"I won’t lie, Mortimer… I don’t like any of the ideas I’ve had so far.
"I could try to distract Reginald while you hunt for the Half-sight ink in his nest; but I doubt I could give you enough time, and I don’t imagine you want an angry owl after you much more than I do. If he doesn’t eat me, I fear I would have to tunnel for days before I’d feel safe!
"We could try to challenge him in a battle of wits, if only we could choose the nature of the challenge. I can do a kind of magic trick which might surprise him. But… well… I think he’s smarter than me.
“Or… those bats were protecting a treasure… if we could somehow convince them to give us something valuable, we might be able to offer Reginald an exchange…?”
Hubert trails off, lost in thought, with an unhappy expression on his face…
You press on through the sycamores, getting closer and closer to the edge of the Greenwall. The way ahead is blocked by a ravine. A felled sycamore creates a land bridge across the ravine, or of course you could fly over. Do you wish to scurry over the branch, take to the air, or something else?
You fly forward over the ravine. This counts as a progression of the clock as you move forward, so you are now at 3 of 4 before the dice changes to a d10.
But you feel great forward momentum as you pitch in to the skies. It is however difficult as the tree branches and leaves need to be avoided, even more so if Mortimer wishes to avoid Hubert being swept off the contraption by a passing protrusion.
But Mortimer is more than up to the task. You hadn’t counted on one thing though as you weave through the trees. In your effort to make sure you keep low and out of raptor sight, you fly through a copse of trees that seems infested by red squirrels. They appear to be hoarding their nuts in the copse. They look very angry at you - possibly as you have found their nut store, or maybe just as you look a bit weird with Hubert hanging from the contraption.
Either way (or perhaps a third, stranger way?) one of them points at you and yells, and then the fiery tempered flufftails start firing acorns at you. One comes near - a ranging shot.
Evade! “Sorry, Hubert, this is going to get a bit rough.” If they’re in front of us turn sideways, if they’re behind us keep going, the idea is to turn away from whatever they’re protecting.
If we’re not overtly here to take his stuff, we need a reason for having visited. Flattery? Asking his advice on the All-Craft?
And then try to work round to mentioning the bats’ treasure and how we couldn’t take them on but surely he could deal with them? (Though we’d need to find a different way back just in case.)
