The midday sun beat down hard on Penelope as she wandered the streets thinking about what Lord Kairon had told her.

“Assemble a defense team,” he had said. That was all well and good, she thought, except my own parents are accusing me, and I never had any friends to begin with.

She navigated the rough thoroughfares and alleyways which ran trench-like through the yellow city. The buildings on either side were one story, with the odd second story here and there, but the straight lines and angles were off-putting. Those windows which left their shutters open stared at her with their huge black eyes.

If she didn’t look at them, it was almost like walking the narrow trenches of the steppes. The trick was not to look.

But it was hard not to. The sheer novelty of hard-walled homes had yet to wear off on her. Kairon had exhibited to her how the buildings of adobe could be constructed to take advantage of even slight breezes to freshen whole rooms. It was much better than living in what amounted to a sail tied to a wooden frame.

Living as she had in the Town Hall, he referred to it, had exposed her to many such convenient utilities.

Access to water, for one. All Kairon had to do was summon a servant and one would appear, unerringly, with a jug of fresh water.

Where are they getting it? she had wondered. There’s not even a river through here.

At first she had been wary, thinking it was that volatile and unpalatable magic geyser water. But he had put her worries to rest, bidding the servant to drink from the jug first.

“You see, Penelope? All it contains is fresh, clean water.”

“Watch it!” came a cry. It preceded a shoulder from an orc coming the other way, which knocked her bodily to the ground and out of her thoughts.

“Are you even looking where you’re going, girl?” it asked as Penelope tried to stand up. It grunted, kicked her back down, and continued on.

Shocked and seething, she glared daggers into its back as she tried to stand back up.

Another passerby trod on her fingers.

“Ow!” she said, and cursed. She stood up more quickly this time.

There was nothing new here. She knew orcs to be cruel from when she had lived with them before. But it was less personal in Hurraggh. Back then, you knew who your bully was. And where they slept.

The crowd around her was steadily thickening. Orcs with anonymous faces followed invisible threads of responsibility and intent, which just so happened to form a gradually worsening knot at this juncture.

There was a crash and someone bellowed, “Outta my way!”

“Outta your way?!” came an even more outraged reply.

Penelope, deciding to make herself scarce, ducked into an empty alley.

****

The instructor paced slowly in front of the prisoners in the tutorial yard, scowling as he did. Daily yardwork for hours a day was starting to take its toll on the students. Amerigo wasn’t sure, but he thought he could sense that his neighbor – a goblin - was sleeping standing up.

The instructor marched over to a burlap sack and ripped it open. He thrust his hand inside and drew it back out.

“This,” he said, “is what we’ll be farmering.” He held up his hand, thumb and forefinger delicately pinching something small, oblong, light brown, and pitted all over. “You’ll be workin’ for peanuts. These bags,” here he gestured to the pile of burlap sacks, including the one he had ripped open, “are full of ‘em. And so far we’ve covered the first step.”

The instructor scanned the column. His eyes reached Amerigo and he suddenly grinned evilly.

“Can you tell me what that first step was?”

Amerigo gulped.

“Hey!” the orc shouted. “Answer the question!”

The orc threw the peanut. It didn’t hit Amerigo, but the goblin who had been startled awake. “I want an answer, sleepyhead.”

It looked around for help, overcome with jitters by this waking nightmare. Those nearest to it stepped slightly away. Wide-eyed, it chirruped what sounded like a question.

“I was asking,” the orc said as he stomped through the rank, “what was it you were doin’ all day yesterday!”

The goblin chittered “fu-fu-furrowin’!” as it closed its eyes and covered its head.

The orc grunted. It was somehow angrier that the goblin had gotten it right than when it discovered the thing sleeping during the lecture. “That’s right,” he said before returning to the front of the group. “First, there’s the furrowin’. Then, there’s the plantin’. You plant seeds in the furrows. Lord Kairon says they need to be a finger deep and a hand length apart, and I’ll be usin’ this hand to check.” He held up his hand. It had an index finger the size of a sausage. The whole hand was the length of Amerigo’s forearm.

“Put ‘em in the mounds, not in the valleys. Got it?” He barked the last sentence. This, the group had learned, was when they were meant to reply, which they did.

“Get to work!” he bellowed, and punctuated the command by hurling fistfuls of peanuts at them.

The group burst into chaos. Everyone began scrambling to scoop the peanuts up, but when Amerigo tried to join them he found something holding him back.

“There’s plenty of peanuts in the bags. Let’s go get the better plows instead. C’mon.”

It was Chicken. He had almost forgotten the kobold had come to the yard with him. And he made a good point.

Amerigo nodded and the two made their way to the pile of bent swords.

“This one’s my favorite,” Chicken said as he lifted one out of the pile. It sent the others piled on top clattering away. “It’s got just the right angle coming down. Not much of an edge any more, of course. The best ones are dull from us using them.”

Amerigo picked one up after a moment’s consideration.

“The one with the cushy handle? Yeah, I guess that one’s alright. You haven’t got armored palms like me.”

Then Chicken flew forward, landing flat on the ground. A goblin had tackled him from behind and was picking up his sword.

“That one’s mine, I got it first!” he protested as Amerigo helped him back up.

The goblin blew a raspberry and made a rude gesture with both hands.

“You come back here!” he started. But Amerigo held him back. The gnome glanced meaningfully at the instructor, who was standing with his arms crossed watching the scrabble for peanuts die out slowly.

“No fighting,” Chicken intoned.

Amerigo offered him his own plow.

“No, you keep that one. I’ll take, uh,” and he looked down at the pile again, picking one up at random. “This one. Woah!”

This he exclaimed when sparks arose from the sword as he dragged it across the stones. He repeated it experimentally. Little red sparks jumped out from beneath.

He knelt down and did it a few more times, his eyes and grin widening. “This is one of the rocks we use to start fire,” he said, conjuring small waves of dazzling lights. “So this plow must be made of the other kind. Or something.”

Amerigo was gesturing stiffly, glancing at the instructor.

The orc was looking his way.

Chicken allowed Amerigo to help him up.

“That might be how we can signal Penelope,” he mused, his other hand coming back out of his pocket. Amerigo hadn’t seen it go in.

“You go start on your plot, and I’ll get us some peanuts.”

Amerigo had lived alone too long. If he was more socially practiced, he might have seen the strange look in Chicken’s eye. Things as they were, he just nodded and stalked away.

Amerigo’s plot wasn’t hard to differentiate from the others. It wasn’t contested for being better than any others. For one, it was overgrown. A point their instructor never failed to hold him accountable for. None of the other prisoners would dare take credit for it, so they left it well alone.

He stood looking at the greenery. It would all have to be removed to make room for the peanut plants.

Perhaps the peanut plants could be introduced around the existing ones.

He put his head on one side, trying to imagine this. The instructor had said the plants would be one finger deep and one hand-length apart on the ridges themselves. The small bush starting to grow definitely didn’t fit. Perhaps the grasses and mosses that were springing up in small patches would-…

But he wouldn’t delude himself. All these plants went against the rules.

He looked back at the sacks of peanuts and spotted Chicken crouching in front of them. He probably spilled some and was picking them up.

It wasn’t as if he tried to make them grow. They just did for some reason. He crouched to look through the leaves, inspecting them for dead or wilted parts.

He fished in his hat and pulled out Fen, who clipped an offending branch for him before Amerigo returned him to his cap.

He chalked it up to his natural affinity. Or perhaps it was the slimy film that coated him, the constant protection he received from Stormhaegen.

“Water!”

He looked around at the shout. It had been their instructor.

There were red and orange tongues of fire belching a column of smoke. The peanut sacks were ablaze.

Amerigo was running, but wasn’t sure why. Oh, right. Chicken had been getting peanuts, and now the peanuts were on fire. So he wanted to check on him. That was why.

“Water!” the instructor bellowed again.

Chicken was standing next to the blaze, throwing some peanuts on the fire and looking up at the smoke when Amerigo reached him.

“Penelope should be able to see this, you think?” he asked. Amerigo wasn’t sure if he was talking to him or himself. He looked from the kobold, who looked eerily calm, to the fire and back. His eyes felt the size of saucers. On the ground next to him were his plow and one of the rocks that had caused the sparks.

Something grabbed Chicken by the nape of his neck, and Amerigo felt similar. They were both lifted as their instructor said, “You!”

****

“…so you set the bags on fire?” Salander asked. His words were weary. Greater than the collective age of a nursing home.

“I knew what I was doing,” Chicken retorted with words closer to that of a nursery.

Amerigo was trying his best not to exist. Salander was sitting up on the bed while Chicken sat on the dust and nursed his injured pride from being thrown into the cell.

“They removed you from the tutorials, Chicken.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

Eye contact in the cell was extinct, not for lack of effort on Salander’s part. Chicken should have felt the glare drilling through his skull and into his brain. No answer was forthcoming.

“You had a degree of freedom,” Salander enunciated. “And now that’s gone up in smoke.”

When it clicked for him through the burgeoning headache, he added, “Literally, I guess.”

He laid back down and pinched the bridge of his snout. “Not that I care. It’s just….baffling is all.”

None of the cell’s occupants noticed when the door to the block opened and closed with no one apparently passing through it.

“You gave up your only leverage. And now I’m stuck with you. It’s not like you’re going to miraculously-…”

The distinct jingle of keys dropping on a cell room floor cut him off. When he turned back over to see, there was a lizard standing just inside the bars, a key ring sitting in front of it.

Not a lizardfolk or a kobold. Just a regular desert lizard.

“Are those-…” he started.

“The keys to our cell!” Chicken finished. Amerigo swept up the lizard, in more than mere relief, and gave it a kiss.

“Let’s get out of here!” Chicken rallied, not missing a beat.

“No.”

“No?”

Salander rolled back over. “I won’t stop you. But I’m not coming.”

“But we can get out. We can get back home.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Because,” Chicken said weakly, “we can help them.”

“I think I’m done helping. And you’d be smart to stop, too.” His words dropped the temperature in the room. “You don’t have the best track record.”

Amerigo unlocked the door to the cell, the lizard still in hand. But Chicken couldn’t stop looking at Salander.

“I’m not sure I can do this without you.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Amerigo tried not to move, sensing he could cut the tension with a dull plow. Perhaps even something as blunt as an orc guard.

Then Chicken straightened.

“But I can try.”

He stomped out, beckoning to Amerigo as he passed. He prepared to slam the door.

“Chicken?” came a call from the cell. It wasn’t forceful, but it stopped the jail break mid-tantrum.

He looked at Salander.

“Don’t shut the door. It’ll look like I helped otherwise.”