"Didn't Captain Rolith say somebody was going to deal with the tuskmongers today? Maybe that'll be all sorted by the time we're back from box-hunting!" 

"Oh, you're right!"

That makes Elan feel better.

"Well, I'm pretty hungry. Wanna see what's for breakfast today?"

"Okies!" 

They head down to the mess hall. Would Elan like eggs and bacon, buttered toast, or oatmeal with honey? (Twilly will have the oatmeal.) 

Elan would like a little bit of all of those, if that's okay! If not, he'll go for the bacon and eggs and see if Twilly wants to share.

He can have a bit of everything!

Someone has found a tall stool for Twilly, with crossbars he can climb up like the rungs of a stepladder. There are a few other people eating, but the main breakfast rush seems to be over. 

Yay, breakfast!

Elan doesn't mind that the mess hall is mostly deserted. It's fun to talk over dinner, but Elan's already plenty excited for the coming day.

"I wonder what Boxopolis is like," he remarks to Twilly. "Sir Valance says that it's big and it has a sneevil king there. Do you think there's a box castle?"

"I bets there is," Twilly says between bites. "Sneevils seems to love building castles and forts out of boxes! I's not sure why; boxes aren't very good building material." 

"I think you're right… maybe they use boxes because boxes are easy to stack? Or maybe they used to just take boxes for the things in the box, and then they started to build with boxes because they had a bunch laying around."

Elan suspects that if he asked a sneevil he'd be told that it's because boxes are cool.

"Maybe. I doesn't think anybody knows for sure. Sneevils have been stealing boxes for hundreds of years!" 

"Whoa, that's a really long time!"

Elan doesn't have anything more to say for the rest of the meal.

"Is there anything you wanna take care of before we go? I think I'm pretty much ready."

"Nope, Twillies ready too!" 

"Great! Let's go!"

They set out on the quickest path Elan can find to Boxopolis. Shortly after leaving, something occurs to Elan:

"Sir Valance said the box inspector thing probably wouldn't work, so we should figure out what we want to do instead. Do you have any ideas? I guess we could tell them that it's really important, but maybe that will make them wanna keep it more."

"Hmmm..."

Twilly thinks hard. "We could maybe try the box inspectors plan anyways? But if it doesn't work, they might be mad at us...oh, I knows! Maybe we should say they can keep the box if we can have the stuff inside it!" 

Elan thinks on this.

"That sounds like a good idea to me. Hopefully the sneevils won't decide that they'd rather keep the box and what's inside… I mean, I guess we could beat them up, if nothing worked. But it feels kind of mean, if they don't attack us first…"

Elan sighs.

"This does seem really important, though. So plan A can be asking them if we can open it up and then give it back, and plan B can be to fight them about it, if we don't think of a better plan B first."

Serious nodding.

"If we might be getting in fights, what sorts of things can you do? Twillies just has healing magic and a stick."

"I can do swishy sword stuff! I can't do anything with the big swords that are, like, longer than my whole body like my friend Roy can, but I can do stuff that you might see on stage, except real. Which is good for dramatic one-on-one confrontations, especially with prideful mastermindy villain guys. It also makes it easier to capture someone for questioning or to put them in jail than to kill them.

"I've also got magic, but that's more about helping my friends or distracting my enemies…"

"Like what sortsa stuff? Your kind of magic works really differently from magic here, doesn't it? So I might be imagining completely the wrong sorts of things!" 

"Oh, right! Well I can do a little healing, like yesterday in the infirmary, and I can also play inspirational music. I do that the most! It gives bonuses on skill checks, so like… let's say that you really needed to climb that tree," he points at one nearby that looks particularly tricky to climb, "and were having trouble. I'd pull out my lute and sing a little song, and then… well, if you were back home you'd get +2 on it, but I dunno how that translates here. It probably wouldn't let you climb the tree if you were really bad at climbing trees, but it probably would if you were almost able to climb it by yourself."

Pause for breath.

"I also do illusions! I think I've shown you a couple already. I can disguise myself, or make a still or moving picture, or make a picture with sound. What kinda stuff would you have imagined if I hadn't told you?"

"The +2 one sounds sorta like what I was imagining, but here those mostly give a bonus to hit or a boost to damage or Crit. Spells that boost other skills are pretty rare! And then when you said about distracting enemies I was thinking you might have a daze or blind effect—ummm, daze means they can't do anything for a few seconds, and blind gives them a minus to hit."

"I do have a confusion spell, which sounds similar to the daze thing. I don't think I have anything that would blind someone completely… usually what I do is I make illusions of other people or creatures. Like a pretty girl! Or one time we were being chased by a bunch of orcs on an island, and I panicked and made an illusion of more orcs chasing us, except that one actually worked out really good because the first orcs decided that they could let the illusion orcs capture us instead."

Twilly giggles at the anecdote. "Can you illusion people invisible?" 

"There are some invisibility spells on the bardic spell list! Except I can go invisible by taking off my clothes."

Beat.

"For some reason a lot of people act like they can still see me when I do that, though. And it would be rude to take off someone else's clothes if I wanted to turn them invisible. So maybe the next time I level up I should learn one of those."

Twilly looks down at himself. "Twillies doesn't even have any clothes to take off..." 

Elan nods thoughtfully.

"Yeah, I guess it doesn't work for everyone."

Life sure is mysterious!

"I wonder what kind of classes you have that we don't," he wonders aloud.

"Well, I can list all the ones I can think of? The basic classes are Warrior, Mage, and Rogue! Then there's Pirates, Ninjas, Paladins, Necromancers, Technomancers, Dragonlords, Dragonslayers, Guardians...I thinks there's more but I can't remember them right now."