Helen looked around, focused on a tower sitting atop a nearby hill.  Then she pointed in the general direction the road was heading.  “In about five miles there’s a bridge across a deep creek.  Good fishing spot.  We stock salmon each year in the park’s lakes, and there are always trout.”

“Awesome!  As long as there isn’t one of those friggin’ sturgeon in there.  That thing creeped me out.”

Chuckling, Helen said, “You can fish from up on the bridge if that makes you feel better.”

They settled into a comfortable silence as she drove the last few miles to the bridge.  In the back seat, Fuzzy polluted the air again, and Helen rolled down the back windows without a word.  Allistor wasn’t so polite.

“Damn, Fuzzy.  You couldn’t hold it for a few more minutes?  And what the hell have you been eating?  Can we feed him some antacids, Helen?  Will that hurt him?  Cuz I think something’s deeply wrong in there somewhere.  Like he ate something dead and rotted that also ate something dead and rotted that fed on rancid spam.” He kept up a monologue until Helen was laughing and Fuzzy buried his nose under his paws in seeming embarrassment.

Allistor spent a little time looking into his Battlemage class.  The choice had come with two new spells.  One was Barrier and was just what it sounded like.  He could cast a magic barrier that blocked both physical and magical attacks.  At level one, it could block up to one thousand points of damage.

The second spell was a sort of combination interrupt and damage spell called Mind Spike. Again, it was much like it sounded.  It seemed the system lacked creativity in its descriptors.  The spell sent a sort of mental dagger into the target’s brain, doing physical damage and causing intense pain that would interrupt any spellcasting or physical attacks.

When Helen pulled off the road and parked in a gravel area near the base of the bridge, both humans got out and scanned the area.   Fuzzy let himself out by crawling awkwardly out a window and dropping to the ground.  His nose was in overdrive, checking the scents in every direction.   When he casually walked up and dipped a paw into the water, Helen and Allistor relaxed.  Helen said, “If there’s a predator within a couple miles upwind of us, he’d be able to smell it.”

She went to the back of the truck and retrieved a fishing pole while Allistor withdrew his fishing gear from his ring.  They both rigged up their poles and split up slightly, standing about thirty feet apart on the creek’s bank.   Fuzzy, being a grizzly, had some instinctive fishing skills of his own.  He politely went downstream about fifty yards to where a rocky spur extended partway out into the creek.  Standing in the shallows, he put his nose near the water and waited.