OwO

Expedition to Isekai

---

It missed. Thankfully, Rin hadn't exactly been punished for her failure in that instant. No, the beast had merely dodged and sent a megaflare her way. She was doing better than her partner in crime who had narrowly avoided being called Sh and Un.

How unfair it was. Sure, Rin had an inkling that something in her changed. Just as she felt a wellspring inside her after being flung into a tree, the beast had its own well floating towards her. Only her well was inside and doing nothing. The beasts well had been firing blasts at her. She could do little but move to dodge them. Her speed was lacking. Most of the dodge turned into scraping blows. She grit her teeth. Not the worse mishap she's ever been in. Pain was just a sensory illusion, that's what she'd convince herself to think.

She who dares, right?

Further in she went against the eyeballer and its orb. She'd certainly give it something to ponder. That something was a spear.

She'd draw from her own well. Everything she could. Every drop. Would it work? Who knew. Someone had to do something. Just as the Wright brothers believed they could fly. Just as Cugnot believed in self-propulsion. Just as Hormell Foods believed they could can ham. All she could do was believe that this was her correct choice.

She directed what she could towards her spear and thrust it towards the orb.

Expedition to Isekai

---

Rin could sense it. The monsters didn't give chase. Even if her vision in the night was hazy, she could tell that they didn't follow. Perhaps it was for the better. Perhaps it was the worse.

If her vision was better, she could have used her spear as a javelin. Even if the hide was tough, the eyes were almost always a weak spot. The thought did cross her mind that if she struck one of the laser wolves in the eye while it was charging its blast, its head would just explode. There was no evidence for this to happen unless one took cartoon as fact.

With Shun on laser duty, Rin had to do something. In a creeping dash, she skulked towards one of the laser-wolves. Quiet and fast. She'd pierce one of the laser beast with Shun acting as her cover.

Sleepless Nights\\ Iron Cages

thanks for putting up with my immense delays

I should be back on track now. No exact date on when I'll post next, but I'll try to respond when you guys post.

Soon: a downtime flavour interlude to the next missions. For now, it's just conversation with Roqe time.

Sleepless Nights\\ Iron Cages

"Do I know Mel?" A chuckle escaped from Roqe's lips. "Most people do. She gets around. Though, I'm technically pretty close to her~. Even worked on some things toge-" Roqe's head quickly shifted to the right as she dodged a damaged chain-glaive thrown directly towards her skull. "Well, I'm not supposed to talk about that. You can ask Mel about it. You even have the book we-"

Clonk.

A brick came flying at Roqe's head and bounced off.

Roqe was quite chipper about having something hit her noggin. Perhaps she didn't even see it as an attack. After all, the sensibilities of someone who couldn't die would, without a doubt, be dissimilar. If they weren't cursed and reviled, immortals would be great at slapstick comedy. Though, perhaps the funnier thought was if Honest kept a stack of bricks linked to her power solely to throw at immortals.

"If you want to talk about if I know Mel personally, then that's a very big yes~! We go back to when we were children. I was the one who dragged her out of the underworld, after all. Funny how that turned out. I'm back down there, Mel managed to rub shoulders at the first. Though last I checked, she's voluntarily persona non grata now."

Roqe looked at her fingernails. Still green. One fell off.

"I don't quite have much time left in this form, so if you want me to give you a quick summary of the past before I leave, ask. Otherwise, I can answer any question you kiddos have. Roqe knows many things."

She paused.

"Though don't ask about what that does." She gestured to the book. "I was never exactly told why we had to use it last time and never cared enough to ask. I just know that it's important."

Clonk.

What an immortal considered bad was definitely something curious. Even more curious was that a second brick had struck Roqe in the head after she mentioned the book being used last time.

The Little Hamlet

Ingrid Lucentia von Draph

^{Interacting with: Wormwood @Dark Cloud}
The Bridge || Guardsmanin'? || Interrogating?

Oh shit, a rat!

Except it wasn't. No, rats had fur and, when they weren't being pests, were actually quite cute. Well, the fur made them cute. Rats without fur were, in fact, quite horrifying to look at. What had locked eyes with her was a toddler-sized lizard with scales, bulbous eyes, and jutting teeth. He certainly matched the description that Dalton gave her when something went through the inn's garbage: a short and bulbous thing scaly thing. Then again, it may have just been an ugly rat that had gone through Dalton's garbage.

Regardless, Ingrid didn't share the villager's level of caution when it came to the more non-human types around Hearth. After all, she was tutored by a libertine, acted out her knightly duties, and had spent time travelling across the lands before settling down. Though, perhaps a large portion of it was instead instinct: a mixture of her natural sense of danger and the understanding that the Kobold could pretty much only bite her ankles. Maybe if he stretched as high as he could, he could scratch at her knees.

This whole situation reminded Ingrid of one of her escapades as a knight. Her duty (alongside the other knights) was to find and bring to justice a group of brigands who had taken over a bridge and demanded a toll from anyone who would pass. They called themselves "The Bridge Boys" and would wait under a bridge until a merchant came by.

For Wormwood, that wasn't exactly a good memory to come up.

"...Why are you under a bridge?" The soaked Ingrid asked with an interrogating look on her face. Her level of authority here was strange; on one hand, she wore no armour, was carrying a rather thick fishing rod instead of a blade, and was completely soaked. On the other, she was sized to punt Wormwood to the next village over. That was definitely intimidating.

Surprisingly, him being a Kobold was less of an issue than being under a bridge. As for why was a story for a different time.

Expedition to Isekai

---

Though a curious thought went through Rin's mind when she saw the spear poke into the carcass with ease: what if the monsters were strong only when they were alive? The spears would be useless if that were the case. The alternate hypothesis was that things in a dungeon had an affinity for affecting each other. Rin had no evidence for something like that, though. In either case, some level of testing was complete and Rin was off for some rest. She needed it.

Rin never really dreamed of much. It was always some mundane thing for her. Building in a weightless world, looking for something that didn't exist, something like that. More often than not, her dreams reflected her current state. Judging by her current dream, having her bag torn open and her things flying away affected her pretty deeply. She collected enough that she could push it down from the forefront of her mind while she was awake. Work on whittling away spears or telling people how to tie knots. However, when she was asleep? There was no way for her mind to hide how she lost some of her tools.

Her turn on the watch gave her a brief moment of respite from her stressful dreams. Sharpening a stick was simple, but it required some level of focus. Not enough to ignore the watch, but enough to not think about things. If only man didn't need to sleep. She whittled her time away before Shun had taken over the watch.

And she went back to her dreams. Back to the mundane dreams that would wake her feeling nothing but stress. This time, however, she did not awaken to cold sweats and stress. No, it was Shun yelling. It appeared that the students were never safe.

Perhaps a pitfall would have been a good idea after all. An ambush in the night was brutal. She stumbled up with spear clutched in hand. The others had been littered nearby for other students. After all, Rin only had two hands. It was better to keep them spread out where they were needed. Surely a weapon, even one as simple as a sharpened stick, would be better than students beating the life out of the wolfbears with their fists.

...

At least, it would be better if they weren't named Duncan.

If only Rin had some magnesium. Or phosphorus. Really, anything. Shun running off with a flashlight to act as bait was foolhardy. If it was night and the wolfbears had good night vision, it would be nice to try to abuse that instead. Though, Shun would need to run towards them rather than away for that to happen.

Well, if Shun would try to be a distraction, Rin would move to help her. She moved near her ready to stop any pounce with her spear. Though, not close enough that the two would have been clipped by the same beam.

The Little Hamlet

@Enkryption

my b, i incorrectly assumed the issue was something else as there wasn't a mention of it not working on mobile (I don't use mobile at all for RPG, so I really only check if bbcode dies when I make a thread).

In which case yes, double subs, dropping the subs and h3 all together (losing serif, but it's about the same size), stacking things vertically, and keeping the sections short either mitigate or fix the issue of words folding into themselves on mobile.

The Little Hamlet

It's not really that finicky.

If it's the matter of exact spacing, you can just enshroud the text you change with {color=ffffff}{/color} to ensure that you only change the correct text since the spaces are consistent in their logic (one at the end of leftmost section, two surrounding middle section, and one at the beginning of the final section).

xampl:
[center][h3][b]Name Nameman[/b][/h3]
[sup]Interacting with:
[h3][color=a9a9a9][color=ffffff]Place[/color] || [color=ffffff]Action[/color] || [color=ffffff]Vibe[/color][/color][/h3][/sup][/center]

Thing

Name Nameman

Interacting with:

Place || Action || Vibe

Screenspace for aesthetic is a sacrifice of having it on one line; it shouldn't really be an issue unless you keep the qualifiers and decide to have a very long description of all of them.

If it's the matter of being unbalanced if you have a large section, then yea. You could also begin to use tables to solve that, but that begins the devil's work of being weird as hell. That's just a limitation to try to keep them sufficiently equal.

Though it doesn't really matter. Mae did say that as long as it had the same information, it didn't really matter how the header looked.

Sleepless Nights\\ Iron Cages

Alright, so some next steps on this RP:

Just give a quick shout on what you'd want to do in your character's free time between missions. I'll write a short scenario and we can spend a week or few on that endeavor.

It could be anything, as stated before.

The Little Hamlet

Ingrid Lucentia von Draph

Interacting with: Wormwood @Dark Cloud

The Bridge || Fishing? || Victorious?

It was rare for Ingrid to not wear her armour. After all, armour was the symbol of a knight (even if her armour felt more like a childish attempt at making a soldier less frightening; lipstick on a pig--or literally a goat on a helmet). Common belief would hold that a guard should always be on guard. However, Hearth was not a place in which such a stern outlook on one's duties mattered. She did more work repairing waterlogged and rotting planks on bridges and docks. Besides, Ingrid without her armour was just as imposing. Even if her loose-fitting undershirt and pants hid her physique with draped cotton, her height couldn't be hidden. Most conflicts could be solved by standing above and looking down on someone.

As for why: today was Market Day. That meant that Ingrid had a craving for seafood. She was always on a see food diet, but something about the these days that she craved fresh fish. Perhaps it was the fresh bread. Maybe it was the lack of seafood in the market as it didn't keep besides via obscene amounts of salt or smoke. It could have just been some strange craving that she got. Most likely it was that she spent most of Market Day watching the roads and fishing gave her something to do besides wave hello to the regular handful of visitors. Ingrid herself never thought about why. In fact, she never thought too deeply about anything.

Fishing was not a pursuit of a noble, but it was a noble pursuit. Stately matters and governance may protect one's land, but it did nothing to quell one's thrice daily hunger pangs (in Ingrid's case: eighce daily). In this regard, fishing was perhaps one of the noblest pursuits of them all. After all, proverbial wisdom often involved fishing. Probably because there was little to do while fishing besides thinking up proverbs.

Ingrid enjoyed fishing, yet she couldn't fish for shit. It always ended up the same way. Perhaps her lack of skill related to her inability to think up pithy little bits of wisdom while she fished. More likely it was her trying to muscle her way into every catch rather than use any level of finesse. If the fish in the river were 6ft behemoths of oceanic virility, that strategy would probably work. Unfortunately, the fish at the bridge usually remained snack sized. Well, Ingrid-sized snacks.

"Skeutan!" Ingrid yelled as she felt her rod slipping out of her hands, something that happened because she zonked out looking at the horizon. With a quick fumble, she found herself leaping after the rod as it descended away from her grasp and into the river. Incidentally, that is why she didn't wear armour on Market Days. After the third time she had to clean, dry, polish, and oil her armour, Dalton reminded her that she could just not wear it when she tries to fish.

With an inglorious fall, Ingrid flopped into the water. Her instinct took over as she plummeted the few feet between the bridge and waterline. Her knees tucked into her chest and her body shrunk into itself. One's body doesn't quite forget the feeling of jamming into the bottom of a riverbed, especially for someone as dense as Ingrid. Tightening into a ball made it so that her legs didn't touch the riverbed until her momentum was mostly stopped. Of course, this had the side effect of creating a large splash of water. Said splash would usually be meaningless. After all, there was usually a keen lack of people in the immediate vicinity. Unfortunately for the lizard man under the bridge, he was mere feet away from the violent knight-powered geyser of water.

In any case, it was two fish with one cannonball. Two fish were stunned and floated to the surface alongside her fishing rod. In all honesty, Ingrid should have just ditched the rod all together and started with jumping into the river. Switching to that method would mean that Ingrid would have an out of character moment of introspection, so it was unlikely that she would ever do so. Hands from the depths grabbed all three: both fish in one and the rod in the other. Everything sunk down into the refraction of the river.

A normal person would have, perhaps, intuited a way to float their way to the riverbank. Unfortunately, such an act was impossible for Ingrid. As was usual when she fell into water, Ingrid had to get out the only way she knew how: by walking along the riverbed until she climbed out on her own feet. Thankfully, the river was never quite dangerous enough to sweep someone as dense as her away.

As she rose from the riverbed mentally unfazed from the ordeal, Ingrid was in a good mood thanks to her newly acquired breakfast. Well, her post-breakfast snack. The thing that she ate that came before brunch.