Chapter 112: Twin Suns
Chapter 112: Twin Suns
One of the other construction team members, the Earth mage who had been doing most of the shaping for the concrete work, shook his head and straightened his glasses.
"With the volcanic ash layer, we’re essentially one big beach, or a flat mountain. The stone is going to absorb a huge amount of heat during the day, which will keep the early evenings warm. But without plant life to regulate it, we’re going to be more like a desert, and the temperature will plummet late in the evening, giving us cold mornings."
He paused, waiting for everyone to understand the implications.
"We’ll need both heat and air conditioning. Because it will be roasting hot during the day with that red sun added. Give me a few hours, and I will calculate the trajectory of this planet and give you a seasonal weather estimate.
It will be wildly wrong, as I only know what our area looks like, and what direction we’re circling the stars, but it’s enough to guess."
"How can you even guess that?" One of the warriors asked.
"When the afternoon progresses, we can see what direction and rate the suns pass. They’re likely not going to move through the sky at the same rate unless they’re very close together, and one will likely pass behind the other. Though, that might not happen at this point in the year.
Plus, we have extensive lab equipment in the astronomy lab.
It won’t take long, and I’ll have all sorts of data on the distance to the stars, expected output, daylight cycles at different points in the year, and such.
One day, that’s all I need to get the data with the equipment that we have."
The first teams from the kill mission came back, looking excited, and more than a little bit battered, as they had been initially caught out in the open when the hail started.
"Kalli, good news. Not only did we get our five kills, we got loot. One of the creatures awarded the group with an obsidian dagger. Common Grade, but still, it’s good to see rewards out in the wild."
She nodded in agreement. "That is excellent news, and it means that we have a chance to improve everyone’s gear as this Trial goes on. It might be random chance, but the more gear that we collect, the better the odds to get something amazing.
Did they have any sort of special abilities? Magic use? Skills? Resistant to anything that you could determine?"
"Resistant to fire, but not immune. They do use fire attacks, both from short ranges and on their claws. The fire damage isn’t terribly high, but it is hard on wooden shields.
So, making sure that you have a metal shield, or a skill that protects your shield, is essential to fighting them.
Other than that, the real danger is that they have collected in packs and work together.
One warrior trying to keep them all engaged doesn’t work well, you need a couple to block while the ranged damage dealers work."
Kalli added it all to her notes and nodded in satisfaction.
"Perfect, now I can put these up on the board so that everyone else can see them when they come in. Give me a few hours, and I will link the board to the student portal app as well, so you can see updates and quests without coming all the way over to see me."
"Oh, that would be handy. We could check the quests in the morning, set alerts for urgent quest notifications that will set off our phone alarms, and all sorts of essential stuff.
It’s a shame that the replacement devices are so expensive."
"Yeah, they’re pricey. But once everyone starts filling out their skill tree, and they’ve got the essential gear they want, they’ll start having points for luxuries. Just give it a couple of months."
As long as the Trials didn’t get too out of hand, they could theoretically be on track to get luxuries anyhow.
There were more than enough reasons for Kalli to set quests every day to give people at least a point or two. The only issue was the increasing skill cost as the heroes went up the skill tree.
Ten and twenty points for a skill was crazy talk to a lot of the heroes.
However, those who had saved up for it had incredibly positive things to say about the improved skills.
For example, Nancy had gone down the path of the Lightning mage, and now the former cheerleader had [Chain Lightning] at her command that would hit up to half a dozen targets at the same time, with as much effect as her old lightning bolt had on one target.
Niall had gone for [Flurry] and [Deadly Poison] skills, both of which were cheaper entry-level Rogue skills, but he was still one of the strongest damage dealers in the Academy.
Strong enough that everyone else with a Rogue class wanted to do the same as soon as they had points.
The teams were all headed out now, intending to clear the monsters from the immediate vicinity of the Academy before the ash got bad again. The sky was better, but not perfect, and if the wind picked up, there would be a huge amount of ash blown around the area for the first few weeks or months.
In the evenings, when the ground began to cool, the wind would blow from inland, and that would place an eruption upwind of them to the west.
During the daytime, when the wind was coming from the ocean most of the time, it wouldn’t be bad, but it was getting humid. The eruption had made things dry for a bit, but with the rain today, and the coastal winds, the humidity was no joke.
The Battle Armour was excellent at wicking sweat, and breathable while still being water repellant. But you could only ask so much of even modern clothing unless it had some sort of active temperature control in it.
Kalli waved to Esmeralda as the Necromancer left with her escort of undead and Special Forces.
Their team still didn’t have a healer with it, which Kalli really should talk to them about.
Marimgar didn’t really have spare healers, but they should at least make some effort to find one to go out with them, or a group with one to be near when fighting unknown monsters.
That could wait for tomorrow, though.
Tonight, she needed to flex her coding skills and make an app plugin to connect her quest board to the student app, and to auto-update all the data that she was inputting. Something like a monster compendium, so that heroes could quickly look up what was known about a threat before they faced it.
That would keep her busy for the rest of the day, and most of the night.