When it came to the A.T.V., Jax would say that, personally, he was a fan.
They traveled places in an eighth of the time it would take others on foot, and it had everything from beds to keep them out of the rain to other small amenities that helped in general.
Yet despite his normal love for their vehicle, the path they were on was not nearly as fun.
Liora had called the front seat today, so Jax was in the trailer with Selene, Thalia, and Beatris.
Though both Beatris and Jax were currently hanging out of the open back door with sickly colors to their faces.
The road was an old mountain pass.
It had a mix of twists, turns, ups, downs, and bumps everywhere.
"I told you trying to read books on a road like this wouldn't end well," Thalia said as she patted Beatris on the back.
Beatris dry-heaved for a moment before laying back down, looking miserable.
"H-Hey, Aiden," Selene called toward the front while it was Jax's turn to dry-heave. "Do you have something that can help with motion sickness?"
"I have something for it," Aiden called back, "but I would need to make a new batch. We're almost to the end of this road. Can they hold on for a few more minutes?"
Aiden took a sharp turn.
Jax's already hungover stomach decided to begin doing gymnastics, to the horror of the rest of his organs.
"What kind of cruel god would invent such a heinous thing as this?" Beatris asked, sprawled out with a look of pure fatigue on her face.
"Probably Sinic Valba, that tricky fu—bleah."
Jax was cut off by another round of dry-heaving.
Both to his and Beatris's horror, they ended up traveling for another hour before finally reaching a stopping point on the side of the road, on a plateau along the small ridge they had been climbing all day.
Whether out of pity, or simply because both Beatris and Jax refused to stand, the others set up camp while the two of them lay there and let their restless stomachs settle.
Jax refused to look at Beatris, knowing what would happen if he did.
The obsession had been growing steadily, and by now it was rather extreme.
It even physically leaked out of him during the small tests they had done away from the others, appearing as a strange inky redness.
Despite this, it seemed that the more clearly Jax could detect Beatris, the more the obsession applied.
So he could not look at her in what was probably a sprawled-out state without it going into a frenzy of protectiveness.
Instead, he looked toward the assembling camp, keeping the mental image of Beatris being fine but bored in his mind to quell the obsession as much as possible.
By the time camp was finished and Aiden had given them a remedy, everyone was sitting around discussing what to eat.
"Look," Aiden said, turning to the rest of them, "we have jerky and nuts. Shouldn't we save the good food for when it's a celebration?"
Jax shook his head.
"Aiden, love you, buddy, but I have been puking my guts out all day. I am not eating nuts and week-old jerky tonight."
Beatris nodded in agreement.
Selene added, "P-Plus, it's a beautiful spot to eat a nice meal. F-From what my brother said, Alucan has some of the best night sky views in the world."
Thalia had her head in a small booklet they had gotten in Vexbourne before beginning their long trip.
"True," Thalia said, "but personally, I'm curious to see the Shattered Reflections on the coastline when we get there."
Everyone turned to her with confused looks.
Then Liora perked up.
"Oh, I heard about this. Apparently, in certain spots, the water can reflect moments of someone's past. It's one of the weird phenomena I was reading about in my book."
As if to show off, she made her way from the campfire to the A.T.V., grabbed a leather book, then brought it back over and held it up for everyone to see.
"There are all sorts of weird things in the world," Liora said. "Like in Fortunz, apparently there are nights when the stars look like cracks in glass, and a bunch of super trippy and weird visions appear to anyone who watches them. And Flinkeq even has this strange thing where, for a few minutes every few years, the sky seems to switch places with the ground."
She grinned.
"So you're standing on sky, and above you is the ground."
"The sky switches with the ground?" Beatris asked, walking over to peer over Liora's shoulder. "How in the hells does something like that even happen?"
Jax tried to subtly bite his lip as the obsession flared, demanding that Beatris pay attention to him instead of anyone else.
"Well, nobody's exactly sure," Liora said, "but Relic Helia says here that the running theory is that many strange phenomena only started after you-know-who became well known. Some say it was them testing their powers that caused the oddities."
"Hey, I've heard of that author before," Aiden said as he also leaned over to read over Liora's shoulder. "Didn't they write a bunch of monster encyclopedias?"
By this point, everyone had begun to gather and read.
Liora flipped to the back for the author bio, which, to their surprise, showed a picture of a skeleton wearing a bycocket hat and a fancy-looking coat.
Below the picture, a small description read:
Relic Helia is a traveler who achieved lichdom thousands of years ago for the sole purpose of researching the world.
In this research, they have found many things and begun to write them down in hundreds of books to be mass-produced and distributed across the world.
When asked why he was doing this, he said:
"Knowledge is the seed of inventivity, and when you get as old as I have, your greatest passion in life is watching seeds become towering forests of trees."
"Huh," Aiden said, glancing back at the picture. "Surprised people aren't getting super angry at him for being a lich. Aren't they, like, the kill-people-for-an-undead-army guys?"
"Actually, no," Thalia said as she walked back over and began rummaging in her pack to pick what to eat. "Necromancers come in three types. White robes are basically undead exterminators. They do things like deal with a ghost haunting your house in exchange for keeping the ghost."
She pulled out a few supplies.
"Gray robes are more of a purchase-your-uncle-who-passed-recently-to-revive type. Black robes are the undead army guys."
"Oh," Beatris asked, looking toward Thalia like a student hoping for praise from a teacher, "like those guys in the dungeon we saw who all gave up, right?"
"Yeah," Thalia said. "Turns out most were white robe, with only the girl we fought at the end being a black robe who tricked the others."
Jax tensed, fighting not to let the obsession make him tackle Beatris.
He shook his head, hoping to let it settle.
Then a strange feeling washed over him.
It was hard to identify.
Like something was missing.
Something that had been in the background but had gone unnoticed until it vanished.
Jax turned to the others.
They were looking around too.
Then he saw Aiden open his mouth as if to speak.
No sound came out.
Aiden's hand shot to his throat like he was trying to feel for something.
Then he pointed to his own mouth.
Everyone began doing the same.
Jax tried to speak, but realized no sound came out.
Only silence.
He even tried to yell.
Nothing happened.
Everyone turned, their backs to the fire, alert and looking around.
But Jax was the first one to see it.
The figure seemed to be a rabbit halfblood wearing a long black dress that was torn in several spots. Around her feet ran a small group of regular black rabbits.
However, what was worrisome was not the little group of rabbits.
Nor was it the strangeness of the girl.
It was that she was soaked head to toe in blood.