Strawberry's Descent

The celebration eventually thinned into something quieter, small clusters of contributors trading stories, Nettle finally out of merch to sell, Beelzebub having long since returned to whatever business a Lord of Hell attended to when he wasn't buying keychains. Bram found Arista sitting on the edge of Tabula Rosa's still-glowing central plaza, notebook open on her knees despite the celebration, already sketching something new.

"So." He sat down beside her, the particular weary contentment of a man who'd survived a full year of catapults, hydras, and structural collapses to see the actual finish line. "What now?"

Arista looked up, and the smile that crossed her face was, unmistakably, dangerous: the exact expression that had, over the past year, preceded a gravity bike, a boring rig, a continental rail network, and at least one incident involving a caged human canary.

"...Would you mind testing a glider plane with me?"

Bram closed his eyes slowly. "We just finished. We just, this very hour, finished the largest infrastructure project this game has ever seen."

"And?"

"And you want to immediately start something new."

"The trebuchet's been half-built for months," Arista said, entirely unbothered, already flipping to the relevant sketches, old ideas, shelved back when the metro had swallowed her entire attention, now surfacing again with fresh urgency. "You remember. Launch gliders instead of people directly. Get real lift out of actual wings instead of just ballistic arcs. It's the natural next step after the wingsuit."

"The wingsuit that got eaten by a hydra."

"That was a design problem. This is a launch mechanism problem. Completely different category of disaster waiting to happen." She grinned wider. "Come on. You survived the catapult. You respawned from the hydra. You survived worse than this. What's one glider?"

Bram stared at her for a long, silent moment, then let out a long, resigned breath that carried the specific weight of a man who had genuinely, thoroughly given up pretending he'd ever say no to her.

"...Fine. When?"

"Tomorrow. I've already got the trebuchet frame mostly assembled, just needs final calibration on the launch angle and release timing." She was practically vibrating now, the old restless energy fully returned. "This time we're not aiming at another kingdom. We're aiming up."

Arista lingered a moment longer before actually standing, one more loose thought surfacing now that the adrenaline of the day had fully settled. "...Hey. Random thing I've wondered for a while now and never actually asked. You said pure Vitality build, way back at the very first catapult test. So how do you even carry half the gear you carry? Tower shields, riot shields, whatever cursed thing I hand you next week. Strength handles weight, not Vitality."

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Three to one," Bram said, entirely unbothered, like the question had been sitting there waiting for someone to finally ask it. "Three points to Vitality for every one in Strength, every level, since character creation. Enough Strength to actually function. Just, considerably less than the Vitality side."

"Huh." Arista filed that away with genuine interest, the specific interest of someone who'd just found one more small, useful fact about a tool she fully intended to keep using. "Good to know."

"...Why does that sound like a threat."

"No reason," Arista said, entirely too innocently, already closing her notebook for the night.

The trebuchet stood ready the next morning on a wide, natural plateau roughly two-thirds of the way up the same mountain where Arista had once first hacked a hole through the cloud barrier with a Damascus-folded pickaxe, chosen mainly because hauling glider components up in sections no longer meant a full three-day climb every single time something needed replacing.

"Launch angle's calibrated for a shallow arc," Arista called out, double-checking the counterweight release mechanism. "You should catch lift almost immediately, glide out over the—"

"Should," Bram repeated, flatly, from inside the glider.

"Should," she confirmed, entirely too cheerful about the uncertainty. "Ready?"

"No."

"Great! Launching."

[Launch Sequence Initiated]

The counterweight dropped, the arm swung, and the glider shot skyward at an angle considerably steeper than Arista's calculations had promised, a calibration error she wouldn't fully diagnose until much later, something in the release timing firing a half-second early, sending Bram not into a shallow, controlled glide but directly, forcefully, upward into the cloud barrier itself.

"THAT'S NOT THE ANGLE I—"

The glider hit the cloud layer at full launch speed, and the same strange, elastic property that had once bounced her iron pickaxe clean back into her own hands did precisely the same thing now, at considerably greater scale, the entire glider absorbed into the barrier's resistant surface for one brief, suspended moment before the cloud's stored energy released all at once, launching the whole craft back downward with nearly the same violent force it had struck upward with.

"OH NO—"

Arista watched, horrified and fascinated in roughly equal measure, as Bram's glider plummeted back toward the mountain in a long, uncontrolled arc, wings shuddering under stress they were never designed for.

"BRACE FOR IMPACT, SAME AS THE SHIELD, YOU KNOW THIS PART—"

"I KNOW THIS PART DOESN'T MAKE ME HATE IT LESS—"

The glider clipped the mountainside hard, skidding through loose scree in a shower of dust and splintering wood, finally grinding to a halt several dozen meters from where it had launched, considerably worse for wear but, crucially, still in one piece.

[Player Bram — Status: Alive][HP: 42%]

Silence.

Then, from the wreckage, a long, muffled groan.

Arista sprinted down the slope, skidding to a stop beside the glider's crumpled frame, already assessing damage with the particular, practiced calm of someone who had, by this point, done this exact routine more times than either of them could comfortably count.

"...Okay. New data. The clouds bounce things back down at roughly the same force they went up with. That's, actually, that's really useful information, structurally speaking."

Bram pushed himself up out of the wreckage, dust-covered, glaring with the flat, weary intensity of a man who had, once again, personally paid the price for her research.

"...I would like it noted," he said, "that I am beginning to suspect you enjoy this part."

Arista didn't even try to deny it.

"...A little bit, yeah."

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