“I’m fine,” Rick said, unconvincingly.

“Such a lightweight,” Phoebe said, shaking her head at her brother.

“The mirage chamber is booked today anyway,” Danielle said. “The bronze-rankers are practising sandy terrain encounters.”

“They have a whole desert for that!” Rick complained.

The drink continued to flow and the conversation roamed. The wiser iron-rankers went easy on the drinks to catch any loose-lipped reveals from the bronze and silver-rankers.

“…a committee,” Danielle was saying. “All silver-rankers who spent decades buying up monster cores while they sat on their backsides. Thalia, do you remember when we were the age of these kids? Crazed, we were; knocking out contracts faster than they could post them. Now they’re all sitting around like fonts of wisdom, deciding what to do about pirates that they never would have gone out to catch in the first place!”

“Your mum seems to like the sauce, Hump,” Jason said.

“She can get a bit boisterous when Father isn’t around,” Humphrey said. “Or when he is, for that matter.”

“Hump takes after his father,” Phoebe said to Jason. “His dad is the straight line to his mum’s squiggles. Kind of like Hump is for you.”

“There you go, Hump,” Jason said, throwing an arm around Humphrey’s broad shoulders. “Jeez, you’re a biggun.”

“Please stop saying Hump.”

Later, Rufus addressed all the iron-rankers in a group.

“Don’t go rushing off to fill all your awakening stone slots. There’s an opportunity coming up. I can’t tell you about it, but in about a month there will be a… thing.”

“What kind of thing?” Jason asked.

Rufus drunkenly frowned at Jason.

“It’s a thing. Shut up.”

Drink and the soporific afternoon sun left most of the group aggressively lounging. Jason and Cassandra were laid out on a blanket with Humphrey and Gabrielle on another, next to them.

“It sounds like your problem is the butter,” Jason said to Gabrielle. “You want to take it out of the cooler box and let it stand for fifteen minutes; no more, no less. Oh, and get a stand mixer instead of creaming it by hand. You can get good ones from Artifice Association.”

“Maybe you can show me?” Gabrielle asked.

“Sure,” Jason said. “Madam Landry gives me free run of the kitchen, and learning about biscuits is very important. There’s this whole country where I come from that call scones biscuits. They’re all lunatics.”

* * *

The memorial service for the lost adventurer was held at the Adventure Society campus. The mausoleum occupied a portion of the campus abutting the north shore of the Island. The shore of the artificial island was raised up from the water, with lawn seeded atop. The service was held overlooking the water.