec—”“Not that!” the Governor barked at him. “Whether or not ‘earth is weak to fire', as the geriatric said!”“Oh,” said Huld. “My apologies, Lord Governor.” He turned his head back to look at Ryn, uncertainty breaking out on his normally smiling face. “Um… Yes, I believe it is…” He spoke slowly, as if reluctant to admit what he was saying, still looking at Ryn. “In the Shrine to Eto, this boy with the fire abilities used them to great effect on its magical guardians, who were composed of either earthen or vegetative material… I… I do think it is accurate to say that were it not for his fire-projection we would not have been able to retrieve the Emerald...”“Hmmm…” Now the Governor's scowl had morphed into a troubled frown. “I have had reports of aggressive Morekemian movements in the West assisted by supernatural fire-projection…”          “Yes, that's right,” Nuthea chimed in. “We defeated and...killed a number of the soldiers who had obtained fire abilities when we retrieved the Ruby, but we don't know how many who still have fire projection are still out there. Or what other Jewels the Emperor may have found and got his hands on by now, like Grandfather said.”The Governor made a ponderous noise again, and stared off into the distance at nothing in particular. He did not say anything for a few moments.Then: “I have the solution. You make an odd but interesting case, foreigners, and it is troubling that this ‘Fire Ruby' is so effective against the element of earth, as Huld has attested… But I will not just give you the Emerald. That would be a great dishonour to us, and I cannot do it. You may have earned the right to bring it back to me, with Huld's help, but if you wish to take it for yourselves, you must earn that right too. And if what you say is true, then it would seem that the Emerald will be most safe with whoever is the strongest, and so most able to protect and defend it—which may well still prove to be us, as Huld has demonstrated.” He glanced down at the earthen mound which encased Ryn. “Thus, we shall settle this in the traditional Farrian way.”“What is that?” said Nuthea.“We shall have a tournament.”“A tournament?!” Nuthea looked like someone had just told her she was going to have to spend the night in the boys' sleeping cabin on board their airship.“Correct,” said the Governor. “We shall hold a tournament to decide who gets to keep the Earth Emerald.”“What kind of a tournament?” asked Ryn, intrigued. He thought about using his fire projection to break out of the earthen mound which Huld had encased him in, but decided not to for now. Sagar's aggression hadn't gotten him very far with the Farrians, and the diplomatic approach seemed to be working marginally better—at least, it had got them this strange offer...“A tournament of single combat,” said the Governor. “We're very keen on them here in Farr. We will make it open to anyone, including as many of you foreigners as wish to participate. After a few rounds of qualifying heats, eight champions will fight each other in three rounds of elimination. The winner will get to keep the Emerald—either one of you, if you even make it to the final eight, or a Farrian, for our nation.”“Lord Governor,” Nuthea said, “with all due respect--and I do respect you and the nation of Farr, very much—that is a very creative idea, but we just don't have the time for such a ‘tournament'. We need to be leaving in search of the other Primeval Jewels as soon as possible. As I've said to you many times, the Emperor of Morekemia is searching for the other Jewels too, and may even have found more of them by now. Our quest is urgent. We simply do not have time to participate in a ‘tournament'.”“Nonsense.” The Governor waved his hand at her as if he were swatting away an irritating mosquito. “This is my decision. You are lucky that I am making this concession to you at all—I could just decide to keep the Jewel outright, and have you all thrown out of here by Huld.”Ryn's finger's twitched inside the earthen mound in which he was encased.“But,” the Governor continued, “I am most merciful, and you gave me an even better idea. Shun-Pei has been somewhat restless of late, what with all of this news of military posturing on foreign shores, and a good tournament will give the people some entertainment, and pull them together, and in the process we shall discover who is most worthy and well-qualified to protect the Jewel. Yes. The winner of the tournament will get to keep the Emerald.”“But my Lord Governor,” Cid spoke up again, desperation creeping into his voice with a quiver, “this is madness! The princess is not jesting with you when she says that we do not have time for such a thing. Can you not see the urgency of our quest? If you delay our progress towards finding the Jewels by holding this tournament, you are putting the whole of Mid, the whole world, in even more danger than it already is!”“Enough!” the Governor snapped, flushing red, and held up a hand. “The tournament is my final offer. Do you accept or not? If you do not accept, I will have you thrown out of here!”“We don't accept!” said Sagar. “Come on guys, we can take them! Show ‘em some firepower, Ryn!”“No!” Nuthea yelled at once. “No violence!”Ryn's hands had grown hot inside the earth mound, but he held himself back. He wasn't about to take orders from Sagar, and he agreed with Nuthea that violence wasn't going to solve anything here. Huld still stood in front of them with his hands held up, along with the four other fighting monks. Although Ryn did think he could take them, given earth's weakness to fire. They may be better trained hand-to-hand fighters than he was, especially if these other monks were anything like Huld, but he was pretty sure if he threw a fireball or two at them they would back down pretty quickly. He didn't need to prove that to anybody. Yet.“Lord Governor,” Nuthea spoke again when she had seen that no one was going to start fighting, “thank you for your generous offer. May...may we take a moment to talk about it together? In private?”The Governor of Farr itched a fat cheek. “I do not see what there is to talk about. This is my offer. There will not be any others.”“Be that as it may,” said Nuthea, “we must still confer as to...as to whether to remain here to participate in this ‘tournament' or to leave in pursuit of the rest of the other Jewels.”“Alright,” said the Governor. “You can have five minutes. In the antechamber outside. Let them go, Huld.”“Are you sure, my Lord Governor?” said Huld, still looking at Ryn. “We do not know if they are sincere.”“Do not question me!” barked the Governor. “The Manolian is clearly the ringleader, and she has spoken peace. They're not clever enough to employ covert methods of communication between themselves. If they try anything, you have my permission to incapacitate them.” Ryn was sure he wouldn't be so confident if he wasn't talking from behind a wall of five fighting monks, one with elemental projection powers. “Let them go.”“Yes, Lord Governor,” Huld said and, still keeping his gaze firmly fixed on Ryn, he motioned with his hands and brought them down to his sides.At the same time, the earthen mounds holding the party members in place receded back into the floor with a rumble.Ryn rubbed his arms. Huld had been holding them in the earth quite tight, it turned out…Once they were out in the antechamber and the doors had been shut, Sagar said, “Alright, team huddle.”Ryn realised he didn't care so much anymore that Sagar was initiating this. Whatever Sagar said, Nuthea was clearly the one who was leading their adventuring party in practice, as the Governor had identified. At least at the moment. Sagar was ‘all talk and no trousers', as Ryn's mother used to say…Mother. Father. Hometown. Found Vorr. Got Vorr. Killed Vorr. Now stay with Nuthea. Find the Jewels. Save the world.The party locked arms and huddled together, shoulder to shoulder for one of their team discussions. Nuthea's honey-scented breath warmed Ryn's left cheek. On his right, Sagar—stale tobacco leaf. Ugh.“Right, you guys,” said Sagar as soon as they were all in the huddle, “I say we march straight back in there and take the Jewel by force. We can take a handful of baldies easy, and with Ryn here's fire projection powers he can deal with them in a matter of moments!”“No!” said Nuthea again. “We are not doing that, Captain Sagar!”“Well why the hells not? It's the most logical course of action! Wham, bam, we get our Emerald, a big cash bonus for me since the first Jewel has been found, and it's off in search of the next one. Where's the problem with that?”“It is not the Way of the One.”“Arrrg,” protested Sagar, “not this again! Come on! Only two of us are Oneists!”Maybe two and a half, thought Ryn.“It's not just that,” said Nuthea. “Not only is it not the Way of the One, but it's against the whole spirit of this Quest and our whole mode of operation.”“She's right,” said Cid. “We can't just go charging into countries and taking Jewels by force. If we do that we're no better than the Imperials.”“Well that's what pirates do,” said Sagar. “Are you saying that I'm no better than the Imperials, old man??”“Of course he's not,” said Nuthea. “At least you fought against the Empire. And you rescued Ryn and me.”“If you can call it that…” mumbled Ryn.“What was that, pup?”Ryn nearly said “Nothing,” but then instead he went for “The way I remember it, you needed quite a lot of persuading by Nuthea not to keep us captive, or kill us.”Sagar scowled at him.“Look, let's not argue about this,” said Nuthea. “We're in a difficult enough situation as it is. Not only is taking Jewels by force from people they legitimately belong to not the way that we are going to do things, but even if it was, it would work against us in the long run. The Emerald is only the first of nine more Jewels which we need to find. If we start off our Quest by just snatching Jewels from countries' governments for ourselves, other nations will hear of it and we'll get a reputation.”“Again,” said Sagar, “I don't see the problem here. What exactly is the problem with this plan?”“Captain Sagar, that kind of reputation might work for a skypirate crew, but for us it could mean that it is harder for us to find the Jewels hidden in other countries, or even outright stop us entirely from having their locations divulged to us. It just wouldn't help us in the long run. On the other hand, if we work with the nations of Mid to find the Jewels before the Emperor does, explaining why we are doing so when we have to, then we'll get a reputation for being the group trying to protect the world that we actually are.” She glanced at Sagar pointedly. “That way, the different peoples of Mid might actually help and assist us in finding the Jewels. The Governor of Farr has been very helpful and cooperative with us, up until now. If we fight him for the Emerald, we can't expect him or anyone else to trust us in the future. But if we work with him to get the Emerald, we set a precedent, and we might be able to work with other nations to find other Jewels afterwards, too.”A pause.“Rrrr,” said Sagar.“But he is asking us to fight for the Emerald,” said Ryn, “just in a different way to what Sagar's saying: he wants us to enter this tournament thing. What's the deal with that?”“It's because the Farrians love fighting so much,” said Elrann, the first time she had spoken up in the huddle. “I remember this from the times I was in Farr before. They love fighting here—not brawling for arguments' sake like you, pirate-man, more like a controlled, practiced sort of fighting, without weapons. It's like sport for them. They do it for exercise, to train themselves—I think it's even part of their religion. All those monks in the green robes are trained in it. Like Huld. And they hold these fighting tournaments quite often—to give themselves something to train and practice for, and so the different students and masters of their fighting schools can show off their skills and gain prestige. I got to see one once, on one of my visits. It was pretty amazing actually.”“Alright then…” said Sagar, eyeing her carefully. “So I enter this tournament, I beat the Farrians, I get the Emerald for us. Easy. A bit more work than I'd hoped, but still: Easy.”“What?” said Elrann. “Ya think you can win it just like that? Ya think you can beat monk-man, do ya?”“Baldy?!” Sagar scoffed. “I could take him, easy!”“Have you seen the way he fights? And he has earth powers now as well.”“Pffft,” Sagar made a dismissive noise and waved his hand. “I could still take him...” His words remained confident, but Ryn noticed his voice became a little quieter.“I wonder if we'd be allowed to use our elemental powers in this tournament,” Ryn said. “If we were, I think I'd have a pretty good chance of beating the Farrians with earth powers, what with their being weak to fire and everything.” He deliberately phrased his words in a less brash way than Sagar. He didn't want to get shot down like the skypirate had.“That's a good point,” said Cid. “Before we accept this offer of a tournament, we should find out if elemental projection will be allowed or not. If it is, it does seem like we have a good chance with Ryn.”Sagar mumbled something indistinctly.“Well what do we do if you're not allowed to use elemental powers in the tournament?” said Elrann.“Then we would need to rely on someone who is extremely skilled at fighting, even without them.”All of them except Sagar looked at Vish.“What?” said Vish after a moment, the first thing he had said in the huddle.“Will you fight for us, Shadowfinger Vish?” Nuthea asked him.“Yes,” Vish said simply, “if you give me poppy.”“We've spoken about this, young man,” said Cid. “You need to spread out your poppy hits more in order to come off of it.”“Alright then,” said Vish, a tinge of irritation touching his tone. “What I mean is, if you continue to supply me with poppy and to...help me ‘come off it', then of course, I will do whatever you want, yes. I will fight in this tournament for you, yes. I will win it.”“Excellent,” said Nuthea.“Oh sure,” mumbled Sagar, “he gets to assume that he'll win even without powers, and everyone just agrees with him…”“I think it's settled, then,” Nuthea continued, ignoring him. “We will enter this ‘tournament' that the Governor is proposing. Either Ryn will win it if powers are allowed, or Shadowfinger Vish if they are not—”“Or I will,” said Sagar.“--and one way or the other, we will get the Emerald. Are we all agreed?”“Agreed,” everyone said, except Sagar, who said “No.”“Good. Let's go back in there and find out some more details, then.”They broke the huddle and marched back through the double doors to the Governor's audience chamber, resuming their places in a line in front of his desk together. The monks had resumed their own places at the doors and either side of the desk. Huld now stood at the right hand of the seated Governor, hands behind his back, upright and attentive. The Emerald shone on the wooden surface in front of them.“Well then,” said the Governor, sneering at them, “do you accept my generous offer of a tournament?”“We think so, yes,” said Nuthea. “We just have a few questions, if we may.”“What?” said the Governor rudely.“Well, firstly, will Jewel-gifted powers of elemental projection be allowed at this tournament?”“Yes.”Huld's face cracked into a frown, breaking the mask of his serene smile. “My Lord Governor! Are you sure?”“Quiet, Huld!” barked the Governor. “Do not speak out of turn! I am quite sure. The whole point of this tournament is to find the person or persons most worthy and capable of guarding and defending the Emerald. If elemental projection is to play a part in that, then so be it. What's more,” he added, almost to himself, “if the people of Farr see one of you defeat the fighting monks of Eto to win the tournament (which I highly doubt will happen), they will find it much easier to understand why I am entrusting the safety of the Emerald to a band of filthy foreigners…”That's good, thought Ryn. Though the pressure's on me now… Find the Jewels. Save the world. Win the tournament.“Thank you, Lord Governor,” said Nuthea. “Question two:” ‘Question Two'? thought Ryn. Who talks like that? I guess she does. “When will you be able to hold this tournament? My companions and I must be leaving as soon as possible in search of other Jewels.”“We've just been talking about the logistics,” said the Governor. “The tournament will be held in one week.”“One week?!”“That's what I said, Manolian.”“But my Lord Governor, we need to be off in search of the other Jewels as soon as possible! A week is a long amount of time at the moment. The Empire could make significant progress in a week! They could discover the whereabouts of more Jewels, even obtain them…”“I remind you that my decision to hold a tournament to decide who keeps the Emerald is my final offer, Manolian. In truth, whether you accept and enter or not is really irrelevant—I am going to hold it anyway.”“May we confer again?”“No. I want your answer now.”Nuthea looked pained. “It seems you leave us no other course of action, Lord Governor. The Emerald is the only Jewel which we fear the Empire may know of already, due to the once public nature of its previous discovery and hiding. It is the highest priority on our list. Though I regret it, we will wait a week for this tournament. Then we will enter it, and one of us will win it.”“We shall see,” said the Governor, the corner of his mouth curling up mockingly. “Very well. You shall enter the tournament, which shall be held in one week, in the Tenkachi arena. Until then, I will provide lodgings for you in Shun Pei. Feel free to explore the city. Witness our superior culture. Train, I suggest, if you want even the faintest flicker of a hope of winning in the tournament! I will see you in one week. Yal!” He shouted the last word. A name.There was a fumbling at the door and then it opened and a harangued head poked around it. Ryn recognised the official who had first led them to the Governor's chamber.“Yes, Lord Governor?”“Have these foreigners shown to guest rooms in the manse. Then issue a decree: There is to be a tournament at Tenkachi, open to all Farrians and anyone currently residing in Farr. They have one week to travel here. There will be a great prize for the winner.”“Yes, my Lord Governor.” The official's gaze fell on the Emerald where it sat on the Governor's desk. “Shall I say what the prize will be?”“No,” said the Governor. “Absolutely not. We don't want the Morekemians getting wind of recent events. Just tell them there will be vast sums of money involved. Say, a million gold pieces from the treasury. That should attract the very best talent; not that we need any more than what we already have here in the city. Now be off with you.”“Very good, Lord Governor,” said the official. “Please come with me,” he said to Ryn and his friends, and the party bid goodbye to the Governor, for now, and followed him out of the chamber.Thanks for reading!Read advanced chapters and support the Saga on Patreon! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sagaofthejewels.substack.com

Previously on Saga of the Jewels…The life of seventeen-year-old RYN, bookish son of a wealthy landowner, changes forever when his hometown is destroyed by the EMPIRE and everyone he has ever known is killed. Ryn discovers that the Empire are seeking TWELVE PRIMEVAL JEWELS which grant the power to manipulate different elements, and that his father had been hiding the FIRE RUBY. He sets out to take revenge on the Imperial General who killed his family and retrieve the Fire Ruby, and along the way meets NUTHEA the lightning-slinging princess, SAGAR the swaggering skypirate, ELRANN the tomboy engineer, CID the wizened old healer, VISH the poppy-seed-addicted bounty hunter, and HULD the fighting monk. Together the companions decide to find all of the Jewels in order to stop the evil EMPEROR from finding them first and taking over the world. They have thus far succeeded in retrieving the Fire Ruby, borne by Ryn, and the Lightning Crystal, borne by Nuthea. They have now come to the land of FARR where under the guidance of the Farrian fighting monk HULD they have entered the Earth Temple in order to attempt to find the EARTH EMERALD…EPISODE TWENTY-SEVEN: THESE DOORS ARE MADE OF STONE“At least no more of those golem things appeared when you pushed the doors like last time,” Ryn called up to Sagar where the skypirate stood at the top of the flight of earthen stairs.“Yeah, that's something…” said Elrann nearby.“Sure,” Sagar called down, “but how are we going to get through these doors? They're shut fast, I tell you!”“Maybe Huld can try them?” Ryn suggested.“Rrrr,” came Sagar's growl of irritation from above, echoing through the large hall. Despite himself, the side of Ryn's mouth twitched up into a half-grin. “Fine! I wouldn't say he's much stronger than me, though!”Ryn turned to the monk, who wore his usual blank smile.“Do you mind having a go, Huld?”“I will try.”The monk plodded up on the steps and stood next to Sagar. He put his hands on the doors and pushed.“No,” he confirmed, “I am not strong enough to move these either.”“See?” said Sagar, holding out his hands sanctimoniously.“Why don't you try your special technique thingy?” yelled up Elrann.“You mean The Strike That Moves Mountains?” Huld said.“Yeah! That one.”“Hang on,” Sagar called down, “the last time he did that, those golem things appeared and attacked us! We don't want that to happen again!”“I'm ready with my fire,” Ryn said.“Yes,” said Nuthea, “but you are meant to be conserving your mana.” She shook her head at him like he was a naughty child. Annoyance tightened Ryn's mouth, but it quickly turned to a suppressed laugh. Nuthea could be so bossy sometimes he just had to laugh at her.“Right,” said Elrann, “that could happen, but this is the best bet we've got at the moment.”“So would you like me to try?” said Huld deferentially from the top of the steps. He was the picture of politeness, but Ryn wondered if underneath that gentle giant exterior the monk was experiencing any irritation with them.“Yeah,” said Elrann. “Go for it!”“Rrrr,” growled Sagar.Huld set his feet, pulled back his hands behind his body and breathed in loudly, sucking in the stale air.Ryn braced himself. His fingers tingled, ready to summon flame if need be.Huld drove his open palms into the stone doors. An almighty boom resounded throughout the chamber, followed by...…cavernous silence. “Well that's done absolutely nothing,” observed Sagar. “Again.” The skypirate marched back down the stairs. Huld followed.“Anyone else got any smart ideas to try?” Sagar said in exasperation as the two of them re-joined the circle of the group in the faint glow-worm light.“It's another puzzle…” said Cid, stroking his beard. “Like the last floor. Although it seems we may not be able to solve this one just by blasting through it, since these doors are made of stone.”“Rrrrr!” growled Sagar loudly, turning purple in the light from the glow-worms as he lost his temper. “This is a load of chocobo-poodoo! I'm sick of puzzles! There must be a simple way through!”All of a sudden he turned and ran back up the stairs, so fast he must be calling the wind to assist him, and indeed Ryn felt his hair flutter. When Sagar reached the top, this time he shouted “WIND!” and flung his hands forwards at the doors.The party didn't see the gust but they felt the disturbance in the air even from where they were sitting on the floor. The back-blast of his own wind attack off the doors knocked Sagar backwards, and he flew into the air away from them. His hands waved around frantically for a moment, but then he managed to convert his momentum into a backflip and put them out on either side of him to raise a smaller gust below himself and float to the floor more slowly. Sagar touched down on the ground almost gracefully.“Godsdammit!” he yelled all the same, most ungracefully, frustrated that his attack hadn't done anything to the doors. Ryn wasn't sure why he evoked the gods, or the hells, so often when he didn't even believe in them.“That was pretty cool, too,” said Elrann.That seemed to calm Sagar down a bit. He sighed, and let his hands drop to his sides. “It didn't work, though...”“Of course not,” said Cid. “We've established that the element of Earth is highly resistant to the element of Wind.”“Yes thank you, old timer,” said Sagar, completely unthankfully. “I've had just about enough of you stating the bleeding obvious. I'd figured that out by now. So how are we going to get through them? Hey—you should try your fire, pup.”“You reckon?” Ryn said. For once the skypirate had spoken to him almost like he was an equal, even if he still used the same term of address as for a baby dog. “Well why not?” Sagar said. “The old timer says earth is supposedly ‘weak' to fire, isn't it?”“But they're made of stone.”“Have you got any better ideas?”Ryn shrugged, and walked up the steps to test out a small fire attack on the stone doors.It didn't even mark them. They remained exactly as they were, indifferent and immovable.Next Elrann tried shooting them with one of her pistols. Then Cid tried saying some more magic words and passwords. Even Vish, under coercion, had a go at trying to work his blade into the very thin crack between the two doors and prise them open, but to no avail. For some reason Nuthea refused to even bother to try a lightning attack, though Ryn supposed that was fair enough. It made sense to him that lightning was likely to be completely ineffective against earth as an elemental pairing.Eventually they all found themselves sitting or lying in a circle on the worm-lit floor, tired, fed up and at a complete loss about how to get past the doors.“Welp, this is fun,” Elrann said sarcastically. “I guess we're going to have to retrace our steps and find a way back, or else we're going to die of starvation or thirst in here. Or boredom.”“Raarrrrr!” Sagar said. That was a really big one, Ryn thought. “There's got to be a way through!” He slammed his fist onto the floor next to him where he sat.As he did so, Ryn noticed that the floor got a bit darker for a moment where he had hit it. “Hey…” Ryn said. “Do that again, Sagar…”“Do what?” said Sagar.“Hit your fist on the ground.”“Why? Are you going loopy, pup?”“Just do it,” Ryn said impatiently. Then he thought he better add, “Please?”“Well, since you asked so nicely…”Sagar hit the ground with the side of his fist again, even harder than the last time. “There. Happy?!”This time Ryn saw them. When Sagar's fist connected with the floor, the glow-worms inside the floor nearest the place that he hit wriggled quickly away from the point of impact for a moment, then slowly came back to it.“They're moving!”“What are moving?!”“The glow-worms are moving away from your hand when you hit the floor!”Sagar thumped the floor again to test this.“...so they are. Who cares?”“That must be the key to solving the puzzle!”“What good is that going to do us, pup? It's just moving some worms around.” “No, don't you see?” Ryn said.He stood up, and then tried stomping his foot on the ground. The glow worms wriggled away from the spot where he stomped, taking their light with them. He stomped again, somewhere else nearby, and some of the worms that had moved away from his first stomp kept going, moving away from this one too, so that it got a little darker around his foot.“We can affect them!” Ryn said. “We can move them, herd them!”The others were frowning at him.“What good is that going to do us?” said Sagar. “It's a nice trick, but it's not going to get us through those doors, pup, is it?”“No,” said Cid, standing up too, “I think young man Ryn might be onto something. The boy is right—the worms are the only things in this room that we can affect. It's the best lead we've had so far. Come!”He started to stomp on the ground too and, while Ryn had to admit that the two of them looked quite silly taking big exaggerated steps around the darkened hall together, the worms moved for Cid as well.Nuthea joined in, then Elrann, then Huld (he got a lot of worms moving), then at their request even Vish. And at last Sagar breathed another big sigh and joined them too.The worms were definitely moving, only they were wriggling around inside the floor all over the place in random directions away from different people's feet.“Hey!” Ryn called over the noise of their galumphing feet. “If we all stomp in the same place, we might be able to make them go in the same direction!”They all clumped together and began to stomp near each other, their footwear illuminated by the glow worms that fled their feet: Ryn's brown leather shoes, Nuthea's golden slippers, Sagar's steel-capped boots, Elrann's simple laced plimsolls, Cid's simple sandals, Vish's black shoes with upturned toes, and Huld's bare feet. Combined, they made a tremendous racket, like the sound of drums being beaten very fast and erratically, that echoed throughout the hall.Thudthudthudthudthudthudthud. Sure enough, the glow-worms fled through the floor away from the vibrations of their feet, faster than Ryn had seen them move yet, and many of them all in a group together, taking their light with them in a moving puddle of luminescence.“It works!” proclaimed Ryn in jubilation.“Yes, this is all well and good, pup,” yelled Sagar, ever persistent in his antagonism, “but what's the point?! Where are we going to herd them?!”The answer seemed obvious to Ryn. “Up the stairs, of course!”“This is ridiculous!” Sagar yelled.Neither Ryn nor the others bothered to contradict him, but he joined in all the same. Ridiculous it may be, but this was the only action that had changed anything in this room thus far, so Ryn reasoned the worms must have something to do with the doors at the top of the steps.Under his direction, they began to stomp their way over to the foot of the steps. As they stomped, more glow-worms got caught up in the big group that they were pushing towards the step, and now they were shepherding a big mass of them about three measures across. The light from all of these worms collected together to form a shimmering pool, and they seemed to be emitting it more intensely as they moved away from the party's thudding feet.They reached the steps. A few of the moving worms broke off from the main pack and moved around the bottom step, but most of them went into it.“Keep going!” Ryn spurred the others on over the sound of their stomping feet. “Get them up the steps!”Once most of the worms had burrowed into the earth of the first step, it lit up white with their glow. This must be the key to progressing through this room. They waited until the worms had moved a little way along the big step, away from their footfall, and then, Ryn leading, they all hopped up onto the step and continued to stomp.The worms continued to flee, quickly, across the first step and into the earth of the second step.“Keep going!” Ryn called again.They carried on like this, driving the worms up another step, then another, another, another.Thudthudthudthudthud went their feet on the earth below them.And then they were at the top of the steps, driving the worms they had collected towards the doors of stone, all stood in front of them together and jogging on the spot like idiots.The mass of glow-worms moved along the top step and arrived at the doors.Then they disappeared underneath them.“Huh?” Ryn exclaimed aloud.Everyone stopped stomping.“Well, that's bloody brilliant,” said Sagar. “We've chased them into whatever room's beyond the doors. Now we've lost them and it's even darker in here than it was before. Great work, pup.”“No,” said Ryn, at the situation. He had been sure they had been onto something. Cid had said so as well.One God, he found himself saying inside his head. Show me the way through.Keep stomping! he thought.“Keep stomping!” he said out loud. He didn't know why he said it; he just did, and started to stomp again, his eyes fixed on the immovable stone doors.Nuthea joined in again. Cid. Elrann. Huld. Vish. Thudthudthudthudthud. Sagar didn't bother this time.“What's the point, pup?” Sagar yelled. “This is a waste of time! You're just driving the worms further away!”And then the doors began to glow.The grey stone of them started to turn white. As Ryn's eyes stretched wide, he saw hundreds of tiny worms burrowing out of the front of them, coming up through their surface.“Of course!” Cid yelled. “The worms eat earth, and that's what makes them give off the light! We could see them before because some of their light got through the earth near its surface! But stone is more opaque, and blocks it out! They're eating through the stone now, so we can see them as they reach the surface!”Cid was right. Not only were the doors glowing, hundreds of small white worms poking out of them in different places, but they actually seemed to be shrinking too. They stomped harder. Ryn noticed that Sagar had joined in again, and gone uncharacteristically quiet.And now he noticed something else too. The worms were still giving off their light, and when they reached the surface of the doors they were poking their little squidgy glowing ends out, but then they were stopping still, not eating any more of it.Apparently stone was more filling than soil, or whatever the floor and steps were made out of.“We need more of them!” he cried. He took charge. “Cid, Nuthea, Vish, you stay here and keep stomping! Huld, Elrann, Sagar, come with me! We need to herd more of the worms up the steps!”Sagar actually did what Ryn suggested without protest this time and came with him, Elrann and Huld down the steps. Together, they chased down the remaining glow-worms in the floor of the hall, stomping and stamping and cooperating together to herd them back towards the steps and up them, a group at a time. Each time they got to the penultimate step, Cid, Nuthea and Vish would stop stomping for a moment to let the new batch of worms pass under their feet, and then resume again, driving them into the doors, then up and through them.At last, Ryn and the others managed to sweep up the last of the glow-worms from the floor and herd them up the steps and into the doors. They had caught every single last one now, and the only light in the hall came from the glowing doors where they all stood at the top of the steps. The last worm disappeared into the stone doors.They all stamped together in front of them, willing the final batch of worms up through the doors.The doors flared with bright, white light, the brightest yet.Ryn put his hand over his face to cover his eyes.The party stopped stomping.Ryn took his hand away from his eyes.The doors just weren't there anymore. The worms had eaten through the entirety of them.Instead they could now see another cramped, darkened, rectangular, earthen corridor, to which the doors had been barring access.They could see the shape of the corridor because the worms had apparently all dropped back into the earthen floor, though all Ryn could see of them was a pool of white light now coming from the floor in front of them; a wide disc of brightness.The disc shot forward, along the floor, taking its light with it, threatening to leave them in darkness.“Come on!” Ryn yelled to the others. “We need that light!”He shot forwards too, pursuing the pool of light across the floor, and the others ran with him without hesitation.The light-pool led them down the corridor, left at a turn, around a bend, right at another turn. If they ran at full pelt, they were just able to keep up with it, sometimes even to run into the encirclement of its glow below their feet, though it was moving fast now, and they never kept this up for very long.It was as though they were making their way through another version of the ground floor they had gotten lost in before, only this time they had the disc of light to guide them and illuminate their path.Though that didn't turn out to be the only thing that was different about this floor.Ahead of them, in this latest corridor that the light had led them into, running at the front of the pack Ryn could see that the floor dropped away.He stopped just in time, pulling up and halting his run, and the others crashed into the back of him, and would have knocked him forwards into the pit had he not braced himself for the impact. “Oi!” said Sagar.“Hey!” said Elrann. “What gives?”Ryn recoiled from the edge of the pit even more when he saw, as the pool of light moved down the side of the pit and passed underneath them, a few metres below at the bottom of it, row upon row of sharpened, earthen spikes.“Wow,” said Elrann when she looked over the edge and saw them too. “It's a good thing you did stop.”On the other side of the pit the pool of moving light came up and reached the floor of the corridor again, and carried on moving quickly away from them.Their part of the corridor got darker.“Quick!” Ryn said desperately. “How are we going to get across this gap?”“We'll have to jump again,” said Sagar. “I'll boost us over with a gust. Come back a bit, everyone; you'll need a run up.”They ran back a few paces away from the pit. It was still getting darker as the light moved away from them—they could only just see where the pit started now.“One…” said Sagar, “two... three... run! Jump! WIND!”Ryn took his running leap over the lip of the pit with the others and felt Sagar's wind blast rush into him from behind, picking him up and carrying him through the air above the spikes.A brief sensation of weightlessness, and he landed clumsily on the other side of the pit, lost his footing, put his arms out to break his fall, rolled and came up again, then carried on dashing forwards to try to catch up with the rapidly receding pool of light.The pool of light which reached the end of the corridor and turned left, deepening the darkness once again.Ryn hit the end-wall and went left too. He pushed himself to keep running, his lungs and legs burning, and began to gain on the pool of light.“Ryn!” called Nuthea from behind. “Which way? We didn't see!”“Left!” Ryn shouted over his shoulder. “Hurry!” He must not lose the light.When he had looked round briefly he had seen Sagar, Vish and Huld's faces lit up in the worm-light behind him, but he couldn't wait for them to catch up. He must keep pace with the light.The light which he had nearly reached again, which was moving down the corridor, past a thin tubular protrusion that stuck out about a hand's breadth into the middle of it, at around chest-height. That was weird. What's that for? Ryn thought as he ran following the light towards it.Hands grabbed hold of his shoulders.“Get down, you stupid boy!” shouted Vish.The hands forced him down with ferocious strength, but he kept his momentum so that he ended up diving to the floor and skidding along it for a few metres on his stomach. It was only a hard earth floor, but it knocked the air out of Ryn and grazed his belly.Above him, a sound like someone rapidly chopping vegetables—thunkthunkthunk.“Hey!” Ryn said to Vish, who had forced him down and ended up on the floor with him, his masked face only inches away from Ryn's own. “What was that for?”Then he saw. A couple of metres back, a number of feathered darts stuck out of the wall on the opposite side from the tube.Sagar reached the tube, but instead of diving under it as Vish had with Ryn, he made a wind-assisted jump over it, and three more darts shot out of the tube and thunked into the wall on the other side.“Watch out, you lot!” Sagar called back the way he had come as he ran past Ryn and Vish on the floor. “There's a tube about halfway down this one that shoots darts!”Ryn scrambled to his feet. He wasn't about to let Sagar get ahead of him.  Run, Ryn, run, he thought, an old rhyme coming back to his mind as he hurtled after Sagar and the light. But he would have to change the words now. Run, Ryn, run away, live to fight another day, live to train another way, live to find the Jewels and make the Emperor pay.The pool of light reached the end of the corridor and went right, deepening the darkness again. Sagar followed it. Behind Ryn the others were calling and shouting about something, but there wasn't time to worry about them. He must keep pace with the light.“Swinging axe!” yelled Sagar from somewhere up ahead.Huh?Ryn pulled up just in time, and a huge curved-bladed axe moved across his vision perpendicular to the corridor, inches away from his nose. It swung from the corridor ceiling, and as it reached one wall with the tip of its blade it hung suspended in stillness for a moment, then swung back the other way.Ryn took a deep breath and waited for his moment, hearing Vish and Huld arrive behind him.“Swinging axe,” he informed them matter-of-factly.Vish grunted his acknowledgement. Huld didn't even bother to do that.The axe reached the apex of its ascent again and hung.“Now!” Ryn yelled, and the three of them shot past the axe, further down the corridor, after Sagar, after the light.“Swinging axe!” Ryn called back one more time as he heard the others arriving in the corridor behind them.“Slow down, would ya?!” Elrann called back. Ryn couldn't slow down or he might lose the light. “Stay together!” he called back, still without looking. “We've got to keep up with this light or we'll lose our way! We'll keep telling you what the traps are up ahead as we reach them!”It got darker again as the pool of light turned down yet another corridor, Sagar hot on its tail.Ryn, Vish and Huld reached the corner and turned too.This time they were greeted by Sagar running towards them in pursuit of the pool of light, which was now moving very quickly back along the corridor it had apparently just gone down. Behind him, something stirred and grumbled in the shadows.“ROLLING BOULDER!” Sagar cried, even as the pool of light passed underneath Ryn's feet and the skypirate pushed past him in the opposite direction.“Oh, poodoo,” Ryn swore as he saw the giant grey boulder that filled the entire width of the corridor rolling rapidly towards them.He turned with Vish and Huld and ran for his life. They rounded the corner they had just turned down.In the distance, beyond Sagar and the light-pool, Nuthea, Elrann and Cid were stood on the other side of the swinging axe, waiting for the right moment to dash past it.“What's going on?” said Nuthea when she saw the light moving towards her.“At least now we can see again!” said Elrann.“Turn around!” yelled Sagar. “There's a massive rolling boulder behind us!”A tremendous crash sounded from behind them.Ryn dared to hope that the boulder would stop in its tracks now that it had hit a wall, and looked round.Nope.“Damned magical shrine-temple!” Sagar cursed in exasperation.They kept running, barely avoiding another swing of the axe-blade in their mad rush, following the light-pool as it shot back the way it had come, sweeping Nuthea, Elrann and Cid into their wake.They were all near to the moving light-pool now, as they ran together, Ryn back at the head of the pack next to Sagar and Vish.They turned a corner as they heard a sound of snapping metal. That must be the boulder smashing its way through the swinging axe-trap.Back they went, back past the shooting dart trap, which they all ducked under or jumped over. The boulder rolled after them.Back they went, back over the spiked pit, which they flew over again with a quickly coordinated jump and wind-assistance from Sagar.A little way on the other side of this pit, they all stopped and turned, convinced that the boulder would fall into the pit, and stop.Instead, the spikes at the bottom of the pit rose up to meet the boulder, and it continued to roll over the tips of the spikes, over the pit.  “Oh, come on!” cried Ryn as they all turned and continued to run.The boulder rolled after them.Back they went, back to the first fork they had reached when they had got past the stone doors at the start of this floor.The boulder rolled after them.This time the light-pool moved straight on past the turning to the doors, in the other direction from which it had initially taken on their arrival on this floor.“Stupid bloody glow-worms!” Sagar cried. “It's like they're teasing us, leading us into all these traps!”“We've got to keep following them!” yelled Ryn. “It's our only option!”“I know, pup! Do you think I don't know that?”“It's not a tease!” yelled Cid, “It's a test!”“Shut up, old timer! I'm starting to get testy with you!”Another turn at the other end of this corridor, more corridors, more turns.But no more traps, for now.And yet still the boulder rolled after them. Never more than a corridor behind. If anything, it seemed to be getting faster.Ryn began to pant and wheeze as he ran, and his chest burned.“Huld, do you have any idea how much further we have to go?” he gasped to the monk.“I am sorry,” said Huld as he ran, almost breathless too, exasperation in his voice. “I do not. Just to remind you: I have. Never. Been. Here. Before!”“Hey, look!” Elrann called out.The light-pool had stopped. It had gotten some length ahead of them in their exhaustion from sprinting so long, but about twenty paces away at the end of this corridor it had stopped at last in front of a solid wall that seemed to be made out of something shiny which shimmered as it reflected its glow.It was probably because Ryn was trying to work out what this wall was made of that he didn't notice the new pit in front of him, into which he fell.“Oomph!”He pushed himself up and rubbed his arms where he had landed on them.There was another thump from nearby.“Stupid pup!” Sagar said next to him.“What did I do?” Ryn said.“You didn't look where you were going!”“Neither did you!”Thank the One, at least there were no spikes at the bottom of this pit, just a cold, flat, earthen floor about ten feet down and a few feet long. There was, however, still a giant boulder in the corridor above, rolling towards them.The heads of the others appeared at the lip of the pit above.“Quickly!” said Nuthea. “Captain Sagar, we need you to boost us over this pit as well!”She still manages to add the honorific to his name, even at a time like this…Sagar wind-boosted himself and Ryn as they jumped back up to the corridor, on the side that they had fallen down from.The boulder had nearly reached them.“Hurry!” Nuthea cried.“Windaaaaaaarragggaaaahh!” Sagar shouted, as he and everyone else were thrown through the air above the pit by the great gust of wind that he summoned.This time there was no question of a smooth landing. They all crashed into each other in the corridor on the other side of the pit, banging limbs and heads and collapsing in a bug jumbled heap, then disentangling themselves from one another and scrambling up cursing and bickering.A massive boom issued.Ryn got up to see that the boulder had fallen into the pit after them.It rolled forwards a few paces in the pit, then sank down a little and came to a halt, where it made a clicking sound, pressing on some sort of mechanism that he and Sagar hadn't noticed had been built into the floor of it when they had been down in it.A creaking noise followed, this time from behind Ryn.He spun to see the steel doors at the end of the corridor, which apparently the glow worms were not able to eat through, opening.Opening onto glorious blue sky and sunlight which lit up the corridor completely, dimming the glow from the worm-pool on the floor ahead.A flood of warm air from the world outside filled the corridor, pleasantly caressing Ryn's face.At last; they had made it to the top of the Shrine.To be continued… This is a public episode. 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#有雷慎入 #一小時帶你認識夏日咖啡男友

Previously on Saga of the Jewels…The life of seventeen-year-old RYN, bookish son of a wealthy landowner, changes forever when his hometown is destroyed by the EMPIRE and everyone he has ever known is killed. He discovers that the Empire are seeking TWELVE PRIMEVAL JEWELS which grant the power to manipulate different elements, and that his father had been hiding the Fire Ruby. Ryn sets out to take revenge on the Imperial General who killed his family and retrieve the Fire Ruby, and along the way meets NUTHEA the lightning-slinging princess, SAGAR the swaggering skypirate, ELRANN the tomboy engineer, CID the wizened old healer, and VISH the poppy-seed-addicted bounty hunter. Together the adventurers decide to find all of the Jewels in order to stop the EMPEROR from finding them first and taking over the world. The companions now find themselves traversing the skies of Mid in Sagar's airship, heading to the land of FARR to attempt to retrieve the EARTH EMERALD…SEASON TWO EPISODE 23: ABOARD THE GOOD AIRSHIP WANDERLUSTElrann hated to admit it, but pirate-man's airship was an absolute beauty.She strode out of the doors of the captain's chambers in the forecastle and onto the main deck. Rushing air immediately greeted her, whipping her purple hair around her face, and she pulled her goggles down over her eyes. The skyscape, pale orange and blue and white, was decorated with the fluffy clouds of a dawn somewhere over Aibar, above which they were currently flying on their way to Farr.“Ah…” Elrann exhaled after taking a drink of the cold crisp air. It's good to be alive.Ryn, Vish and Cid were already up, she was surprised to see, stood together looking out over the prow of the ship, yapping about something or other and taking turns to point at the clouds and scraps of desert visible below. They hadn't heard her come onto the deck.“‘Bout time you got up, woman!” someone called out over the wind from behind her.Elrann whirled on her heel. Above her, atop the ship's forecastle, underneath her black blimp from which the body of the ship hung suspended by steel ropes, behind the ship's wheel, stood Sagar.“I never got my wakeup call!” Elrann yelled back.“Ha!” the pirate scoffed, his ponytail flapping in the wind behind him. “You'd be lucky! Where's her majesty--still sleeping?”Always with the asking about princess-girl, Elrann thought. “Yeah,” she said, “for the meantime. She needs her beauty sleep. I don't need so much 'cause I'm more beautiful.” She grinned and winked at him.“Ha!” Sagar laughed again. He seemed happy at the helm of his ship--literally in his element. “Listen, woman; go do a check over the engine for me. She's flying fine--but you might be able to get a little more juice out of her.”“Where d'ya think I was going?” Elrann shot back. “I'll go of my own accord, not to obey an order, thank ya very much. You might be the pilot of this ship, but you ain't her captain any more, whatever princess-girl calls ya.”She turned away from the faint sound of Sagar's “Rrrr,” hiding her smile, and paced across the deck to steps that led below. That's for calling me ‘woman' twice already today. She waved a good morning to Ryn, Vish and Cid before descending.Belowdecks were five main rooms: a hold which had been stuffed full of food supplies by princess-girl's ‘countrywomen' before they left, a very small brig, a very small mess with chairs and a card table, the sleeping cabin, and the engine room.Unfortunately, you had to go through the sleeping cabin to get to the engine room.The sleeping cabin was filthy, the walls that enclosed its rows of hung hammocks scrawled with lewd paint graffiti or knife-scored with tallies of how many days the original crew had been in the air at a particular time. Even the Imperials hadn't bothered to clean it up when they had occupied the ship for a while. All the same, Elrann wouldn't have minded sleeping in the main cabin, and had done so on many other airships.But on their first night in the air, when they had opened the door to the cabin and been hit by a wave of the stink of...boys, Nuthea had spoken up.“No,” Nuthea had said, wrinkling her nose. “Absolutely not. This does not befit a Queen.”“But you're not a Queen,” Sagar said. “You weren't coronated.”“It does not befit a princess either. I am not sleeping in here. I am not having you men leching over me and Elrann while we get undressed.”Sagar's face fell. “Well, where do you suggest that you sleep? You can't exactly sleep up on the deck, and the other rooms aren't really big enough.”“Elrann and I will sleep in the captain's quarters.”Sagar's face lit up. “An excellent idea! I'll be able to keep you both company.” His wolf-grin gripped his face.Nuthea's expression could have curdled milk. Nuthea's expression could have boiled milk. “No, Captain Sagar: Elrann and I will sleep in the captain's quarters by ourselves.”Sagar's face turned as purple as Elrann's hair. “But it's the captain's quarters! That means it's for the ‘captain'! The clue is in the name!”“My mind is made up,” Nuthea said. One of her catchphrases, Elrann noticed.“Rrrrr.”They had argued some more, but eventually Sagar had been forced to back down when Nuthea had reminded him that he was in her pay, since she was funding this little Mid-trotting Jewel-hunting escapade and keeping him in coin to be the pilot for it.Poor moronic pirate-man… Elrann thought as she opened the door to the engine room at the back of the ship, having successfully navigated the gauntlet of the vacant sleeping cabin. You just don't have a clue, do you?Wanderlust's engine was a big, shining, black, iron beauty that filled the whole of its room. The main chamber, effectively a massive tank, had a door built into the front of it into which fuel could be shovelled--coal, usually, but this was a Class One Steam Engine made in Erm, which meant that she could run on pretty much whatever you put in her—coal, wood, oil, grass, leaves, poodoo, metal if it was hot enough, animals, even people… Elrann blinked away that particular memory from the one time she had worked on a ship with a Class One before. As long as the fuel burned or evaporated and produced some kind of smoke or gas to fly up the feeder pipe, into the engine's compression system above and then eventually along the two fuel lines to the two air turbines that sat at the underside of Wanderlust's bow, it would work.She opened the door of the main chamber, its heat immediately warming her skin, and shovelled in some more coal from the nearby bag on the floor. The furnace inside glowed as it swallowed the fuel, and the whirring of the ship's turbines from outside picked up in pitch a fraction.She shut the door and took a spanner out of one of her utility pouches, relishing the feel of the cold metal as it sat comfortably in her palm, read the gauges on the top of the engine, and set to work on it.A Class One engine was effectively a heart, except that instead of pumping blood it pumped smoke, or steam. The ship's engineer's main job was to fine-tune the compression and decompression system in the upper chambers of the engine, built above the feeder pipe that came from the fuel tank, so that the gas in it was expelled at maximum speed and efficiency along the two fuel lines to power the turbines which propelled the ship through the air. This was largely achieved by tightening and loosening various screws, knuts and bolts attached to the chambers to shrink or enlarge the different ‘ventricles' of the engine system.As she did this now, Elrann lost herself in her work. For a time there was only the engine and she only had space to think briefly that the place where she was happiest and most in her element was in front of a metal machine, preferably an engine, tinkering and investigating and adjusting, being warmed by the heat from its burning fuel, savouring the burnt taste of smoke on her tongue, listening to the industrious hum of the turbines.Eventually she got the engine pretty much where she wanted her and her mind became free to wander again.What had she been thinking about before she got to work on the engine? Something had been bothering her…Oh, yeah. Pirate-man.  She was fairly sure that, as well as obviously ‘leching' after Nuthea, Sagar had been sending some meaningful glances her way lately as well. It seemed that, after he had gotten over his initial shock at her short hair, tomboyishness and the facts that she was an engineer and could both drink and swear better than him, he had become interested in her as well. It seemed that his lechy-ness knew no bounds. He wasn't very good at either hiding or showing it, though in different ways.Little did the stupid man know that rather than letting him into her overalls she was much more interested in trying to work out whether or not he was actually her half-brother.Truth be told, she reflected as she continued to tend to the engine, making some perfectionist and entirely unnecessary tweaks, Sagar had made her think of her father the very first time she had met him, in the Traveller's Rest in Ast. Of course, she had never actually known her father, but he had been described to her as a dashing skypirate with a brown leather jacket with a high collar, a rugged beard, baby blue eyes and...a ponytail.She turned a screw on the engine with her spanner, listening for the subtle change in the turbine's hum, trying to get exactly the tone she wanted. She knew that her obsession with skypirates, airships, and eventually airship engines had originated from being told about her father, a skypirate who had landed in Zerlan once and got her mother pregnant from a single amorous encounter, but she didn't care. She could no more change her love for them than she could change the colour of her purple eyes or her supernatural ability to hold her drink. They were a part of her.Early on in her acquaintance with Sagar, when they had been escaping from Ast and then trekking across the Imfisi plains, she had developed a small crush on him. Her cheeks warmed now at the memory, and it wasn't just the warmth of the engine. It was embarrassing to see now how obviously that had been connected to her longing for her father, but at the time she had just fallen right into it. It had been so scary being in Ast when it was invaded, and Sagar had taken charge and been so confidentShe tightened another knut. But, the thing was, as time had gone by, slowly the crush had morphed into something else. She had begun to notice some little things, and some big things. The big things were so obvious that she hadn't noticed them at first, thinking them too common not to be coincidences: the brown leather jacket with a high collar, the blue eyes, the handsome features, and that ponytail. But it was the little things that had begun to stack up and eventually make her wonder about the big things: The way his wolf-like grin sometimes reminded her of her own when she caught it in a looking glass. His slightly larger than normal front canine-teeth. His own love of airships, and all things to do with them. Even the way he growled when he got frustrated or irritated, though thankfully Elrann had so far managed to keep that particular trait of hers hidden from the other members of their traveling party. Too many coincidences had mounted up for her to continue to doubt that they were just coincidences with as much conviction.   The clincher had been when Sagar had revealed that he was in possession of the ‘Wind Shell' and that his father was Captain Edbin Figaro. Elrann's mother hadn't even known the name of the man that had swept her off her feet and impregnated her on the same evening, but she had told Elrann that he had been a captain of a ship, since she had seen him sail off piloting it the next day. Elrann worried that her mother, and now she, had romanticised the man, wanting him not just to be some regular old scummy skysailor or randy cabin boy. But it was what her mother had told her.So, gradually, little by little, she had pieced together the idea that maybe, just maybe, she and Sagar might share a father.Maybe, just maybe, Sagar might be her half-brother.And if Sagar was her half-brother then, maybe, just maybe, he might be able to help her to find her father.That was a good enough reason to hang around with this crew a little longer—at least until she worked up the courage to tell him.Of course, there was also the pay (courtesy of princess-girl), the protection, and the general sense of meaningfulness now that they were questing after these magical Jewel-thingamys to save the world or what have you. And the company was alright, she supposed. Princess-girl could talk like anything when she got going, though she was pretty interesting to listen to.But yeah, the main reason she was still here was to see if she could get a shot at finding her father, she reminded herself. If he was still alive, that was.She walked over to the bronze speaking tube set into the wall and put her mouth to it.“Hey pirate-man!” she said into it. “What d'ya think?”For a moment there was no reply, just the gaping protrusion of the speaking tube.Then: “She's sounding alright, woman.”Elrann's lip curled up at the corner. She knew well enough not to expect a ‘thank you' or a ‘good job'. But she also knew that she had the engine functioning damn near perfectly. She had heard the reluctant acknowledgement of that in Sagar's tone.“You coming up for breakfast?” said Sagar's voice through the speaking tube.“In a bit,” Elrann answered. “I want to tend to her a bit more for a while.”“Suit yourself.”Elrann went back to the engine. There was absolutely no reason to do anything with her right now, but she liked being here, and she could always play with trying to get her functioning even more near perfectly.She set about the screws and knuts again, and thought about how and when she was going to bring up her theory about their parentage with Sagar.*Sagar couldn't decide who he was more attracted to, the princess or the engineer woman.He checked the red needle of the compass built into the centre of Wanderlust's wheel and adjusted her slightly to keep on course. It was pretty easy to navigate to Farr. He had never been out all that way before, but he knew you basically just had to head east for a long time. That was the direction he was flying them in now, into the bright Aibarian sunrise.Of course, both ladies came with their problems. The princess was an obvious choice, what with her being drop-dead gorgeous, with that golden hair and slender face and full bust. And she had a lot of money. But she was a handful and a half—no, two handfuls, if not more. A right royal pain in the arse. Almost literally. She was basically mad. And being hit by lightning from her hurt. A lot.So then there was the engineer woman too. Sagar had been almost embarrassed to admit to himself that he was attracted to her at first, and truth be told, he sort of still was. She looked too much like a boy with her short hair and engineer's overalls and laddish way of speaking. Being attracted to her made him feel all sorts of uncomfortable feelings that he didn't like to acknowledge. That was why he called her ‘woman'—to reassure himself that he was being attracted to a woman. For attracted to her he was. Something about her strut, something about her self-assuredness, something about the way she held a wrench and tended so well to his ship's engine, got his winds gusting.  He licked his lips, enjoying the play of rushing air moving over them and cooling them where he wet them.Yes, he promised himself, I'll get one of them before this ‘Quest' is done. Maybe both of them. Maybe both of them at the same time. They are sleeping in my quarters after all. How hard could it be?Never mind that he had never actually slept with anybody before.Never mind that he was hopelessly, desperately insecure and under-confident on the inside.Never mind that his brash skypirate demeanour was just a persona he had had to develop fast when he had inherited this ship and its crew from his father much earlier than he had expected to.The women didn't need to know any of that.None of the others needed to know any of that.He tried to push these thoughts away, but they just came back stronger.A great job he had done of looking after this ship and crew her… Things had started well, sure, with a few very successful early raids, and then taking down that Imperial ship.But then it had all gone wrong. Not only had he lost the ship, for a time, but he had also gotten the whole of his crew killed. He winced at the memory, and almost choked up a little, but forced the sob down hard. No way anyone was going to see him cry up here. It was a good thing he hadn't been too attached to the crew. It was a good thing he hadn't been with them that long. But he still felt guilty that they had been killed. He had left them unattended, right after taking down an Imperial warship, and then that Imperial General had specifically attacked him in revenge.Damn that General. If Ryn hadn't killed him first, Sagar would have liked to have been the one to do it. His eye itched underneath his eye patch. He did a quick scan of the deck. The pup, old timer and scumsucker were still yammering on about something or other at the prow. The woman was still in the engine room, for now. And the princess had not yet graced the morning with her presence.Quickly, before anyone had a chance to turn around and see, he slid one hand up underneath his patch and gave his left eye a good old itch, then withdrew it again.None of the others needed to know that he only wore the eye patch for show, to pretend that he had lost his eye in a battle and look tough.He would never have lost his eye in a battle. Fighting was the one thing he was genuinely good at. He was good at it because he had practiced at swords with his father's crew ever since he was young enough to hold one. And he was good at it because he cheated. He used his air projection abilities to throw his opponents off and give himself an unfair advantage.Below him, the princess stepped out onto the main deck. She was wearing a pale lilac dress with a purple sash that wove around her chest and waist, and long purple gloves. She had had a chance to restock her wardrobe before they left her home country. Damn, but she's looking good this morning, Sagar thought.“Morning, princess!” Sagar called down at her before any of the other men got a chance to greet her. “So good of you to join us!”Nuthea turned and looked up at him with a scowl that creased her exquisite forehead. “I did not sleep well,” she said over the wind and engine noise. “Your bed is not comfortable.”“Works fine for me.” Sagar said, not able or wanting to stop himself. “I'm sure it would be a lot more comfortable with me in it. You should let me show you how to use it sometime.”Casually, almost absent-mindedly, the princess raised a finger in the same gesture with which she had nearly singed him with lightning when he had been rude to her on his ship before.Sagar let out a little yelp involuntarily and jumped from fright, losing control of the wheel for a moment, and the ship lurched to one side. He put out a foot to steady himself, got his grip on the wheel back and righted her.“Rrrr,” he growled.“What happened?” said the pup, who had run over to see what was going on.“I was just reminding Captain Sagar here not to overstep his bounds and to speak respectfully in the presence of a princess. Everything is fine now.”Ryn frowned up at Sagar, as if to say ‘Control yourself.'Sagar wanted to blast the boy with a barrage of air, but he bit back his spellword. He was trying to get on better with Ryn. Particularly after that incident when the boy had horribly burned his face. Things would probably go better on this Quest if they could get on with each other.Why am I on this stupid Quest again, anyway?Oh yeah, that's right. To see if I can get laid with the princess and/or the engineer woman. That's not going too well so far… But also because I'm going to get paid a tonne of gold for going on it. And because I don't have anything better to do.And I suppose that saving the whole of Mid from the Emperor of Morekemia is a relatively worthwhile thing to do as well... “Sagar,” Ryn called, “now we're all awake, shall we have some breakfast?”Sagar blinked, shaken out of his rare moment of self-reflection.“Whatever,” he said. He turned to the speaking tube that rose out of the floor nearby and put his mouth in front of it. “Woman, it's time for breakfast! Come on up, and bring some waybread with you from the hold while you're at it!”“I'm coming, but you can get your own damn waybread!” Elrann's voice hollered back at him through the speaking tube. “Pilot, not captain, remember?”“Rrrr,” growled Sagar as he locked the ship's wheel in place with its mechanism and stomped off to go and find some food.*The open sky, wind caressing his skin, glimpses of cloud rushing past below.Cid hated flying.He had hated it when he had been part of his previous adventuring party years ago, and he hated it now. The back of his throat was moist, and he kept having to swallow, worried that he would be sick at any moment. Butterflies not only fluttered but crashed into each other in his stomach. He wished he knew a spell to cure him of his nausea. If there was one he hadn't discovered it yet. Esuna didn't work.He hated flying, but he knew it was a necessary evil. It was the fastest way to get where they needed to go.He tore a chunk of waybread from the communal plate that lay in the middle of them where they all sat in the centre of the main deck and tried to pay attention to what the young ‘uns were saying.Sagar was speaking. “What were you three yammering about up there at the front of the ship for so long, anyway?”Cid's eyelids fluttered, and he tried to make it look like it was from offense and not from queasiness. “If you must know, we were talking to young man Vish here about his poppy addiction.”“Ah, that old chestnut again,” scoffed Sagar. “What about it? You ready to come off the scum yet, scumsucker?”Vish said nothing. He didn't even favour the pirate with a look.“As a matter of fact,” Cid said, “he is. He had a double hit recently and he's still feeling some of the negative after-effects. The headache, the mind fog, the despair... He says he's ready to start spacing out the hits for longer, and perhaps to stop them completely.”“Ha!” said Sagar. “I'll believe that when I see it!”Now Vish did look at Sagar and his eyes slitted to tight grey lines behind his face covering.“Alright team, so what's the plan?” said Ryn, changing the subject.Cid was grateful the boy was taking charge. Someone needed to lead this group, and Cid judged Ryn was the one to do it. Though the boy would have competition from his Grandaughter and the young pirate. And true, each of the two of them were good leader material, too. His Granddaughter was brave, fierce and knowledgeable. But she was also impetuous and condescending and had a tendency to fly off the handle. And the pirate was highly skilled with his blades and wind-projection, not to mention at piloting the ship, and he seemed to have a lot of adventuring experience. But he was also completely in this for his own personal gain, at least at this point in their Quest.Cid himself was not the one to lead. That had not gone well for him before. The One wanted him here just to guide, to advise, to help, this time, he was sure.“Well,” said Nuthea at length, “it will take us about another four days' flying to reach Farr.”“Four days!” said Sagar. “That's ages!”“Well, yes, it is a long way away.”“We'll have all killed each other by then!”Vish looked at Sagar again, Cid noted.“Let us hope not,” said Nuthea.Cid really hoped not. If this party was to succeed where his previous one had failed, they would need to all get along with one another. He couldn't face a repeat of what had happened the last time he had been part of a group trying to gather all the Jewels together…“Actually,” Nuthea continued, “we will get to Farr a bit before then, but Shun Pei is in the extreme east of Farr, so it will be four days before we get there.”“And what will we do when we get there?” asked Ryn.“We will land Wanderlust and seek an audience with the Governor of Farr, who resides in Shun Pei. He should know where the Earth Emerald is kept.”“That's your plan?” said Elrann. A favourite question of hers. “Just walk in and ask for the shiny rock?”“Yes. I am sure that once I explain the situation–that the Emperor of Morekemia is seeking the Jewels and that we are collecting them to keep them safe–the Governor will see that the most reasonable course of action is to entrust the Jewel to us.”“Sorry, princess girl,” said Elrann, “but that's just wishful thinking. I've been to Farr. The Farrians are a proud, stubborn, reserved sort of people. They ain't going to give ya the rock just because ya march right in and ask for it.”Cid stroked his beard. He was, of course, inclined to agree. There was no way that the Farrians were going to hand them the Jewel just because they walked in and asked for it. But don't say that. Let them work things out for themselves. Guide, don't lead. Influence, don't control. It's the only way they'll end up doing the things they need to do.“Well, we've got to at least try,” said Nuthea. “It's the only other Jewel that we know about at the moment. We've got to make sure that it's safe.”“What makes you think that if the Farrians have it it isn't safe already?” asked Ryn.“Perhaps it is, but then we can at least warn them that the Empire might be coming for it. And…” Nuthea turned to Cid. “Grandfather, when it comes to the elemental ‘strengths and weaknesses' you discovered, how does earth interact with fire?”Cid searched his memory, glad of the distraction from his skysickness. “Hmmm. If I recall correctly, we can't know for sure yet, but it seems likely that earth-aligned people would be either partially or highly vulnerable to fire attacks. Fire consumes and ravages the earth, after all. And fire burns up wood, leaves, grass, which are all associated with the element of earth.”“There we are,” Nuthea said conclusively, folding her arms. “We may have the Fire Ruby now, but we don't know if there are any remaining Imperial soldiers or officers who still retain any fire affinity from it. If there are, then they will be dangerous to any earth-aligned Farrians. I've made up my mind. The Earth Emerald will be much safer with us than remaining with them, as is the case for the Fire Ruby and the Lightning Crystal.” She fingered the glittering crystal that hung on the chain about her neck.Cid agreed. He was utterly convinced that their task from the One was not only to find the Jewels, but to gather them together. The scriptures, his dreams, and his own sense of inner direction from the One all confirmed this to him. He was convinced that the Emperor of Morekemia was going to rise up to become a threat to the whole world and that the Jewels needed to be gathered together in order for him to be stopped. But don't say that. Just guide, advise, gently encourage. Nothing too forceful. No matter that these weren't the only things he was convinced of, either…“There's just one thing I want to ask,” said Ryn. “The same thing came up at your Council at Orma.”Uh-oh, thought Cid.“Yes?” invited Nuthea.“I know we're a long way off from this, as there are twelve jewels and we only have two of them–”“--two and a bit,” interrupted Sagar, holding up his white fragment of the Wind Shell on its necklace.“Right...two and a bit. So I know we're a long way off, but let's say, down the line, we do succeed in this crazy ‘Quest' to gather all of the Primeval Jewels together. What then? You say there's a legend which says that whoever does this will be granted unbelievable power. What would we do with that?”The boy is clever, thought Cid. Definitely leader material.“I know what I'd do…” said Sagar, licking his lips and getting a far-off look.“That doesn't matter at this stage,” said Nuthea. “The important thing at this stage is simply that we gather the Jewels together to keep them safe from the Emperor.”“I know,” said Ryn, “but...you know…what if we actually manage it? What could we do with the Jewels? Do you think...do you think they would be powerful enough to do something like...bring people back from the dead?”Ryn's question stunned the whole group into temporary uncharacteristic silence. Even Sagar didn't mock it.Nuthea looked over at Cid again, deferring to him. “Grandfather?”All eyes were on him.Cid's mind recoiled from what he was convinced he had worked out about the Jewels. He couldn't even let himself think about it, let alone tell the young ‘uns about it. He spoke slowly and as plainly as he could, selecting his words with great care.“Of course, nobody has yet actually succeeded in gathering all of the Jewels together, as far as we know. So I don't know for certain. But the Jewels were made by the One, the Creator of Life itself. So it seems possible to me that, if the One made them, they could grant the power to restore life.”Sagar groaned. “Urgh. There you go with your ‘One' stuff again. What a load of nonsense.”The pirate's atheism was irksome, but not intolerable. Cid must tolerate it. It was also understandable, given what Cid knew of his life, but Sagar didn't know what he knew. “How do you even know this ‘legend' about the Jewels is true, anyway?” Sagar said. “I mean, sure, there are Jewels and they do give people special elemental powers, I'll grant you that much, but how do you know they were made by a ‘One' and that something wacky will happen if you put them all together? Where does this legend come from, anyway?”“It comes from earliest time, time before memory,” said Cid. “It comes from the earliest humans who saw the One face to face and walked with him at the Making of Mid. It comes from a time before writing and reading were invented, but the legend was passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, and when writing was invented, it was set down.”“Where?” asked Ryn.“Well,” Nuthea joined in. “There are a number of different texts. We have one in Orma, known as the Book of the Crystal, because it was kept with the Lightning Crystal.” She touched the Jewel at her chest again. “They are all copies of the originals, which have long been lost, but they were copied faithfully.”“Oh,” said Sagar, “well that's very convenient, isn't it? How do you know that they were copied faithfully, and things weren't changed?”Cid took over again. “Because the copies all ended up in different places, many a long way away from each other, but they all say the same thing. Or essentially the same thing, with only minor divergences. I have seen many of them on my travels. There are texts in Manolia, in Imfis, in Umbar, in Farr…”“Say what, pops?!” butted in Elrann. “You've been to Farr before as well?!”“Yes.”“Well why didn't ya say so?”Cid shrugged. “I hadn't seen it necessary to mention it.” Guide, don't lead.“Alright, alright,” said Sagar, “so these copies of Oneist texts that are supposedly scattered around the place. What does this legend about the Jewels written down in them actually say?”Cid recited the scripture he knew best:“Twelve Jewels there areFor the Twelve Peoples of Mid:Ruby, Crystal, Sapphire,Emerald, Onyx, Diamond,Beryl, Meteorite,Chrysolite, Chrysoprase,Pearl and CarnelainWhenever they are gathered together,The power of the One will be there,To save Mid in her greatest hour of need.”For a moment, only the rush of wind and the hum of Wanderlust's turbines.“What a load of hokey,” said Sagar.Cid smiled at him. The boy would come to see in time.His Granddaughter was not so accommodating. “Captain Sagar, you are being very rude. The legend has been passed down for generations. What is ‘hokey' about it?”“Well for a start, it only mentions eleven Jewels. Didn't you spot that? Some ‘prophecy'. ‘The One' can't even count properly!”“That's easy to address,” said Granddaughter, holding her head up. “The twelfth Jewel is for the element of Void. The texts list the twelve elements elsewhere, and it's not difficult to figure out there must be a twelfth Void Jewel. Just because they don't mention it explicitly doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.”“What about ‘Stone'?” said Ryn. “That isn't even a Jewel?”“Yes,” said Nuthea, “not a lot is known about the Nature Stone either, but the texts do mention it. It may be that it is another kind of jewel, since jewels are kinds of stones, after all.”“Well it's still nonsense,” said Sagar. “There ain't no ‘One' who made the Jewels. They are just part of nature, a quirk of Mid. All this stuff about a One and gathering the Jewels together is just stories that people made up to try to explain things they don't understand. One day we'll be able to explain it properly.”Nuthea's jaw tightened and her eyes grew in size. “Captain Sagar—” she began, but for once Cid thought it was time to intervene.“Granddaughter,” he said gently, “there is no use in arguing further. We have our gamble on what we believe is true, and young Sagar has his. In the end, either we will turn out to be right in our beliefs, or he will. And before the end of our Quest, he may change what he believes too, though not likely through argument. Or he may not.”“Whatever,” said Sagar. “You know what? So long as I get paid, I don't really care.”The party got on with their breakfast, drawing ever closer to Farr.Indie ebook sales: Get full access to Faenon's Fantasy Fiction Newsletter at sagaofthejewels.substack.com/subscribe

"I don't know who you are, I don't know what you want. But if it's Taken you're looking for, I can tell you, this is only a knock-off." RRRR! That's right, it's another JetBag

#1- Expat Insider seminar update: Looks like its gonna launch in February 2024   #2- Some say you ain't really speakin' real Spanish till you can roll your R's: Can you roll your RRRR's?   #3- An amazing “boots on the ground” report from Guatemala: A recent gringo expat opens up about his first 3 years living, working and playing in Guatemala       #4- The “Gringo Advantage” can strike in the most unusual of situations… like in the weird situation we discuss today…   #5- A gringo "hit and run" story: This could happen to you so pay attention.  #6 Our own Captain Mango has developed a unique one-on-one Crypto consulting and training service (he's been deep into crypto since 2013). To get started, email him at: bewarecaptainmango@gmail.com  #7- Be sure to pick up my newly updated, "LATIN AMERICAN HEALTHCARE REPORT": The new edition for 2023 (and beyond) is available now, including the latest "Stem Cell Clinic" info and data and my top picks for the best treatment centers for expats and gringos. Just go to www.ExpatPlanB.com

Author's note: Some substack subscribers have read this chapter before. This is because I am re-publishing it and next month's chapter as podcast episodes so I can include some fantasy book sales promotions with them, which are here:PREVIOUSLY ON SAGA OF THE JEWELS:Seventeen-year-old RYN's hometown is attacked by General VORR of the Empire and everyone he has ever known is killed. Just before Ryn's father dies, he gives Ryn a ruby which causes him to project fire. Ryn is captured by the Empire and meets another captive, Princess NUTHEA, who has the ability to project lightning. Nuthea explains to him that the Empire have learned of the existence of twelve Primeval Jewels which grant the ability to manipulate different elements, and are searching for them. The Imperial vessel where they are being held is in turn attacked by a pirate airship, and the pirates capture Ryn and Nuthea. The lead pirate, Captain SAGAR, agrees to escort Nuthea back to her homeland, and to spare Ryn's life, in exchange for the promise of gold, gemstones and beautiful women upon her safe delivery. They land in the port city of Ast and recruit an engineer called ELRANN. Ast is then attacked by the Empire, who are using the Fire Ruby to invade the continent and search for more of the Jewels. Ryn, Nuthea, Sagar and Elrann flee the city together, but are then attacked by a bounty hunter, VISH. They manage to subdue the bounty hunter but Nuthea is gravely wounded in the process. Ryn beats Sagar to the hunter's mount and rushes Nuthea to the nearest town where he finds a healer, CID, a mysterious old man who saves the princess's life with his arts and asks to join the traveling party, saying that he believes it is the purpose of ‘the One', the God that he and Nuthea each worship. On leaving the town the party is pursued by an enormous monster driven by a troop of Imperial soldiers. The party manage to escape with the help of Vish, who fights on their side in exchange for Cid supplying his poppy-seed habit. Cid reveals that he was once a member of another adventuring party who set out to find the twelve Primeval Jewels, but failed. The party press on to the capital city of Sirra, where they ambush some Imperial soldiers and steal their uniforms in order to sneak onto a sleeper train bound for Nuthea's homeland. They make it aboard successfully, but then Ryn gives them away when he comes face to face with General Vorr on the train and is unable to prevent himself from attacking him. The party are thus forced to escape from the train by leaping into a river it is passing. But there encounter with Vorr has revealed two things: that the Fire Ruby-touched Imperials are invulnerable to Nuthea's lightning attacks, and that Nuthea was the person who once accidentally gave Vorr the location of the Fire Ruby, thus leading to the destruction of Ryn's hometown and the death of his parents. After a brief rest stop, the party press on towards Manolia in order for Nuthea to warn her people of the Morekemian Empire's new knowledge of the Jewels. However, when Nuthea speaks with her mother, the Queen, and reveals that she knows of the whereabouts of other Jewels, the Queen is assassinated and Vorr appears from behind her throne with a battalion of soldiers—he has been waiting to entrap the companions and was holding the Queen hostage A vicious battle ensues, in which Ryn touches Vorr with the lightning crystal, stripping him of resistance to fire, and kills him, and with the help of the Fire Ruby the companions and Manolians overpower the soldiers.Episode 20: Now What?!Ryn stood panting halfway up the balcony steps and surveyed the aftermath of the battle in an exhausted trance.It was almost entirely black-armoured bodies that lay about the floor, though there were a handful of golden-armoured Manolians too, who Cid had not been able to save since he had used up the last of his mana reserves for the time being healing Ryn's leg. But most of the Manolian guards had survived. Ryn was surprised to see that, in fact, not all of them were blonde, but some had brown, dark, even red hair underneath their golden helmets.Elrann, Vish and Sagar were up here with them too. Smoke coiled up from the barrels of Elrann's pistols and Imperial blood dripped from Sagar and Vish's swords. All of them were panting. Even Vish.Everyone seemed to be looking at Ryn“Well…” said Sagar, then paused for a moment. “...well done, pup. I hate to say it, but you got us out of a sticky situation there. If you hadn't got the Ruby off that Imperial officer and got it to the ladies, then boosted up here to distract the soldiers until they arrived… Well… thank you.”A ‘thank you' from Sagar. Anything was possible… Ryn was too battle-fatigued to appreciate it properly at the moment though.“Yes, thank you...young man,” said one of the Manolians who had long brown hair. She sounded almost as reluctant to say it as Sagar had been, if not more so. “If it hadn't been for your intervention, we might have lost our princess, as well as our Queen.”Princess?“Nuthea!” Ryn said, realising she wasn't up here with them.She was still down on the ground floor of the throne room, next to the throne, kneeling on the dais, her face buried in her mother's neck.When they got down there they all stood in a circle around her.Nobody said anything for a while. Nuthea stayed where she was.Ryn knelt down next to her and tried a whisper. “Um, Nuthea… I'm… I'm really sorry you lost your mother…but…are you going to get up?”No response.Kathuna came and knelt with them too, and spoke equally quietly.“Princess… Our grief is great, and there must be time for mourning. But now that the Queen has died, the throne will pass to you. You must be strong for the Queendom.”At that Nuthea raised her face. It was tear-soaked, her blue eyes bloodshot.“You are right,” she said resolutely, seeming to harden all of a sudden. “I must compose myself. It is what she would have wanted.”She wiped her face with both hands. Then, without warning she stood up and addressed the ring of adventurers and her guardswomen.“The Manolian throne now passes to me,” she said to them. “And already it is fixed in my mind what I am to do with it. Never in our long and glorious history has an adversary infiltrated this palace and assassinated a Queen. We must make sure that nothing like this ever happens again. That's why I am leaving tomorrow on a quest to find the rest of the Primeval Jewels before the Emperor of Morekemia.”“What?!” said all of the other Manolians at once.“Do not forget yourselves in the presence of your new Queen-to-be,” Nuthea said sternly, her eyes flashing. “The whole reason this came to pass is because the Morekemians were after our Lightning Crystal. As long as it remains here, Manolia is not safe. You heard that Imperial General. They know of other Jewels already. The Emperor will clearly stop at nothing to get his hands on them. But we have the advantage now. We have two Jewels, and two more who are Jewel-touched. The Emperor must be stopped, not only for the sake of Manolia but for the sake of the whole of Mid itself. We must find the remaining jewels before he does. That is why I am leaving with the Lightning Crystal, to do just that.”As he listened to her, Ryn was surprised to discover that he was inclined to agree. What Nuthea was saying felt...right. And once he knew that, he also knew right away that he must join her. What else was he going to do with his life now? His hometown was still destroyed. There was nothing left for him to go back to in Efstan. And he had finally achieved the goal that brought him here. Mother. Father. Hometown. Found Vorr. Got Vorr. Forgave Vorr. Killed Vorr. Stay with Nuthea. Find the Jewels. Save the world.“But princess,” one of the Manolians was saying. “If you leave us, who will govern the Queendom?”“Kathuna will serve as regent while I am away,” Nuthea said without hesitation. “She has been a strong and loyal friend to me for a very long time. I trust her judgment implicitly.”“But princess,” said Kathuna, “I want to come with you.”“Yes,” said another of the guards. “We all want to come with you.”“We will muster a mighty Manolian army, and make war on Morekemia!”“For Queen Nuthea!” said another, and raised her weapon.“Queen Nuthea!” they all said together, and raised their spears in unison.“No!” Nuthea said, and they lowered their spears again, looking like chided children. “First, I have not been coronated yet. And second, this quest does not call for an army or a great show of strength. I will need to operate covertly, seeking out the Jewels one by one and warning their owners of the Emperor's intent, without being detected by him.”“Then who will you take with you?” said Kathuna.“I would take those who helped me to return here, and who made it possible to defeat the Imperials who infiltrated the palace.”She turned to Sagar, Elrann, Cid and Vish, who were all standing next to each other in the circle. She did not look at Ryn.Sagar was the first to respond, and held up both his hands in front of him. “Woah, now! Just wait a second here. I believe I was promised gold, jewels and beautiful women in return for bringing you safely back here, isn't that right, princess?”“Yes, I suppose I did promise you those things…” Nuthea said with a sideways glance, to a chorus of gasps from her assembled countrywomen. She gestured with her hands for them to calm down. “Let's see then…” she said pensively, and Ryn detected just the faintest note of mockery in her voice. “Well, gold we have aplenty in Manolia, and we shall be taking lots of it as we shall need lots on our journey, to look after our airship and stay stocked with supplies. Jewels, we have two: the fire Ruby, and the Lighting Crystal. And as for beautiful women--well, I am not unattractive in appearance, am I?” Understatement of the century, Ryn thought. Though he didn't like that Nuthea was pointing this out to Sagar. “And Elrann is beautiful too, in her own special way.”“Thanks, princess-girl,” said Erlann. “I think.”“So really you will have everything you were promised as a reward if you come with us on this quest.” Ryn noticed how she said ‘us'. Who did she mean when she said ‘us'? Did she mean him and her, or the others, or all of the above?“Now hang on,” said Sagar, getting worked up, pointing a finger at Nuthea. “This is not what I signed up for. That is not what I thought you meant when you promised me ‘gold, jewels and beautiful women' and you know it.”“Well,” said Nuthea thoughtfully again, biting her lip, “I suppose you could stay here if you wanted. As I said, there is a lot of gold in Manolia, and there are some jewels of the non-Primeval variety here as well. I would even give you some to send you on your way with, skycaptain. But with regards to the beautiful women…” She became more serious for a moment. “Well, yes, I am afraid to say I may have misled you there somewhat. My apologies.”Now Nuthea was apologising for something. This truly was a day of impossible happenings.“I mean,” Nuthea went on, back to her slightly more playful tone, “there are lots of very beautiful women in this country too, but they won't allow themselves to just be ‘given' to a man. I suppose you could commit yourself to the service of a woman who would have you and see if you could win their affections over time, but there is no guarantee there, I'm afraid.”Sagar looked from Nuthea to the Manolian guardswomen that stood assembled with them. One of them winked at him. Another made a little meowing noise and playfully waved a hand at him like a cat pawing at a toy.“Rrrrr,” said Sagar as he turned back to Nuthea. He had turned purple.“What's more,” said Nuthea, “I would really rather prefer it if you came with us, seeing as in order to get around on our quest we will be needing your airship.”“My ship?!” exclaimed Sagar. “What about my ship? How do you know where my ship is?”“Well, you heard Vorr, didn't you? He managed to get a single ship into Manolia to get his audience with my mother. He stole your airship, didn't he? I assume that it is therefore somewhere around here.”“My ship… said Sagar quietly, looking off into the distance.”“Furthermore, if you come with us, although I can only promise you at present the company of two beautiful women, I will pay you monthly for the use of your ship, in addition to the substantial fee that you are due for safely delivering me back to my homeland.”Sagar continued to stare at nothing for a while. Eventually, slowly, his eyes came back to the princess. “In that case… I can't believe I'm saying this but… alright then. Rrrr. I must be crazy. I want a lot of gold for this.”“You will have it,” said Nuthea. “An excellent choice, skycaptain.”Her eyes moved one person along the circle. “Elrann, will you come with us too?”The purple-haired engineer shrugged. “Sure, I'll come. I've got nothing else better to do, what with Imfis being invaded and all. Er, I wouldn't mind taking a cut of that gold, though. For serving as the ship's engineer, like.”“Consider it done,” said Nuthea.“Hey--” started Sagar.“Don't worry, skycaptain, that is, of course, in addition to what you will be paid for navigation and the use of your ship.”“Oh,” said Sagar. “Well I guess that's alright, then...”Nuthea beamed at Elrann. “Good to have you aboard, Engineer Elrann.” Her eyes moved one person along again. “Grandfather?”“Of course I will come with you,” said Cid straight away. “There is nothing that I want more. Except at present possibly a hot meal and a warm bath. But to quest with you in this way has been my intention from the start, as you know, Granddaughter. It is the Will of the One.” “It is the Will of the One,” agreed Nuthea, nodding. “Shadowfinger Vish?”“I will come with you so long as you keep me supplied with poppy.”“I can do that,” said Cid. “And slowly we will work at weaning you off it and getting you clean.Vish just grunted. He didn't seem all that keen on the idea of being ‘weaned off' the poppy, but he had said he would come with them all the same.“Good,” then it's settled, said Nuthea. Huh? Isn't she going to ask me? “Guards, have chambers made up for my companions. I want them in the finest guest rooms, the ones in the east tower. Rest well, my friends. I will see you at dinner in the feasting hall. I have business to attend to.” Her voice trembled very slightly as she said that last sentence, but Ryn wasn't sure anyone else noticed. “You will be provided with food, drink, and new clothing. We leave at first light tomorrow.”The circle broke, her guards taking this as a signal to get to work, to move about and start talking to one another, to begin clearing the bodies from the hall.Nuthea had gone back to her mother and was looking down at her, one hand over her mouth. She was managing to hold back the tears, for now.Ryn couldn't hold out any more.“Nuthea…” he said gently.She turned to him at last, and her eyebrows rose above her pale blue eyes, as if she was expecting him to say something to her.“I'm…” said Ryn. He broke under her gaze and had to look at the floor. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry for behaving like such a...like such a b*****d and being so horrible to you for the last part of our journey. I was mixed up and confused and full of rage and hate.” He looked up at her still-expectant face. “But I've dealt with that now--I've gotten rid of it. I'm sorry for holding onto it for so long.”Nuthea held his gaze, held him in agony as he waited for her response.“It's alright, Ryn,” she said finally. “It was unpleasant, but I forgive you. The Way of the One is to forgive.” She moved close to him all of a sudden, and gave him a delicate kiss on the cheek. “You can spend the rest of the quest making it up to me,” she whispered quietly into his ear. “Thank you for saving us from the Imperials, and from Vorr.”She walked past him, away into the crowd of guardswomen rushing to and fro, and began to issue them with commands--the first, to have the body of her mother removed from the throne room.Ryn stood watching her go. The small place on his cheek felt on fire with sensation, and he had to put a hand to it to make sure that it was not, in fact, actually on fire.“Well, pup, you did it,” said a voice from someone stepping up next to him. “You finally killed the General. I suppose I'm actually a little bit impressed. But only a little bit.”Ryn turned and looked down at Vorr's body with Sagar. The General's corpse lay flat on its back, its flesh abnormally red and brown and charred. Its eyes were closed. It was beginning to stink.“You know,” said Ryn. “In the end, I didn't even want to kill him any more. But strangely, letting go of my hatred for him, and for myself, was what gave me the power to beat him.”“You what?” said Sagar, uncomprehending.“Well done, Ryn,” said Cid, stepping up to join them too. “You've taken your first steps on the Way of the One.”Ryn didn't reply, but he thought I suppose I have. And that may not be a bad thing.“Er, guys…” said Elrann, looking up at them on the dais from where she stood on the floor next to Vish. “What do we do now?”“I am going to go and take some poppy,” said Vish, turning away.“Wait!” said Cid to him. “Can't you hold out a little longer?”“No,” said Vish.Ryn spoke up now. “We'll come with you. What we do now is find our ‘guest rooms' and get some good rest before dinner is served. You heard Nuthea--we're leaving on our quest at first light tomorrow and we want to make sure that we're all well fed, watered, washed and rested.”“Pup, that's the most sensible thing you've said all day.”And off they all walked together, to find a Manolian to show them to their chambers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sagaofthejewels.substack.com

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Previously on Saga of the Jewels…Seventeen year old Ryn's hometown is attacked by General Vorr of the Empire and everyone he has ever known is killed. Just before he dies, Ryn's father gives him a ruby, which causes him to project fire. Ryn is captured by the Empire and meets another captive, Princess Nuthea, who has the ability to project lightning. Nuthea explains to him that the Empire have learned of the existence of twelve Primeval Jewels which grant the ability to manipulate different elements, and are searching for them. The Imperial vessel where they are being held is in turn attacked by a pirate airship, and the pirates capture Ryn and Nuthea. The lead pirate, Captain Sagar, agrees to escort Nuthea back to her homeland, and to spare Ryn's life, in exchange for the promise of gold, gemstones and beautiful women upon her safe delivery. They land in the port city of Ast and recruit an engineer called Elrann. Ast is then attacked by the Empire, who are using the Fire Ruby to invade the continent and search for more of the Jewels. Ryn, Nuthea, Sagar and Elrann flee the city together, but are then attacked by a bounty hunter, Vish. They manage to subdue the bounty hunter but Nuthea is gravely wounded in the process. Ryn beats Sagar to the hunter's mount and rushes Nuthea to the nearest town where he finds a healer, Cid, a mysterious old man who saves the princess's life with his arts and asks to join the traveling party, saying that he believes it is the purpose of ‘the One', the god that he and Nuthea each worship. On leaving the town the party is pursued by an enormous dog-like monster driven by a troop of Imperial soldiers. The party manage to escape with the help of Vish, who fights on their side in exchange for Cid supplying his poppy-seed habit. Cid reveals that he was once a member of another adventuring party who set out to find the twelve Primeval Jewels, but failed. The party now press on towards the next stop on their journey, the capital city of Sirra, where they ambush some Imperial soldiers and steal their uniforms in order to try to sneak onto a train bound for Manolia…“Alright chumps, so here's the plan,” said Sagar.They stood in their stolen Imperial armour looking at the large, dirty, blocky building that was Sirra Station from a nearby street. A huge round clock adorned the front of it. Both of the long black hands had almost reached the number twelve, though the longer still had ten more minutes to traverse until it got there. It was dark. To either side of the station building ran tall, spiked, iron fences.Five of them had waited here while Sagar had gone inside the station once already to carry out reconnaissance.“Basically,” Sagar continued, “we can get on a train that will take us right to the border of Manolia. There's an express sleeper train heading there leaving very soon, at midnight. They're taking troops down there to amass a land invasion force.”“Why don't they just invade by airship,” Ryn asked, “like they did here?”“Because of our lightning projection,” Nuthea explained.“Huh?” said Ryn.“We can blow airships out of the sky with lightning bolts,” Nuthea said proudly. “Land forces are harder.” “In any case,” said Sagar, “we need to be on that train. So what we're going to do is go through the front entrance, find the correct train, and board it, as though we're part of the invasion force that is being transported there.”“That's your plan?!” said Elrann.“Yes.”“So the plan is basically: We walk onto the train?”“Yes.” “You're an idiot.”Sagar's mouth twitched. “Rrrr. It's a fine plan! We're in Imperial armour, aren't we? Nobody will know who we are.”“Stop bickering,” said Nuthea, apparently now familiar enough with both Sagar and Elrann to reprimand them like this. “It's the best plan we've got, and our mission is urgent. Come on; it's nearly time.” She drew a deep breath. “Let's go.”Ryn walked towards the station with the others.He went through one of the entrance doors, his whole body tense, hyper-aware of his every movement in his Imperial armour disguise. The helmet, while not heavy, had grown stuffy, and he could feel his own shallow breaths on the front of his face. While it offered him some protection from head-wounds and discovery, it also obscured his vision to a horizontal slit that disappeared into darkness at either side, so that he had to turn his head if he wanted to see into his periphery. The inside of Sirra's Main Station was massive. The high ceiling sloped up into the pointed roof they had seen from the outside, from which hung lanterns on chains, lighting the lobby with a white glow. At the far end, a series of desks broke up metal barriers at intervals which barred the way to different doors and passages that Sagar had told them led to the different ‘platforms'. Across the stone floor, to and from these barriers, walked soldiers in the same armour as they were wearing, like a self-organising colony of black-shelled worker ants. “Pssst. Ryn,” whispered Cid next to him. “Don't lose your focus.” Ryn shook his head briefly and concentrated on walking with the group again. He had allowed himself to be distracted for a moment by the sheer number of Imperial soldiers in the station and veer off course slightly. It was extremely important that none of them lost sight of each other, as they all looked like Imperial soldiers now and wouldn't be able to tell the difference between each other if they got separated. Although Ryn fancied he'd still be able to tell Nuthea a mile off. She walked in front of him now, her head held high, something very slightly out of place about the way she tried to keep her gait graceful and soft-footed despite the clunky armour she was in—despite her disguise, she was still trying to walk like royalty.Gods, I hope nobody sees through us, Ryn thought, though he didn't know why he was still addressing his thoughts to the gods. Especially Nuthea. You can take the princess out of the palace, but you can't take the palace out of the princess.Of their party, Vish alone wasn't wearing armour, though his black attire didn't seem to attract any unwanted attention from the Morekemians. If anything, the soldiers seemed to give Vish a slightly wide berth. Apparently Shadowfingers were people to be avoided, or at least not gotten too close to. That could be to their advantage. Sagar led them to the clerk's desk for platform four, which he'd told them he'd found out was the one with the train bound for Manolia. They took their place in a queue for it and shuffled along a few paces every time another soldier got clearance and went through the barrier. Ryn tried as hard as he could to slow and deepen his rapid, shallow breaths. When they got to the front of the line, the armoured grunt behind the desk said “Destination?” without looking up from the papers in front of him.“Manolia,” said Sagar. “Unit?” said the grunt. A pause. “Er…” said Sagar. Panic gripped Ryn's chest. Apparently Sagar hadn't known this was coming, or thought this far ahead… The grunt looked up from his desk. Ryn could see the man's gray eyes through his horizontal helmet-visor, and they narrowed. “What unit are you with, soldier? It's a simple question.” What do we do? What do we do? “They're with me,” said Vish all of a sudden. “They're serving as my retinue for a mission.” The grunt turned his head, then practically jumped out of his seat. “Oh! My apologies, Shadowfinger Vish, I didn't see you there! No wonder you didn't answer,” he said to Sagar. “Please, come right through.” He pulled a lever on his side of the desk and the metal barrier in front of them swung up. Ryn had to make a concerted effort not to run through. They passed under the barrier and into the walled corridor beyond. When they had gone a few steps, Ryn whispered “That was lucky,” to Sagar. “Did you know that was going to happen?” “Be quiet, pup,” Sagar hissed back. “I had everything under control.”“It's a good thing we had the bounty hunter with us,” whispered Elrann. Sagar made no reply. The corridor opened onto a dark, dusty platform. All along it stood a series of conjoined rectangular steel boxes with multiple glass windows set into them. So this is a train. They followed the stream of soldiers on board. It was cramped inside the train, and Ryn suddenly became very worried that he was going to lose sight of his companions in the crush of soldiers. A soldier with his helmet off stood just inside the door they entered by, bellowing at the new arrivals as they boarded. “Keep it moving, soldiers!” he yelled at Ryn and company when they passed him, spittle flying from his mouth, a vein throbbing on the temple of his fat, close-shaven head. “We haven't got all night! We need to be in Manolia by dawn! Train leaves in five minutes! Eight to a compartment! Get on with it!” Hang on, eight to a compartment?! But we're only six! Ryn's pulse began to pound between his ears as he walked down the narrow walkway that ran the length of the train, passing closed metal doors. That was still Sagar walking in front of him, he was sure of it, and—he glanced quickly over his shoulder—there was Vish just behind him. But where were the others? Were they still following? And how were they going to make sure they all ended up in the same compartment without two extra random soldiers joining them? We didn't properly think through what we were going to do when we actually got to our destination! Sagar had just said something vague about sneaking away from the Imperials when they got to Manolia, just like they were sneaking onto the train. But how was that going to be possible?Before Ryn could panic any further, suddenly Sagar turned off to the right, through the first open door he had come to. Ryn followed him.Inside was a small room with two cushioned benches that faced each other from either wall. Between them on the far side of the compartment ran another wall with a window looking out onto the dimness of the station platform.Following Sagar's lead, Ryn went and sat on one of the benches next to him. They watched the door carefully. In came Vish, who sat at the end of the opposite bench. That makes three. Then more soldiers entered. Four, five, six…seven! Eight! Ohcrapohcrapohcrap. The last soldier in shut the door behind him. “Phew!” he exclaimed in a voice Ryn didn't recognise. He collapsed onto the bench opposite Ryn. “It's bad enough that they fly us non-stop to Imfis without any breaks and barely any rations, but then they frog march us to the station as soon as we get here! I need some sleep!” The soldier took off his helmet and rested it on his knee. He had a friendly, grinning face and a mop of thick, brown hair. He was young--maybe in his early twenties. Ryn found that he liked the man immediately, which confused him. “Ah, quit your whining, Tillbrook,” said the soldier whom he had sat next to. This one took off his helmet too. A somewhat older, more weathered-looking man with graying hair, a hooked nose, and a big scar along one cheek. “This is nothing. In the Umbar campaign I once flew for two days straight without anything to eat, then got dropped directly into combat. At least here we're getting a run-up.” He looked at Ryn sat on the bench across from him. “Aren't you going to take your helmet off? We're off duty now, ya know.”Not wanting to appear out of the ordinary, Ryn lifted his hands to remove his helmet, but then Sagar elbowed him in the side. Oh yeah, that's right. Three of us have bounties on our heads. Ryn's cheeks blushed hot and all of a sudden he was very glad that he was wearing the helmet. “We prefer to keep them on,” Sagar said.The older soldier frowned at him. “What in the hells for?”Uh-oh.“Because they're with me,” said Vish, from further along the bench the soldiers were sitting on. The soldiers each turned to look at who had spoken, then jolted with surprise.“A Shadowfinger!” said the younger one.“I thought you were all chasing a bounty in Northern Imfis?” said the older.“We were,” said Vish, “but I completed on it, and now I've been redeployed to Manolia on a classified mission. These three are serving as my retinue, but they must keep their helmets on at all times. No questions asked.”The soldiers looked at each other for a moment, then the older one shrugged. “Suit yourselves, then.”Ryn's shoulders relaxed a little. It seemed that Vish carried enough authority that this wasn't going to be queried any further. Just then a high pitched whistle sounded and the train began to strain forwards slowly. The platform began to scroll past through the windows. Outside, the pistons turning the wheels of the train began to pound out an increasingly fast rhythm. In moments they were out of the station, moving through the white buildings of Sirra which glinted in moon- and lantern-light, and before long they were again traversing the darkness of the Imfisi plains that Sirra sat within. Only now they weren't just walking across them; now they were traveling much faster than they had been before.“Well,” said the younger soldier, “I'm completely beat. Do you guys mind if we get some sleep?”“Good idea,” said Vish for the rest of them.The two unhelmeted soldiers stood and pulled down another bench Ryn hadn't realised was built into the wall above the one they had been sitting on. It folded out of the wall and hung suspended from it by two chains at either end. He, Sagar and whoever else was sitting at his side--Nuthea? Elrann?--did the same with the bunk on their side of the carriage.With the two bunks folded down, you could just about fit two people lying down one after the other onto each of the four benches now available in the carriage.“We'll take the top,” said Tilbrook deferentiality to Vish, and he and the older soldier climbed up.Ryn took one of the spaces on the bottom bunk on his side. He had no idea who was lying down on the other end of it, but they each lay so that their helmeted heads would be next to each other in the middle of the bench.“Night all,” said Tilbrook.And then there was just the darkness, and the gentle rattle and chug of the train as it traveled through the Imfisi plains.Chukkachukachukkachuckkachukkachukka.Ryn stared up at the grubby underside of the bunk above him as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Well, this was some predicament they had got themselves into. Aboard an Imperial-commandeered train bound for Manolia, stuck in a carriage with two genuine Imperial soldiers, which meant they couldn't even talk openly to each other. Maybe they should kill the soldiers while they slept? No, that was a horrible idea. That was thinking like Sagar. Even if they were working for the Empire, these two soldiers didn't seem to be murderous monsters like Vorr. They seemed like they were just trying to get by and do a job to earn a living. They were just following orders. Nuthea was right; it wouldn't be right to kill them in cold blood. Though he wouldn't put it past Sagar for the idea to cross his mind, too… Hopefully the pirate wouldn't do anything stupid. He hadn't so far, at least, and from the snoring noises coming from the opposite top bunk the two soldiers seemed to be fast asleep.What was Ryn even doing here? Mother. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Kill Vorr. Stay with Nuthea. He wasn't even certain that General Vorr would be coming this way--it was just his best guess. He shut his eyes. In the darkness and the encasement of his helmet, familiar images started to crowd in on him, invading his mind's eye. His mother being pierced by a sword. His father's eyes going out of focus. The Imperial General laughing in his face. How was he going to get to sleep like this, without the cool of the open air and the reassuring chatter of his traveling companions to lull him into unconsciousness?He thought he would try to talk to Sagar on the bench next to him for a little while. Even that might be better than just lying here in the dark with his memories. Might.“Sagar?” Ryn whispered as quietly as he could so that only the pirate, whose head lay a little way from his own, could hear.Nothing. Then: “No,” whispered back a noble, feminine voice after a moment, “it's me.” Nuthea. Ryn could barely believe his luck.He better say something else to her. “Are you alright?”“Yes, quite alright! Stop talking and let me go to sleep!”That stung.For a moment there was only the chukkachukkachukka of the train again.“Ryn?” This time she had spoken first.“...yes?”“I'm sorry; I didn't mean that. The truth is...the truth is I'm not alright. I'm...I'm scared.” Wow. A rare admission of vulnerability from the lightning-slinging, lecture-delivering princess. “What are you scared of?” asked Ryn eventually. Stupid question. What wasn't there to be scared of right now?“I'm...I'm scared that we won't make it to Manolia,” Nuthea whispered. “I'm scared that we'll be discovered. I'm scared that the Empire will find all the Jewels and overrun the world.”That's quite a lot to be scared of, fair enough… Ryn thought. But instead he said, “I know. Me too. I'm scared of all those things too, and I'm scared that I'll never be able to find Vorr again, or that I'll find him, but I won't be able to beat him when I find him.”“You can beat him,” said Nuthea. “You're doing really well in your training.” I shouldn't need to hear her say that, thought Ryn, but I sure like that she did. “If you continue on as you are doing you are only going to grow more powerful in the use of your gift and your swordsmanship. But, Ryn…” She paused. “Ryn, by the time you do find him, and I'm sure you will be able to find him again, you might not want revenge on him any more…”Ryn's brow furrowed inside his helmet. Why would she say something like that? He thought of Vorr again, of the man with the thick-set jaw and the flaming red hair, laughing in his face. At the very thought of him, Ryn's hands grew hotter and the tips of his fingers tingled.“There's no way I'm going to stop wanting revenge on him,” Ryn whispered to himself as much as Nuthea. “He murdered my parents and destroyed my hometown. Why would I ever not want to take revenge on him?”Nuthea took a while to speak again. Eventually, she whispered, “It is not the Way of the One. The Way of the One is to forgive.”Ah, there she goes with her One stuff again. Ryn wasn't in the mood for this right now. But he didn't want to be harsh with Nuthea, especially if she was feeling scared at the moment. “Alright,” he said, “well, I'll think about it.”“Thank you.”“But Nuthea?”“Yes?”“Look, it's okay to be scared. It makes sense. Like I said, I'm scared too. But you've got a lot of people around you right now to take care of you. Me. Sagar. Elrann. Cid. And I guess Vish too. We'll take care of you and make sure you get to Manolia, alright?” I'll take care of you, he added in his head, but he didn't quite find the courage to whisper it.“Thank you, Ryn,” said Nuthea. “I am glad of that.”Ryn smiled inside his helmet.“Hey lovebirds!” someone whispered from the bunk above them.Ryn spasmed and nearly fell off the bench. He hadn't realised anyone else could hear them.“Stop talking so we can get some sleep!” Elrann whispered again. “Yeah!” whispered someone else from above. No, not Sagar too! “You're lucky those two bucketheads are sleeping like babies, or you might have given us away! Quit yammering and go to sleep!”“Sorry…” Ryn whispered back sheepishly.They ceased talking. Ryn's blush had come back to his cheeks, and he was even more grateful no one could see it. As it slowly faded and the tingling in his fingers died away, he thought of his conversation with Nuthea, listened to the chukkachukkachukka of the train, rocked with its gentle movements, and eventually felt himself slipping into sleep. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sagaofthejewels.substack.com

This chapter is dedicated to Stephen Hibbs, because it was written early in the mornings during the school lockdown at the start of 2021 when I was working remotely as a teacher in a school in an empty classroom by myself, which was really lonely and difficult. Stephen called me every day to help me get through it. What a total legend.Previously on Saga of the Jewels…Seventeen year old Ryn's hometown is attacked by General Vorr of the Empire and everyone he has ever known is killed. Just before he dies, Ryn's father gives him a ruby, which causes him to project fire. Ryn is captured by the Empire and meets another captive, Princess Nuthea, who has the ability to project lightning. Nuthea explains to him that the Empire have learned of the existence of twelve Primeval Jewels which grant the ability to manipulate different elements, and are searching for them. The Imperial vessel where they are being held is in turn attacked by a pirate airship, and the pirates capture Ryn and Nuthea. The lead pirate, Captain Sagar, agrees to escort Nuthea back to her homeland, and to spare Ryn's life, in exchange for the promise of gold, gemstones and beautiful women upon her safe delivery. They land in the port city of Ast and recruit an engineer called Elrann. Ast is then attacked by the Empire, who are using the Fire Ruby to invade the continent and search for more of the Jewels. Ryn, Nuthea, Sagar and Elrann flee the city together, but are then attacked by a bounty hunter, Vish. They manage to subdue the bounty hunter but Nuthea is gravely wounded in the process. Ryn beats Sagar to the hunter's mount and rushes Nuthea to the nearest town where he finds a healer, Cid, a mysterious old man who saves the princess's life with his arts and asks to join the traveling party, saying that he believes it is the purpose of ‘the One', the god that he and Nuthea each worship. On leaving the town the party is pursued by an enormous dog-like monster driven by a troop of Imperial soldiers. The party manage to escape with the help of Vish, who fights on their side in exchange for Cid supplying his poppy-seed habit. Cid reveals that he was once a member of another adventuring party who set out to find the twelve Primeval Jewels, but failed. The party now press on towards the next stop on their journey, the capital city of Sirra…The night after they escaped from the monstrous dog, Ryn slept better than he had in a long time, probably from exhaustion. They slept outside, wrapped in thick gray woolspun cloaks that Cid had brought with him from Nonts--one for each of them--along with his other food supplies. They slept on the grassy earth under a roof decorated with myriad stars, having finally made it out of the woods that surrounded Nonts, although they kept close to the tree cover in case they were attacked again and needed to flee into it. They set a watch, and took turns taking it, and Ryn was glad to have one of the later watches of the night which meant he could get a good chunk of sleep before Elrann invariably shook him groggily awake and whispered “Your turn, farmboy.”They rode for the better part of each day, stopping only to eat from the provisions that Cid had brought with him--bread, hard cheese, some salt beef, watery wine, and the odd apple. It would take them five or so days of chocobo riding to get to Sirra, Cid said.The terrain mostly consisted of flat fields, though it did rise and fall from time to time, making the chocobos work harder to carry them, and here and there it was dotted with little woods and forests, which they made good headway through, re-checking their direction of travel against the traversing sun whenever they emerged back into the open fields.They looked over their shoulders constantly as they rode, and continued to set watches at night, but for now no more Imperials came their way, nor monstrous dogs, nor Shadowfingers, despite Vish's insistence that there were others on the hunt for them. They seemed to have escaped the grasp of the Empire by running away on their chocobos, at least for now. In fact, looking out over the flat green fields only occasionally interrupted by a fence or a farmstead or a forest, with the bright sun lighting up the clear blue sky and their route ahead of them, you could almost be forgiven for forgetting that this country had recently been invaded by the Empire at all.“But that's only because we're in the provincial grasslands on the far outskirts of Sirra, pup,” Sagar explained from his mount on the second day when Ryn voiced this thought. Ryn was still bitter that Sagar got to ride with Nuthea, while he was stuck riding his bird with Vish. “When we get to the city--you'll see--that's where the fighting will have been. That's where those airships were headed when they left us behind in Ast.”In the tiny amount of free time that Ryn got between sleeping, eating and riding, he practiced his flame projection powers and his swordsmanship. Nuthea had told him that he needed to practice his flame projection in order to grow in skill and increase the amount of time he was able to use it before he grew too tired, which she said was linked to something called his ‘mana reserve', so he took every spare moment that he got to practice forming little flames in his hands, concentrating hard to hold them in existence, then deliberately willing them to extinguish. “That's it--you have to practice commanding the element into existence, then shutting it off again,” Nuthea said one evening when observing him practice, nodding sagely. Ryn was glad of the excuse to spend time with her. “Then, once you've mastered that, you can focus on manipulating it--making particular forms and shapes, and sending them in directions that you choose.”Ryn sometimes ‘practiced his flames', as he came to think of it, when he was on watch too, but he had to be careful doing that as he didn't want to give away their presence to any prowling Imperials or Shadowfingers that might be on their trail. Once he accidentally lit a flame too bright and it woke Sagar up, who swore loudly and in turn woke the whole of the rest of the group up. They were a grumpy traveling party on that particular morning.The other thing Ryn practiced was swordfighting. When they had set out after defeating the dog-monster near Nonts, he had made sure to take the sword from one of the corpses of the Imperial soldiers who had been chasing them. Cid, who had also taken one of the Imperial's blades and somehow knew swordfighting despite his profession, offered to teach Ryn. Ryn wondered whether Sagar was actually better with a sword, but Cid seemed to know what he was doing, and Ryn felt he would much prefer to be taught by Cid than Sagar. So in the few remaining moments between riding, sleeping, eating and practicing his flames, he practiced with his sword with Cid a little way away from the rest of the group, following the old man's instructions in swinging, thrusting, blocking and parrying as they traded carefully pre-agreed blows. Sometimes when people fell quiet on the long rides during the day, or during his night watches before he started practicing his element-projection, Ryn tried to remember his life before any of this had happened--before the Empire had attacked his hometown. The trouble was, he couldn't. Of course, some memories stood out, which he clung to like solid rocks in a seething, foggy sea of despair. His birth-day celebrations with mother and father. Racing the farm chocobos out in the woods with Jaq and Fargu on seventhdays. Making Carlotia laugh in the classroom at the town school. It wasn't as if all of this had happened very long ago. But even these memories were growing faint, the light and colour fading from them as time passed. He found he could no longer remember any of their faces clearly. And they all threatened to be swallowed up by the one single big memory that loomed large in his mind, that his mind didn't seem to be able to let go of: His mother and father being killed, and his hometown being destroyed. The thoughts of all that, the images of the sword going into his mother's chest, the burning buildings, and the light going out of his father's eyes, never really left him. They came to him unbidden, again and again, when he was riding, when he was talking to Nuthea and the others, while he was eating, making water or before he fell asleep. Mother. Father. Hometown. It was like his mind was obsessed with the events and couldn't let them go, and nor could he move on from them either. It was torture. Once he had recovered from the exhaustion of escaping Nonts, he continued to re-live the whole thing again and again in his sleep. Sometimes he would wake in the night shouting at the memories, as he had done when Cid had revived him from his sword-wound, sometimes with whimpers and moans, which was extremely embarrassing. Rarely, if ever, did he wake up feeling refreshed. His nerves were constantly frayed and his head ached all the time.There was only one way out, as far as he could see:Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr.What he would do after that, if he ever managed it, he did not know. There was only ever one other vague notion that now occasionally presented itself in his mind:Stay with Nuthea?*Late on their sixth day of riding, sore and sleepy, they sighted Sirra.The first things they saw were lights. Where they had been riding for what felt to Ryn's backside like an age over grasslands and fields that turned black with dusk, all at once little pinpricks of light appeared in the blackness.A few leagues further and the pinpricks turned out to have been the lights of hearths and candles in the homes of a smaller settlement on the outskirts of the city of Sirra.“There are lots of these smaller towns on the edges of Sirra,” said Elrann, who knew the city best. “As you get nearer to it they get denser and denser until you're properly in the city and everything is paved streets.”They rode on past the buildings, and some curtains twitched. They got glimpses of people staring out at them for brief moments.“Why is nobody outside?” said Ryn from atop his mount with Vish. “Why is nobody coming out to greet us?”“Why d'you think, pup?” said Sagar. “They're scared. They've been invaded--they're under occupation. We haven't seen any soldiers out here, but you can bet when we get to Sirra proper it will be crawling with them.”Ryn's cheeks flushed hot. Stupid question.Despite the fact that with every chocobo-step they took closer to Sirra they got closer to danger, they rode on. They had discussed the plan in detail two days ago.“What are we actually going to do when we get to Sirra?” Ryn had asked as they had been riding over the Imfisi plains.“We've been over this,” said Sagar. “We're going to board a train to Manolia.”Ryn had never been on a train before but he knew what they were.   “But will the trains really still be running,” said Elrann, “if Morekemia have occupied Imfis?”“Not for their usual purposes,” said Sagar “but I'd be willing to gamble good money that the Empire will have reappropriated them. If they've flown in a load of soldiers here to occupy Imfis with a military presence, the Emperor is probably planning to use Imfis as his base of operations in Dokan. If he's doing that, he'll need good control of the whole country, especially its borders. In the long run, it would be easier to also move soldiers to and from the borders using the Imfisi train system, rather than having to fly them every time. That means he'll still be using the trains.”“But how are we going to get on a train?” Elrann pressed. “Most of us are probably wanted by the Empire now, with bounties on our heads.”“Just you leave that to me, woman,” said Sagar. “Don't forget that you're riding with a legendary pirate captain here.”Elrann snorted, and Sagar had either not heard her or pretended not to hear her from his chocobo.They sold their three chocobos to an innkeeper in one of the smaller settlements on the outskirts of Sirra, for a healthy fifty gold pieces each, after a hearty meal of beans and mashed potatoes in his common room. If everything went to plan from herein then they wouldn't need them for the rest of the journey on to Manolia.“Don't know how you've kept hold of them this long,” said the innkeeper who bought them in a worn-out, cynical voice. “The Empire've been rounding up all the mounts and vehicles for miles around and commandeering them for their army. But I'll happily take them off your hands.”Ryn patted the beak of his chocobo, the original one that Vish had stolen which the two of them had been riding for the last three days, as he said goodbye to it in the stables. “Thanks, buddy. You saw us through a lot. Sorry for crashing you in the woods.” The chocobo cawed and nuzzled him in response. “We need to keep a low profile,” said Cid as they left the inn. “Keep those cloaks wrapped tight around you until we can find…alternative attire.” Ryn would have liked to have spent a night at the inn, but Nuthea still insisted that their mission was urgent and that they couldn't afford to waste even one night. And the next phase of their plan was going to work better under cover of darkness anyway. Sirra proper began as a cluster of tall, white-stone buildings in the middle distance and soon became tough cobbles under their feet. The cluster became a maze of streets and alleys which they wandered within. The white stone shone in the light from fires inside buildings, streetlamps, the moon.  “So this is a capital city…” said Ryn under his breath. The others didn't seem so bothered by it. He guessed they had all been in capitals before. He supposed he really was a ‘greenhorn farmboy', or whatever Elrann called him…The occasional person paced the pavement, and the odd chocobo-drawn cart passed them on the cobbled road, though not as many as Ryn would have expected. That must be because of the invasion too. Still, it was busier than Nonts. Every now and again the cramped streets would open up into a larger road or a square, with a fountain, or a statue, or a tower at its centre. And usually they would sight a patrol of Imperial soldiers somewhere on it. Whenever this happened, they turned around abruptly and went back down one of the smaller alleys. “I don't understand,” Ryn said, “I thought we were looking for Imperials.”“Yeah, but not out in the open, pup,” Sagar answered him. “We want to find them in one of the sheltered streets, but by the nature of things we're less likely to come across what we want there. It might take a while.”“Give it time,” said Cid knowingly.“Hang on,” said Sagar, “what's this?”He moved towards a series of three upright rectangles attached to the side of one of the nearby buildings.On the first piece of paper was an ink drawing of Sagar himself. The likeness was strong, right down to the eye patch, the ponytail and the cocky smile.Sagar tore the poster off the wall and inspected it more closely while Ryn looked over his shoulder.WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE, it said under the drawing. BOUNTY: 7500 GOLD PIECES.“Heh,” said Sagar. “And not my first, either!” He rolled up the poster and stuffed it down his shirt. “What?” he said when Ryn frowned at him. “The ladies love this sort of thing! How much did you say they put on the princess? 5000? I guess they value me even more highly than her…”“I wouldn't be so sure,” said Ryn, his eyes wandering to the next poster along. It was the same drawing of Nuthea as he had come across in Nonts, only this must be a more recent poster because this time it said WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE. BOUNTY: 10,000 GOLD PIECES.“Rrrr,” said Sagar. He tore that one down too, but it didn't go in his shirt.It was the next poster along that really pissed him off, though.“Ryn, you'll want to have a look at this,” said Nuthea.Ryn looked, and froze.An ink drawing of himself, complete with tousled hair, big eyes and boyish features, looked out of the third poster at him.WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE. BOUNTY: 15,000 GOLD PIECES. HIGHLY DANGEROUS.“Well that's just ridiculous,” mumbled Sagar. “Stupid Imperials got their labeling mixed up.”“They didn't,” said Vish. “The boy used his powers in Ast. They know that he's on the loose, they know he is on this continent, and they know he has flame projection abilities.” “Well they didn't need to add that ‘highly dangerous' bit…” muttered Sagar.“They clearly view those as more dangerous than wind projection,” Vish continued explaining, “and even than lightning projection.”Sagar didn't say anything.Ryn could not keep a warm glow of satisfaction from lighting up his mind for a moment.Just a moment.“Well this just makes things even harder,” said Elrann. “What are we going to do about this?”“There's nothing we can do,” said Cid. “But it's all the more reason to keep a low profile and find our disguises as soon as we can. Come on, let's keep looking.”They found what they were looking for soon after that, down another of the side streets.“Stop,” hissed Cid all of a sudden, and held up his hand. “There. At last. Do you see them?”He pointed. In the distance at the end of the enclosed, built-up street was a smaller group of Imperial soldiers out on patrol. Thankfully, they were walking away from Ryn and his companions, or else they would have been spotted, which probably wouldn't end well—a patrol would surely not take kindly to a group of armed vagabonds wandering the streets of an occupied city at night. As usual, they wore the black plate armour and bucket-like helmets of all Imperial soldiers. Ryn did a quick count of them before the soldiers turned a corner down another street and disappeared from view.“I counted five,” he said.“Five is fine,” said Vish. “I can remain as I am. I look like an Imperial Shadowfinger. Because that is, after all, what I am.”“Was,” said Nuthea.Vish didn't reply.“Whatever,” said Sagar. “We'll still need your help for this though, much as I hate to say it. Right, listen, here's what we'll do: They've just turned left down that street over there, so I reckon if we turn and go down there then our path will join up with theirs again and we can give them the jump.”“Got it,” said Ryn, nodding with the others, happy to defer to the Sagar's wisdom in all matters of ambush, deception and theft. They crept their way down the street that Sagar had indicated. The skycaptain whispered to them while they walked: “Now listen: They're armed, of course, but I only saw swords—and none of them drawn at that. No bows or crossbows. They look completely off guard to me—it doesn't seem like Sirra has put up much of a resistance to this invasion, or if it did then it's clearly been crushed. So I don't think they'll be expecting us at all. This'll be like harpooning a skywhale on a clear day. Now, woman, don't go using those pistols of yours, as they'll alert others to what we're doing--”“Well, obviously, said Elrann, rolling her eyes. “Do you think I was born yesterday, pirate-man? I've got almost as much skyship experience as you do. I'll use my whip.”“Good,” said Sagar, ignoring her jibes for once. “I've got my swords. Scumsucker, you've got your poison blade and…whatever else it is you're carrying. Princess and old timer, you can stay in the back, but you've got your lightning and your healing abilities if things go south—they shouldn't, though.”“Hey, what about me?” said Ryn.The pirate glanced sidelong at him. “What about you, pup?”“I can fight too.”“You just try to stay out of the way and to not get hurt.”Ryn's irritation boiled over. “But I don't want to stay at the back.” He heard himself saying it like a petulant child, but he couldn't help it. “I want to be up front with you, Elrann and Vish. I've been practicing my swordsmanship with Cid.”“Rrrr,” said Sagar under his breath. “Fine, pup. I suppose we could use one more up front, seeing as we're trying to take down five of them. You've got your fire, I suppose, but we only want to use that in an emergency. Ok then; use that sword you took from the soldiers Vish killed back near Nonts. You think you can handle being up front after last time?” “Yes,” Ryn said defiantly, trying not to pay attention to the memory of being impaled that flashed in his mind. If something went really wrong, Cid could always heal him like last time. Although he wasn't in a hurry to go through the experience of almost dying again. “Good, I'm glad that's settled,” said Nuthea. “But that's still only four of you up front, when there are five soldiers. You're still one short. I don't want to use my lightning at all if I can help it, as it will attract attention. And you are only going to render them unconscious, aren't you? You're not going to kill them.” “What?!” Said Sagar. He practically squeaked it, so loud that Cid said “Shhh!” and they froze in their tracks for a moment. They waited to hear if anyone had taken notice of them, to see if anyone would come running,. Only the silence of the high-walled alley they were creeping down answered. Ryn exhaled relief.“What?” Sagar said again, more quietly this time, as they resumed walking. “You can't be serious, princess…” “But I am,” said Nuthea. “No unnecessary deaths. The One would not approve. We only kill in self-defence, if we really have to.”“That's completely stupid,” said Sagar. “I've had enough of this One stuff…there's no way we're only knocking them out. We've got a much better chance of stealing their armour if we kill them first.”“Captain Sagar, may I remind you that you are my escort on this mission? I am the one you are taking to Manolia.”“So what?”“So, if you don't carry out my wishes, it may affect the amount and nature of your reward when you successfully deliver me back to my people.”A muscle in Sagar's jaw twitched. “Rrrrrrrrrrr.” That was a big one, thought Ryn. “Fine. We can aim to knock them out. But it's not a precise art. If I accidentally kill one or two of them in the process, I can't be held responsible.”“That's all I ask,” said Nuthea, tilting her head back with a flutter of her eyelids. “That you try.”“What's the best way to knock someone out?” Ryn asked, testing the weight of the Imperial sword in its scabbard and suddenly feeling even more out of his depth. His mouth had gone dry.Sagar looked at him.“What? I've never done it before.” “Do you really need to ask, pup?” said Sagar. “You just hit them really hard in the head with the hilt of your sword or something. If we get this right, we'll be pouncing on them from behind, so you should have plenty of time to aim. They shouldn't see us coming. Easy pickings.”“What about their helmets?“If you hit them hard enough, you should be able to knock them out through their helmets. Or if you really want to you can get that off them first, but I wouldn't recommend it.”Ryn's palms were clammy. He gripped the sword tighter. “Alright. But like Nuthea said, there's still only four of us going in close, and five of them.”“Just leave that to me,” said Vish all of a sudden. “I can take out two of them at once. At least,” he added. Was he smirking underneath his face covering?By now they had arrived at the end of the street, where it met the one they hoped the patrol they had spotted was now walking down at a right angle.“Wait here,” said Sagar. “Get low.”Ryn crouched with the others with their backs against the nearest building, keeping themselves from view to wait for the patrol to go past. The stone of the building was cold against his back even through his cloak. There wasn't much light to see by here. He could hear Nuthea shivering slightly next to him. On his other side, Vish's silhouette crouched perfectly still, like a cat waiting to pounce. Sagar crept to the corner of the building and very slowly peeked his head round it with his good eye.No sooner had he put his head round, than he drew it straight back again.“Perfect,” he whispered with a wolfish grin. “They're coming this way, just like we hoped. They didn't see me. We wait here until they've gone past, then jump them from behind. Got it?”Ryn nodded his silent assent with the others. They shuffled along the wall a little deeper into their own street to make sure they were as concealed as possible, keeping to the many available shadows.“Right,” said Sagar. “Everyone, draw your weapons and wait for my signal.”The secret scrape of three swords being slid quietly from their sheaths. Elrann rummaged in her overall and uncoiled her whip.They waited. And waited.Just the dimness of the street. Ryn suddenly became very interested in one particular cobblestone, and tried not to pay attention to his imaginations of the violence about to take place.The soldiers' faint footsteps came into earshot from around the corner, then slowly grew louder, along with their conversation.“…has to be the easiest invasion the Empire has ever carried out.”“I know. But we were starting from a pretty strong place to begin with. Imfis is a vassal state after all, and they don't have anything in the way of an army.”“Yeah, but I mean, even so, these people barely put up any resistance at all. Just a few boys and men with death wishes. The rest of them basically rolled over and surrendered.” The soldiers came into view now, all five of them in black plate armour, and……turned down the street that Ryn and his companions were waiting in.Oh poodoo.The soldiers took a couple of steps into the street. They hadn't seen their crouching ambushers yet.“It's like they wanted to be occupied,” said the one who had been speaking most recently. “It's like...What the--?”He had spotted them.“NOW!” yelled Sagar.Ryn sprang forwards and made for the nearest soldier. He gripped the hilt of his sword tight and drew it back, blade up, then slammed the pommel into the soldier's helmet before he could react. It resounded like a clear bell.“Ouch!” The soldier raised his hands to his helmet, but remained standing.“Crap,” said Ryn. The soldier drew his sword, then lunged. Ryn managed to jump back out of the way. His pulse began to pound loudly between his ears. Not again.A black shape crashed into the soldier, sweeping his legs out from underneath him, then slammed another sword-pommel down onto the soldier's helmet, much harder than Ryn had managed. The soldier lay still on his back. Vish leapt away as quickly as he had arrived. Someone was shouting in surprise.Ryn turned. Two other soldiers lay unconscious at Sagar's feet. Vish dispatched another one, swiftly sliding his sword into the visor of the man's helmet, who went down with a muffled scream and clutched at his face. Nuthea's not going to be happy about that.Elrann had her whip coiled around the arm of the final soldier. Whatever she had been trying to do hadn't worked, and he had managed to draw his sword. The two of them stood frozen for a moment, sizing each other up, connected by Elrann's whip.The soldier swept his helmeted head from side to side, taking them all in.He drew in a breath, like he was about to shout for help.Ryn, Vish and Sagar all rushed him.Ryn got to him first, and this time he hit the soldier so hard with the pommel of his sword on the front of his helmet that the man went down at once. Apparently Ryn had warmed up now, and lost his battle shyness.All the soldiers were down now.“Quickly,” said Sagar. “We got unlucky. That was noisier than it should have been. We've got to strip them of their armour quickly, before anyone notices what's happened.”They got to work straight away, looking around anxiously as they did to see if anyone had spotted them. Nobody seemed to have, yet—at least they heard no cries of alarm and saw nobody else in the street for the moment. Ryn followed Sagar and Cid's instructions and knelt down next to the soldier he had just knocked out, unfastened the man's chestplate and leg-guards, and stripped him of his gauntlets. He then set about putting all of these pieces of armour on himself, over the top of his clothes. Lastly he slid off the soldier's helmet. He almost gasped when underneath he found the smooth face of a young man with a shaved head, not much older than himself. Ryn hoped that he had not done the boy any lasting damage. He slipped the helmet on over his head. At first the metal was cold against his cheeks, but it fit snugly. The black bucket-like Imperial soldiers' helmets all had a horizontal slit to see out of, which now became Ryn's window on the world.“You did not need to kill that one, Shadowfinger Vish,” Nuthea chided when the bountyhunter took the helmet off his soldier, revealing a bloody mess that used to be a face which made Ryn flinch and look away.“I made a judgment, girl,” Vish said to her. “We needed to be quick, so I acted as efficiently as I could in the situation and dispatched the soldier in the quickest way available to me.”“Hmph,” said Nuthea. She had managed to wriggle into a breastplate, which from her grimace appeared to be quite uncomfortable, and she looked absolutely ridiculous with the hem of her once-white, torn, bloodstained dress poking out of the bottom of it.“You're going to need some trousers, princess,” said Sagar, barely stifling a laugh even in their highly dangerous situation.Cid pulled some off a soldier and gave them to her. Once the trousers and the rest of her armour were on, and her dress tucked in, she looked much more like an Imperial, apart from the facts of her chestplate sticking out a bit more than normal, her feminine facial structure and her long golden hair. But she bunched that up as best she could and shoved it inside a helmet, her lip curling in revulsion as she lowered that over her head.“Urgh, it smells in here,” said Nuthea.The illusion was more or less complete. Still, hopefully nobody would look too closely at her... Elrann was having similar difficulties. “Where am I meant to put all of this?” she complained as she took things one by one out of the pockets and insides of her engineer's overalls and placed them on the ground. Her two pistols. Her whip. A spanner. A wrench. A screwdriver. She seemed to have all manner of things stuffed down there--almost as many items as Cid kept in his healer's satchel, which he was simply able to sling over a shoulder as usual over the top of his armour. “Here,” said Cid, pointing at one of the fallen soldiers. “Look. This one has a leather belt with some pouches sewn onto it. He must be some sort of Imperial engineer himself. You can use it.”“Ah, thanks pops,” said Elrann, bending down to take the belt from the soldier and inspecting the contents of its pockets. “Hey, there's some good tools in here! I could use some of these! And some of mine need replacing.” She set about filling the belt with her stuff and the items from the soldier that she wanted.“Come on, woman,” hissed Sagar, “we haven't got all night.”Once she was done and had strapped the belt around her waist she stood up, and they all surveyed each other, six ragamuffin travelers now disguised as Imperial soldiers. With the helmets on, they just about passed as them. Ryn twisted his torso from side to side, testing out the feel of the armour. His head rocked back in surprise. “It's so light,” he said. “Flimsy too,” confirmed Cid. “It's made of alphite—very plentiful in the Morekemian mountains. Alphite is light, cheap and easy to pierce. The Empire don't exactly kit their soldiers out with the finest equipment, or even train them that well. The Emperor takes more of a ‘quantity over quality' approach to warfare--” “Enough yammering,” said Sagar, who had rolled up his pirates' coat and stashed it in his pack. “We don't have time for lessons now. We need to get going.”“What do we do with them?” said Ryn, nodding towards the floored soldiers, five of them knocked out, one dead at Vish's hand.“Drag them into a dark corner,” said Sagar, “and hope they wake up later rather than sooner.” He gave Nuthea a passive-aggressive look.Together they dragged the soldiers' limp bodies further into the alley and hid them in a particularly shadowed corner behind a wooden bench. One of the still-alive soldiers started to murmur something, but Sagar hit him again, and the murmuring stopped. As far as they could tell, nobody had seen or heard them. “When these guys wake up again, they'll raise the alarm…” said Sagar, sounding regretful that they hadn't killed more of the soldiers. “By that time we will be gone,” said Nuthea. “It's worth it for a clear conscience.” Sagar tutted. “Come on, then,” he said. “We better get out of here before they do wake up.” The six of them moved off as quickly as they could, not running, as that could attract attention, but walking briskly through the darkness of the sleeping city, trying to look like a group of Imperial soldiers out on patrol. They headed north, as that was where Sirra's main train station was found, finding their way bit by bit from landmarks and key streets that those of them who had been here before remembered. Elrann knew the city best, having lived here the longest, but Sagar, Cid and even Nuthea all seemed to know or remember parts of it too. Ryn guessed that just left him and Vish. But for all he knew the Shadowfinger had been here before as well, he just wasn't letting on—not that he ever let on about all that much anyway. Ryn supposed he was the least well-traveled of their whole group. Naïve greenhorn pussywillow farmboy, ran Sagar's and Elrann's words in his mind. “Stop!” said Sagar when they finally sighted the station, still quite a long way off, as they approached it along one of the smaller streets that ran like veins to this focal hub.Sirra Main Station was a big, rectangular building with a series of pointed roofs and a massive clock-face built into the wall above its many-doored main entrance. It was built out of the same white-gray stone as many of the other old or important buildings in Sirra, but Ryn could see that it was extremely grubby in the light from the streetlamps that lit this sector of the city. And there were soldiers streaming in and out of it. There were more soldiers going in than out, but there was still a steady stream going in both directions—though thankfully the ones leaving the station were all heading off down a different street from the one their party was approaching by, the main road that led due south away from the station. “Well this makes things harder,” said Elrann. “How are we going to sneak onto a train with all these bucketheads around?” “Why are there so many of them?” asked Ryn. “I don't know, pup,” said Sagar. “But I'm going to find out. You guys wait here and make sure nobody sees you. I'll be back in a bit.” And before anyone could protest, he walked off towards the station. “He's very brave,” said Nuthea. Ryn bit his cheek. Elrann snorted. “Very stupid, if you ask me.” They kept watching Sagar as he strode towards the station. Soon they lost him amidst the stream and he was just another helmeted, black-armoured soldier walking among the crowds. They waited in the street, staying out of sight, eyes fixed on the stream, nobody saying anything else. After about ten minutes, from the clock on the front of the station, Ryn knew they were all thinking the same thing. What if he's been caught? What if he's not coming back? Ryn also wondered, What if he's decided to turn us all over to the Empire for gold? But that wouldn't make sense. Sagar had a price on his own head as well, and he seemed too enamoured by the prospect of the rewards Nuthea had offered him for transporting her safely, and possibly by Nuthea herself… Mother. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Kill Vorr. Stay with Nuthea. There it was, firm in Ryn's mind as he watched the station intently, keenly aware of Nuthea's presence next to him. He wasn't sure if any of his goals were attainable. But damn him if he wasn't going to try to attain them anyway, he decided. If the others were all wondering if Sagar was going to come back, nobody voiced their concern, and the minutes went by, marked by the slow movement of the big black hand of Sirra Station's clock, which crept up higher and higher towards the midnight hour. Apparently everyone was too tense to say anything. They just stood there, watching the soldiers streaming in and out of the station, poised and alert like taut bowstrings. Then, at last, one of the soldiers emerging from the station entrance turned right out of the main stream and started to walk towards their position. But was this him? With the soldier's helmet still on, they couldn't know for sure. Ryn's hand went to the hilt of the Imperial sword that now hung at his side.“Relax!” called the soldier as soon as he was in earshot, but close enough not to be heard by anyone else. “It's me! Don't look so nervous!” Ryn exhaled. Sagar drew closer. “I was right,” he said from inside his helmet. “They're using Sirra as their transport hub to move troops around. This isn't just an occupation of Imfis—this is a full-scale invasion of Dokan.” “By the One…” said Nuthea. “Well, poodoo,” said Elrann. Neither Cid nor Vish said anything. Ryn's head was too foggy from grief and disorientation for him to register much of the significance of this. So what if the Empire were invading the whole of Dokan? He just wanted to kill General Vorr.“I didn't even have to ask anyone anything,” Sagar went on. “I just picked it up from walking round and listening. They've requisitioned the trains and they're running them round the clock to send troops to the various Imfisi borders to prepare to invade the neighbouring nations.” Ryn heard Nuthea take in a sharp breath. “Then they're also bringing some troops back into here to keep their grip on Imfis and perform various different tasks here as their base. It's a major operation--”“That's all well and good,” interrupted Nuthea, “but what are we going to do now we're here?” “Calm down, princess, I was getting to that. There's a train that leaves tonight, soon. At midnight. All we need to do is sneak onto it, but with the amount that's going on in there, that will be a piece of cake.” “Where is it going?” asked Ryn. “Manolia, of course,” said Sagar. “Your homeland. Or as close to the border as it will be able to get.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sagaofthejewels.substack.com

Previously on Saga of the Jewels…Seventeen year old Ryn's hometown is attacked by General Vorr of the Empire and everyone he has ever known is killed. Just before he dies, Ryn's father gives him a ruby, which causes him to project fire. Ryn is captured by the Empire and meets another captive, Princess Nuthea, who has the ability to project lightning. Nuthea explains to him that the Empire have learned of the existence of twelve Primeval Jewels which grant the ability to manipulate different elements, and are searching for them. The Imperial vessel where they are being held is in turn attacked by a pirate airship, and the pirates capture Ryn and Nuthea. The lead pirate, Captain Sagar, agrees to escort Nuthea back to her homeland, and to spare Ryn's life, in exchange for the promise of gold, gemstones and beautiful women upon her safe delivery. They land in the port city of Ast and recruit a new engineer called Elrann. Ast is then attacked by the Empire, who are using the Fire Ruby to invade the continent and search for more of the Jewels. Ryn, Nuthea, Sagar and Elrann flee the city of Ast together, but are then attacked by a bounty hunter, Vish. They manage to subdue the bounty hunter but Nuthea is gravely wounded in the process. Ryn beats Sagar to the hunter's mount and rushes Nuthea to the nearest town where he finds a healer, Cid, a mysterious old man who saves the princess's life with his arts and asks to join the traveling party, saying that he believes it is the purpose of ‘the One', the god that he and Nuthea each worship. Cid tells the party to meet him at the top of a hill after he goes back to the nearby town to pick up some supplies. They go to the hilltop to wait, but when Cid arrives back he is being pursued by an enormous dog-like monster and a troop of Imperial soldiers. The party runs away from the soldiers, but they catch up to Ryn and Vish, who now fights on the side of the party in exchange for Cid supplying his poppy-seed habit. In the battle, Ryn is stabbed through the chest…Episode 12: Where Someone Has Gone BeforeRyn's house was burning again.This time he was inside it. Hellish red leapt from the walls, licking the ceiling, belching black smoke. He reached out with his hands and tried to manipulate the flames with his new powers, willing them to recede.“Go back!”Nothing happened, except that his arms ached. His powers had deserted him. And now before him stood his mother, cowering, holding up her hands. The black-armoured, flame-haired Imperial officer Vorr standing in front of her with his huge sword drawn.His mother looked at him, chestnut eyes pleading.“Do something, Ryn!” she begged him. “Please, help me! This is all your fault!”“No!” Ryn whimpered. “I..I can't!”And then Vorr's sword went into her. It ran her right through the chest, making a slippery, slithery sound like a hissing snake. When it came out so did a gushing flow of red. He had seen this image so many times. But here he was, seeing it again.Ryn's mother hit the floor.“NO!”This time Ryn ran at Vorr.This time Ryn had a sword in his hand, which he swung at Vorr with all that remained of his feeble strength as he screamed with rage.The Imperial General batted away his strike easily with his own blade, laughing as he did so; a deep, mocking, mirthful laugh.“The boy from Cleasor!” Vorr laughed. “How did you manage to survive the crash? How did you even get here?”“You murdered my parents!” Ryn screamed back. “You destroyed my hometown!”“Did I?” Vorr laughed even harder. “Oh yes, I suppose I must have…” As those casual words echoed through Ryn's mind, Vorr's sword plunged through Ryn's chest just as it had through his mother's. The shock of it sliding through his flesh.It's all my fault. I should have saved her. It's my fault. I killed my mother.Did I? Oh yes, I suppose I must have…The scene shifted, and now Ryn was running through the burning buildings of Cleasor, his hometown, looking for someone, but he couldn't remember who. Damn the Imperials! They destroy everything… They burn everything… They gave me no warning. There's no joy in this world. I'll never be happy again. I'm going to die burned and broken and alone.A man lay on the grass in front of him; a tall, middle-aged man with red-grey hair and one of his legs missing, lying in a pool of his own lifeblood.“Dad!” Ryn cried. He ran to his father and knelt at his side, cradled his face with his hand.The flames leapt high all around them.“You're hurt...let me help you…” “No!” his father said, insistent though his voice was still weak. “Leave it, son… I am past help… I will be gone soon…”“I don't want you to die, Dad…”“Take it now.”“Take what?”“The ruby.”“I already did, Dad, but I lost it!”“That's right,” said his father. His voice was getting quieter, and harder to hear over the crackle of the flames; his eyes were glazing over. “You took it and you lost it. You're a failure, Ryn. You've failed. You lost us because you failed.”Hot tears ran down Ryn's cheeks. “No! I'm sorry! Please, Dad, give me another chance! Come back!”His father's eyes lost focus completely.“COME BACK!” Ryn yelled…...and resurfaced from the nightmare, sitting up violently and shouting.“Argggh--!” When he realised he had been dreaming he stopped shouting abruptly and took in a sharp breath. “Easy, lad!” An old man was holding him by the shoulders where he sat. The man had bushy white eyebrows and a white beard with the hair between his nose and mouth shaved off.“You've just had a brush with the void. Best if you take things slowly.”Beyond the old man's head was the face of a beautiful blonde woman in a tattered cream dress, her brow crinkled up in concern.“Are you alright, Ryn?” she asked. “We thought you had died.”Memory returned to Ryn, seeping into his mind along and mingling with the aftertaste of the nightmare.Cid released him and he took in another few gulps of air. They were still in the woods, it was cold, and it was getting dark. It must be early evening. “I guess it was your turn to be worried about me,” Ryn croaked to Nuthea when he had calmed down a little, surprised at his own boldness, but disappointed that it came out in a croak. “I'm fine now...I was just having a nightmare before I came to…...I remember… I remember being stabbed. What happened to me?”“I healed you,” said Cid.“I thought you had ridden on...” said Ryn. “I thought you had left me and Vish behind…” He looked around. The bodies of dead Imperial soldiers littered the forest floor. Sagar, Elrann and Vish were a little way away with thechocobos. Hearing that Ryn was awake, they wandered over and sat down on the grass. Nuthea joined them, and they all sat in a circle together.“Of course we wouldn't leave you and Shadowfinger Vish behind,” said Nuthea.“S'right,” said Sagar. “Soon as we realised that the Imperials had caught up to you and the scumsucker, I turned around immediately and led the charge to come back and rescue you.”“Actually,” said Elrann, “way I remember it, you did want to leave him behind. Princess-girl was the one who wanted to turn around. You took quite a lot of convincing.”“Whatever,” said Sagar.“Anyway,” went on Nuthea, “once we eventually got back you did fight very valiantly, Captain Sagar. Shadowfinger Vish here had succeeded in dispatching most of the soldiers, but even he couldn't cope with all of them at once--”At that, Vish made a disapproving noise inside his head covering. “Humph. Please. I had them all taken care of. I think I deserve some poppy for what I did.”“In time, in time…” said Cid. “I've told you, you need to space the hits out, or they'll diminish in intensity.”“If I don't get a hit soon everything will diminish in intensity.”“Hang on,” said Ryn, “you can't have done that good a job at fighting them ‘all' off because one of them stabbed me through the chest.”Vish went quiet at that, narrowing his eyes to slits as he looked at Ryn.“Yeah, that's right,” said Elrann. “When we got here you'd already been run through by that fat soldier.”Ryn thought to look down at his tunic for the first time. It had torn where the sword had gone through and blood stained it. But there was no wound on his chest. It ached awfully, yet there was no visible sign of the sword's piercing it. He couldn't even work out exactly where the blade had gone in.“He did...” Ryn said. “He ran me right through. Just like…” Mother. Father. Hometown. He swallowed. Every time he remembered them a jolt of pain went through his mind, even now. No wonder he dreamed about them every time he was unconscious. He hadn't had time to feel sad about them properly before he had been caught up in this crazy whirlwind adventure. An adventure on which he had just been stabbed through the chest. “How the hell am I still alive?” he asked of Mid in general.“Well, to be honest, we did think you were a goner, pup,” said Sagar. Was that disappointment in his voice? Disappointment that Ryn hadn't died? B*****d. “But then the old timer here got to you and worked his magic. I don't care what you say about your healing skills any more, old timer, that was magic and I know it was.”Ryn's eyes grew wide as he stared at Cid. The old man's face was solemn, his jaw set behind his white beard. He seemed tired, the crow's feet at the edges of his eyes more pronounced.“I was basically dead...” Ryn said to him. “How powerful are you?”“Yeah, come on,” said Sagar. “Spill the beans, old timer. Pup here was basically dead when you got to him. What did you do?”They sat and waited for Cid to speak.It took him a while, staring at the ground, but eventually he said “I brought you back to consciousness with a ‘Life' spell. I am Jewel-touched as well, like the three of you are.”“I knew it!” said Sagar triumphantly. “You have healing powers as well as healers' training! I knew all that stuff about ‘miracles' was garbage!” “It's still a miracle!” protested Nuthea at once. “The One can also work through the magic of the Jewels.” For some reason, she didn't seem all that surprised at the revelation that Cid was Jewel-touched.“Whatever,” said Sagar.“Indeed,” said Cid, “whatever we call it, I'm afraid this young man is right. I have healing abilities from my contact with the Light Diamond. I think of these as being miraculous too, Granddaughter, but it is also true that I received them from my contact with that Jewel.”“So you can bring people back from death?” said Ryn.“No,” said Cid.“Huh?” the rest of them all said together (except Vish).“Let me be very clear on this,” Cid went on. “The Life spell can resuscitate a person who is dying or who has been brought near death. If someone loses consciousness from injury, or is so injured that they are slipping away into death, I can bring them back. But once they have fully passed away into it, once they have died, I cannot bring them back. I cannot people back from the dead. Only the One could do that.”Sagar snorted. “Yeah, if ‘He' existed.”“Hold on, hold on,” said Elrann, motioning with her hand for the rest of them to listen, then massaging her forehead underneath her short purple hair. “Let me get this straight. What you're saying is that these magical jewel-thingamys--”“The Primeval Jewels,” interrupted Nuthea.Elrann blinked at her. “Right, yeah. What you're saying is that these magical primeval jewel-thingamys that we're trying to get princess-girl back to her homeland to tell her parents about can also give people healing powers, and that pops here has come into contact with one before, and that it's because of that that he was able to bring farmboy here back from near-death after he got stabbed by that fat Imperial soldier?”A pause.“Yes,” said Nuthea, Sagar, Ryn and Cid all at the same time.“You're all completely nuts…” mumbled Elrann, shaking her head and pinching her nose. “Ok--let's assume for a moment that I believe you: How did you ever get ya hands one one of these jewel-thingamys then, pops?”“Primeval Jewels,” Nuthea felt obliged to correct her again.They all looked at Cid. Even Vish stared at him intently.“Hey, I led a rich and full life before I settled down in Nonts…” Cid said defensively, shrugging his shoulders and holding out his hands in protest. “I did many things and went on many adventures. Is it so surprising that I would have come across one of the Primeval Jewels?”“You're right,” said Nuthea, “it's not. And followers of the One are all the more likely to come across such things. It must have been your destiny.”“No, I'm not buying this,” said Sagar, shaking his head. “This is chocobo-poodoo. Tell us how you really came by it, old timer. I'm not traveling around with someone who has elemental manipulation powers when I don't know where he got them from.”“Hey,” said Elrann, “you have elemental manipulation powers and we don't know where you got them from!”“I inherited a fragment of the Wind Shell from my father, alright!” said Sagar heatedly. At the same time, he took out a necklace from inside his shirt and showed them the shard of translucent shell that its silver chain ran through.Elrann's eyes stretched. “Oh my,” said Nuthea.Ryn wasn't so surprised--he had come to suspect something like this might be behind Sagar's powers. Cid's face was unmoved too.“And the princess here has her powers,” Sagar continued, putting the necklace back down his shirt, “‘cause she's from the royal family of Magnolia.” “Manolia,” said Nuthea.“Whatever. And pup has them because the Fire Ruby was hidden in his village for years without him knowing or some poodoo like that, yadda yadda yadda. And as far as we know the woman and the scumsucker don't have elemental powers, but if we find out later they'll do I'm sure they'll tell us how they got them. So...what's your deal, old timer?”The group fell silent, waiting for another answer from Cid, who for a moment only stroked the side of his beard and scrunched up his face.Ryn chewed the side of his mouth. On the one hand, he could perhaps believe Cid and Nuthea that Cid had just stumbled upon one of the Jewels somewhere, and even that it was made more likely because it was his ‘destiny' from this ‘One' god, the ‘God of gods'. On the other hand, what Sagar was saying made an awful lot more sense. Once again Ryn found that while he would prefer to believe what Nuthea and Cid were saying, what Sagar was saying seemed more likely. These Jewels didn't seem like the sort of objects that you just chanced upon, or that ‘destiny' brought you to. They seemed like the sort of things that you had to know about, and go looking for, in order to find. After all, there had been one hidden right under Ryn's nose for apparently as long as he had been alive, and he hadn't found out about it till recently. And now he had lost it to someone who had been looking for it… Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr.“Come on, Cid,” Ryn said, choosing to lend his support to Sagar. “Even if you did just chance upon the Light Diamond somewhere, we want to know how it happened. The true version of how it happened.”At length, Cid sighed. “I suppose it was foolish of me to think that I could keep this from you for long. The One must have purposed for me to tell you through this turn of events.”“Sure He did,” said Sagar, “or maybe you just discovered you couldn't keep lying to us for very long.”“Sagar!” objected Nuthea. “Don't be so rude to Grandfather!”“That's what he was doing, princess. Call it what you like, but that's what it was. We know that now. Come on, old timer, out with it.”“Well, if you must know,” said Cid, his eyes not looking at any of them but off into the vague distance of memory, “I was once the healer in an adventuring party that set out to find all of the Primeval Jewels long ago. And with some of them, we succeeded.”“What?!” said everyone else (including Vish).“It's true. We stole the Light Diamond from a Citadel in Erm. I was already trained as a healer, so since the Crystal grants manipulation of the element of life, I was chosen to be its bearer.”“Do you still have it?” said Ryn.“In this case...no.”“Why not?”“Er, I put it back.”“WHAT?!” said everyone.”“Why would you do that?” said Sagar.“That will require some further explanation--”“What happened to the other adventurers in your party?” butted in Ryn. He had begun to wonder about certain things. Cid closed his eyes. “That I am not ready to tell you about yet.”They died, then, Ryn surmised. And he couldn't bring them back from death. Because he can't do that. Because no one can do that.Cid opened his eyes. “But what I am saying to you is true.”“How did you find out about the Jewels in the first place?” Nuthea jumped in. Clearly everyone had their own question they wanted to ask. “In Manolia the knowledge of the Jewels is a closely-guarded secret…”“That's the least interesting part of the story,” said Cid. He glanced at Sagar for a moment. Why did he do that? thought Ryn. “It really doesn't matter. What matters is why we went after them. Once we found out about their existence, we decided it would be terrible if the Jewels ever fell into the wrong hands. So we set out to find them ourselves, to keep them safe, should anyone with malicious intentions or ambitions ever learn of them. And as I say, we succeeded in finding some of them.”“How many did you find, then?” asked Elrann.“Four,” said Cid.“Which ones?” asked Nuthea.Ryn answered for him. He had begun to work things out. “The Light Diamond, the Lightning Crystal, the Wind Shell, and the Fire Ruby.”Cid nodded. “Correct.”“You knew my father,” Ryn realised. And he probably knew Sagar's too.“Yes.”“He was part of the adventuring party. Along with others.”“What happened to you? Why did you abandon searching for the Jewels?”Cid swallowed. His next words came out with some difficulty, and he kept pausing as he said them, like he was holding back tears. “When we went after the fifth jewel, two...two of our number were killed. That was when we realised the folly of what we were doing. It turned out we had only got to the Jewels that were relatively easy to find--the ones that were nearby, and not so well guarded. The others were going to be much harder. So we decided to return or hide the ones we had found. They really were safer in their original hiding places all along, anyway.”Ryn had never heard of any of this. He knew that his father had had a life before he had met his mother and settled in Cleasor, that he had been a traveler himself and worked in a variety of professions, but he had never heard about any of this. Perhaps with good reason, he saw, but he still couldn't help from feeling betrayed. Mother. Father. Hometown.“But now,” Cid went on, “now that a malicious power has learned of the existence of the Jewels, and one with enough strength perhaps to take them for himself, now those who guard and keep them must be warned.”“What are you saying, Grandfather?” asked Nuthea.“What I'm saying is that I must help you to get to Manolia as soon as possible in order to warn your people of what the Emperor has learned as soon as possible. I owe at least that much to the memory of your grandmother.”“What?” said Nuthea, forgetting her usual polite terms of address. “You knew grandmother Effi?”“No,” said Cid. “I knew your other grandmother.”“Lissa?”“That's right.”“How?”“She was a part of our adventuring party too. Quite a firecracker. She was the one to find the Lightning Crystal, deep in an underground dungeon.”“But my mother taught me that the Lightning Crystal has been in our family for generations!”“Nope. Well, I suppose three generations is still ‘generations'. Lissa found it. Maybe it used to belong to the Manolians before, but if it did, they lost it, and Lissa found it again.”Nuthea's  face looked like she had just eaten something that disagreed with her. She seemed horrified at the idea that her parents might have taught her anything that was factually incorrect, unintentionally or not.“Grandmother Lissa… She always was very peculiar… And she always did seem to want to encourage me to break the rules and go out on adventures… In fact, it's probably her fault that I… Never mind. I can barely believe it,” she finished, running out of steam. What had she been about to say?“I don't believe it,” said Sagar. “This is getting completely ridiculous. The old timer is clearly making all of this up.” “If he's making it up,” said Nuthea, “how did he know the name of my grandmother? I've never said it or told it to you any of this time.”“I...er…” for once Sagar ran out of steam for a moment too. “I suppose you might be right there. But this is ridiculous. Next you'll be telling me that my father was part of your little ‘adventuring party' too.”Here we go... Cid looked at him, and smiled.“You have got to be poodooing me.”“Captain Figaro was an invaluable member of our party. He was the one to find the--”“--Wind Shell,” said Ryn. He had seen where that was going easily enough.“But my…” said Sagar. “I always thought my father was a famous plundering skypirate…”“He was, for most of his career. But when he ran into our party who were also going after the Wind Shell, and beat us to it, we managed to convince him to come with us to try to find the other Jewels.”“My father would never have done that.”“Well, he did.”“If you're not lying, that is.”“I have no reason to lie.”“Look,” said Ryn, whatever happened in the past, this is getting pretty weird.” His doubt about ‘destiny' was starting to erode. “Four of us now who have been thrown together are all ‘Jewel-touched', or whatever you call it, Nuthea.”“Yes,” said Cid, “the Jewels have a way of doing that.”“Doing what?”“Bringing together those who have been touched by them. It is the purpose of the One at work, seeking to find a group of people who will serve him by gathering the Jewels together to protect the world from evil. It's no coincidence either that I knew three of your parents, or ancestors at least.”“Rrrr.” Sagar looked about to explode. “Enough of this already!” he yelled, going red in the face, little flecks of spittle flying from his mouth. “I've had enough of all this Oneist garbage! It's not purpose, or destiny, or whatever that we've all come together! The Empire are going after the Jewels. That's how the pup and the princess ended up in the same place--because they came from places that have Jewels, so the Empire captured them. Then I attacked the ship they were on because being Jewel-touched I'm the only pirate crazy enough to go after an Imperial warship. Then we got grounded and the princess got hurt and… and… we made for the nearest healer, who was obviously well known for being a healer because he's Jewel-touched too…”Even Sagar did not sound so convinced any more.Ryn, Nuthea and Cid all looked at Elrann and Vish, who were standing next to each other.“Don't look at me,” said Elrann, a hand on her hip. “I don't have any crazy jewel powers. Least not that I'm aware of.”“Nor me,” said Vish, scowling at them from behind his face covering. “If I had powers of elemental projection I would have used them to kill you all and hand you over to the Empire for poppy seed by now.”“But you will gain elemental powers,” said Cid. “You both will. I am sure of it. If the One's purpose is done, both of you will become Jewel-touched, even Jewel-bearers, before the journey of this group is done.” Jewel-bearers… thought Ryn. Like my Dad must have been. Wait a second... “Hang on,” he said, “how did the Empire know that we had the Fire Ruby?” That was something he had wondered many times, but he had not thought to voice the question until now.“That I cannot tell you,” said Cid. “Ornos did not reveal his secret ownership of the Fire Ruby to anyone else, as far as I know. The only people who knew about him having it were the members of our party. But when we parted ways, we didn't even tell each other where we were going or where we planned on settling or hiding our Jewels. Even that was deemed too dangerous, in case someone got captured and tortured for the information.”The Empire were going to torture me, Ryn realised.“Never mind that now,” said Sagar. He had become interested in something else. “Old timer, are you telling me you think we're all going to end up with Jewel-powers?”“If this party is successful in its quest, yes. Look: Four of us have them already. We've been brought together by the One's Purpose. It's as though He is writing a story, and we are characters inside it. We may have free choice, but He is guiding us in towards the outcome He desires.”Sagar went quiet again, and tapped his mouth in thought. Even he now seemed to be contemplating the possibility that they had all been brought together by something more than dumb, blind luck.It seemed a little more convincing to Ryn too, now that they had discovered another of their group was Jewel-touched. But why would this ‘One' add Elrann and Vish to their traveling group as well? Unless they really were going to find more Jewels and develop elemental projection powers of their own like Cid predicted… And it was still bugging him: How had the Emperor learned of the location of the Fire Ruby in his hometown if none of Cid's original adventuring party had told him about it. Or maybe they--Nuthea interrupted his train of thought. “Look, fellows.” Fellows? Who talks like that? “I agree with Grandfather here that the One must have brought as all together for a Purpose, but whatever that Purpose turns out to be, we still need to get to Manolia as soon as possible to warn my people of the Emperor's knowledge and plans. If I don't warn them in time, more of the Jewels could fall into the Emperor's hands, which would be catastrophic for the whole of Mid, let alone Manolia. That was what we were doing before this revelation that Grandfather is Jewel-touched too. And now that thanks to him Ryn is awake and back to good health, we need to be on our way again. Are you all still coming with us to Sirra, Grandfather?”“Of course I'm coming with you, Granddaughter,” said Cid. “It is the Will of the One.”“What about the rest of you?”“I'm coming with you too,” said Vish. “So long as the old man eventually gives me some more poppy seed and can keep supplying me with it.”“In time, in time”, said Cid. “I told you, you need to wait a little longer or the hit won't be as strong.” “I'm happy to keep tagging along with ya,” said Elrann. “I've got nothing better to do, since Imfis has been invaded by the Empire. And if I'm going to develop elemental projection powers by staying with you guys, I think I'll stick around.” It wasn't clear to Ryn whether or not that last sentence was a joke.“Captain Sagar?” said Nuthea.“You know I'm coming. I'm escorting you. Rewards. Gold. Precious gems. Beautiful women. We've been over this.”They all looked at Ryn.“What?” said Ryn. Mother. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Kill Vorr. Stay with Nuthea? “General Vorr was heading towards Sirra. If there's a chance that I'm going to find him there, then I'm still coming with you. “And nearly dying isn't going to stop me.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sagaofthejewels.substack.com

Previously on Saga of the Jewels:Seventeen-year-old Ryn's hometown is attacked by General Vorr of the Empire and everyone he has ever known is killed. Just before he dies, Ryn's father gives him a ruby, which causes him to project fire. Ryn is captured by the Empire and meets another captive, Princess Nuthea, who has the ability to project lightning. Nuthea explains to him that the Empire have learned of the existence of twelve Primeval Jewels which grant the ability to manipulate different elements, and are searching for them. The Imperial vessel where they are being held is in turn attacked by a pirate airship, and the pirates capture Ryn and Nuthea. The lead pirate, Captain Sagar, agrees to escort Nuthea back to her homeland, and to spare Ryn's life, in exchange for the promise of gold, gemstones and beautiful women upon her safe delivery. However, in the battle with the Empire Sagar's ship's engineer has been killed. They land in the port city of Ast and recruit a new engineer called Elrann. Ast is then attacked by the Empire, who are using the Fire Ruby to invade the continent and search for more of the Jewels. Ryn confronts General Vorr, his parents' murderer on whom he has vowed to enact revenge, and only narrowly escapes with the help of his new friends. Ryn, Nuthea, Sagar and Elrann flee the city of Ast together, but are then attacked by a bounty hunter. They manage to subdue the bounty hunter but Nuthea is gravely wounded in the process. Ryn beats Sagar to the hunter's mount and rushes Nuthea to the nearest town where he finds a healer, Cid, a mysterious old man who saves Nuthea's life with his arts and asks to join the traveling party, saying that he believes it is the purpose of ‘the One', the god that he and Nuthea also worship. Cid also gives the still-captive bounty hunter a poppy seed to alleviate his withdrawal symptoms from the addictive substance, and tells the party to meet him at the top of a hill after he goes back to the nearby town to pick up some supplies. Episode 10: Argument With An AddictWhile the healer Cid circled around to re-enter Nonts from the north, Ryn, Nuthea, Sagar and Elrann kept to the woods and continued south-east past the town, walking to the hill where they had agreed to meet later. Ryn walked leading the chocobo by the reins, the captive bounty hunter propped up in its saddle. The black-shrouded man didn't make any sound except the occasional sighing “Ahhhh.” He seemed still to be lost in his ‘poppy trance', although from time to time his body twitched a little, making the chocobo beneath him caw. Ryn carried the man's sword in its black sheath, making it his own for the time being, seeing as he had returned Sagar's and had no other weapon.As they walked, the travelers kept looking round over their shoulders, thinking every stray breeze on the back of their necks was an Imperial battalion come to find them. But no Imperials came. All they saw were the trunks of the trees that they had just walked past. All they heard was the sound of the leaves rustling above them, the squerch of their footsteps on the forest floor, and the sighing and cawing of the bounty hunter and his steed.A single green leaf floated down from a branch, swaying through the air, and came to rest a few paces in front of Ryn. He remembered that it must nearly be the end of Summer; Autumn was on its way.Eventually they made it to the wooded hill beyond Nonts that Cid had spoken of and climbed the ascent to its crest. By now Ryn's shins and calves ached awfully. He and his body had been through a lot in the last day. Not to mention the last week… Mother. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr. Stay with Nuthea?At the top of the hill, trees obscured the view so they couldn't see into the distance unless they stood at its lip. When they did so all they could see was the treetops of the wood for miles around, except for where Nonts lay nestled in the north-west. It was safer to stay hidden under the tree cover though, so they quickly decided to walk back underneath it. Ryn tied the chocobo to a branch and they all sat with their backs against the trees. Ryn settled with his own back in the smooth crook of a tall, mighty oak, relishing the chance to give his legs some rest as he lent against its reassuring bulk.Everyone seemed too exhausted to talk. So they just sat like that for a while, waiting for their new companion Cid to return. Ryn watched the leaves dancing as the branches swayed gently in the breeze.Can we really trust this man? he thought of the old healer. He wondered if in the end he had voted the best way in the group decision. After all, one elderly resident of Nonts had betrayed him already. But this man seemed different.He looked around at the other members of his traveling party. Nuthea was hugging her knees in her torn dress and watching the leaves as well, apparently lost in thought. Sagar had his legs and arms crossed and his head bowed, eyes closed. Elrann fiddled with one of her pistols, tipping some powder from a bottle into a hole she had opened in the top of it. Come to think of it, can I really trust any of these people? I don't even want the same things as them. I'm just staying with them for safety and convenience until I can find General Vorr and kill him, because I think he might be headed the same way as them. Although… His gazed settled on Nuthea again, but when she raised her eyes to him Ryn quickly looked away at the bounty hunter. The bounty hunter, still sitting astride the chocobo, had gone quiet and stopped making his sighing noises. Why had Ryn argued they keep him alive, again?Ryn remembered the look of glinting desperation he had seen in the man's grey eyes when he had been about to die. Because I know he's been through some sort of horrible nightmare just like I have, that's why. And anyway, it hadn't turned out to be such a bad choice so far, had it? The bounty hunter had given them directions to Nonts. If Sagar had killed him, they wouldn't have known which way to go. And he might be able to give them more information about what was going on with this Imperial invasion when he woke up. If he ever woke up...Hang on, was he snoring? When did he fall asleep?Mother. Father. Hometown. If Ryn stayed still in one place too long images of his parents dying and his hometown burning crowded into his mind again. He got to his feet and walked over to the chocobo. The chocobo inclined its head to inspect Ryn with its beady eyes, then nuzzled him with its beak when Ryn stroked its head feathers. “Hey, well done,” Ryn whispered. “You did good today. I might need you to run fast like that again sometime--so catch a good break while you can.”Somewhere, a twig snapped.Ryn's head shot round. “What was that?” Nuthea and Elrann looked up too. All was quiet for a heartbeat. “It was nothing,” said Sagar, without lifting his head or opening his eyes. “Just a branch falling in the wind or something. Go back to your rest, pup. And sit down. If you must insist on keeping that scumsucker alive, let him sleep off his poppy hit in peace so we can all have a break from him.”Ryn's jaw tightened at Sagar's casual commands. The skypirate was really beginning to irritate him. “I want to find out what he knows about the invasion,” he said. He also wanted to further vindicate himself for having kept the man alive, but he wasn't about to say that out loud.Sagar sighed audibly from where he reclined against his tree, but he didn't say anything more.“Hey, wake up,” Ryn said to the bounty hunter. He prodded him in his black-clad leg where he sat bound astride the chocobo. The man didn't even stir. “Wake up,” Ryn said again a bit more loudly, and shook the man gently.Nothing.“If he's sleeping off a poppy trance he'll be pretty hard to rouse,”  said Elrann helpfully as she polished her pistol with a cloth. “That's if you can rouse him at all.”“Just give it a rest would you, pup?” said Sagar. Ryn gritted his teeth. “Wake up!” he yelled, and slapped the bounty hunter in the face.  “Huh?! Whrrrrrrrr…” The man opened his eyes. They were deeply bloodshot, more red than right. But he was awake now. “Where…...where am I?” he rasped. Ryn noticed again how his accent was neither Efstanish nor Imfisi, but something else entirely--a strange combination of guttural and lilting. “Rrrr...now you've done it…” muttered Sagar.  “You're in a forest outside Nonts, in Imfis,” Ryn said to the man.The man's brow knotted and some grey reasserted itself in his eyes amidst the red. The black discoloration around his mouth was really quite horrible. “I am...? Oh...you're one of the boys who was with the target.” One of the boys. That meant the bounty hunter classed Sagar as a ‘boy' as well. Either that or maybe he mistook Elrann for a boy, as some people did. “Why didn't you kill me when I failed the job?”“Yes, why indeed...” said Sagar from off to the side.Even the bounty hunter himself is questioning my decision to keep him alive! Ryn thought. But then he set his jaw. He was determined to justify his actions and make some sense of his spur-of-the-moment choice to spare this man's life.“I didn't kill you,” Ryn said, “because you're going to tell us what the Empire is doing invading Imfis.” The man's forehead furrowed even more deeply as he looked at Ryn. He did nothing for a moment. Then his body twitched and his arms tensed against his bonds. He let out a small grunt.“You're not going anywhere,” said Ryn, a little surprised at his own boldness in the face of his fear of the man. “You're tied up good and tight.”“Why should I tell you anything?” the man said, his foreign-accented voice dripping with spite.A clicking noise sounded. Ryn turned to see Elrann standing next to them. She had cocked her pistol and had it pointed at the bounty hunter's chest. “Because this time I will shoot to kill,” she said. “I've re-loaded. Now tell farmboy here what he wants to know or I fill you full of lead.”Does everyone have to have a derisive nickname for me? Ryn thought.The man curled his black-tainted lip, looking contemptuously between the pistol and Ryn. He didn't seem afraid of the weapon or of the prospect of imminent death. “Do you have any more poppy seed?” he said.“You just had a hit,” Elrann growled. “You shouldn't need another one for a while.”The man did seem a lot more together and focused to Ryn, even if he was being entirely ungrateful and uncooperative.The man smiled, but not in a happy way, and the blackness around his mouth rearranged itself. “It's never too early for another hit. Besides, it's nice to know where your next one is going to be coming from. If I knew that, I might be inclined to be a little more talkative…”“You'll be talkative because if you don't I'll put a shot in you,” said Elrann.“Stop talking, woman, and just shoot him already!” said Sagar.“Please,” called Nuthea from where she sat. “No more violence! The One does not approve of senseless killing.”That lent Ryn a little more authority. “Cool it, Elrann,” he said gently, reflecting as he did so that he seemed to be the only one of them who called anyone by their proper name. “He can't tell us anything if he's dead…” Mother. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr. Stay with Nuthea?“Where's the old man?” said the bounty hunter, taking advantage of Ryn's being interrupted by his own thoughts to break the momentary silence. “The one who gave me the poppy before?”“He's doing something for us,” Ryn said. He decided to use a bargaining tactic that Sagar had used earlier. “But he'll be back soon. We're just waiting for him. If you talk to us, I'll get him to give you some more poppy seed when he gets back.”The man went quiet for a moment and seemed to be considering his options. He must know he didn't really have very many. He was tied up and completely at their mercy. “Alright,” the man said at last. “I will talk now, for poppy later. What do you wish to know?”“Well…” Ryn wondered where he should start. “Well, to begin with, what's your name?”“My name?” The man looked puzzled again. “Why would you want to know my name?”“You don't need to know his name, pup, that's a stupid question.”Ryn's fingers twitched. But then he remembered the feel of the cold point of Sagar's blade pressing into his neck. He remembered the pirate had elemental powers too. He remembered that he wasn't officially the leader of this group. Yet.“Vish,” said the bounty hunter.“Huh?”“My name. It's Vish.”“Oh. Good... And...who hired you to capture Nuthea?”The man's grey eyes darted briefly beyond Ryn and back. “Nufea? Nufea is the girl with the yellow hair?”“That's right. Nuthea.”“The Empire, of course.”“You work for them?”“Yes.”“So you're not a bounty hunter?” said Elrann.“I am, or, you might say, was, a bounty hunter on a permanent contract with the Morekemian Empire.”“You kill for them and they supply you with poppy,” said Elrann.Vish's silence might as well have been a ‘yes'.“But you're not Morekemian,” said Elrann.“You are right. I am from Aibar. I trained to kill in Aibar.”“How did you get involved with the Empire, then?” asked Ryn.“They found me. They gave me poppy. Now I work for them. I hate them, but I work for them. The bigger the bounties I collect, the more poppy they give me.”“Why?” asked Ryn, confused at that second-last sentence. “If you hate them, why don't you just leave?” Hating the Empire was something he shared with this man, at least.Vish dropped his voice. “You have never tasted poppy seed, have you, boy? It is the greatest feeling you could ever imagine. Greater. There is nothing better than it. Nothing. I have tried to leave it, but I cannot. I need the poppy. It makes me happy. I am a slave to it. So I am a slave to the Empire too, since they give me poppy in return for killing.”Ryn pondered that. He understood a little more of this man's situation now. How Ryn hated the Empire. All they did was steal, kill, destroy. Enslave. Mother. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr. Stay with Nuthea?“We will help you escape from your poppy enslavement,” said Ryn, surprising himself as much as anyone.“We will?” said Elrann.“Urgggh…” groaned Sagar irritatedly, like his perception of Ryn's stupidity made him physically sick. “Will you all just shut up?”“That is a noble idea, Ryn,” said Nuthea. She was standing next to him and Elrann now. She smiled. Vish just sucked in his black lips and said nothing, and this time it wasn't clear what his nothing meant.“So…” Ryn said, “if you work for the Empire, you know what they're up to. Why did you invade Imfis?”“Yeah, what gives?!” said Elrann all of a sudden. “We pay our levies! There hasn't been any Imfisi trouble with the Empire for a long time, ‘cept for the odd little pirate raid.” “I wouldn't call them little...” said Sagar from off in the distance.“Still, nothing that should have led to a full scale invasion! What in the hells is going on here?” Elrann was clearly still rattled by what had happened--as they all were--but as a recent resident of Imfis she seemed to be feeling it most.Vish shook his head from where he sat atop the chocobo. “I know as much as you do, boy--”“I'm a girl,” said Elrann. “A woman, actually.”“So she claims,” said Sagar.Vish frowned. “But you have short hair and you dress like a boy. And you carry a pistol.”“Yeah. What of it?”Vish raised his eyebrows, but then blinked his puzzlement away, apparently accepting this oddity. “Alright, girl, then. But still--I know as much as you, girl. I just collect my bounties. They don't tell me why or where I'm going. I was flown by airship to Imfis, dropped into the forest and told to hunt for a woman matching her description.” His eyes flicked to Nuthea. “They showed me a drawing, and set me loose. They must have been very keen to get their hands on her, as they had not given me any poppy for a long time.”“Why does that affect anything?” said Ryn.“Because the more desperate he is for poppy the harder he will hunt, dingbat,” said Elrann. “Oh.”“How did you find me?” said Nuthea. “If they knew where I was, why didn't they send more soldiers to capture me? Why did they just send you?”Vish went quiet. He licked his blackened lips. “You will give me lots of poppy when the old man returns?”“We'll get him to give you some, yes…” said Ryn carefully. “And then we'll start helping you to get free from it.”Vish swallowed. He was quiet a moment longer, but then he said “There are others like me. Not all from Aibar--though some are. Other Shadowfingers.”“‘Shadowfingers'?” said Sagar. Now he stood up and joined them as well. “What in the poodoo is a ‘Shadowfinger'?”Vish bit his lip. “I want lots of poppy,” he said.“Yeah, yeah,” said Sagar, taking over the bartering from Ryn. “When the old timer gets back, sure.”“The Shadowfingers are the Empire's elite assassins,” said Vish. “People call us bounty hunters because that is what they think we are. And that is true, in a way. But really we are all poppy slaves--and slaves to the Empire because of that. The Emperor finds the most dangerous killers in Mid, gets us hooked on poppy, and then uses us to carry out his wishes. Together, we make up the Emperor's Hand. It wasn't just me they dropped into Imfis, but other Shadowfingers as well. Maybe about three of us.” He looked at Nuthea. “They must have known the general area you were in, but not exactly where. I stole this chocobo for transportation and just happened to chance upon you in the forest. I was lucky, I suppose. Or not, as the case may be,” he added, eyeing Elrann's pistol. “I was doing fine until you shot me with that infernal contraption. Where did you acquire such a device, anyway?”“In Farr,” said Elrann, and grinned.“Ah yes. Some of the Farric Shadowfingers have them as well.” Vish nodded knowingly.A distant noise like a dog barking, only deeper and angrier, came from somewhere very far away. Everyone looked round in the direction it had come from, the direction from which they had walked, but there was nothing to be seen, only the interwoven eaves of the trees.“What was that?” said Ryn.“Nothing,” said Sagar. “A stray dog or something. So you're one of these ‘Shadowfingers' then,” he said, turning back to Vish to resume their interrogation. “One of the Morekemian Emperor's assassins. If that's true, you must know why he has invaded Imfis.”“You don't need to ask him,” piped up Nuthea. “We already know why the Emperor has invaded Imfis.”“Well why don't you ask him if he knows what you think you know about why they've invaded?”“I…” Nuthea hesitated. “I'm not sure we should talk to him about that. I'm not sure that we can trust him.” Ryn understood that. The bounty hunter had almost killed her, after all...“Look, bounty hunter,” said Sagar, disregarding her, “the princess here thinks that the Emperor has invaded Imfis because he's found out about some ancient relics called the ‘Primeval Jewels' and he's trying to get his hands on them.”“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Vish said at once. He looked completely blank. “I've never heard of any ‘Primeval Jewels' before.”“He's lying,” said Elrann.“Think what you will,” said Vish. “I have no reason to lie to any of you. I haven't the faintest idea why the Empire has invaded this pitiful country. They don't tell me what they're doing--they just drop me into places and point me in the direction of my target so I can claim my poppy. I just want my poppy. In fact, it's in my interests to tell you the truth.”“Do you know who General Vorr is?” Ryn jumped in all of a sudden.Vish was silent a moment. “Yes,” he said.Ryn's pulse quickened. “What can you tell me about him?”“You don't want to know about him,” Vish said slowly. “You don't want anything to do with him. He is a brutal, cruel, highly dangerous Imperial officer. That is as much as you should want to know.”“What's his involvement in the invasion?” “He has been tasked with leading the invasion of Imfis by the Emperor; I know that much.”“How do you know that much if they don't tell you anything?”“Vorr is running the whole operation. He personally gave me my orders to hunt and capture or kill your yellow-haired girl himself.”“Nuthea.”“Nufea.”“What's he planning next?”Vish sighed; not a sigh of pleasure this time like when he had been in the poppy trance, but a deeper, coarser sigh of exasperation. “That I cannot tell you. He merely issued me with my target. I was to kill or capture her, then report back with evidence--”“Evidence?” interrupted Sagar.“You know. Evidence that I'd completed the job. The severed head of the target will usually do, for example.”Nuthea put a hand over her mouth.“I was to report back with evidence,” continued Vish, “receive my poppy, and then await my next target. I don't know anything about why I am given my targets, why the Empire are doing what they're doing, or what they're going to do next. I find it is best not to think about any of those things. All I am interested in is my poppy.”Ryn's pulse slowed again, and he sighed now as well. Whatever the others thought, he judged that this man was probably telling the truth, and that he really didn't know anything more about Vorr's plans or whereabouts. It made sense. He was just a sort of slave who followed orders. Although...maybe if Ryn pressed him further the man might be able to give him some hint as to Vorr's plans and where Ryn might be able to find him next, and perhaps even how Ryn might most easily be able to kill him...A question formed on his lips. “What else can you tell me about Gen--”“Quick!”Their heads snapped round. Someone had called out from somewhere in the forest, just on the edge of hearing.There was another sound like the deep bark they had heard earlier, only louder and closer this time. There it was again. And again.Rustling. Something moving through the undergrowth.And then the old man healer Cid appeared, a way off still, hurtling through the trees towards them at full gallop on the back of a yellow chocobo. Where he clasped the reins he also held a rope attached to another chocobo that galloped along behind him.“Quick, get on, get on!” he yelled as he approached them. His face was puffy and red and he spoke between gasping for breath. “We've got to go, now! They're coming! They caught me stealing the chocobos from the stable and now they're coming!”“Who's coming?” Ryn was the first to say as he scrambled around in a panic, trying to work out which chocobo to mount.The barking noise sounded again, closer still; horribly, bone-chillingly close.“The Imperials, of course!” yelled Cid urgently. “But they're bringing something with them! Some kind of beast!”From between the trees behind him, where Cid had been only moments ago, several black-armoured Imperial soldiers mounted on chocobos appeared.And with them, twice their height and more than four times their width, was some sort of bone-white, dog-like, black-eyed, many-toothed, barking monster. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sagaofthejewels.substack.com

回答的問題: 有大大的夢的呆呆 常駐連結：

Previously on Saga of the Jewels:Seventeen-year-old Ryn’s hometown is attacked by General Vorr of the Empire and everyone he has ever known is killed. Just before he dies, Ryn’s father gives him a ruby, which causes him to project fire. Ryn is captured by the Empire and meets another captive, Princess Nuthea, who has the ability to project lightning. Nuthea explains to him that the Empire have learned of the existence of twelve Primeval Jewels which grant the ability to manipulate different elements, and are searching for them. The Imperial vessel where they are being held is in turn attacked by a pirate airship, and the pirates capture Ryn and Nuthea. The lead pirate, Captain Sagar, agrees to escort Nuthea back to her homeland, and to spare Ryn’s life, in exchange for the promise of gold, gemstones and beautiful women upon her safe delivery. However, in the battle with the Empire Sagar’s ship’s engineer has been killed. They land in the port city of Ast and recruit a new engineer called Elrann. Ast is then attacked by the Empire, who are using the Fire Ruby to invade the continent and search for more of the Jewels. Ryn confronts General Vorr, his parents’ murderer on whom he has vowed to enact revenge, and only narrowly escapes with the help of his new friends. Ryn, Nuthea, Sagar and Elrann flee the city of Ast together, but are then attacked by a bounty hunter. They manage to subdue the bounty hunter but Nuthea is gravely wounded in the process. Ryn beats Sagar to the hunter’s mount and rushes Nuthea to the nearest town where he finds a healer, a mysterious old man who saves Nuthea’s life with his arts. The trio are attacked by the Empire, who now have a bounty on Nuthea, but Elrann and Sagar arrive just in time to rescue them, the captive bounty hunter still in tow.Episode 9: Party of Six?The chocobo could only move at a brisk trot with three people on its back, but that didn’t matter as they’d left their assailants in total disarray. After his battle with the soldiers Ryn could barely run to keep up alongside it anyway. The old man didn’t move very fast either. Sagar sat upright on the chocobo next to Nuthea and the bounty hunter, clutching his wounded arm. The only person who seemed to have much strength left among them was Elrann, though she was still shaken from the sudden invasion of Imfis by the Empire, as far as Ryn could tell.When they’d made it a good way back into the woods outside Nonts and Ryn was satisfied that they hadn’t been pursued, he stopped them in a small clearing of beech trees. He, Elrann and the old man carefully lifted Nuthea down from the chocobo and lay her on the ground, then did the same with the gagged and bound bounty hunter, then helped Sagar down.Nuthea was the priority. Although Ryn’s heart had stopped palpitating when the old man had pronounced that she was going to live, she still hadn’t woken up and his heart was still beating faster than usual. He knelt down next to the princess. The old man had applied a fresh bandage from his bag to her abdomen and, mercifully, this one was not drenched in blood. Blood still stained her disheveled dress around it, though. Her face was still very pale--though Ryn fancied he could see a faint pinkness returning to her proud cheeks already--and frozen in a disapproving pout. Even unconscious she looked like she was about to deliver a lecture. “Is she going to be alright?” Ryn asked.“Yes,” the old man said plainly. “She should wake up soon.”The healer gently placed a hand on Nuthea’s forehead, closed his eyes and whispered something. He withdrew his hand.First, nothing. Then a flicker of consciousness passed across Nuthea’s face and she began to stir, wrinkling up her nose and frowning even more deeply. The pinkness in her cheeks grew warmer. She blinked, then opened her cool blue eyes and looked into Ryn’s.“Oh,” she said. “Why do you look so afraid, Ryn?”It was an unusual first question but Ryn supposed that it made sense. “I was afraid,” he said to her. “I thought...I thought you might have died...”Nuthea’s mouth pushed up into a smile underneath her heavy eyelids. “There’s no need to be afraid of death,” she said quietly, taking the opportunity to teach him something.“What happens to us after we die?” Ryn heard himself ask her. He didn’t know how she would know or why he was asking, but he asked her all the same.“If we have believed on the One, we go to be with Him forever.” “How can you be so sure?”“I don’t know. I’m not always. But right now, I am. I’m all the more sure from having just almost died.”“Well, I didn’t want you to go to be with the One just yet…”“What happened to me?”“You were attacked by a bounty hunter, but I found a healer for you. I’m… I’m glad you're alive…”His words ran out, and for a moment no more passed between them, and he hovered above the cool blue pools of her eyes.“Well, this is all very touching, pup, princess,” said Sagar, “but do you think I could get some attention from the old man, now, too? You’re not the only one who’s been hurt. I got injured rescuing you as well.”Ryn had forgotten that there was anyone else with them for a moment. They had all faded into the background temporarily.He coughed and let go of Nuthea’s hand, realising at the same time that he had been holding it.“Ah, I apologise, young man,” the healer said to Sagar. “Of course, you are injured too. Now that the young lady is alright, I can attend to you. Let me take a look.”Ryn helped Nuthea to sit up and they sat on the grass with Elrann and watched as the old man took out a small knife from the leather bag that he carried slung over one shoulder. Delicately, he cut the torn sleeve of Sagar’s shirt away to reveal the part of his upper arm where the bounty hunter had nicked it with his sword.Ryn winced. Underneath the shirt was a horizontal gash. It wasn’t too deep--the man in black had only sliced through the top layer of skin this time--and it had already started to scab up. But in amongst the red and brown of the scab was something else: a putrifying black colour.“Poison,” the old man, muttered. “Of course, the same as used on the young lady. Ajanga, as the other young man told me. I am sorry I did not get to you sooner. But now that I have, I can heal you. You did very well to last this long, young man--you must be feeling very weak.”“Just heal me, old timer,” said Sagar, eyeing Ryn.“Of course.”The old man rummaged around in his bag, then produced a small glass phial of some sort of silvery liquid.“Here, drink this antidote.” He pressed the bottle to Sagar’s lips and the skypirate drank a gulp. The old man shut his eyes and gently laid a hand on Sagar’s arm, over the cut. Sagar clenched his jaw. “Cure,” Ryn heard the old man whisper this time.Sagar’s eyes went wide and his head rocked back. He took the man’s hand off him.The black discolouring had disappeared from the cut on his arm. Not only that, but now the cut closed before their very eyes, the skin sealing itself up and returning to a pinky-white hue, as if nothing had ever happened.“Woah…” said Elrann.“It’s a miracle...” said Nuthea.“I…” said Sagar.He leapt at Ryn. Before Ryn knew what was happening he was lying flat on his back on the ground, Sagar pinning his chest down with one of his knees. The pirate had drawn one of his swords, and he pressed the blade into Ryn’s neck so that just the very tip of it pierced his skin, like a wasp sting sticking into him. What the hells is he doing? thought Ryn, not in a position to voice his question aloud.Ryn remembered why Sagar had cause to be angry.“Sagar!” called Nuthea from somewhere above. “Get off him!”“Just a moment, princess, we’ve got some business to settle.” Sagar leaned in close so that Ryn could see his stubble. His breath stank of stale tobacco leaf. Is he going to kill me? No--if Ryn knew Sagar at all, he would just threaten him. Or maybe slightly maim him?The pirate captain dropped his voice to a low growl. “Listen, pup, and listen good. If you ever pull something like that--unseating me from my mount by surprise--again, especially in front of the ladies, I will slit your throat quicker than you can say ‘naive little greenhorn pussywillow farm boy’. You got that?”Ryn wanted to gulp, but he thought just now that would be a bad idea. He also thought that that phrase took quite a long time to say, actually, but he thought it would be a bad idea to say that too.“Y-yes,” he said instead out of self-preservation.“Good,” said Sagar, keeping his voice low. “I’m going to let you up now, and you’re going to support me in my suggestion that we keep traveling to Manolia so I can collect the reward for the princess. Clear?”“Clear,” croaked Ryn, though he hated himself for acquiescing so easily. He didn’t really have any other choice though.“Sagar!” said Nuthea again.“Al-right!” said Sagar like a henpecked husband, and got up off Ryn.Ryn stood up, rubbing his throat. His hand came away with a small smear of blood on it, but it wasn’t much--Sagar had only pricked him.“Silly boys,” said Nuthea with a roll of her eyes, as if Ryn had been just as complicit as Sagar in what had just happened.“How did you do that?” said Elrann. She addressed the old man, but she was looking at the still-exposed flesh of Sagar’s arm where his cut had sealed itself up.“Yes, that was truly remarkable!” said Nuthea. “A miracle!”Ryn hadn’t heard this word before. “What’s a miracle?”“The way that he healed Sagar’s wound. And mine. Mine even more so!” Nuthea placed her hand over the fresh bandage on her abdomen. “I can barely feel any pain anymore. And my wound has closed up too. That man”--her eyes flicked over to where the bounty hunter in black lay tied up on the floor--“gave me quite a cut.”“No,” said Ryn, “I mean, what is a ‘miracle’? What does it mean?”“A miracle is a wondrous sign that points to the One,” Nuthea recited, closing her eyes for a moment and holding up a finger. “It’s when the One works in the world to show His power.”“It’s not a miracle, princess,” said Sagar, shaking his head. “There are no such things. Don’t be foolish. This healer just used his arts to heal Nuthea’s wound, is all—didn’t you, old timer?”They all looked at the old man. He smiled, deep lines forming around his white-bearded mouth and under his bushy white eyebrows. “I did do that,” he said happily. “Whether you want to call it a miracle or not is up to you.”“But you made the wound close up by itself!” said Elrann. “How did you do that?”“The medicine he gave me,” said Sagar. “Obviously.”“But you did something else to him as well, didn’t you?” said Elrann.The old man’s smile grew wider. “I couldn’t possibly say.”Ryn remembered the man whispering the word ‘Cure’.“I am telling you, it’s a miracle,” said Nuthea.“I still don’t get what you mean by ‘miracle’,” said Ryn.“A miracle, Ryn, is when the One acts out of the normal course of things to show his power. Look at it like this:” (Ryn was amazed again at how easily, having been so recently near the edge of death, Nuthea was able to resume her usual teacherly manner.) “In the course of life, and death, things normally happen a certain way: The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, heavy things sink and light things float, and wounds do not close up by themselves. All these things have been arranged by the One, the God of gods. But sometimes the One intervenes in the normal course of things and changes something, to show that he is there and that he has the power to do so. It’s a bit like the writer of a story putting something into the story to show that they wrote it.” She pointed to Sagar’s arm. “This was clearly a miracle. My healing too is clearly a miracle, performed through this healer by the One, to show us that He endorses our quest.”Sagar snorted loudly.“If you have something to say, dear Captain, please say it,” said Nuthea.“I’m telling you, it’s not a miracle!” said the pirate. “There is no ‘One’, or any god at all! This healer simply used his skill and medicines to heal you, princess. You’d be surprised at what bodies are capable of doing to heal themselves, with a little help. I’ve seen a man’s belly be torn open by a cutlass only to have it close up and heal itself the next day after a night drinking rum. I’ve seen a man ghostly pale with the pox spring up right as rain when a skysailor’s blessing was spoken over him. I’ve seen a man who had lost his eye in a fight screaming and wailing on the floor one moment leap up and kill his five attackers the next.” He patted his eye patch. “It happens. They weren’t miracles. They were just the ‘normal course of things’.”“You’re wrong,” said Nuthea, eyes flashing.Ryn could more than detect an argument brewing so he decided to interrupt before she could say any more. “Look, why don’t we just ask the healer himself?”“There’s an idea,” said Sagar, clearly of the opinion that the old man was going to agree with his side of the argument. “Did you do a miracle or not, old timer? Tell us straight.”The old man sniffed and wiped his nose. “I think it is best at this point if I keep my methods to myself,” he said in his kindly voice, slightly throaty with age. “I put my healers’ arts to use in service of the pair of you and I did everything I knew to do in your situations, and happily you have both recovered...that is all I will say on the matter.”“There you go,” said Sagar, folding his arms, interpreting the old man as agreeing with his own opinion. “Healers’ arts. Not a miracle.”“I will add, however,” the old man spoke up, “that I too am a follower of the One. It is good to meet a granddaughter in the faith, young lady.”Nuthea’s face lit up. Ryn found himself hoping he would be able to make her beam like that one day. “Oh! A father!” she exclaimed. “I’m so pleased to meet you!”She stepped up to the old man and they each gave one another a light kiss on either cheek.“Urgh…” said Sagar, slapping his hand over his face. “Not another one…”“Please, granddaughter” said the old man to Nuthea, “I am old in years. You do me a great honour, but ‘Grandfather’ will do.”“Huh?” said Ryn, his brow knotting. “‘Grandfather’? What are you talking about?”“It’s part of their religion, farmboy,” Elrann explained to him. “The Cult of the One are a worldwide religion, not just limited to a particular place. You do meet them sometimes. I’ve come across a few on my travels. They all see themselves as this big sort of family, with the One as their Supreme Father. So they call their younger women ‘daughters’, older women ‘mothers’, then there’s ‘sisters’, ‘brothers’, ‘fathers’, an’ stuff. I’ve never heard of no ‘grandfather’ before though.”“Yes,” said Nuthea, smiling, “that honorific is reserved for the eldest and wisest of men. There aren’t many of them in Manolia, where I am from. What is your name, Grandfather?” “I am called Cid,” said the old man, smiling in return.“Well, this is all very touching; old timer, princess,” said Sagar, “but now that you’re healed we need to be getting back on our way. Do I need to remind you that you’ve got a war to prevent, and I’ve got a reward to collect?”The old man’s eyes widened.“Hey numb-nuts, give her a moment,” said Elrann. “She’s just barely avoided dying from a mortal wound. Give her a bit of time to recover!”“She’s fine now!” said Sagar impatiently, flinging out his hand to indicate Nuthea’s bandaged abdomen. “The medicine-man worked his magic, or whatever you want to call it. Let’s get this show back on the road!”Ryn’s blood began to boil, but the old man called Cid spoke first.“Actually, there is some wisdom in your companion’s suggestion,” the healer said diplomatically, stroking his white beard with one hand. “It would make much sense for the young lady to rest awhile. Although my arts are powerful, her wound was almost mortal, and she could do with at least a night here to recover fully before you go on your way. What’s more, that will give me time to pack my things.”“Pack your things?” said Ryn. “Why?”“I’m coming with you.” “What?!” said Sagar.“PUUUUU--UUUUUY!”They all looked round, startled by the sudden muffled shout.The bounty hunter in black had begun to writhe around where he lay tied up on the ground, violently throwing his head this way and that and shouting something so loudly that they could hear it through his gag, although it was still impossible to make out what he was saying. In their heated conversation they had completely forgotten about him.“PUU--UUY!” cried the man as he twisted on the ground, contorting his body inside the ropes. “PUU--UUY!”“What’s wrong with him?” said Cid, concern raising the normally deep pitch of his voice.“He’s a damned poppy addict,” Sagar said with a dismissive wave. “I promised him I would give him some if he told us the way to Nonts. Now the fool’s having a tantrum.”“No,” said Cid, his bushy brows pushing together, “don’t you understand? Poppy addicts experience terrible withdrawal symptoms if they don’t ingest again within fourteen days. They have fits, and it feels like utter agony. Their whole body can flare with terrible pain and convulsions. Sometimes it can be so bad that it kills them. If they come off it, they have to cut down gradually. He needs some poppy seed.” He reached into his leather satchel and began to rummage around. “So what?” said Sagar. “Who’s going to give it to him? I don’t have any. Let the b*****d die. He’s served his purpose. I don’t know why he is still alive, anyway. I don’t even know why the pup wanted to keep him alive in the first place.” Ryn bristled and his pulse quickened. “He did tell us the way to Nonts,” he said defensively. “And he told us about the poison he used on his sword.”“If you hadn’t kept him alive for that, this young lady would be dead,” said Cid, glancing at Nuthea as he knelt down on the ground next to the squirming bounty hunter. He carefully held the man’s head in place with one hand, and with the other untied his gag. The cloth of material fell away from the man’s face, and Cid tugged the bottom of the man’s headscarf down too, exposing his blackened mouth. “POPPY!” the bounty hunter shouted in an inhumanly shrill voice, like he was being tortured. “GIVE ME POPPY!”“Shhhh,” soothed Cid.“What are you doing, old man?” said Sagar.“I carry poppy with me in my healer’s bag,” said Cid. “It’s not just used for pleasure--in smaller doses it’s useful as an anaesthetic--to numb pain. In fact, I gave a very small amount to the young lady earlier.”“That explains a lot…” Sagar mumbled. Nuthea didn’t respond.Cid produced a small glass phial of many round, black objects--seeds-- unstoppered it, and tipped a few into the bounty hunter’s mouth.“GIVE ME POP--” the bounty hunter shrieked again when he had swallowed, but then stopped mid-word. Immediately his grey eyes went glassy, his pupils grew bigger, and his body went still, no longer convulsing and wriggling. He lay his head back on the ground and stared up above him, though his eyes had lost focus. “Ahhhhh…” A long, blissful sigh escaped the bounty hunter’s lips.“What’s happened to him?” asked Nuthea.“He’s gone into a poppy trance,” Sagar said scornfully.“What’s that?” asked Ryn.“Ain’t you seen one of these either?” said Elrann. “You need to get out more, farmboy.”“It’s good that he is tied up for the moment,” said Cid as he watched the bounty hunter enjoying his reverie. “A poppy trance, when you ingest a large amount of poppy all at once, is a state of euphoria--bliss--unlike any other. It is supposed to be the most wonderful and amazing sensation that can be experienced in Mid, though I have my doubts about that. And it comes at a terrible cost. Once a person has experienced a poppy trance, they almost without fail become enslaved to it. Once the trance wears off it is only a matter of time before the person’s body, mind and spirit desire to experience the trance again, and so they become addicted to it, trapped in a never-ending cycle of craving and acting more and more desperately to obtain their next ‘hit’ of poppy seed. If you say this man is a bounty hunter, I would not be surprised if he became one in order to feed his poppy habit.”“Why is it ‘good’ that he’s tied up, then?” asked Ryn.“Some people can actually do things while they are in a poppy trance--get up, walk around, and so on--and they can last quite a long time, depending on how much the person takes. Peculiarly, you also have heightened senses, and are actually slightly stronger and faster during a poppy trance. So it’s very good that he is tied up. Though you better make sure he is properly tied up.”“You seem to know an awful lot about poppy trances, old timer...” said Sagar as he bent over the bounty hunter and pulled on his cords to check they were tight enough. The bounty hunter moaned merrily.“It’s my job to know,” said Cid. “I’ve treated many a poppy addict in my time.”“What, get a lot of them in small-town Nonts, do you?”“I have not always lived in Nonts,” said Cid with a wry smile.“Hey,” said Ryn, remembering what they had been talking about before they had been interrupted by the poppy-addict bounty hunter. “What did you mean you’re ‘coming with us’, anyway?”“Yeah, old timer,” said Sagar, “who said you were tagging along?”“Well,” said Cid, “just now I heard you say that you’re journeying to prevent a war and to do something for this young lady here. That sounds like a noble cause to me. It’s been a while since I’ve been adventuring and I’m itching to have one more adventure before I pass into the furtherlife. I have no living relatives left alive in Nonts and my apprentice is ready to take over at the Healing House. Now that Imfis has been invaded I have little desire to work as a healer in the service of the Morekemian Empire. So, I would like to come with you on your journey.”The four of them--Ryn, Nuthea, Sagar, Elrann--all looked at each other, silently conferring over the possibility of adding this fifth member to their party (sixth, if you counted the captive bounty hunter).Sagar ran his tongue along his upper lip. “I’m not buying this,” he said. “You’ve only just met us, old timer. You did us a favour healing me and Nuthea, I’ll grant you that, and we still need to pay you, but you’ve no good reason to suddenly join us on the turn of a bronze piece. You don’t even know what we’re doing, really. What’s really going on here?”Cid’s smile grew even deeper, and he closed his eyes as he spoke. “Ah, you have me there, mister ‘captain’. I have my own personal reasons for joining you. But I would rather keep them to myself, for now. Suffice to say, my intentions are purely noble. And you need not worry about paying me for the healings--I have plenty of coin.” “Oh, do come with us!” said Nuthea, clapping her hands together. “Do come with us, grandfather!”Sagar slapped his hand to his forehead. “Not this again…”“I will say,” said Cid, opening his eyes, and now they seemed to shine, though Ryn saw no colour in them except white light, “that from the way that this young man threw fire, and you, young man, commanded the wind, I assume that each of you is Jewel-touched. Therefore I also deduce that your journey has something to do with the Primeval Jewels, whether or not you know it yet. I discern here the Will of the One. Therefore, I would come with you to assist you.”“Look,” said Sagar, “that’s all well and good, old timer, but not all of us buy into your religious mumbo-jumbo. Some of us may be ‘Jewel-touched’, or whatever you call it, but that’s got nothing to do with what we’re doing. I’m escorting the princess here back to her home country so that I can be handsomely rewarded.”“Yeah,” said Ryn, feeling the need to speak up too, “and I’m trying to find the Imperial Officer who killed my parents and burned down my hometown, who’s probably headed in the same direction, so I can get revenge on him. I’m just tagging along with these guys until I can find him.” As he said it, he knew that it was no longer the whole of the truth. But he wasn’t about to admit that to everyone. Mother. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr. Stay with Nuthea?“S’right,” said Elrann, “and I’m just sticking around with these guys ‘cause they’re the last contract I took before the invasion, till something better comes up.” Ryn wondered if that wasn’t the whole truth, as well.“Ahhhhhhh…” said the bounty hunter from somewhere in his poppy trance.“Be that as it may,” said Cid, “two of you are Jewel-touched--”“Three, actually!” said Nuthea happily. “I am Lightning-Crystal-touched.”Cid’s bushy eyebrows nearly jumped off his face.“Why would you volunteer that information, princess?” Sagar said, shaking his head at her. “You need to be a lot more careful who you go around telling that too. You’re far too trusting.”Nuthea bit her lip, but then she said “It’s alright. He is a grandfather in the faith. I trust him.”“Three of you are jewel-touched!” said Cid. “Well, that settles it even further. I would come with you to serve as your healer. And what of this ‘war’ you are seeking to prevent that I heard you mention?”“I’m trying to get back to Manolia as soon as possible,” said Nuthea in her refined, royal tones, “to warn them that the Morekemian Emperor has gained knowledge of the Jewels, and is seeking them. I hope that this may prepare them for whatever he is planning.”“What could be a more noble cause?” said Cid. “Truly, I discern the Will of the One in this. Again I tell you, I would come with you to serve as your healer.”“Alright, alright, team huddle,” said Sagar, and beckoned for Ryn, Nuthea and Elrann to come close. Ryn wasn’t sure when they had become a ‘team’ but he supposed that they were one. They had by now, after all, fought off and escaped from not one, but two groups of Imperial soldiers together. Ryn felt a little twinge of irritation in his gut that Sagar seemed to have made himself the ‘leader’ of the team. But he left that alone for now.“Just wait over there for a bit while we talk this over, old timer,” said Sagar, gesturing for Cid to move away, who did so.The four of them linked arms and put their heads together. Ryn had never been so close to Nuthea’s face. But he was also close to Sagar’s face again on the other side. Urgh. Elrann faced him on the opposite side of the huddle.“I don’t like this one bit,” said Sagar quietly. “The old timer’s hiding something, I know it. Our traveling party’s getting big enough as it is. I say we rob him of his stuff and leave him here.” “Captain Sagar!” said Nuthea. “Even for a pirate that is despicable! He is perfectly trustworthy. He is a follower of the One, and he has already healed both of us.”“He is good at healing...” said Elrann. Sagar frowned at her from his place in the huddle, looking betrayed. “You’re on board with this guy too, woman?”“He just seems like a kind old man to me. You’re right, I don’t believe in any of this ‘One’ stuff either, but I’m prepared to believe he believes it. What has he done for us so far? Healed two of us, and helped calm down that bat-poodoo crazy bounty hunter.”Sagar’s frown grew more pronounced, like milk curdling.“That’s two against one,” said Nuthea, seizing upon the opportunity. “Ryn--you have the deciding vote: either we are locked two against two in a tie, or Grandfather Cid can come with us. What’s your answer?”Ryn considered his opinion of the old man. He thought back over what he knew about him so far. “Well, when he found out I knew someone who was hurt he came with me straight away. Then, Elrann’s right, he healed you, Nuthea, while we were fighting off the soldiers. Then he healed Sagar’s arm. Then he helped us out with the screaming bounty hunter, who could have attracted the soldiers to our position. And he doesn’t even want us to pay him for any of that. I…”“Yes?” said Nuthea.“...trust him,” finished Ryn.“Rrrr, fine,” said Sagar exasperatedly, his face turning red. He broke the huddle abruptly and turned toward the old man. “Alright old timer, apparently you can come with us, for some reason.”“Wonderful,” said Cid, with a smile.“You can come with us on the condition that you don’t try to pull anything funny or slow down our trip. The minute that happens--” Sagar drew a finger across his throat to indicate a decapitating action.“Of course,” said Cid, still smiling. “You have nothing to worry about, young man.”“We still have a problem, though” said Ryn, seeing a chance to make himself more of the leader. “Where are we going to go now, and how are we going to get there?”“Now that I am healed,” said Nuthea, “I still need to get to Manolia as quickly as possible.”“The plan is the same,” said Sagar. “We make for Sirra, the Imfisi capital, and try to board a train to Manolia.” He looked over at the chocobo, which had crouched down and rested its head on the ground plaintively. It cawed. “Actually, now that we have the bird, I could simply ride there with the princess to get the train. The rest of you coming on foot would only slow us down. I say we part ways here.”Heat rose in Ryn’s chest. “Hey! There’s no way you’re ditching us here! I’m still heading that way to look for General Vorr, remember?”“Yeah, and there’s no way I’m walking all the way to Sirra, now that we have a chocobo,” said Elrann.“And it does somewhat defeat my joining you to be your healer if I don’t actually join you to be your healer...” said Cid.“Ahhhhhhhhh…” said the bounty hunter from his place on the ground.Sagar merely pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes malevolently.“Yes,” said Nuthea, “we travel together. As grandfather said, the One clearly has a purpose in bringing us all together. Especially you, Ryn, with your fire gift.” Ryn stood a little taller. The heat in his chest was replaced by a light, dreamlike sensation that moved up into his head. “But Sagar is right…” The lightness disappeared as quickly as it had come. “...we’re going too slowly on foot. And no doubt all the Imperial troops in the area will be searching for us now. We all need a way of traveling more quickly to get to Sirra.”“I may be able to help there,” said Cid.The four of them turned to look at him.Cid nodded towards the bounty hunter’s steed. “Your man in black must have rented or stolen that bird from the chocobo stable in Nonts. None of you will be able to show your face there--especially you, Granddaughter--but I can. As far as the Empire know, I’m a nobody. I handed over my Healing House to my apprentice before they arrived. They have no idea who I am.”“Won’t they have seen you escaping with us?” asked Ryn.“I doubt it,” said Cid. “You killed all of the soldiers in Eda’s house, didn’t you?” Eda must be the old woman who had betrayed Ryn to the Imperials. “Yes,” said Sagar. “And I doubt they would have had time to get a good look at me in the chaos that followed, especially what with you throwing wind spells all over the place. Even if they did, I can just say that I’m a retired old man with some healing skills whom you forced to heal someone for you and then abandoned in the forest. They won’t look at me twice. I will go and find a couple more chocobos for us.”“Oh, you’d do that for us, Grandfather?” said Nuthea. Ryn thought she was laying it on a bit thick. “Of course,” said Cid. “As I say, I have plenty of coin. This is good--this way I can go home before we leave and pick up some supplies--gold, a cloak, some sleeping mats, that sort of thing.”“Food?” said Elrann.“Naturally,” said Cid. “Are you hungry, young lady?”“We haven’t eaten since last night.”“Well of course, then! You must be famished. I will bring as much as I can carry, and gold to buy more. I best be off. I will meet you back here in a few hours, with the chocobos.”“Not here,” said Sagar. “We need to keep moving while you’re getting your supplies, old timer. The Imperials will be looking for us.”“You’re quite right,” said Cid. “Tell you what: meet me at the crest of the hill a few miles due east of Nonts. It’s wooded there too, so you’ll be sheltered.”“Good idea, Grandfather,” said Nuthea.“Let’s go,” said Elrann.“Hmph,” said Sagar.“Ahhhhhh…” said the bounty hunter, still in his poppy trance.“Wait,” said Ryn, realising something.“What?” The others turned to him.“Him,” said Ryn, pointing at the bounty hunter. “We still haven’t decided what to do about him.”“He’s served his purpose,” said Sagar. “I say we slit his throat and leave him to die here.”“Sagar!” said Nuthea. “No! Who is this man, anyway?”“Who do you think, princess? This is the bounty hunter that jumped us and made that cut in your belly before the old timer healed you. Pup here kept him alive out of ‘pity’ or some such nonsense. I suppose he did tell us the way to get to Nonts. But there’s no reason to keep him alive any longer.”“Well done, Ryn,” said Nuthea, completely unexpectedly.Sagar put his head in his hands.“Why?” said Ryn.“Oneism teaches to love one’s enemies, and that it is wrong to kill another living thing. Forgiveness and restoration are always possible.”“But I’ve seen you cook Imperial soldiers in their armour with lightning bolts!”“That was different…” said Nuthea sheepishly, rubbing her arm and looking sidelong at Cid. “That was self-defense…”“Be that as it may, Granddaughter is right,” said Cid. “It would be wrong to kill and abandon this pitiful soul. It would only add more evil to the world.”Sagar had turned red. “Rrrr. Not this again! You two are completely crazy!”“You know,” said Elrann, “for once, I agree with the jackass. I’m not saying we have to kill him, but there’s no sense in keeping this guy around. He’s clearly dangerous. I don’t see what good can come of it.”“Thank you, woman. At least one of you is seeing sense.”“Well that’s two against two again,” said Nuthea. “If we’re going to go with the ‘majority vote’ in this team, a concept which while vulgar I am not entirely unfamiliar with, then you get the deciding vote again, Ryn.”Ryn looked down at the entranced bounty hunter laying face up on the ground. Right now the man’s dark eyes were glassy and unfocused, staring off into the leaves and sky above them while he occasionally emitted moans of pleasure. But Ryn remembered the look in the man’s eyes the first time Sagar had been about to kill him. Somewhere in that gray Ryn had seen terror, and desperation, and trauma. Somewhere in that gray Ryn had seen--humanity. And he had known in that instant that really, despite the man’s appearance and current choice of occupation, he and Ryn weren’t all that different. This man had seen horrible things in his life too, and maybe it was those horrible things that had driven him to what he was doing now. He was a person too.“He stays with us,” said Ryn. “He knew the way to Nonts. He told us what poison he had used. He may know his way around the rest of Imfis. He might be able to give us information about the Empire.” Like where Vorr is, for example. “He might prove helpful yet.”Sagar threw up his hands in exasperation. “This is insane!” He sighed passive-aggressively, like an angry horse whinnying. “Fine, you had better load him onto the chocobo then, pup, seeing as you’re so desperate not to part from him--he’s not going anywhere by himself any time soon. You go get your supplies, old timer--we’ll meet you at the top of the hill east of Nonts in a few hours.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faenon.substack.com

久等了咪納桑~~ 距離KKBOX Podcast 第二屆風雲榜頒獎典禮已經過了兩週 一定要來個典禮現場回顧心得RRRR (根本是認親+迷弟迷妹見面會) 當然最重要的是我們的聽眾留言分享!! 掰惹味 這一集尬一個西卡年度複訓壓力山大 原本要請變變來剪輯 結果不知道為什麼後來還是西卡撿起來剪了 但變變這一週也是水逆轟炸差點逆到溺斃(? 辛苦辛苦 有機會再跟大家聊聊到底花~~黑~~盆~~ -----------------------------------------  ★各個收聽平台與連結 ⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://linktr.ee/30afterparty ★小額贊助支持本節目： https://pay.firstory.me/user/30afterparty ★ 留言告訴我你對這一集的想法： https://open.firstory.me/story/cl0p4a87a0p3p093446foftbh?m=comment 片頭音樂: Celebration by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/5051-celebration License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license 片中音樂:youtube音效庫 _Sunshine_Samba、Earth_Bound Shades of Spring by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4342-shades-of-spring License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license 片尾音樂:youtube音效庫 _ Cockpit Powered by Firstory Hosting

PREVIOUSLY ON SAGA OF THE JEWELS:Seventeen year old Ryn’s hometown is attacked by the Empire and everyone he has ever known is killed. Just before he dies, Ryn’s father gives him a ruby, which causes him to project fire. Ryn is captured by the Empire and meets another captive, Princess Nuthea, who has the ability to project lightning. Nuthea explains to him that the Empire have learned of the existence of twelve Primeval Jewels which grant the ability to manipulate different elements, and are searching for them. The Imperial vessel where they are being held is in turn attacked by a pirate airship, and the pirates capture Ryn and Nuthea. The lead pirate, Captain Sagar, agrees to escort Nuthea back to her homeland, and to spare Ryn’s life, in exchange for the promise of gold, gemstones and beautiful women upon her safe delivery. They land in the port city of Ast and recruit a purple-haired Engineer called Elrann who they need on board since Sagar’s engineer has been killed in the battle with the Imperials. The party of four spend the night at an Inn in Ast…Episode 6: InvasionRyn was brought out of sleep by the sound of screaming, explosions and crunching timber.At first he thought he was having another nightmare because the last two times he had been unconscious he had had nightmares of his mother and father being killed and his hometown burning. Just as these images invaded his waking mind, they invaded his sleep.But as he blinked awake and peered at the nightstand next to the bed he lay in, then over at the stirring form of Sagar in the adjacent bed, Ryn realised that the sounds were real.His chest constricted, sending a shockwave of distress through his body.“Sagar! Get up!” he cried. “Someone’s attacking the inn!”“Mmmmbbbrrr...wha?” said Sagar.Another explosion sounded, like someone had set light to a barrel of oil outside, and more screaming followed, high-pitched and hysterical.Sagar’s one exposed eye opened wide and he scrambled around, then fell out of bed in a tangle of sheets, banging his head on the floor. “Ow!”In a heartbeat he was up again, pulling on his shirt and jacket. “What in the hells is happening?”“I don’t know!” said Ryn, hurriedly shoving himself back into his woolspun tunic. “It must be the Empire!”“The Empire!? That’s ridiculous! We’re safe from the Empire here! Imis pays her levies, and we’re too far away to be of any interest to them!”Another explosion outside. The room shook slightly and some dust dislodged from the ceiling, tickling Ryn’s nose. More screams. Shouts. Nuthea burst in through the door, Elrann behind. Both their faces were pale white.“The ship,” said Nuthea and Sagar at the same time.Sagar finished strapping on his sword-belt and bolted out the door. Nuthea and Elrann followed him without another word. Ryn went after them. He hurtled down the stairs of the inn, taking them three at a time, past the desk at the front of the house where the innkeeper knelt on the floor cowering with his head in his hands, back out onto the cobbled streets of Ast.He looked up into the sky and nearly collapsed and gave in to horror and despair there and then.Not just one broad black Imperial airship with a pointed prow and cannons protruding from each side filled the sky, but a whole fleet of them.He counted at least five, and those were just the ones he could see from his current position through the thatched and tiled rooftops of Ast. They rained down cannonballs on the city, bright flashes erupting from their hulls, emitting thunderous echoes and sending up clouds of debris into the air. But they were raining down something else as well. From the front of one of the ships Ryn saw a jet of flame spurt out, like the breath of a dragon, spraying down onto the buildings of Ast and setting them alight. He stood mesmerised by the violence.“Ryn, come on!” Nuthea called to him from somewhere ahead.His legs were heavy. For a moment he thought he wouldn’t be able to move them, but then his body came back to him and he darted forwards, pulse pounding between his ears.As they ran they had to weave in and out of people stumbling out of their houses, looking up and wailing in terror, or dashing this way and that trying to find shelter, or just kneeling frozen in panic, like the innkeeper had been. “Stay with me!” yelled Sagar over his shoulder and trailing ponytail. “I know the way back to the airfield!”They ran round corners, down alleys, through streets, jumping over sacks, sidestepping out of the way of the panicked citizens, ducking their heads down instinctively whenever another cannonblast sounded and splinters and dust were thrown into the air. Ryn had never run so fast in his life.It’s happening again, he thought as he ran. Wasn’t it enough that he had lived through one Imperial attack already? Why was he having to live through another one? Would he live through another one?Eventually they made it back to the airfield at the edge of the city, its perimeter marked by the little stone cottage that the airship marshall they had met the day before, Roldo, lived in.All of the moored airships that Ryn could see were on fire.“Where is she? Where is she?” cried Sagar, charging into the field of flaming ships, apparently calling for his own vessel.“Sagar!” someone called out to him in a choked voice. Roldo, a little way away, crawling on his hands and knees. He coughed like he had swallowed some of the smoke. A big gash on the side of his face bled down onto his black leather coat, soaking it even darker in blotches. “Get out of here! Run, fools! Run for your lives! They went for your ship first!”“What?!” said Sagar, and kept on running into the airfield. They ran with him past more of the burning vessels, billowing black smoke pluming from them into the sky, some of them broken into pieces, some of them with men on fire jumping off their decks to break their legs on the ground, others lying suffocating on the floor, others just standing and watching the destruction in horror, until they reached Wanderlust.Sagar stopped dead in his tracks and Ryn, Nuthea and Elrann pulled up beside him.Wanderlust was not on fire. Instead, soldiers in black armour were moving around on board it. Corpses lay strewn on the deck. Some wore black armour, but the majority of them were unarmoured, wearing simple sailors’ clothing. Puddles and spatters of blood decorated the spaces between them.And there in the midst of them, stood in the middle the main deck, was a hulking, unhelmeted man in black armour, with flame-red hair.General Vorr. Ryn did a double take. It was definitely him. He was standing right on the main deck of the airship, beneath the centre of its blimp, barking orders at the Imperial soldiers, who seemed to be looking for something for him.The spark in his heart lit the fuse of Ryn’s rage, and he leapt forwards, lungs filling with heat.“Ryn, no!” came Nuthea’s voice from behind him. “Don’t! It’s not safe!” But it was far away now, and growing dimmer by the moment.The palms of Ryn’s hands grew hotter as he cleared the distance to the ship and clambered up the handholds on its starboard side. Then he was over the rail and shouting “You!”, pointing at the Imperial officer. Vorr’s head snapped round and his forehead crinkled for a moment before his eyes glinted with the light of recognition.“The boy from Cleasor!” the Imperial General said disbelievingly. “How did you manage to survive the crash? How did you even get here?”“General Vorr!” Ryn shouted, fists shaking, heat building. “You murdered my mother! You killed my father! You destroyed my hometown!”“Did I?” chuckled Vorr. He looked up and to the side. “Oh yes, I suppose I did…” he said, and rubbed his chin, as if he was considering the most insignificant fact in the world.“KILL YOU!” Ryn shouted.He flung his hands palm-out at Vorr and let out a primal roar of hatred. A jet of flame materialised in the air around his hands and shot out towards Vorr.The flames hit the officer square on, right in the chest. They spread out on his armour and then enveloped him, encasing him in an aura of orange and red as Ryn continued to pour the fire forwards.He willed his hatred, he willed revenge, he willed death into those flames.Then Ryn finished exhaling and the flames from his hands disappeared.His arms quivered where he held them up. The exertion of the fireblast had drained him deeply. It took a moment, but then the smoke around Vorr cleared, leaving......the Imperial officer, still standing, just as he had been before, a malevolent, sharp-toothed grin twisting up his round, red-headed features.Ryn’s legs nearly gave way. “N...no…” he stammered.“You pitiful little peasant,” said Vorr with a leer, in his deep, well-spoken voice. “Didn’t you think that I would have touched the Fire Ruby for myself? We have a whole battalion that can project fire now, can’t you see? We’re going to conquer the whole world! This invasion of Imfis is just the beginning! Haha!”With that outburst of jubilation, he flung out one of his massive hands in Ryn’s direction like he was swatting away a fly, to launch a fireball through the air.Ryn felt the force of the fireball crash into his face and knock him backwards onto the ground. The back of his head hit the deck and stars danced in his vision for a moment. He put his hands to his face, but he was not burned, and he did not feel any pain or heat there. He pushed himself back onto his feet.Vorr loomed over him. “Ah, yes. Of course. You have touched the Ruby too, so you are also impervious to the kiss of fire. Not to worry. I have other ways of ending your worthless little life.”Ryn watched in horror as Vorr reached behind himself, clasped a round steel hilt from between his shoulders, and slowly drew from a scabbard on his back an enormous, wide, long, black sword. The same sword that had pierced his mother’s heart. It seemed to take an age just to slide out of its sheath with a long sliding scraaaaape of metal, then flashed in the light from the burning ships as Vorr drew it back, ready to kill.Ryn was faintly aware of Imperial soldiers standing in a circle around them, blocking his escape. He did not know if he had the energy left to run.“Let me send you to the same place that Mummy and Daddy went with this, then,” said Vorr. He paused, and sucked in his lower lip for a moment. “Although...you don’t happen to know where the captain of this ship went, do you? Or that Manolian hussy we locked you up with?”Ryn remained rooted in place by despair. He had nothing left to say.Mother. Father. Hometown, he thought.“No?” said Vorr. “Oh well. I’ll find them soon enough--if they’re alive to be found, that is.” The world slowed.Vorr’s blade sliced through the air towards Ryn. He was about to die.Words passed through his mind.Mother. Father. Hometown. I failed you all. What a stupid way to die.Something slammed into Ryn’s side and he was pushed off his feet and sent skidding along the deck, past some of the soldiers and out of the way of Vorr’s swordswing.He landed with his back against the ship’s rail and looked up to see what had happened.Stood atop the opposite rail was Sagar, two curved swords drawn in a stance of open provocation of the Imperials, his jaw set in defiant fury.What happened? thought Ryn. What did he hit me with?“Run, you idiot!” Sagar shouted at him. “Run, pup, run!”“It’s the skycaptain!” Vorr bellowed. “Get him! Hurt him, but remember, we want him alive!”The Imperial soldiers rushed at Sagar. He brought both his swords down through the air. A gust of wind flew out from where they moved, flowing across the deck, knocking the soldiers over, making Vorr stumble and pressing Ryn back against the rail again.What?“Ryn!” someone called. “This way!”Ryn looked over the rail. Nuthea, Elrann. They had run round to the other side of the ship and were beckoning for him to go with them.His legs remembered how to move again and he ran to the place in line with the handholds on the siderail and scrambled over. He flew down them, but slipped and lost his grip a few metres from the ground, dropping and landing on his side with a roll as the breath was knocked out of him. “Quick as you can, please, Ryn!” called Nuthea as with a wave of her hand and a crack she sent a lightning bolt back at the soldier coming down the handholds after Ryn. He screamed out and fell to the ground from a much further height than Ryn had.Ryn did not need to be told twice. He made it up again and dashed for Nuthea and Elrann. They sprinted full titlt away from Wanderlust, through the burning ships. Now Sagar joined them, running too. Shouts and cries followed them, but these were soon lost in the noise and chaos of the burning, beseiged city. They made it out of the airfield, into the residential area that bordered it. “Follow me!” Sagar took the lead.Ryn kept pace with the others, his lungs prickling agony. His fire-hurl had sapped most of his energy, but it had not completely exhausted him this time, and he still had just enough left to run for his life. But it hurt like hell all the same.Gradually the brick houses changed to steel warehouses, to wooden shacks, to a slum of tents, most of them now abandoned, to grassy fields. Their pace slowed a little once they had made it out of the city and they looked round to check that they weren’t being pursued, but still Sagar did not let them stop.Ryn ran on, though his legs were starting to seize up and he thought he could taste blood at the back of his throat.Run, Ryn, run. Run Ryn, run away, live to fight another day. Live to train another way. Live to find Vorr again and make him pay.That was the rhyme that formed in his head and bore him on.Finally when they were under the trees of a little wood at the foot of a hill and had gone some distance into it, Sagar let up and allowed them to stop.Ryn collapsed on the grass, and lay on his back, panting deeply, looking up at the canopy above him, though he barely took it in.The others hit the ground too and breathed hard like they’d just come up for air from having almost drowned. They all lay there for Ryn did not know how long, breathing and looking up at the trees. At some point Sagar passed round a flask from somewhere about his person. It stang Ryn’s throat, and he guessed it was rum, but he didn’t care about the pain--it was good just to drink something.After a long time, their breathing slowed. One by one they got to their feet, with difficulty. Elrann. Sagar. Nuthea. And Ryn.In the distance, they could still hear the faint sounds of explosions and people crying out in distress.They looked at each other without saying anything, holding silent counsel. Elrann’s bottom lip was wobbling slightly. Sagar’s face was red and his exposed eye had a manic, bloodshot look. Nuthea was still white as a sheet.Cannonball-shocked, Ryn supposed. She had stayed so calm when the airship they had been imprisoned on had been attacked. But she had thought that her ‘countrywomen’ were coming to rescue her then. And this time, it wasn’t just an airship that had been attacked, but a whole city. And she had lost her means of transportation back to her homeland.“Come with me,” said Sagar, breaking the silence at last. “There’s a clearing further up this hill, not far from here, with good views of the city. Not many people know about it.”He turned and left. Ryn looked at the women for a moment, and then they followed Sagar.Now they were safe, or at least they hoped they were safe, they were able to take the walk up the wooded hill much more slowly. Ryn’s breath still came in ragged gasps, and his legs ached something awful, not to mention his lungs, his chest and his head. But at least he was able to walk.In time, the thin, gangly trees parted and, sure enough, revealed a sloped clearing. Sagar had led them well. How does he know this place? Ryn wondered. A short trek up, and they were able to sit and look down on the leafy wood they had just hiked through, and beyond it at the slums, the industrial quarter, the airfield and the burning city of Ast, wreathed in black smoke, with no less than twelve black airships hovering over her. People moved about it or streamed away from it like ants fleeing a flaming anthill. Beyond that, the grey soil faded into a sandy crescent, and beyond that the blue of the Leviathan’s Channel could still be glimpsed glittering in the morning sunshine, a beautiful backdrop to the scene of terror and destruction before it.“What do we do now?” Ryn said to all the others, but while looking at Sagar, him being the former owner of their most recent means of travel.Sagar didn’t respond. He sat still as a statue on the grass, staring at something. Ryn followed his gaze.Through the smoke coming from the airfield, unmistakable from its size and brown timber, Wanderlust had begun to ascend to join the Imperial airships. Sagar’s ship. Sagar’s former ship. Soldiers in black plate armour were moving around on the deck.Sagar’s cheek had begun to twitch.“I’ll…” said Sagar. “I’ll...KILL THEM!” He jumped up from where they lay on the grass and made as if to dash back down the hill towards the rising ship, but Nuthea grabbed one of his arms and held him back. Catching on, Ryn followed suit and grabbed the other. Together they wrestled him to the grass and held him down as he wriggled and kicked.“Don’t be foolish, Captain Sagar,” chided Nuthea. “They’ve taken off! You can’t possibly get back on board now, even with your gift. Anyway, there’s a whole legion of them up there. You might dispatch one or two more soldiers but they would soon overwhelm you. Do not throw your life away.”Sagar went still again buried his face in the grass. Ryn shared an anxious glance with Nuthea.After a moment, the skypirate’s shoulders began to convulse. They tremored gently at first, then shook with violence. A gasp escaped his lips.“My ship…” Sagar breathed where they held him. “My home… My crew… They’ve taken all of it… They’ve taken everything…”Now you know how I feel, thought Ryn, but he held himself back from saying it. Mother. Father. Hometown. Sagar went still again. Ryn and Nuthea released their grip and knelt next to him, judging he was not about to try to run off again.For a long moment there was only the sound of the wind tickling their ears, the brightness of the warm afternoon sunshine, and the mess of smoke and shapes in the city below them.Then Sagar said “What do we do now?” into the grass, echoing Ryn’s question. Ryn noticed that he said ‘we’, not ‘I’.“What we do now,” said Nuthea, entirely confidently, “is we carry on traveling to Manolia. I need to return to my homeland as soon as possible in order to tell my people what the Empire is seeking.”Sagar raised his face. His eye was red and his cheeks puffy; his mouth set in a canine-bearing snarl. “No. What we do now is put together a new crew, go and get revenge on those murderous b******s and win back my ship.”“It’s an admirable idea,” granted Nuthea, with a condescending nod of her head, “but you’ve got to look at the bigger picture, Captain. I know it’s difficult for you to comprehend this right now, I fully understand,”--Ryn did not think that she fully understood Sagar’s emotional state, or that her tone conveyed that she did--“but my mission is even more important than you avenging your fallen comrades and getting your ship back. Where do you think you will be able to find a whole new crew all of a sudden? What will you pay them with? Doing all that would waste valuable time, time that we don’t have. The future of Imfis, the future even of the whole of Mid, is at stake.”“The whole of Mid?” said Elrann, puzzlement contorting her face. “Why would that be?”Ryn, Nuthea and Sagar all stared at her.“What are you still even doing with us, woman?” said Sagar. “You don’t need to be here. You can go your own way now.”The purple-haired engineer bit her lip and looked at the ground. “I… I was making my living by working in Roldo’s airfield. I had other contacts, and contracts, in Ast, but I don’t think that they’re going to be available any more…” She looked up. Her face looked younger. “What’s happening? Why did the Morekemians attack the city? And what’s this about the whole of Mid being in danger?”All eyes fell on Nuthea.“Talk,” said Sagar.“I just need you to escort me to Manolia as quickly as possible--”“Talk,” said Sagar.Ryn felt a little defensive of her at that, but he wanted to hear more from Nuthea too. A faint idea of what was going on was forming in his mind, but she would confirm it…Nuthea sighed. “Fine. You skypirates really are a most impatient bunch. If you must know--”“We must,” said Sagar.“If you must know, I have reason to believe that the Emperor of Morekemia has become aware of the existence of the twelve Primeval Jewels and has begun searching for them in order to gain the power to extend his Empire and to conquer the whole of Mid. I would not be surprised if this attack on Ast in Imfis is the beginning of an invasion of the whole of Dokan. Now that he knows about them, he will stop at nothing until he finds all of them. I must return to Manolia to warn my people, since they hold the Lightning Crystal, and are the stewards of much lore about the Jewels. I imagine that the Emperor will turn his attention to them soon, if not next.”“Huh?” said Elrann, confusion twisting up her features. “What’s this? Twelve Jewels?”“Yes. Twelve Primeval Jewels that bestow powers of elemental projection on people who touch them. Ryn here is Ruby-touched, like I explained to you in the inn we stayed at last night. I am Crystal-touched, which is why I can project lightning. I apologise for not revealing this to you earlier. I only wanted to reveal it if I absolutely had to… Although, it seems I am not the only one who has been concealing their powers of elemental projection…” She gave Sagar a pointed look.Something itched at Ryn’s memory. Now that they were out of Ast and safe, they hoped, for the time being at least, recent events were catching up to him. “That’s right!” he said when he remembered. “Where did that gust of wind that saved me from Vorr’s sword come from?” He turned to Sagar. “How did you do that?” The captain folded his arms and looked away into the distance, towards his former airship, which had joined the Imperial fleet and was now moving east. “I assume,” Nuthea said to Sagar, “that you are Shell-touched. You have touched the Wind Shell. You have powers of air projection. And I don’t just mean the hot air that comes out of your mouth…” she added more quietly. Ryn’s eyebrows raised. A rare joke from Nuthea.“So what if I am…” mumbled Sagar, refusing to meet anyone’s gaze.“But how did you come to be?” asked Nuthea. “Ryn’s town were secretly harbouring the Fire Ruby, unbeknownst to him. I have touched the Lightning Crystal because I am Manolian royalty.” She held her head up a little higher. “But you...how did you come into contact with the Wind Shell of Imfis?”Sagar’s head whipped round. “That’s my business!” he snapped, spraying spittle. “You stay out of my affairs, princess! What does it mean to you?”Nuthea held out her hand, and some sparks fizzed at her fingertips. Ryn couldn’t tell if she was being angry or just passionate. “Don’t you see?” she said. “It means everything! Ryn and I ended up on the same Imperial skyship, both of us Jewel-touched, and then we met you! And it turns out you’re Jewel-touched too! The One must have brought us together as part of His purpose! Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if our engineer here had elemental projection powers too…”Elrann stuck her tongue in her cheek and frowned deeply.Sagar shook his head at Nuthea. “You’re not a follower of that ridiculous religion of Oneism, are you?”“All Manolian royalty are. And its not ridiculous.”“Yes it is,” said Sagar. “There ain’t no ‘One’, princess, or any god that’s real. We haven’t been brought together for any kind of ‘purpose’. We were brought together by random chance. Dumb luck. There’s plenty of people with elemental projection out there, if you look hard enough.”“No, there aren’t,” said Nuthea. “Believe me; I’ve looked. This is the work of the One.”“Oh don’t give me that b--”  “Wait,” Ryn interrupted. He had remembered something else. “When Nuthea and I fell out of the Imperial airship we were imprisoned on...a sudden gust of wind pushed us on to your ship. That was you as well, wasn’t it?”“Maybe,” said Sagar defensively.“Of course it was him,” said Nuthea, eyes flashing. “How else could it have happened? Why did you do it?” she challenged the captain.“You didn’t look like Imperial soldiers,” said Sagar, “and I wanted to find out who you were. And how partial to skypirates you were.” He grinned lasciviously. “What of it?”“You saved us, without realising it, at the prompting of The One.”“It wasn’t no ‘One’, lady!” said Sagar, dropping the ‘princess’. “I’m telling you was just dumb luck!”“Ah, well that’s a double negative,” said Nuthea. “If it wasn’t ‘no One’ it must have been Some One. The One.”“Rrrr.” Sagar put a hand over his face.“Er, ’scuse me,” said Elrann. She had put up a hand.“What?” said Nuthea and Sagar at the same time.“Who is this ‘One’ you’re talking about? I’ve always worshiped Yntrik, the god of metal. I’ve never heard of a ‘One’ god. And where did these ‘Jewels’ you’re talking about come from, anyhow? I don’t think you mentioned that last night.”Nuthea slipped easily back into lecture mode. “The One is the One True God. He is not the god of anything in particular, but of everything in general. He made the whole world--the whole of Mid. He doesn’t live in human walls or temples, but beyond the world. One day it is prophesied he will enter it, at its greatest hour of need. At the beginning of time, when The One made Mid, he made the twelve Primeval Jewels, as a gift for us, to bless the world with. But we humans sought to use them for our own power, to dominate others, so The One scattered them to the twelve corners of the nations. The prophecy, held to by my people and by all followers of the One, says that if someone were to gather all twelve of the Jewels together, they would be granted unlimited, unfathomable power. That is why we must warn my people that the Emperor has learned of the Jewels, and is seeking them.”At last she finished. Ryn had heard most of it before. He looked at Elrann to check her reaction. Elrann’s mouth hung slightly open. “And you really believe that, do you?” she said.“Of course she doesn’t!” said Sagar. “It’s just a fairytale Manolians tell their whelps to get them to go to sleep! The Jewels are just part of the world. They’re just there, and that’s all there’s to it. In fact, there’s probably not more than three, anyway. We’ve only got proof of three: Fire, Lightning and Wind. There probably aren’t even any more, and there’s definitely no ‘One’. Or any ‘real’ god.”Ryn pondered Sagar’s words in the silence they left as Nuthea bowed her head, evidently disappointed in the captain’s atheism. He had always been dutiful in paying tribute to Imkala, the frog-god of his hometown, which was built near some marshes, but the Empire destroying his hometown had blown Imkala out of the water. He hadn’t thought of him once since that day. He had seen no reason to.Now Nuthea and Sagar were presenting with him two new, very different options: So Nuthea believed in this “One” god, a god who made the whole of Mid, and didn’t just belong to one part of it, but to all of it, a god of all the other gods. But Sagar didn’t seem to believe in any god at all. Who was right? To be honest, at the moment Sagar’s beliefs seemed a lot more...realistic. They seemed more likely to be true. That said, Ryn would prefer it if Nuthea’s ideas were true and there really was a ‘One God’ who was looking out for them and orchestrating everything behind the scenes… But just because he would prefer them to be true didn’t mean they were true, did it? And there couldn’t really be a god of gods, could there?“If there’s a One God,” Ryn spoke up into the silence, “why doesn’t he just come down here right now and stop the Emperor from getting all these Jewels himself?”“The One works in mysterious ways,” said Nuthea straight away like she was repeating a memorised phrase. “He prefers to work through his followers than to intervene directly. But it is prophesied that one day he will come down to Mid himself to save it, in its greatest hour of need.”“Poodoo,” said Sagar, this time without being interrupted.Nuthea held her jaw shut and sighed through her nose. “You are being very rude, Captain Sagar. If you wish to part ways at this point because of our different beliefs, I will not oppose you.”Sagar’s face suddenly switched from smirkish derision to open-mouthed protest. “Now hold on, princess, I didn’t say that! All I was saying was that your god was a load of nonsense! I didn’t say anything about parting ways.” His eyes ranged over the rapidly burning buildings of Ast and the airships, now growing smaller, making their way across the sky further east and inland. “My wings are clipped without my ship...and my crew……. But if I still succeed in escorting you back to Manolia, will your ‘people’ or whatever still reward me?”“I am sure.”“With enough gold to buy a new airship, or have one built?”“With enough gold to have several new airships built, I imagine.”“And with beautiful women?”“I’ve told you. There are many beautiful women in Manolia.”“Then I’m taking you to Manolia.”Nuthea’s eyelids fluttered, but she allowed him this choice of phrase without correcting him.“Ryn?” Nuthea turned to him.“I want to find that Imperial Officer again and kill him.” Ryn said it as a bare fact, simply voicing his thoughts aloud.“Well,” said Nuthea, nodding at the airships, “they are heading east, and Manolia is in that direction anyway. If the Emperor of Morekemia knows what I think he does, I imagine he will be despatching his very best officers to Manolia very soon, if he hasn’t already. Vorr may be among them. I need to beat them back to my homeland, however possible. We may need to...commandeer another vehicle somehow, but that is the direction that I am heading too. At least we will get a head start on Vorr when he soon discovers that the ship he has stolen is damaged and has to stop to repair it.”As if prompted by Nuthea’s words, at that moment Wanderlust began to descend, breaking away from the fleet of black Imperial airships. It was still moving east, and moving to land far away, out of sight, but it was clearly descending.“I will come with you until I find him, or find a way to find him again,” said Ryn, his eyes boring hatred into the shrinking shape of Wanderlust. He also wanted to stay at Nuthea’s side, but he didn’t say that part out loud. Mother, he thought. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr. And now his mind also added, Stay with Nuthea?“Er,” said Elrann. Ryn started. He had forgotten she was still with them too. “Do you mind if I tag along for a while as well? I was lodging in Ast but I’m not from Imfis originally, ya see, so I’m at a bit of loose end… I’ve never been in a country when it’s been invaded before, and I’m not really sure what to do…” She smiled, closing her eyes.“Of course, my good lady,” said Nuthea. “If we ever succeed in commandeering another airship or some other kind of steam-vehicle, the services of an engineer will be most valuable to us. Boys?”“No problem with me,” said Ryn.“Whatever,” said Sagar, and spat. “The woman can come, I suppose.”“Then let us set out,” said Nuthea, and they did.Enjoyed the episode? Read ahead and support Saga of the Jewels at patreon.com/sagaofthejewels This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faenon.substack.com

(From now on all chapters will be released in both text and audio versions.)PREVIOUSLY ON SAGA OF THE JEWELS:Seventeen-year-old Ryn’s hometown is attacked by the Empire and everyone he has ever known is killed. Just before he dies, Ryn’s father gives him a ruby, which causes him to project fire. Ryn is captured by the Empire and meets another captive, Princess Nuthea, who has the ability to project lightning. Nuthea explains to him that the Empire have learned of the existence of twelve Primeval Jewels which grant the ability to manipulate different elements, and are searching for them. The Imperial vessel where they are being held is in turn attacked by a pirate airship, and the pirates capture Ryn and Nuthea. The lead pirate, Captain Sagar, agrees to escort Nuthea back to her homeland, and to spare Ryn’s life, in exchange for the promise of gold, gemstones and beautiful women upon her safe delivery.Episode 4: One Small ProblemThe airship Wanderlust sailed on a sea of clouds.Ryn and Nuthea sat in the small viewing bubble built into the underside of the ship, watching the clouds and, further below, the landscape passing underneath as it was veiled and revealed by them. The viewing bubble was made of reinforced glass, on which they rested their feet as they sat on a wooden bench built across it. A speaking-tube came out of the ceiling that a lookout could talk into for their voice to be carried to another speaking-tube on the ship’s raised forecastle. Really designed just for one person to sit in, the viewing bubble was not quite big enough for two. Ryn was sure that Captain Sagar had only sent them down here to do the job of one person in order to keep them out of the way and prevent the crew from asking them any more awkward questions. He sat rigid and tried not to brush Nuthea with his elbow. It was difficult. This time, she was giving him a geography lesson.“So we are currently flying over the Isle of Efstan,” she said. “You see those rolling green fields? They’re what Efstan’s famous for.”“Well, I know that much,” said Ryn, not wanting to seem completely ignorant. “My hometown is…was in Efstan, after all.” He blinked away the images of burning buildings that flared up in his mind’s eye, then looked for the next question to distract him. “Where are we heading now, then? Where is your homeland?”“Well, as I was saying, Manolia is situated on the much larger neighbouring land mass of Zokan. That’s where we’re heading. Soon enough, you’ll see, after we cross the Leviathan’s Channel the landscape will become much more varied and interesting, even mountainous in some places. And after we cross the Pelnian mountains, Manolia is a peninsula the juts into the Sundering Sea.”“If that’s where you’re from, how did you end up all the way out here?” Ryn actually knew the answer to this question, but he wanted to keep Nuthea talking to distract himself from the intrusive memories that kept popping into his head.“Don’t you ever listen?” She looked up from the clouds and fields below them for a moment and frowned at Ryn, her noble forehead creasing. “I was on an undercover diplomatic mission in nearby Imfis, in the north of Zokan, when the Imperials discovered and captured me.”“But what were you doing on the mission?”Nuthea’s eyes narrowed. She paused for moment. “I suppose I can tell you because you’re jewel-touched.” She adjusted the circlet she wore underneath her golden hair. “I was trying to engineer an alliance with them.”“Why do you need to make an alliance with them?”“We don’t, necessarily. But…” Nuthea dropped her voice, even though between the background thrum of the ship’s engines and the whistle of air beneath the hull nobody else would have the faintest hope of hearing her. “As you’ve seen, the Emperor of Morekemia has learned of the Jewels. He has begun to search for them, and his power and dominion are growing even now. He cannot be allowed to gather them all together. So any nations who have knowledge of the locations of our Jewels must band together to stop him.”“What would happen if the Emperor gathered together all of the Jewels?”Nuthea’s voice went even lower. “Didn’t I tell you that before? If someone, anyone, gathers all of the Jewels together, the legend says they will be granted unbelievable, unfathomable power. Command over every basic element of which Mid is composed. They would be practically omnipotent--all powerful.”Nuthea gazed back out of the glass of the viewing bubble, her voice trailing off. Ryn followed her gaze down through the wisps of white and over the passing patchwork.All powerful... Maybe they could grant the power to bring my parents back. My friends. My town. But no...that’s impossible. Maybe they could grant the power to find out if that General is still alive…Just then something inside Ryn’s heart shifted. Where it had been numb and cold with grief, a small spark now lit within it. The numbness and the cold were still there, to be sure, but now there was a fragile flickering flame warming them too. A flame of desire. A flame of hope. A flame of purpose. He knew what he had to do.He had to find and get revenge on the Imperial General who killed his mother.At that same moment, the landscape shifted too. Without warning, the distant green fields below them gave way to a vast expanse of blue that stretched out below them further than they could see.“Hey, look!” cried Nuthea. “The Leviathan’s Channel!”It was mainly a deep blue, the colour of blueberries, but here and there it was lighter where the sunshine fell on it, or darker where the clouds obscured it, patches of shadow gliding over its surface. The surface itself shifted and glittered, fragments of white foam rising and falling over it, which Ryn realised were waves.“It’s beautiful…” he muttered.“Well, you use that word very freely,” Nuthea said, glancing sidelong at him. “You act like you’ve never seen it before.”Ryn looked at her.“Oh.”“How long will it take us to get to Manolia?” he asked.“With a full tank of fuel and a good wind...it should be about two days’ flying. We should make Zokan by nightfall of today, and Manolia by the end of tomorrow...”They spent most of the rest of the day like that, sat together in the viewing bubble, watching the sea pass by, with Ryn asking Nuthea questions about the world below to keep his mind away from his memories and Nuthea being only too happy to enlighten him. They didn’t even go abovedeck to eat; instead a grumpy looking sailor came down and shoved a couple of plates of salt beef into their hands, then came back half an hour later to collect them. As they watched the sea gradually it, and the sky around them, grew darker, and the blue got deeper.The shadow of a coastline appeared. And, right at its edge, a cluster of fireflies arrayed in a circle.“At last,” said Nuthea, rubbing her back. “We’ve reached Zokan. Those are the lights of a port.”A low buzzing noise joined the thrum of the engine, and Ryn’s stomach lurched as he felt the ship begin to descend.“What?” said Nuthea. “We shouldn’t be landing already! We’ve got at least a day until we reach Manolia!”She stood and dashed up the wooden steps that led out of the viewing-bubble chamber.Ryn watched her go. Before they had sighted the coastline, she had been in the middle of educating him about the Twelve Peoples of Mid. For once, she had forgotten her lesson completely.He stood too, then rubbed his thighs when they ached. Sitting in one place for the whole day had not been kind to his legs and backside.He followed Nuthea up the steps to the underdeck and then up another set of steps to the maindeck, passing the little cupboard where they had first been thrown by the pirates during their battle with the Imperials.Abovedeck, Ryn immediately noticed that the crew were a lot less busy than before. Many of them were standing at the rail, looking out at the firefly-lights and pointing.Sagar was up on the reardeck, behind the big ship’s wheel.“Why are we going down?” Nuthea demanded of him from the maindeck over the sound of the air rushing past.“We haven’t reached Manolia yet. We won’t for at least another day.” Sagar didn’t even look at her. “Simple! We salvaged a lot of bounty from that Imperial ship we took down”--his eyes flicked to Nuthea just for a moment--“a lot of bounty, but sadly fuel was not part of it. In fact, we blew up her fuel tank, which is what brought her down in the end. Now we need to refuel.”“Can’t you keep going any longer on your current level? We need to reach Manolia as soon as possible.”“No.”“I will give you more money.”“Not going to work, miss. Or ‘princess’. Or whatever you are. We need fuel. And that’s that.”Nuthea marched up the steps to join Sagar on the reardeck. Ryn went after her.“I can’t believe that you already need to refuel,” she said as the Captain continued to take the ship down. “I need to get back to Manolia as quickly as possible. You should have had enough for a return voyage. Where did you set out from anyway?”She was quite stubborn really.“Rrrr,” Sagar said quietly, still looking straight ahead. “Will you shut up? I’m not just refueling--Wanderlust needs some repairs too.”Ryn’s heart missed a beat.“You mean there’s something wrong with the ship?” Nuthea voiced his concern for him. A couple of the skysailors looked round at them from where they stood by the rail on the maindeck.Sagar’s jaw stiffened. “Not so loud, princess,” he said through gritted teeth. “No, the ship’s absolutely fine!” he said more loudly. “We just need fuel, that’s all!”The sailors turned back round.“What’s wrong with the ship?” Ryn asked, keeping his voice low.“Look; pup, princess,” said Sagar, “When you’re in a major battle with an Imperial vessel, you don’t come out of it unscathed. We had the jump on them and we made quick work of them in the end, but the hull sustained some heavy cannonfire in the process. It wouldn’t be so bad, except one of our fuel lines to the turbines got hit. We’re not just low on fuel, we’re leaking it.”“Oh,” said Nuthea.A pause.“Why don’t you tell your men?” asked Ryn.Sagar squinted at him with his one exposed eye. “You wouldn’t understand, pup. When you’re a fearsome skypirate captain like me, you have a certain reputation to preserve….”“What you mean is,” said Nuthea, “that your crew barely follow your orders at the best of times, so you don’t want them to know that you’re only just holding your ship aloft.”Sagar didn’t say anything back. But even in the darkness he seemed to turn a shade redder.“Can’t your engineer fix the fuel line?” Nuthea pressed.“Well, normally he would, princess, but there’s just one small problem getting in his way at the moment.”“What’s that?”“He’s dead.”“What?”“I told you to keep your voice down. We lost a few men in the battle with the Imperials. My engineer was one of them. He was near the fuel line after it got hit, trying to repair it. Another cannonball hit him direct. We lost two others as well. The crew are a bit cut up about it, so that’s another reason I don’t want them to know about the damage we’ve taken. Their morale needs looking after. So now you know. I’m landing, princess, because not only do we need to fix the fuel line, but we need to find somebody to do it too...”Nuthea seemed to have no response to that. Instead, she bit her bottom lip and looked away from Sagar, out at the growing lights of the port town, the same way as the crew.“Do you always pilot your own ship?” Ryn asked.“Course not, pup. I have my crew to do that. But it’s good for the captain to take the helm from time to time. It reminds them that I still know how. It reminds them that I’m the best airship pilot this side of the Sundering Sea. Now shut up; I need to concentrate. We’re coming in to land.”As they had been speaking the firefly-lights of the port-town had been growing steadily brighter. Now Ryn could see that one cluster of them was arranged in a large circle, which he guessed must be an airship dock.Sure enough, Sagar guided Wanderlust down towards this circle. As they approached, some of the other fireflies became lights in the windows of buildings. The structures of the town were many and packed in closely together.In fact, Ryn realised, the port wasn’t a town at all, but a city.All of a sudden he felt very small.Eventually, the circle of fireflies they were flying towards became a collection of huge naptha beacons, giant flames burning in glass containers, like a ring of enormous lanterns. In the space they encircled, parked on the grey earth, were about a dozen other airships. Sagar piloted his blimp-bourne ship over a large space on the airfield, slowing her as he went. Then he flicked a switch on the control panel of the console that protruded out of the floor next to the ship’s wheel.The whole ship dropped slowly to the ground. They landed with a gentle crunch of earth, the purr of the turbines wound down, and the ship was still. Little dots had been starting to move towards them in the naptha light as they were coming in to land. Now Ryn saw that the dots were people, who were now rushing up to the side of the ship.“Fresh dates!” called out the first man who made it to Wanderlust’s side, carrying a box slung round his neck by a cord. “Refresh yourself after a long voyage!”“Draught ale!” cried another, carrying a tankard in each of his hands, sloshing liquid. “Free sample! Only the best at the Traveller’s Rest!”“Get your cheese, right here! Recently made, prime quality, cheese on a stick! I’ve got soft cheese, hard cheese, stinky cheese, blue cheese! Get it all here!”Some of Sagar’s crew called out their orders and threw down pennies for them, or jumped down to the ground and started to haggle.“Out of the way, you vermin!” a gruff voice called out over the haggling. “I told you to wait until they’ve paid their landing fee before you approach! You’re lucky I even let you on this airfield!”These words had been spoken by an extremely fat man dressed in black leather, the folds of his belly leaking out from under his jacket and over the top of his trousers. He wore huge, thick goggles under his dirty grey hair and messy beard. The naptha light glinted off his left leg oddly. It was made of metal, and he moved awkwardly on it.The airfield vendors completely ignored him, and went on selling and haggling over their goods with the newly arrived sailors, but he didn’t address them further. “Sagar!” he called out. “Get your sorry arse down here and pay me your landing fee!”“Wait here,” Sagar said to Ryn and Nuthea with a pointed look from his un-covered eye. He walked to the side of the ship’s deck and climbed over, down some hand-holds built into the side of the ship, to the ground.Nuthea went after him.Why does she need to go too? Ryn thought.Her gold-crowned head popped up above the side of the ship for a moment.“Aren’t you coming?”He shrugged, and followed her.On the ground, Sagar and the man were already arguing.“Fifty gold pieces?” said Sagar. “It was twenty-five last time, Roldo!”The man spat on the ground. “Yeah, well I heard you took down an Imperial Skyship yesterday. News travels fast, pretty boy. And these are uncertain times. Rumour is tensions are building with Morekemia as things are,”--Nuthea’s back stiffened a little at that--“and I need to look out for myself. Fifty gold pieces. It’s not like you’ve got any other choices. And you’ve already landed the damn thing.” “Rrrr, fine,” said Sagar quietly, and fished in his own leather jacket for the coins before handing them over.“Pleasure doing business with you,” said Roldo, stashing the money away in an inside pocket with a brown-toothed smile. “Why’re you back so soon, anyway, Sagar?” He leant his head back to look at the hull of Wanderlust. “And what exactly have you been up to, anyhow? Your ship looks pretty beaten up.”“None of your damn business,” said Sagar, batting the airfield owner’s question away with a wave of his hand. He still spoke quietly. “Listen to me, Roldo, I need to ask you something. I’m down an engineer and I need to recruit one, fast. Where’s the best place I can find myself an engineer in Ast these days?”Roldo’s magnified eyes narrowed inside his goggles.“Why should I tell you?”Nuthea spoke up. “Because we have something that needs fixing, why else?”Sagar turned his head, as if noticing her for the first time. “Hey, butt out, princess, I’m busy here. Go and wait on the ship.”“That’s extremely rude of you,” Nuthea replied. She didn’t move.Sagar sighed, then grabbed Roldo’s scraggly beard and yanked him closer, looking him right in the face.“You tell me, lard-tub, because I’m asking, and because I just gave you fifty gold pieces to park my ship on this little scrap of dirt.” He let go.“Alright, alright!” said Roldo, rubbing his chin. He spat again. “Gods, there’s no need to get all whiny about it.” He tapped his lips in thought. “There’s a brilliant young engineer currently working as a freelancer, name of ‘Elrann Luccavich’. In fact, Elrann’s been down here lately servicing some of the ships of the other miserable b******s who’ve landed in Ast.” “Where can I find him?”Roldo grinned. “Now?”“Now.”“Usually in the Traveler’s Rest. Like I said, ask for Elrann. Not easy to miss.”“Why?”“Elrann has purple hair. Zerlanese.”“That’s all I needed to know.” As he turned, Sagar flicked another single gold piece spinning into the air. Roldo’s hand shot out and he snatched it, then pocketed it with a lick of his hairy lips.Sagar climbed back up on board the ship without another word. Ryn waited for Nuthea to go next, then furrowed his brow at her when she didn’t.“You really can be quite slow-witted, can’t you?” she said. “You go first.” “Why?”“I’m not having you looking up my dress.”“Oh!” Ryn said, a hot blush rising in his cheeks. “Sorry!” The thought hadn’t even crossed his mind, but now it did and he blushed even hotter.Up on the maindeck Sagar addressed his crew as they stood round him.“Listen, men,” he bellowed. “I’m worn out from all our plundering so I’m going to go ashore and refresh myself for the evening at an inn.”“Waheyyyy!” said one of the pirates, and others joined in.“We all know what that means!”Some of them made obscene gestures. Ryn grinned, then looked at Nuthea. Her expression could have curdled milk. He dropped his grin and tried to frown disapprovingly.Sagar held up his hands for quiet. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll also be sure to register our takedown of the Imperial Ship at the local guild tomorrow. Then it’s off to Manolia to collect still more bounty! Arrr!”“Arrrr!” cheered the crew in unison, jubilant.“Look after Wanderlust while I’m gone. You can go ashore too, but I want a skeleton crew of at least ten on board at all times, and everyone back by noon tomorrow. Carrick is in charge until I return. Got it?”“Aye, Captain!” the men chanted.“Good. Now get lost!”The crew dispersed, and Sagar watched them go with a satisfied smile on his face.“Where is this ‘Traveller’s Rest’ then?” said Nuthea.Sagar blinked, like he’d been yanked out of a daydream. “Why the hell do you need to know?”“We’re coming with you.”The pirate shook his head. “No. You bleeding well are not.” “Yes we are.”“Why in the seven hells do you think you need to come?”“I’m coming to make sure that you hire an engineer as quickly and efficiently as you can without getting...distracted. I told you, I need to make sure that we can make it to Manolia as quickly as possible.”Sagar closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed his forehead. “Rrrr.” But he already had the look of a defeated man. “Fine.” He looked up again, now at Ryn. “But why do you need to come too, pup?Why are you even still sticking around at all? You’re not trying to get back to Manolia, are you? You can get off here. You can go anywhere you want. Why are you still here?”Ryn opened his mouth and said…...nothing. He didn’t have a reply to that. In fact, he realised, he hadn’t really thought about why he was still here at all. He had been acting automatically, still too traumatised and dealing with the destruction of his hometown and the death of his mother and father to think much for himself. All he knew was that he wanted to find the Imperial General who had killed his parents and take revenge on him. But he had no idea where to start looking. If anyone was going to be able to help him find him, though, it was Nuthea, he realised. She seemed to know a lot about the world, and the Empire. Plus, she had elemental projection powers, like he did. Maybe she would be able to help him in developing his newfound skill so that he could find and kill General Vorr. And she was beautiful, even if he did over-use that word...In the time it took for him to think these things, Sagar and Nuthea had walked off to go and look for an engineer.“Hey, wait for me!” Ryn called as he ran after them.Enjoyed the episode? Read or listen ahead and/or support Saga of the Jewels @ patreon.com/sagaofthejewels This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faenon.substack.com

Hi Metalll Hedzzz... Well here we RRRR agiiiian.... playing more heavy tunes. LIKE: The Golden Earing / Jimmy Page / AXE / Vrdis and a few more OK no more words LET'S ROCKKKKK Intro: Warning-Black Sabbath 1. No Dancing-The Searchers 2. Lady Luck-Tesla 3. Young Heart-AXE 4. Road Rat-Alice Cooper 5. Power-Vrdis 6. Jet City-Queensriych 7.Let Me Be Your Love Maker-Humble Pie 8. Warrior-Wishbone Ash 9. Time To Rock-Slade 10. Hypnotizing Ways-Jimmy Page 11. Jane, Jane-The Golden Earing 12. Nationality-The Miltown Brothers 13. Back On The Streets-Donnie Iris 14. Late Last Night-Status Quo Outro: Into The Void-Black Sabbath

Low $100k's to $1M - What To Do & What Not To Do Breaking from low 6 figures into 7 figures is a difficult jump. You may be following me for a while now. Been reading my emails.. Or have listened to my podcasts. In these sessions, you may have seen one person do RRRR, saw someone else did the webinar strategy, and another used the CAS strategy. And asking yourself so what is it? What really is the tool or the strategy that will help you make that jump? Here are some key lessons that I've seen from our Inner Circle members who've made the jump from low 6 figures into pass 7 figures over the years. 1. Those who did it are direct, have accountability, have the ability to say ""I fucked up"", and at one time challenged me if I knew my stuff. 2. They all have the drive to change something in their business which means they would do things outside of their comfort zone. 3. They have built a habit of making a 30-day cycle in their Recruitment Search business. 4. When they came to us, they'd already accepted that the old model of Recruitment has changed. I covered in this video more in-depth key lessons that I've seen my members did in order to make that jump That jump is based on a plan, execution, feedback on that execution or metrics, and then implementing on that feedback. This pretty much boils down into 3 things: 1. Accountability 2. Acceptance that the model's fucked and 3. Drive to make a change Hopefully, this has been of use to you. And remember... You're a business owner. You need to get paid. The Laptop Recruiter™ Comment down your question or feel free to message me privately. Andy Whitehead

「靠 我兩個都不要啊!」 我懂這是大多數人看到這個問題當下的直覺反應。 但如果今天有特殊狀況發生 讓你/妳非得勉為其難地選一個呢? 精神出軌這麼抽象怎麼界定才好? 走在街上看俊男美女算嗎？ 伴侶瘋狂迷戀某個明星算嗎? 看A片算是一種精神出軌嗎?  或者說…  在愛愛的時候對方腦袋裡想的是別人呢…? (西卡先磨刀謝謝) 真是棘手呢哎呀(左手背拍右手心) 而且真的遇到對方精神或肉體出軌 單兵又該如何處置才好RRRR 關於精神忠誠 vs. 肉體忠誠的重視 你跟伴侶之間的答案是否一致 來! 今晚睡前就來跟伴侶進行一個 既溫馨又能增進感情(?)的心靈談ㄎㄠˇ話ㄨㄣˋ時間吧 ----------------------------------------- ★誠摯邀請大家到我們的粉蝨團一起來胡鬧★ FB粉蝨團: https://reurl.cc/WdOZ3y IG: https://reurl.cc/exZjkm ★本節目使用中文第一Podcast Hosting平台 >> SoundOn ★想使用你/妳習慣的收聽平台? 請按下傳送門網址⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://linktr.ee/30afterparty 片頭音樂:youtube音效庫 _Swagger 片中音樂: youtube音效庫 _Sunshine_Samba、Earth_Bound 片尾音樂:youtube音效庫 _ Cockpit

佛陀做事的道理換在現今來講真是智慧充能RRRR！ 合作邀約請來信：chewingliterature@gmail.com

《 C'est faire en sorte que chaque être humain trouve sa place de façon juste [...] justice sociale, justice environnementale 》 Catherine Dauriac, alias @cityzencat est une activiste apaisée pour une mode apaisée Toujours en équipe, elle est coordinatrice nationale de @fash_rev_france (antenne France de @fash_rev ), avec @revue_hummade, au sein du @collectif_uamep, @fashiongreendays, @lafabriqueideale Pour aller plus loin : Fashion Revolution On parle d'eux : @marclebihan, l'auteur Sebatien Bohler Où est le sens ?  Avec @elsiepomier 

Hablamos con el artista Daniel Mayrit de su proyecto sobre los populismos en política. Presentamos los festivales Kaiola de Galdakano, RRRR de Gandía y la Feria MARTE de arte contemporáneo en Castellón. Además escuchamos lo nuevo de Autechre. Más info en http://blog.rtve.es/Fluidorosa Escuchar audio

Vincent, un habitant de Rouen s’est amusé à refaire la scène culte du film Rrrr « il va faire tout noir »

Vincent, un habitant de Rouen s'est amusé à refaire la scène culte du film Rrrr « il va faire tout noir »

RRRR!

Welcome to another new episode of our First Time Homebuyer's series, where we discuss all the fine details about purchasing a home for the first time! This is part two of our sixth episode, repairs! We had a lot of information to cover regarding the aspect of repairs in the purchase of the home, so we split it into two separate episodes. If you missed part one, please listen to that one first before listening to this one, as you'll be missing a lot of information!

Download my FREE R word drills and sentences WITH audio to practice the R: https://bit.ly/2uwlVbz How frustrating is it to KNOW how to pronounce the R in English, but when you need to use it… it's not there for you! (Or it feels like you have mud in your mouth ?) I mean, why is your RRRR not listening to you?!?! But worry not, because I got you covered. If you do this R BOOT CAMP every day for 2 weeks, you will see how it is SO MUCH EASIER FOR YOU to use the R freely, and spontaneously when speaking. It's all a matter of developing your muscle memory. You can pair it up with my morning pronunciation practice: https://theaccentsway.com/pronunciation-practice-english/ And you're good to go To watch the R Bootcamp on video: https://theaccentsway.com/american-r-sound In this drill, first we practice the R before different vowels and really get comfortable with those transitions. Then, we'll work on 2 tricky sounds that sound similar to the R: the L and the W. We'll also practice the R after different vowels and build your muscle memory. Once you're done, we'll move to practice the R sound in different clusters and from there we'll move to full words and sentences. And don't forget, when you're done, put ‘DONE' in the comments area on the website! Also, was there any drill in particular that you feel helped you the most? How To Learn New Vocabulary | Build Pronunciation Confidence ? https://theaccentsway.com/how-to-learn-new-vocabulary/ More video and audio materials on R in English: Make the American R! | American English Pronunciation https://theaccentsway.com/the-american-r/ The R sound in English: The most in-depth lesson you'll ever hear https://hadarshemesh.com/podcast/17/ If you want to improve your accent and understand spoken English better, download my free American Accent audio crash course: https://theaccentsway.com/audio-accent-course/ Join the Live English show on all my channels on Thursdays at 12 p.m. EST.

⬇️ Download my FREE R word drills and sentences WITH audio to practice the R: https://bit.ly/2uwlVbz How frustrating is it to KNOW how to pronounce the R in English, but when you need to use it… it's not there for you! (Or it feels like you have mud in your mouth ?) I mean, why is your RRRR not listening to you?!?! But worry not, because I got you covered. If you do this R BOOT CAMP every day for 2 weeks, you will see how it is SO MUCH EASIER FOR YOU to use the R freely, and spontaneously when speaking. It's all a matter of developing your muscle memory. You can pair it up with my morning pronunciation practice: https://theaccentsway.com/pronunciation-practice-english/ And you're good to go

⬇️ Download my FREE R word drills and sentences WITH audio to practice the R: https://bit.ly/2uwlVbz How frustrating is it to KNOW how to pronounce the R in English, but when you need to use it… it’s not there for you! (Or it feels like you have mud in your mouth

Looking for something to do today? Every morning on The Big Breakfast, Rachael recommends different things for listeners to do or try - they are especially important at the moment as we all try and keep busy! Today she had LOADS of amazing bits to do today including: Gavin & Stacy Virtual Quiz this Friday! Stream Broadway musicals online Bake the 'Magic Cake' recipe. Catch all the details for them here: [audio mp3="https://media.radiocms.net/uploads/2020/04/02105817/RRRR.mp3"][/audio]

Spoopy season is upon us. The sun's light is pale and distant, and the nights grow longer and colder. The hippie vampires are among us, hidden in plain view; eating kale and putting runic trinkets in their foul dreads. Their tumblrs fill up with "artful" interpretations of swastikas, and they make fast allies with nazi and white liberal alike. They shroud themselves in thick cloaks of ambiguity, half-truths and half-meanings. They speak of ancestral blood magick, the earth, and how only "they" can heal it. Their runes invoke Odin, the Black Sun, and they pray to their perverted pagan idols to give them the power to "deliver" this world from degeneracy - to make it "pure" again. These are the crypto-fascists. They stand among us, at metal shows, wearing symbols and runes on their denim jackets that look like writhing masses of swastikas, trying to explain the Buddhist origin of the swastika, always claiming to be exactly the opposite of what they really are: Nazi. Scum. On this, our 13th episode, professors/professional vampire hunters Diego and RRRR discuss this foul scourge that has befall the land, it's origins, and give a first hand account of our frightening encounter as we attempted to disrupt a meeting of their crypto-fascist coven. Stay safe out there this season. Links: https://pugetsoundanarchists.org/a-field-guide-to-straw-men-sadie-and-exile-esoteric-fascism-and-olympias-little-white-lies/ (the zine mentioned in the episode hasn't dropped yet, but here's another older analysis that talks about the same issues): https://itsgoingdown.org/countering-fascist-black-metal-bullshit-in-olympia/ Twitter: twitter.com/DoomervBloomer Facebook: facebook.com/doomervbloomerpodcast/ facebook.com/groups/doomervbloomercommune Also check us out on iTunes!

You can find the full web article, media and transcripts for the lesson here: https://adeptenglish.com/lessons/palabras-ingles/ - Palabras inglés If you are a Spanish speaker, then I begin this audio English lesson by asking your forgiveness, speaking English words is easy for me but Palabras inglés well you need to listen to the whole podcast to understand why, trust me when I say it is worth it! This English lesson is all about pronunciation and why speaking a new language is difficult for everyone not just you. Changing the way you do things is hard. This is true for just about everything, but something that we do every day like speaking to people in your native language is just a little harder to change. You get used to the way you pronounce things, like Rrrr’s or you expect to see punctuation at the start of a sentence not at the end. It’s these little things that are so natural to us we have almost forgotten they exist, and then you move on to aprender inglés, a new language, and it’s all a big change. Discover Adept English the modern way to learn to speak English. The aim of Adept English is to help you speak English fluently. Our English language teaching approach is to learn through listening. We publish two new English audio lessons, with full transcripts, weekly. Every one of our English lessons will help you learn to speak English in ways that are interesting and lead to success. We have lots of podcasts, at all difficulty levels, on many topics, suitable for all listeners, ready for you to listen too right now.Adept English is here to help with language courses that are unique, modern and deliver results. You can learn to speak English quickly using our specialised brain training. We get straight to the point of how you should learn to speak English. We teach you in a fun and simple way that delivers results. If you want to learn to speak English, our approach to learning through listening will improve your English fluency.Learn more: adeptenglish.com

Business/Legal: 1) Buyer Inspection Period 2)Request for Repair (C.A.R. Forms RR and RRRR) 3) Contingency Removal (C.A.R. Form CR) 4) Cancellation of Contract (C.A.R. Form CC) - Business Development: 1) New Sellers Guide 2) New Listing Presentation

April Fools!Polish Phonemes: “EJ-pryl’ ful’z”Literal Translation: Kwiecień Głupcy!Elegant Translation: Głupce kwietnia!Polish Equivalent: Prima Aprilis bo się omylisz!Email us! mailbag@howyousay.fmVisit the website! www.howyousay.fmTweet us! @HowYouSayFMRate the show!_______Here’s a full translation of what I said ;-) (Polish transcript is at the bottom!)Hello everyone! Here’s the 71st episode of How You Say?, where I teach you how to say something fun or playful in English. I’m your host, my name is Julia Tutko-Balena.Today I will tell you how to say “First April or you’ll mistake yourself!” in English. So let’s get started!Today’s phrase is “April fools”, which literally translates to “April dummies” in Polish. We Poles would say “First April or you'‘ll mistake yourself!”. In English, it’s significantly shorter!The first word is “April”. It means “April” in English. Let’s say it three times. Accent, that is, the emphasis, on the first syllable. Remember that in English, vowels have usually more than one syllable. Oh well, they don’t want to make it easy on us! But don’t be afraid, I’ll help you.Here when you say the letter A, you have to start on the sound “E” and transition into the sound “I”. So together that sounds like “eejji”. Next, in English speaking countries, people usually don’t pronounce the letter “r” like in Polish. They pronounce it very weakly, they don’t “roll”, they don’t know how to do “rrrrrrr”. Usually. Of course, if they know more than one language, they’ll learn this, but in the English language, that sound is simply not needed. So, in order to pronounce correctly the “r” in the word “April”, you have to allow the tongue to a bit flaccid. Or imagine that something is bothering you, as if you had in your mouth hot potatoes. “Rrrrr”. Try it. “Rrrr”.Next, in English, usually those devilish vowels change sound depending on their position in the word. And here, the letter “i” simply remember that it has to be pronounced like our “y”. “April”.And the last thing, the ‘l’ at the end is pronounced softly, similar to the Russian “l”.Okay. We’re ready! Repeat slowly after me. “April” “April” “April”. Excellent.The next word is “Fools”. It means “dummies”, that is, more than one dummy. This word is a bit easier. “F” is pronounced normally, “l” like we just saw in “April”, but those vowels are playing with us again.Those who are learning English surely [already] know that usually when you see “o o” together, it’s pronounced like “u” in English. “Cool”, “Tools”, and others. There are of course exceptions, where “o o” doesn’t sound exactly like “a”, but close… “Blood”, “flood”… consequently, you have to be careful not to study and learn incorrect information. But now we have the internet and you can always check.In the word “fools”, “o o” is pronounced “u”. “Fools”.Let’s repeat 3 times. “Fools”. “Fools”. “Fools.” Good.Now everything together, 3 times, slowly let’s repeat: “April fools!” “April fools!” “April fools!” Very good!All set! That’s it for today! I how you liked it. If you want to contact the show, we have email, mailbag@howyousay.fm, our Twitter is @HowYouSayFM, and our main web page is www.howyousay.fm. Until next time! I wish you well! Bye!_______Here’s the full Polish transcript, just in case you’re interested ;-)Witam Państwa! Oto 71 epizod programu How You Say? gdzie uczę Was jak powiedzieć coś fajnego albo zabawnego po angielsku. Jestem Waszym gospodarzem, nazywam się Julia Tutko-Balena.Dziś Wam powiem jak się mówi „Prima Aprilis bo się omylisz” po angielsku. No to zaczynajmy! Dzisiejszy wyraz jest „April Fools”. Znaczy to dosłownie „kwiecień głupcy”. My Polacy powiedzielibyśmy „Prima Aprilis bo się omylisz!” Po angielsku znacznie krócej!Pierwsze słowo jest „April”. Znaczy „kwiecień” po angielsku. Powtórzmy to 3 razy. Akcent, czyli nacisk, na pierwszej sylabie. Pamiętajcie, że po angielsku, samogłoski mają przeważnie więcej niż jedną sylabę. No cóż, nie chcą nam ułatwić. Ale nie bójcie się, ja Wam pomogę. Tu kiedy się mówi literę A, trzeba zacząć na dźwięku „E” i przejść powoli na dźwięk „I”. Czyli razem brzmi to „eejji”. Następnie, w anglojęzycznych krajach, ludzie przeważnie nie wymawiają litery „r” tak jak Polacy. Wymawiają to bardzo słabo, nie „turlają”, nie umieją zrobić „rrrrrrr”. Przeważnie. Oczywiście, jeśli znają więcej niż jeden język, to się tego nauczą ale w angielskim języku ten dźwięk jest po prostu nie potrzebny. Zatem, aby wymówić prawidłowo „r” w słowie „April”, musicie pozwolić, żeby język trochę zdrętwiał. Albo wyobraźcie sobie, że coś Wam przeszkadza, jakbyście mieli w buzi gorące kartofle. „Rrrrr”. Spróbujcie. „Rrrr”. Następnie, po angielsku przeważnie te diabelskie samogłoski zmieniają dźwięk zależnie od pozycji w słowie. I tu litera „i” po prostu pamiętajcie, że trzeba wymówić jak nasze „y”. „April”.No i ostatnia rzecz, to „l” na końcu to się wymawia miękko, podobno do rosyjskiego „l”. Okay. Jesteśmy gotowi! Powtórzcie powoli za mną. „April” „April” „April” Doskonale.Następne słowo jest „Fools”. Znaczy to „głupcy” czyli, więcej niż jeden głupiec. To słowo jest troszkę łatwiejsze. „F” się wymawia normalnie, „l” jak dopiero nauczyliśmy się w „April”, ale samogłoski znowu się z nami zabawiają. Ci co się uczą angielskiego napewno to wiedzą, że przeważnie jak się widzi „o o” razem tak, to się wymawia „u” po angielsku. „Cool”, „tools” i inne. Są oczywiście wyjątki, gdzie „o o” nie brzmi dokładnie jak „a” ale bardzo podobnie ... „Blood” „flood”... zatem trzeba uważać, aby nie wkuwać złych informacji. Ale teraz mamy internet i zawsze można sprawdzić. W słowie „Fools”, „o o” wymawia się jako „u”. „Fools”. Powtórzmy to 3 razy. „Fools” „Fools” „Fools”. Dobrze. Teraz wszystko razem, 3 razy, wolno powtórzmy: „April Fools” Bardzo dobrze!W porządku! To tyle na dzisiaj! Mam nadzieje, że się podobało. Jeśli chcecie skontaktować się z programem, mamy email: Mailbag@howyousay.fm, nasz Twitter jest @howYouSayFM i nasza strona główna jest www.howyousay.fmDo następnego razu! Pozdrawiam! Cześć!

Välkommen till Åttonde avsnittet av Gosiga Podden med oss Ruben Täpptorp och Filip Kullenberg. I Dagens avsnitt gästar BullFrida och möter Filip i frågrsporten RRRR/RFFF. Enjoy! Instagrams: Podden - gosigapodden Frida - frida.mansson Filip - fkullenberg Ruben - tapptorp

Vad är egentligen ränta och vad kommer det ifrån? Sover den någonsin och varför har egentligen ett begrepp fått täcka så många olika områden? Anna Svahn och Karl-Mikael Syding diskuterar ränta i veckans avsnitt av Outsiders och pratar om vad som händer om räntan höjs. Dessutom diskuterar de bostadspriser, Anna tycker att det nya och skärpta amorteringskravet gör det för svårt för unga att ta sig in på bostadsmarknaden och Micke tycker att marknadspriserna bör sättas av räntan.

Une fiction sonore immersive produite par Silméa pour la radio officielle du Festival de Cannes 2018.12 jours, 12 épisodes d'une enquête policière déjantée pour savoir qui en voulait à ce point au président du jury !A retrouver tous les jours à 15h pendant le Festival de Cannes 2018 sur Radio Festival : https://www.festival-cannes.com/fr/festival/static-radio-festivalethttps://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/crime-sur-la-croisette/id1382599164?l=fr REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

Une fiction sonore immersive produite par Silméa pour la radio officielle du Festival de Cannes 2018.12 jours, 12 épisodes d'une enquête policière déjantée pour savoir qui en voulait à ce point au président du jury !A retrouver tous les jours à 15h pendant le Festival de Cannes 2018 sur Radio Festival : https://www.festival-cannes.com/fr/festival/static-radio-festivalethttps://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/crime-sur-la-croisette/id1382599164?l=fr REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

Une fiction sonore immersive produite par Silméa pour la radio officielle du Festival de Cannes 2018.12 jours, 12 épisodes d'une enquête policière déjantée pour savoir qui en voulait à ce point au président du jury !A retrouver tous les jours à 15h pendant le Festival de Cannes 2018 sur Radio Festival : https://www.festival-cannes.com/fr/festival/static-radio-festivalethttps://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/crime-sur-la-croisette/id1382599164?l=fr REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

Vad är egentligen ränta och vad kommer det ifrån? Sover den någonsin och varför har egentligen ett begrepp fått täcka så många olika områden? Anna Svahn och Karl-Mikael Syding diskuterar ränta i veckans avsnitt av Outsiders och pratar om vad som händer om räntan höjs. Dessutom diskuterar de bostadspriser, Anna tycker att det nya och skärpta amorteringskravet gör det för svårt för unga att ta sig in på bostadsmarknaden och Micke tycker att marknadspriserna bör sättas av räntan.

Une fiction sonore immersive produite par Silméa pour la radio officielle du Festival de Cannes 2018.12 jours, 12 épisodes d'une enquête policière déjantée pour savoir qui en voulait à ce point au président du jury !A retrouver tous les jours à 15h pendant le Festival de Cannes 2018 sur Radio Festival : https://www.festival-cannes.com/fr/festival/static-radio-festivalethttps://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/crime-sur-la-croisette/id1382599164?l=fr REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

E8: Une fiction sonore immersive produite par Silméa pour la radio officielle du Festival de Cannes 2018.12 jours, 12 épisodes d'une enquête policière déjantée pour savoir qui en voulait à ce point au président du jury !A retrouver tous les jours à 15h pendant le Festival de Cannes 2018 sur Radio Festival : https://www.festival-cannes.com/fr/festival/static-radio-festivalethttps://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/crime-sur-la-croisette/id1382599164?l=fr REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

Une fiction sonore immersive produite par Silméa pour la radio officielle du Festival de Cannes 2018.12 jours, 12 épisodes d'une enquête policière déjantée pour savoir qui en voulait à ce point au président du jury !A retrouver tous les jours à 15h pendant le Festival de Cannes 2018 sur Radio Festival : https://www.festival-cannes.com/fr/festival/static-radio-festivalethttps://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/crime-sur-la-croisette/id1382599164?l=fr REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

Une fiction sonore immersive produite par Silméa pour la radio officielle du Festival de Cannes 2018.12 jours, 12 épisodes d'une enquête policière déjantée pour savoir qui en voulait à ce point au président du jury !A retrouver tous les jours à 15h pendant le Festival de Cannes 2018 sur Radio Festival : https://www.festival-cannes.com/fr/festival/static-radio-festivalethttps://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/crime-sur-la-croisette/id1382599164?l=fr REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

Une fiction sonore immersive produite par Silméa pour la radio officielle du Festival de Cannes 2018.12 jours, 12 épisodes d'une enquête policière déjantée pour savoir qui en voulait à ce point au président du jury !A retrouver tous les jours à 15h pendant le Festival de Cannes 2018 sur Radio Festival : https://www.festival-cannes.com/fr/festival/static-radio-festivalethttps://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/crime-sur-la-croisette/id1382599164?l=fr REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

Une fiction sonore immersive produite par Silméa pour la radio officielle du Festival de Cannes 2018.12 jours, 12 épisodes d'une enquête policière déjantée pour savoir qui en voulait à ce point au président du jury !A retrouver tous les jours à 15h pendant le Festival de Cannes 2018 sur Radio Festival : https://www.festival-cannes.com/fr/festival/static-radio-festivalethttps://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/crime-sur-la-croisette/id1382599164?l=fr REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

Une fiction sonore immersive produite par Silméa pour la radio officielle du Festival de Cannes 2018.12 jours, 12 épisodes d'une enquête policière déjantée pour savoir qui en voulait à ce point au président du jury !A retrouver tous les jours à 15h pendant le Festival de Cannes 2018 sur Radio Festival : https://www.festival-cannes.com/fr/festival/static-radio-festival REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

Une fiction sonore immersive produite par Silméa pour la radio officielle du Festival de Cannes 2018.12 jours, 12 épisodes d'une enquête policière déjantée pour savoir qui en voulait à ce point au président du jury !A retrouver tous les jours à 15h pendant le Festival de Cannes 2018 sur Radio Festival : https://www.festival-cannes.com/fr/festival/static-radio-festival REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

REALISATIONScenario, montage et réalisation: Thomas JUDES ACTEURSCommissaire Lesgourde: Thomas JUDESMagda Piatti: Pauline CHABROLBarman/Policier: Kevin BREROPaulo Alméotino / Annonceur salon agriculture: Stephane ROUXMembre du jury / Excité / Le Golfeur: Dylan PEDRONLe témoin / Mr Yes/Policier 2: Cedric CLEMENTVoleuse de perles / Séductrice: Diana MUSCHEIInspecteur Harrington / Sean Miller / British Member of the jury/ Jury1: Thomas SERRANOJury 2 / Cassandre Destronges: Lorene THAUMASSCarlito Gonzalez: Tommy LEFORT COMPOSITEURSJames LEBRETONAntony LANGET HEISENBERG CREDITShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEnBhQ3B3ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khb0J76Frmkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tMR4qzzKoextraits de Rrrr, OSS117... SUIVEZ-NOUS SUR:https://www.facebook.com/silmea/

Estéreo360º te ofrece una sopa de letras para sorber por las orejas. Canciones y artistas con letras sueltas (o agarradas) en el nombre. De AAAA a YYZ pasando por ABC, AEIOU, GBH, DNA, CSS, OMD, PPP, IMS xxyyxx, xyz, oOoOO, Mmm mmm mmm mmm, Rrrr, SHXSHXCXCHCXSH y hasta SsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSs. Una hora muy loca de buena música y mejor letra. Estéreo360º se estrena todos los domingos de 14 a 15 horas, tanto en el 88.6 de la FM como en la web (https://www.m21radio.es/programas/estereo360o) y en la web de Radio Círculo los lunes a la misma hora: http://www.circulobellasartes.com/radiocirculo/programas/estereo-360o/

On this episode: Bean's Rrrr correction, one minute with Mugs and the guys recap the very 1st pumpkin drop.

19. Januar 1967: Diese Woche ist Jim ist in einem Grafikadventure gefangen! >> Gehe zu Klippe. >> Nimm Salpeter. >> Benutze Salpeter mit Bambusrohr. >> Nimm Diamanten. >> Benutze Diamanten mit Bambusrohr. >> Rede mit Gorn. Rrrr!! >> Benutze Bambuskanone mit Gorn. >> Rede mit Metron. In Deutschland: Ganz neue Dimensionen, ausgestrahlt am 7. Dezember 1987.

Every recruitment business owner knows how important building up data sets is. It's one of the first things that you do in recruitment / staffing / search business. As we all know, an old school recruiter goes and picks up the phone, send out crappy LinkedIn blast. They send out a hundred, or a thousand, two thousand or five thousand, whatever it is and just blast on Mail Chimp and all that rubbish recruitment does. Are you an old school recruiter? Or do you have a system? Keith shares a brief history of where he was before and where he is now – specifically on how he gets his data sources. He talks about the Inner Circle's RRRR process which gave him good figures and has now been running very successfully for 6 months. Keith's advice: Do it rather than just wish you could do it or “I have a problem doing it”. Just start it and get it done. Listen now and discover how you can be like Keith! Andy Whitehead

Progr. No. 1414, Transmisión En vivo desde La Torre Futura, Rocola de Canciones con Rrrr!!, Ronda de Chistes, Deportes con Fernando Palomo, noticias y el Top 5 de Joan Jett.

Estéreo360º te ofrece una sopa de letras para sorber por las orejas. Canciones y artistas con letras sueltas (o agarradas) en el nombre. De AAAA a YYZ pasando por ABC, AEIOU, GBH, DNA, CSS, OMD, PPP, IMS xxyyxx, xyz, oOoOO, Mmm mmm mmm mmm, Rrrr, SHXSHXCXCHCXSH y hasta SsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSsSs. Una hora muy loca de buena música y mejor letra.

Series: NOT A FAN Fan or Follower? What does repent and believe mean Mark 1:15 09/01/2013 FCC Pastor Jeff Williams Let's open the Bible to the gospel of Mark together. Chapter 1, I want to read verse 15 with you today. We are going to try to accomplish in this message this morning as to get it started sort of. OK? We are kicking off kinda. I mean, labor day weekend, honestly, not a great weekend to kick off a series. OK? And so we know that. So what we're going to do is intro the series and then next week, not this week, next week, we get into our journals, we get into our small groups, we start showing the videos, I'll start preaching the message from the journal. We are introing it this week and we'll be into it six weeks to go through the study. And then a wrap-up week, two months altogether including this Sunday. Mark chapter 1 verse 15: “The time has come.” he said, “Believe the kingdom. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” Jesus comes to Galilee, the region he is from and he says, “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news.” What would you have done that day? How would you have responded to Jesus' declaration? Remember, Jesus has not performed one miracle at this point in time. He's not given one sermon. The Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, Lord's prayer, never has happened. OK? Those who do know him do not see him as a religious person at all, a religious leader, maybe a religious person, not certainly a leader. He works as a carpenter. He lives in obscurity. Nobody knows who he is. And he is coming down the street, making this incredible declaration about the kingdom of God. How would you have responded? Well, let's put it this way. Let's say you are downtown Janesville, on a Sunday afternoon. Let's see you there. Let's put you there on Saturday. That makes more sense. You're at the farmer's market. And some guy comes walking down the street and comes up to you and says, “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” What is your response? You probably think, let's be honest, this guy is off and he's a nut, something's crazy with this guy. Who are you? Why should I believe you? And repent from what? And what news? And the kingdom is near, where? I don't see it. Jesus is trying to raise awareness. Do you see it? He's trying to get them to see what they ought to see in their natural eyes. He's trying to get their spiritual radar to try to be aware of the fact that God is present and that his kingdom is near. Recognition of the kingdom, to know the kingdom is among us. The kingdom is here. It doesn't look any different. Today does not look any different than yesterday did, or the day before. I mean, when the kingdom of God comes, would we know it? Would we see it? It would be brought to us by some mystery man that we've never seen before walking down the street. We would know when the kingdom of God is here. I would think, they said. So who this guy is? He's crudely off base. But to raise awareness. Sometimes what is important is difficult to see. I was listening to a commencement speech by Stephen Foster Wallace. I don't know if any of you has heard of that late novelist, or listened to his commencement speech called This Is Water. Anybody ever heard of that? It's OK. Nobody this weekend has. I'm the only person who's heard it. Stephen Foster Wallace is addressing a group. He tells a parable, a story about fish. He says there was an old fish swimming one way and two young fish swimming another way. In a while they passed each other. As they did, the old fish nodded to the two young fish and said, “Hi boys! How's the water?” The young fish smiled and nodded their heads as well. They swam a little beyond the old fish and turned and looked at each other. And one said, “What the hack is water?” Unaware of what they're swimming in. Sometimes the obvious. That's not funny, the joke. That's the fact that most of you didn't laugh. It doesn't discourage me. It's not a joke. It's a parable. Because if I told the joke for real, you guys will be just like dying laughing. It'll be so funny. It's a parable. And the meaning is sometimes the obvious and the important goes unseen, undetected. Sometimes that which's important is unknown and undetected. Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is here.” Reminds me of the apostle Paul when he is preaching in Athens. Athens is an intellectual hot bed. It's kind of the capital of philosophy. It's the birthplace of philosophy. Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, all these great names we still study and still read. And everybody there talks about the latest school of thought, the latest world view, the latest philosophy. And into this intellectual scene comes the apostle Paul to declare the gospel. He's very craft and he's very smooth. He begins to look around and he picks up on the culture, the statues, the idols. And there's one there to an unknown god. And he seizes that. He begins to address the Athenians and he says, “What you declare's unknown, I now declare to you the God of heaven and earth does not live in things made of human hands as if he needed anything. He is not from anyone of us. For in him we live, and move and have a being." In him we live, and move and have a being. There had to be some Athenians scratching their heads as the two young fish going where is God. What is water? Where is God? You're talking about God around me? In me? Where is he? I don't see him. Where? And so what Jesus is trying to do is get them aware. Pay attention. Turn on your spiritual. Wait till you can see truth, see truth and understand it. That's our hope for the series. When God is working in your life, you'll be aware. When God is moving in your heart in the series, you will understand it and recognize it. That we will hear Jesus' words as if hearing them for the first time. We'll strip aside all the man-made stuff, all the junk. Say, why did he come? Did he just come to make you happy to live a happy life? Did he come to bless you and give you stuff? Why did he come? What was his message? And hear the message as if we're hearing it for the first time. And be aware that he is present. And be aware that he is communicating to us. There is something he wants us to know. His news is not changed. Are we perceiving it the right way? Stephen Foster Wallace also talked about two men who lived in Alaska in the wilderness. They were the buddies. One was a believer and one was an atheist. They were having an age old debate of “Does God exist.” They're going back and forth. The atheist finally says, “Wolk. It's not that I don't have a reason to not to believe. I do. I mean I try to hold faith and prayer stuff. At it just doesn't work.” He says, “I tell you, for instance.” He says, “Last year I got lost in a blizzard in the wilderness.” He says, “I thought that I was gonna die. I couldn't see anything, ‘cause the snow was so intense. I couldn't feel anything, ‘cause my feet and my hands were so cold. I couldn't find shelter. And I knew if I was not rescued, or did not find shelter in a matter of time, I was gonna be dead. So I said, ‘I'm not a man of faith, not a man of prayer. If I'm gonna try to do it and be it, I guess now is the time. So God, please help me. God, please save me. I'm gonna die. If you're a real God, please rescue me. Amen.'” The believer kind of scratches his head and goes, “I understand.” He says, “You're here, right? When you ended the story, you were in this blizzard, about ready to freeze to death from exposure. So what happened? God obviously answered your prayer. You're here.” “That's got nothing to do with God,” he says. “It was just two Eskimos that happened to be walking by just when I needed it and escorted me back to shelter. That's all. Nothing to do with God. Just by chance these two Eskimos came walking by.” Get your radar on. Be able to be perceptive of what God is saying. So he starts his message, not a miracle, not a great sermon, but simply a one-sentence declaration of truth to people to whom he was a stranger for the most part. They did not recognize him or know his name. Repent and believe the good news. The kingdom of God is near. The time has come. When he says, “The kingdom of God is near,” that's revelation. That's revelation of the kingdom. Once I've got your attention. Then I'll spill the beans. Then I'll tell you why I want your attention. The kingdom of God is near. It's not gonna look like you thought it was gonna look. So you thought it was gonna come in power. You thought when the Messiah come, he would triumph militarily over Rome and establish a physical kingdom in Jerusalem. Jesus begins to talk about the kingdom that was present. It was gonna be inside of them. The kingdom of heaven was gonna give and reside within them. You have to change the way you look at the kingdom of God, and to change your perception. Paul says, “This God you worship is unknown I declare to you. Jesus Christ came into the world. The God who made heaven and earth sent his son in the world. Here is what he did and here is what he said. Then he died and he rose again. God gave proof that he is Lord by raising him from the dead. And God commands men everywhere to repent and believe.” That's what Paul said in 17 of Acts. It's a command. Repentance is not a suggestion. God doesn't apologetically say to us, “Hey, you know, get some time, you know, when you have a moment. I don't want to impose. I don't want to impede. You know repentance. Think about it. If you want to, that's OK. You don't have to.” God doesn't do that. God commands repentance. So Paul gets them aware. In him we live, we move and have a being. But What? Where? Who? And once he's done that, once he's got their attention, then he begins to reveal the kingdom. The kingdom of God is coming in the person of Jesus Christ. As soon as he said raising him from the dead, he lost them. The Athenians said, “That doesn't make any sense. That's not rational. That doesn't fit into our philosophy. That doesn't fit into our world view.” And many of them rejected. Not all. Many of them rejected. You see, the message of the kingdom, once it's revealed to us, it demands a response. So Jesus talked about the response of the kingdom, too. Recognize the kingdom. He revealed that this is a spiritual kingdom, but demanded a response as well. The response was “repent and believe.” The response could also be “reject.” But it demands a response. And as we encourage you to look at the demands of Christ, the expectations of Christ, there might be some of you who'll say, “I reject that”, or did not understand that was a commitment that was made. But it demands a response. You receive it or you reject it. But it demands a response. The response is “repent and repent and believe.” You always see those two working together. Repent and believe. Repent and believe. The work repent is metaonia which means to change one's mind. Believe is pisteuo which means to believe and act upon. It's not just intellectual sense. But biblical belief always has corresponding action. For instance, you think tomorrow is going to be a nice day. But then you look at the forecast, it says 100 percent chance of rain. When you believe that report, what do you do? You change the clothes you're wearing that day. You bring an umbrella. Maybe you thought it was gonna rain. Later the forecast says hot and sunny. So now you're gonna wear short sleeves and sun block and bring your sun glasses. ‘Cause you believe the weatherman, which I don't know why you do. But, we just keep falling for it, don't we? We're suckers, I guess. But you listen and you believe and you change. And there is corresponding action. If you truly believe something, you will change your behavior. I repented this week. I'll show you a story of repentance now. You know, I've come to miss Pastor Jerry more and more every month. I miss him ‘cause he's my friend. But he's in Evansville. But there is a lot of things that male shepherding pastor does, but the female shepherding ministry doesn't do. You know. She doesn't do in funerals. She's not dealing with men, with man issues. She's not going to prison to visit male prisoners. So lots of stuff Jerry was doing is falling on me. I put in a lot of long days. I didn't get a day off. I had a day off on Monday. I didn't get a day off last week. Tuesday was long day. Wednesday was long day. I'm not complaining. I like my job. I'm grateful to have a job. But just like you, I get tired, too. It's a good tire. But I was tired. When Thursday came along, I said, “I'm just gonna have some me time. I'm gonna go out and work on my terrible golf game. I just want to be alone.” So I called and I made an appointment and he said, “I'll play you with so and so at such and such time.” I go, “I don't want to be paired up. I just really want to work on some things and I want to be by myself.” That may sound selfish to you. But if you have been in a ministry, you know sometimes you need to have time to yourself. OK? Pastor Gary is nodding his head. He knows what I'm talking about. I just want to be by myself. What's wrong with that? So, he said, “If you want to be by yourself, you've got to come at this time instead.” OK. So I showed up. So the clerk said, “OK. We paired you up with so and so.” Trying to be nice, I said, “Look, I called earlier and I said I really want to be by myself.” “OK, then I'll let him know that. You have to wait until he goes. And then you can go.” OK. Then kind of put me at a bad spot. So I went out there and tried to be nice again. I said, “Sorry. But I'm gonna golf course by myself today. I got some things I got to work on. I don't wanna, which was true. I do not know how to TR with my irons at all. I'm terrible. So I'll just work on that. And I don't want to hold you up. So you just go ahead and go.” He said, “OK. All right.” I am terrible at everything else, too. But I'm especially terrible with that. My son's back there, going, “He's bad at everything.” So I said, “Go ahead. You go.” He said, “OK. That's fine. But, listen, if I start looking for a ball, I'm just wandering around looking for a ball, taking a long time, just play on through. See, I had a surgery on my eye and I don't see very good on the other side. I can't track the ball. It passes the side of me.” I said, “I'm golfing with you. Me and you, we're gonna be buddies today, OK. I'm gonna help you track that ball. Don't worry about it.” He was like oh, OK. I didn't mind it at that point. I got a purpose now. So I said, “We're gonna golfing together, me and you. I'm gonna help you find your ball.” He was a very good golfer, very helpful. We had wonderful conversation. He drew lines on my glove. So that helped me grab my club better. Just some subtle changes. That really helped. I'm gonna make sure this arrow points at this shoulder. It helped. So, what did I do there? I repented. I changed my mind. I changed my direction. I wasn't emotional. I wasn't crying. It was repentance. I listened to what he had to say. I believed what he had to say. And I changed my action. I was gonna golf alone. But now I believed the right thing to do was to pair up with this guy, to help him find his ball. OK? That's repentance to change your mind, to change your direction. It follows belief. I hear, I believe and I change. That's a response. Jesus says “Response is the message of the kingdom.” The proper response is to repent and believe.” Believe is corresponding action. Believe what? What is it we call to believe? Or put it this way. Why is it hard to repent? Why is it hard to do? You know why it's hard to repent. Because to truly repent you have to admit you're wrong. Right? I was wrong about golfing alone today. That's not a good thing to do. You're gonna repent, you admit that you're wrong. How many of you have ever been in an argument? You know you're wrong and keep defending yourself. Boy, look at this group of hypocrites. I do it, too. You know you're wrong and you just keep on arguing. Because you don't want to say you're wrong. Remember the father on Happy Days? He can never say he was wrong. The father always goes “RRRR.” Let me try again. “I was RRRR.” He couldn't say it. I was in Philadelphia this year. My table was right next to the Fonz. He was author, you know. Henry Winkler. He doesn't look like Fonz anymore. I didn't talk to him. I didn't want to embarrass him and go “ye ye ye.” I just kind of looked at him, kind of stalked him. That's the Fonz. Could it mean that I was wrong? That was the problem with some of the people whom Jesus wanted to follow him. The religious leaders, the Pharisees, he said, he said to them what. You diligently recite the scriptures, because you think by the scriptures you possess eternal life. Yet you refuse to come to me. That you might have right. Why? You have to admit you're wrong. You've got to eat your words. And nobody wants to eat their words. They don't taste good. Right? My roommate in college, his name is Tod. He had attention deficit disorder when it was time to study. We were playing softball, video games, ping pong, or pool. He could concentrate really well. When it was time to sit down and study, he just lost it. He studied for a second, then he was off playing basketball. He studied for a second, he said, “I'm gonna play dunkey kong. Do you want to go?” He studied for a second, he said, “Hey, let's go down and see what's going on over here. Let's go play some pool.” So now at the end of semester, he got to buckle down to get grades. And he drew out this elaborate schedule. Monday, wake at 8 o'clock, 8:15, 9 o'clock of this, 10 o'clock of that. And he got this elaborate every-15-minutes schedule that he was gonna keep. And he showed it to me all proudly. He expected me to go “Wow! That's great.” I looked at it as a skeptic as I looked at it for the last two years. Then I go, “You ain't gonna do that.” He said, “What do you mean that I ain't gonna do that? I'm gonna do that. I'm serious. I'll take the time to make this schedule.” “I don't care. You're gonna do.” He said, “Why not?” I said, “'cause you've never done that in 2 years. So all of a sudden, you're gonna flip the switch. You're gonna just unstruture God? Play by ear God? Attention deficit God? You're gonna follow this from 8 o'clock in the morning till 8 o'clock at night?” He said, “Yah. I am. You wanna bet?” I said, “Oh, yah. That's a good bet.” So I forgot what I had to do if he would keep, every day he kept the schedule I had to do something. I didn't remember what it was. He said, “What do I have to do if I don't?” A light bulb went off. A big one lit up the campus. I said, “I got an idea.” I said, “Every day you don't do that time, you're gonna figuratively and literally eat your words. I want you to rip a page out of your book. Rip it into tiny pieces and eat the paper.” He said, “Deal. Deal.” I came back to the room Monday night. I couldn't wait. I got into the room and I said, “Tod. How did it go?” Suddenly he went “Whoa! Choo! Whoa!” He started to eat. Tuesday, “Hi, Tod. How was your day?” Whoa! Choo! And he would eat the whole page. And every page, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Actually Friday he skipped out. ‘Cause it was like the last day of school. I held him to it. A month later, we got together. And I went, “Page 5. Time to eat, buddy.” So I mean he ate it. Mom looked at me and kind of scorned, “I want to know he is OK, you know.” He made it just fine. But he had to eat his words. He had to admit “I was wrong. I was wrong. I eat my words.” We don't like to eat our words. We don't like to admit we're wrong. But that's what repentance is. It's admitting you're wrong. It's saying, “I'm wrong. You're right.” You know the word confession? It comes from two words, homologeo, same word. It means to say the same thing that God says. It needs to be in agreement with God. I'm right. You're right. I'm wrong. And Jesus says, a lot of you, when you hear the news of the kingdom, you've got to change your mind. You have to change your mind about who the Messiah is as well. The Messiah's gonna come in and conquer. Right? You know what Isiah says? Isiah prophesies 700 hundred years before the Messiah comes. He says, “A reed he will not break.” So gentle, he will not even break a reed. I'm gonna miss his coming. What's called hardening of the categories. Hardening the categories. So we're just getting that, a little late. That's all right. He wasn't what they were expecting. And to receive him as Lord, you have to admit that your perception was wrong. Your perception of the kingdom. Your perception of the Messiah. You thought you were righteous, holy. But, you, in fact, are sinners, neither are savior. Repent and believe. Two go hand in hand. So believe what? Believe the good news. What good news? What good news does he talk about? Remember the ministry was just starting. There's no sermon. There's no miracle. He hasn't died on the cross for sin. He has not rose from the dead. When we think, we think of the gospel. What's the good news that he was calling people then to believe? It's salvation to come. The time of redemption was here. That he was fulfilling God's plan of redemption. The salvation was here. The good news that God has come to redeem his people. I was talking to my friend, my new friend on the golf course, Doug. He is a physician's assistant at St. Mary's. He lives here 4 days a week. He lives in Minnesota the rest of the time. So I finally asked him, “What do you do?” He told me. The he said, “What do you do?” I said, “I am the pastor of the Faith Community Church.” He said, “Oh, that's the one on the interstate. I drive by there all the time.” I said, “Ya. That's where I'm at.” He said, “I went to a seminary.” I said, “Ya?” He told me about it. So I said, “What do you do with that?” He said, “Well, I'm a part-time missionary.” He said, “Once a year, for a month, I go on the mercy ship. Have you heard of that?” I said, “I've heard of them. I watched a report on 60 minutes. Christians, doctors, surgeons, nurses, specialists travel along on these ships all over the world. They travel around all over Africa. They travel around all over the third world. They travel around the Caribbean. And they'll stop at these various ports of call and they cure people. There will be doctors there that work on eye problems.” He said, “There might be eye procedures that cost a hundred dollars to get it fixed. But they don't have a hundred dollars. You might as well save a million dollars. We fix it for free. Or maybe there is an outbreak. And they simply just need a vaccine. So we'll bring the vaccine on our ship. Or they might have a dental problem. The dentist will be there to work on their mouths.” Something very treatable. Orthopedist surgeons and all kinds of doctors. A lot of times it's very treatable illnesses. They don't have access to medication or they can't afford it. But they hear the mercy ship is there. They come from everywhere, villages and towns. Many of them just disfigured in pain. And they receive help by these Christian medical professionals whom people like you and I sponsored to pay and go. And do you know what they receive? Salvation. Good news. Salvation literally means deliverance, rescue. That's what it means. They're delivered from their illness, from their pain. Sometimes they'll have operations that would last for a period of years. They'll do corrective surgery. They can only go so far this year. And next year they will be back. They'll come back for round 2, round 3 until the doctors get it right. But if there's an emergency, the mercy ship is here for just a time and pulls out. Believe the report. Believe it's there. You're gonna respond. You're gonna show that you believe by going there, taking a step of faith, walking into that ship, allowing those doctors to work on you, those nurses to minister to you. Trust what they say and put into your mouth and swallow what they inject into your vein. You trust them. The result is that you heal. The result is you're delivered. Jesus says, “I'm coming with some news.” It's good news. You may not realize it's good news. But be aware. Be spiritually aware. Have your antennas up. Be alert. Recognize the kingdom of God. This is water. This is the kingdom. And it's all around you. And it's in you. That's our goal. Be aware of the kingdom. Listen to the revelation. What did he have to say? ‘Cause whatever he said to them, he said to us as well. And lastly respond. Where do I need to change? Where do I need to admit I'm wrong in my thinking, in my action and change? Change. Humble myself and repent and believe. That's what the series is gonna be about. I hope you'll join us for it. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this opportunity we had to listen to the first words. You began your ministry. People around did not realize those words were ushering in an age that would change the world. But it did. Lord, as we come to the series, help us to see those words like we're seeing it for the first time and understand the commitment you're calling us to, and why you came. Strip away man-made religion, garbage. We might be left a pure gospel to respond to it. Repent and believe. It's good news. Salvation's come in the person of Christ. In his name, we pray. Amen.

After prayer and meditation, I almost feel disappointed that I don’t have more direction to give you.  What I hear the Lord saying is to stay the course.  It’s not a new word, it’s a keep going word.  And I know this doesn’t make for much excitement.  Stay the course isn’t that cool.  We want an anointed acronym, like RRRR, this is the year of the Lion’s roar, and the four R’s stand for...  We want something, anything to break the monotony and hardship of life.  We want a new focus, a new doctrine even.  But I hear the Lord telling us to stay the course.  The course is the same, the intensity we give ourselves to it needs to increase in this season.  

#RRRR track listing DI GENIUS - BOUNCE A GYAL MAVADO - PEPPER mavado - all dem a talk popcaan - real badman aidonia - chat from no boy vybz kartel - dancehall hero vybz kartel - you mi need VYBZ KARTEL FT SHEBA - YOU & HIM FUCK popcaan - tek off vybz kartel - gimme d benz punanny AIDONIA - CARIBBEAN GIRLS DANIEL BEDDINGFIELD - SOMETIMES YOU JUST KNOW MAVADO - SETTLE DOWN BEENIE MAN - LET'S GO vybz kartel - summer time gaza slim - always popcaan - ravin tiana - pum pum phat mr vegas - bruk it down Vybz Kartel - Bike Back (Ducati Batty) Vybz_Kartel - Foot Pan Shoulder VYBZ KARTEL - NEVER SEE A GYAL WEH MI LOVE SO MUCH Vybz Kartel feat. Gaza Slim - Anything A Anything Vybz Kartel - Warn Him gyptian - wine slow vybz kartel - half on a baby [schlachthofbronx remix] Vybz Kartel - Half On A Baby Wotless Go Dung Final Mix DJ M'Geezy Kes - come gyal Machel Montano - bend over KES The Band - Precision Wine Inches Ft. Shurwayne Winchester - Jiggle It [Remix] Machel Montano - Gyal Wuk zephrin - gyal roll Lil Rick - Eh Yo Machel Montano - Doh Fraid Benjai - Wine To The Side Soca 2011 Benjai - Trini Ricky Minaj - Jones & Wukup Cassi - Tongue Ring (Soca 2011) Spice & Cassi - Jim Screechie (Corleone Soca Remix) SPICE - JIM SCREECHIE RDX - FOR THE GIRLS AIDONIA - JACKHAMMER - RAW aidonia - gal yuh can fuck di genius - call me tami chynn - nevah know (wicked inna bed) nicky b - tik tok busy signal - wine up (nuh pop dung) vybz kartel - love you enuh gaza slim - everything fi hold him shawn storm - real man popcaan - only man she want popcaan - party shot vybz kartel - worl boss vybz kartel - duppy know popcaan - head bad (see me and talk) vybz kartel - tell you say (raw) Vybz Kartel - Sick Head Sick Head Vybz Kartel - Freaky Gyal DJ M'Geezy vybz kartel - freaky gal part 2 VYBEZ KARTEL - FREAKY GAL PT2 RACK CITY #RRRR Tinka Mix - DJ M'Geezy

Well, Ephesians 6 is where were at today. In this passage, Paul sounds the alarm. Weve been following the news, this big earthquake in Chile, and a tsunami is going to follow, so in Hawaii and Japan and other places, they were bracing yesterday for the tsunami. It turned out that it wasnt that bad, but they didnt know what was going to happen; so sirens were going off. People were driving around in cars warning people to evacuate and head to higher ground because there is a threat. Its very real, and its coming. Weve spotted the tsunami at sea. Were not sure how large its going to become, so move to higher ground. Evacuate. They were pretty confident that if they responded to that, they would be safe. They boarded up their homes. They headed to higher ground to wait out the tsunami. So thats wisdom. Thats wisdom because when there is a threat, you prepare. You take every means you can to protect yourself and your family. Paul is going to talk here about a very real threat, a very real enemy that is seeking to destroy anyone in his path. Hes going to introduce us to a spiritual world of darkness, a hierarchy, a struggle in which there is conflict between the forces of God and the forces of the enemy. He sounds the alarm, and he says, Prepare yourselves. Get ready so that youre able to stand. Verse 10 (page 1160 of pew Bibles) Paul writes, Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Notice Paul says you have to stand in His power. You dont fight a tsunami because it will defeat you. Youre not powerful enough to fight it. In the same way you cannot fight the force of darkness in and of your own strength. You have to fight and stand in the power of God, and hes going to tell us how to do that. He says to do that, you must, Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devils schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the Heavenly realms, or in the Greek, it just says in the Heavenly. So he talks about this hierarchy, this unseen force. We see the manifestation of evil in our world, but he says, We are talking about principalities and powers that we cannot see. We cannot see the wind, but we see the effects of the wind. We see what it does. We cannot see the earthquake. We cannot see the platelets moving. We see effect. So we cannot see the enemy, but we can see his effect. We can feel the opposition. Ill tell you when this really became real to me. Ill give you a couple dramatic stories. Ill just tell these really quickly because we want to get in the text, but these are times when this whole idea of warfare became real to me. It went from beyond just words in the Scripture to a reality that I was engaged in. If you are skeptical here today-if you dont believe in spiritual warfare or you dont believe in the existence of a literal devil as Jesus obviously did-these stories arent necessarily going to convince you otherwise; but I share these because these were defining moments for me, and they were very early on in my ministry. I was in my 20s. I was pretty green, and Rockford-where Im from-actually became a hotbed for satanic activity. There was a church of Satan-and may still be; I dont know-that was in conflict with one of the local churches in the community. There was satanic ritual activity at the local parks. One of our pastors had a deliverance-based ministry, and people would come out of that lifestyle and want to be delivered. Theyd come to our church, so we had to deal with this on a regular basis-people who had taken part in various satanic ceremonies and activities who were wanting freedom. That pastor would work with law enforcement because they would try to track down [victims who participated in this satanic lifestyle] because crimes had been committed. There were evidences of it in the parks and so forth. Our pastor would work with investigators, so it was not uncommon for us to deal with this in Rockford, Illinois. One particular time, this young man about 17 years old [came to us]. Hed had a real troubled childhood, was really depressed, and he was on his bed listening to Motley Crew. I think it was a Shout at the Devil, song like that. On his bed, he said, I asked Satan to possess me. I asked him to come and live inside of me. Im really afraid now because things are happening in me that I dont understand. This morning at school, I wrote a letter. Its almost like it wasnt even my words and something dark was writing through me, and Im scared. I need help. So several of us began to pray for this young man named John. As we were praying, he gets this sinister grin, and he opens up the desk, almost as if he knows where to look, and he grabs a large pair of scissors-not school scissors, but a large pair that really was a weapon. He stars to glare at everybody in the room. One of the pastors goes, Jeff, you go find the letter. We have to take him on a prayer to renounce these things he said. This letter Im sensing is a key, so go back to the classroom and find this letter. Id like to tell you that I was real brave. Id like to tell you that I was like, Yeah, Satans going to get it now! but I leave the room where he is holding a knife on these guys. I go to the classroom, I have to find the letter! I have to find the letter! Hes going to kill people! (Pastor is saying this with a shaky voice.) So Im just all in a dither, and I get to the room; and there is no trash in the trashcans. We had said, What did you do with the letter? He said, I threw it away. I saw the janitor, Where, where is the letter? Wheres the trash? He goes, Oh, I just emptied everything into the dumpster. I went, Great! I go outside to the dumpster, a big dumpster. I open up the lid, and you know we have a school K-12. He has just emptied every trash can in all the classrooms. Do you know whats in pretty much every trashcan? Crumpled up white pieces of paper, so literally the bin is entirely full with crumpled up white pieces of paper. I mean there are hundreds and hundreds of crumpled up white pieces of paper, and Im supposed to find one letter. Im like, This is impossible. Hes in the church. He has a knife. I dont know if hes stabbing people right now. Im supposed to find this letter. I was like, Lord, please help me find this letter. Im not going to climb in the bin and start looking through hundreds of sheets of paper. What am I going to do? I reach in and I grab a piece of paper, and I unfold it. The first one-gang, the first one, I grab-is the letter from the kid. I couldnt believe it! That was a real sign to me. Now you might be skeptical and say, Well, it just happened, you know. People win the lottery too. Thats fine, but for me, that was really something-that I would find that letter on the first shot. I took it in, read it. It was like, Im going to kill the principal. Im going to kill myself. I hate God! It was just filled with all this bad stuff. We led the kid on a prayer of confession and renouncing of the decisions that he made. Long story short, I got a call from him actually a year ago, just to let me know he was doing well and say he was doing well and thank you for helping me when I was a young man. Now Im a father, and blah, blah, blah; and we reminisced for a little bit. The second story, really quick, is when a guy called the church. He said, Ive made some bad decisions, and Im involved with what I shouldnt be. I feel like Satan has really attacked me. I dont know if Im possessed or oppressed or what, but I need help. So he came to church. Id never seen him before in my life. I open up the door. Have you ever met somebody who just gives you the heebie-jeebies when you meet them? This guy had these beady eyes and this kind of devilish grin. I was like, Hello, come in. I was like making sure my door handle was not locked because I didnt trust this guy. I was like, I dont want to be in the office with this guy with the door locked. I was like triple checking it, Okay, its not locked. Great. I shut the door and sat down. I had not my main desk-which was behind me-but just this desk a bit smaller that I just met with people at and so forth. Its a light desk. It wasnt wood or anything like that, just a light desk. We were sitting there talking, and he started telling me all the perverse things he was involved with. I was like, Man, no wonder. This is just bad. You have to confess this to the Lord. You have to ask His forgiveness, His cleansing, ask Him to come into your life. We have to get rid of this. This is bad stuff! I said, Can I pray with you? At that point, I was young. I wasnt even old enough to realize, Does this guy even want to get rid of this stuff? I would have handled this situation a whole lot differently now than I did then, but we started to pray. As we were praying, have you ever just sensed somebody was glaring at you? I sensed he was glaring at me. I could just sense it. I knew if I opened my eyes, he would be looking at me with an evil look. That was creeping me out. So I was just praying, and pretty soon his hands started to shake violently, and Im just holding on. Then he starts to go, Grrrr. GRrr! GRRR! He started to growl. I just kept praying. I felt like I got on the back of a tiger now, and I didnt know how to get off. He started to shake even more violently and growl louder. I was like help us, Jesus! Help us, Lord! (Pastor is talking with a shaky voice.) Im just scared. All of the sudden, he stands up; and when he stand up, he pushes the table onto me. The table is now at my waist, and his full body weight is against the table; so I cant move my lower body. Im trapped. He takes my suit coat-yes, my boss made us wear a suit coat-grabs it, pulls it up over my head so sleeves are where my elbows are, and I cant move my arms. Im like in a straight jacket. I literally cant move. Im trapped by the table; he was over me; the suit coat was over my head; and he was shaking me while going, Rrrr! RRRR! Im going, Help. Help. Im in my 20s and Im scared! This guy is… Gary, the expert over here, says, Im on my way! I hear him through the wall. He comes around the door, and he goes shake, shake, shake [on the doorknob]. Just a second. The door is locked. I have to go get a key. Im like, The door is not locked. Im thinking, How can this be locked? and right there in that moment, I said, This is real. I know I didnt lock it. I know that door is not locked! How did that door get locked? Something is going on here. Long story short, they got the key. They came. We restrained the guy and prayed with the guy. It was a battle. He was very violent to himself. Eventually, we got him calmed down; and last I heard about this fellow was he was a pastor in Freeport, Illinois. Last I heard-that was many years ago. This would have been almost 30 years ago that this story took place; so a lot transpired in that time. That event, that locking of the door-when I knew that the door was not locked-how did that happen? I had no explanation for that. So those events kind of woke me up early to the fact that spiritual warfare is real. Now hes going to use an interesting word in this passage. It says, Our struggle. That is the word wrestling. We wrestle not, some of your translations may say. We wrestle not. This wrestling, it would be very similar to our wrestling. This would have been the first Olympic sport that did not involve running in 707 B.C.-pale (pay-lay). Its where you throw your opponent several times. You have to throw your opponent, and then you are the victor when you can stand over your opponent and put your hand on this throat, signifying you are the victor. He uses that word and that word picture. He says, We are in a heated match. I have to tell you I respect wrestlers out here. How many of you high school wrestlers or college wrestlers do we have here today? Yeah, dont mess with those guys. That is a grueling sport. I just thank God He made me a basketball player. I used to see their workouts, and I know what they went through to lose weight, to get in shape. It is a hard sport. So he picks one of the most grueling, physical sports-wrestling, and he says, This is like a wrestling match. Paul is acting here as a scout. A good scout, or a good coach, scouts the other team and say, Okay, your opponent today, here are his strengths. Heres what he likes to do. Here are your weaknesses. Heres where youre vulnerable in your match today, so dont let yourself get in this position. Make sure you dont put your hand here or your foot here. Be on guard against this because heres where he always attacks. Hes going to dive for your legs. When he does that, do this. The coach is helping you in advance. Hes warning you in advance of how your enemy will attack. He says, We are not ignorant of his schemes, of his devices, or of his trickery. Paul is saying he has the same moves every time. He has the same moves every time. The place where he attacks first and foremost is where our greatest strength is because if he can attack our greatest strength and have victory there, then everything falls in place like dominos. What is the greatest strength we have? What is the greatest weapon in our arsenal? Its the first weapon that Paul gives us. He gives it to us first for a reason. The greatest weapon that you and I have is Truth. Well I thought the goodness of God or the love of God is the greatest thing we have. The greatness of God, the goodness of God, and the love of God are only wonderful and great because they are true. The Gospel and our faith, I thought that was the greatest weapon we had. We can only have faith because it is based upon what is true, so Truth is our greatest strength; so when Satan attacks, he will attack the Truth. I guarantee you that, and he will always attack it in the same way. He operates by the if its not broke, dont fix it school of thought. Hes been using the same techniques since the dawn of Creation. They always work, so he continues to use those techniques. So if we want to say, In this wrestling match, we know his schemes. What are his schemes? What do they look like? How does he operate? Then we can expect them and respond to them when they happen. I was talking with a woman in our 9:30 service, and she was able to connect the dots in something she was going through, a struggle she was going through. She said, I didnt realize that what I was going through was a spiritual attack until the message today. She said, Now Im ready! Im ready! I have my armor on. Now I understand whats coming, who it is, and how I can defend against it. Lets turn to the Book of Genesis 3 (page 3 of pew Bibles). The setting is Eden; its paradise. The account is the fall of men, and our concern is with the first five verses of the chapter. We kind of know what happens in the rest of the story, but were going to focus on Verses 1-5. It says, Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, Did God really say, You must not eat from any tree in the garden? Method number one is doubt, to get you to question the Truth. Thats method number one that the enemy will use. He will get you to doubt what you know to be true. Now, Im not talking about a healthy doubt or a healthy skepticism. Every one of us should have that. If you hear something that doesnt sound quite right or read something that doesnt seem quite right, you go to the Word of God and you say, Is this true or not? Im just doubting what I hear today-Im not talking about that. Thats good. You keep that up. However, Im talking about doubting what we know to be true. Eve knew that was true. He tries to introduce doubt to get her to question the Truth. Thats how he operates. He gets us to try to question the Truth. Our children in the schools-growing up in the church-understand that theyve been made imago Dei, in the image of God. Theyre learning that they are evolved, and that they are simply an accident from cosmic goo. Theres no divine plan or purpose for their life. They simply happen. Theyre an accident. They begin to doubt what theyve been taught that is true. Sometimes because of our sin, were ashamed or we feel guilty because of things weve done or said or the things we didnt do that we should have done or didnt say that we should have said. We start to feel like well, God doesnt love me or I cant be a Christian. He will get us to doubt our salvation. God doesnt really love you. You do not really belong to Him. If you really belonged to Him, then you wouldnt do this. You wouldnt say that. He gets us to question what we know is true. Thats how the enemy operates. There were times when the Apostle Paul, I think, struggled with everything that were going to talk about today. One thing we know about Paul is that Paul was a very timid individual. He writes really bold in his letters. He even talks about that. He says, You know, I came to you. You thought youd see this bold man, and when you actually met me, you saw how timid I was, and you were surprised. You were like, Is this Paul? Youre so loud and demonstrative in your letters, but when we meet you, youre just timid. Thats the way he was. There were times when Paul would say, Pray for me that I can proclaim the Gospel. Pray for me that I have confidence to speak the Word as I should. There were times Paul struggled with doubts, even though he knew God had called him to that mission. He knew the Truth. There were times when he began to question what he knew to be true, and he asked for help in that area. So thats how Satan works, because if he can get us to doubt, then we are susceptible to deceit, to desires-the other things were going to talk about-and begin to fall like dominos. Well, Eve holds up pretty well in this first test. If you question and try to get them to doubt the Truth-what did Jesus do in the wilderness? When Satan tried to get Him to question the Truth, He quoted the Scripture. He quoted the Truth. The woman said, We may not eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say… She affirms the Truth. …that you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the midst of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die. Then Satan goes, Oh, okay. Ill leave you alone then. Thanks. No, no, no. Hes relentless. He tries another tactic. Verse 4, You will not surely die. The serpent said to the woman. He tries the tactic of deceit-deceit. Deceit is when you have some truth, and you just twist it a little bit. She wasnt going to physically die. She was going to spiritually die. She said she would physically remain alive, but there was going to be a death. There was going to be a separation, but he was like, Oh, youre going to be fine. Deceit. And with this deceit comes a false justification. We begin to say, I am justified in my behavior because it has just enough Truth even though the Truth is skewed. Ill give you a couple examples. Somebody is working, and theyre handling money. Maybe its their job or maybe theyre a volunteer, but theyre around funds. Thats a very trustworthy thing. I have no authority to sign checks. I dont transfer payroll. I cant determine wages. I dont see deposits or offerings. I just try to stay out of that. Im part of the board, but I dont handle any monies. I dont have the authority to handle any monies as far as writing checks or authorizing salary. I just stay out of that, but there are some people that have been put in that position where they have to handle finances. Maybe things are difficult for them. Theyre struggling. Maybe something has happened in their lifestyle where they have bills to pay and they have a lot of pressures; so they take the money, and they say, I know this money isnt mine, but Im going to pay it back. Because they have an intention to pay it back, they take the money, and they use it for their own purposes. Or they might say, I work hard, but Im just underappreciated. Im not paid what Im worth. This company needs to pay me more, so they actually take the money not with the intention of paying it back. They take it because they think they deserve it. They work hard. But the truth of the matter is it was not authorized. They dont have the authority to take it, but they tell themselves they do. They say, I work hard, which is true. They say, I should make more than I do, which might be true, but theyve not been authorized or entitled to take more; and they take it anyway because of this deceit. They cover it up. They hide it. I had a friend who told me this week that an employee embezzled $200,000 from his company-a person that he had trusted for these very reasons. A person is in a relationship, in a marriage, and theyre not happy. The marriage is not going well. Maybe one of the spouses is just very absent, emotionally or physically absent. Theres another person thats paying attention to him, and they start to have feelings for that person. They say, Well, you know, these feelings are justified because after all, so and so doesnt love me anymore. Theyre always gone. That is true. Theyre always gone. It might be true that they dont feel the same way about you, but its not true that youre justified in having this relationship while youre married; so deceit sets in, and they follow and they act on that impulse. What happens? Counselors will tell you this. People in the mental health profession will tell you this. People in the ministry will tell you this-that a person who lives enough in the pattern of deceit pretty soon is not able to discern truth from a lie. They become so wrapped up in deceit that that becomes their reality. They will tell you without feeling any guilt. Its almost like in their minds its not a lie because theyve just lived with that deceit so long, its become a part of who they are. You probably know some people like that. It started with a lie; it started with deceit, twisting of the truth. That justified our actions, our attitudes. The next thing you know, we are engrained in this pattern of deceit, and Satan has us exactly where he wants us. Theres a third way that he attacks the Truth. Verse 5, the serpents says, For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Be like God. Those words ring over in her mind-to be like God. In this tactic, he takes a lie and magnifies it. He takes our desires and then magnifies a lie, and that lie has to do with the promise, the promise of some sort of pleasure, promise of some sort of gain-a promise thats never delivered. Its a promise that never lives up to expectation, but the promise goes like this: If you just had this person… If you just had this object… If you just had this accomplishment… If you just had this much money…then you will happy. Then you will be fulfilled. Then you will be satisfied. Then life will be good. So a person will compromise their integrity. Theyll compromise their family. Theyll sacrifice their family on the altar. Theyll sacrifice any number of things to obtain what they believe is going to bring them happiness. Youve seen that, havent you? Youve even heard that in your ear. Youve heard a little voice telling you when youre looking at something-this forbidden fruit that youre not supposed to have- and saying, Even if you had that, youd be so much better. If you had that, life would be so good, so youre willing to compromise your standards, your ethics, to acquire because theres this promise. The problem is when you finally sink your teeth into that fruit-and you partake of it and taste it-it is not what it was built to be. It does not live up. It does not satisfy. It leaves you empty and void until the next thing comes along, the next promise comes along and says, Well, not that, but this. So this whole idea of being like God was a temptation. Sometimes its not even these things that we would say, Well, thats blatant sin. Sometimes Satan can tempt us with something that is good, but its not the will of God. You know how the Apostle Paul would say, Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and work with your hands? Hed write that. That's Scripture, Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and work with your hands. I bet you there were times when Paul would write that, and he would go, Man, that sounds good. I bet there were times when Satan would whisper in his ear and say, Paul, youve worked really hard. Youve put up with a lot of stuff. Pauls life was anything but quiet-shipwrecks, riots in which he was the focal point, imprisoned, beaten, starved-all these threats upon him-ridiculed, mocked. And whats more-the pressures of the church as he fights a false doctrine and he fights against those who attack the Truth of the church. We talked earlier about the importance of standing up to deceit. Much of the New Testament was written as a response to deceit, as a response to people who were twisting the Truth. There was a group that would attack the deity of Christ. They were called the Docetists. They began to teach false doctrine about who Jesus was and of His nature. Paul had to attack docetism. There was another heresy called Gnosticism which attacked how a person received salvation; and much of the New Testament is written as a response to defend the Gospel against Gnosticism. There was another school of thought called antinomianism, which is against the law. It was thought that there was no law. As a Christian, you could live any way you wanted to live. Paul defends that in the Book of Romans and elsewhere. He comes against antinomianism. All these other isms, we could go on. They all existed in the first century, and they attacked the church. They attacked the church. All the problems with ethics that we have, they had. Utilitarianism-which says the end justifies the means, that existed in the first century. So Paul, Peter, and the others write against these twistings of the Truth, to uphold and defend the Truth-the very fact that our New Testament exists. Now I understand its the Holy Spirit who inspired the Books and wrote the Books through men and put it all together, but what Im saying to you is understand it didnt drop from Heaven like this. It didnt drop where they picked it up and say, Oh, its the New Testament! It didnt happen that way. The church put together the cannon, or the rule of Scripture. Why? Because the Gospel was attacked. There was man by the name of Marcian, and Marcian attacked the New Testament and the Old Testament. Any reference to the God of the Old Testament was removed. He was an anti-Semite, and by the time he got through slicing and dicing the New Testament, just a little bit of Luke was left and a little bit of some other Books. Hed say, Here, this is all thats left. This is all thats from God. The church went, Oh, we have to do something about this hieratic, Marcian. So they assembled the Books of the Bible together. For the first time-the oldest time we have-is called the Moratorium Fragment from 170 A.D. They wrote a letter and said, Here are the inspired Books of the Bible. They have Apostolicity. Theyd been written by an Apostle. They were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that was a response to somebody twisting the Truth. Paul was right in the thick of this, right in the heart. There was never a days rest for Paul. He was advancing the Gospel, but while he was doing that, he was encountering opposition from every front. Sometimes it was heresy within the church. Sometimes it was attacks outside of the church. Sometimes it was his health. Sometimes it was any number of things. He was a tent maker. Thats what he did to support himself. Im sure it was tempting for Paul that the enemy would just whisper in his ear as he was writing and say, Make it your ambition to live a quiet life and work with your hands. Doesnt that sound good, Paul? How about when you go to one of those islands to share the Gospel, why dont you just settle down there? Just make tents the rest of your life. Satans not asking him to go against the Gospel, to attack the church, or to tear down what hes built. No, no, no, no. But, you know, youve done your share. Youve gone through more than anybodys gone through emotionally, physically. It has been taxing on you. Live the good life. Just retire. Retire from the Gospel, and go make some tents for a while. Is it an evil thing to retire? Do pastors retire? Sure, pastors retire. And Im sure Paul has thought about that. He was thinking, Yeah, thats probably not a bad idea, but it wasnt the will of God. The will of God was that Paul was going to eventually give his life for the cause of Christ. Im telling you any pastor who is honest with you will tell you if theyve been in the ministry long enough, there are days when they say, Hey, I dont need this. Im going to go do something… Not me. No, Ive never had those days, but there are other pastors that I know of whove said that this is a lot of work. This is trouble. Ill just do this over here, a 9-5 kind of a job. Its hard. Some of you are engaged in ministry. You know what Im talking about. If youre engaged in ministry, especially if youre on the front lines, it gets hard. You might just want to say, Oh, you know. Let somebody else fight this battle. Im going to go do something else. So Paul dealt with those temptations. He kept performing the same techniques. He used the same tactics because doubt, deceit, and desires still work-twisting the Truth, getting us to question the Truth, and magnifying a lie still are believed and acted upon. We can get to the point where we know those attacks are coming and we recognize those attacks. When the Holy Spirit sounds His siren within our heart, and we know that a wave is eminent and a tsunami-a spiritual tsunami-is coming, And I need to prepare myself. I need to put on the armor of God that I can stand against this attack. Thats what were going to do. Next week, were going to actually get into the pieces of armor, and were going to see how each piece of armor has to do with holding on to the Truth. Because we have the Truth in Christ, we have the shield of faith. We have the sword of the Spirit. Its the sword of the Spirit thats powerful and active because it is true. So Satan is going to attack the truth; we are called to defend the Truth and stand for the Truth. To do that we place on the armor, so thats going to be our subject matter next week. Before we move on in the service, lets just spend some time in prayer and lifting up these concerns to the Lord because I know some of you are going through these struggles right now. Father, right now I want to lift up Your people, Your children. Lord, there are some people here who are struggling with doubts this week. Theyre questioning what they know to be true. Maybe theyre questioning that You love them or theyre questioning that Youve saved them. Theyre questioning a promise in Your Word. Theyre questioning Your presence in their lives. Theyre questioning something in the midst of a storm, in the midst of doubt. Father, I pray this morning that Your perfect love would drive out that doubt, remove that fear. Help them to know that Your promises are the same yesterday, today, and forever. They can trust in You. They can trust in Your Word. I pray for those this morning who are [involved in] various levels of deceit. Maybe its in its beginning stages, or maybe its advanced. I pray this morning that Your Truth would remove that darkness, that lies would be exposed, repented of and forsaken. Lord, if theyve engaged themselves in a destructive pattern of behavior or if they are beginning to go down a path which can bring destruction and harm to them or their family, [I pray] this morning is a wake-up call; that they heed the siren; that, Lord, they would no longer be the victim of that deceit; that they would be a follower of Truth. Father, for those of us who believed that temptation of desire, whatever that desire might be, the Word talks about the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life, the elements in which Satan uses desire-that we follow that carrot, that promise that says if we just have this, well be happy. Well have power; well have contentment. Father, I pray that we would see right now that what we must desire more than any thing or any one is You. Its only in You, Father, that we find the rest for our souls that we seek. Its only in You that we find the fulfillment that we hope for and long for. So I pray that Truth will be magnified and not a lie. Father, I pray too that we as the church of the living God can come alongside those who have succumb to this trickery; those who have magnified the lie; those who have engaged in deceit; and those who have entertained doubt. Right now they are struggling. Theyre wrestling and theyre losing. We will come alongside and help them, stand with them, pray with them, and encourage them in their faith. Help us to be the church today to one another. Grant us wisdom through Your Spirit; [teach us] how to apply this message to our hearts and lives. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.