Chapter 2347 Floaties

--- Lily ---

Before getting distracted by food, ingredients for alchemy, or even a debate on how safe it was to end up here... Lily needed to check with Kat if they were any closer. The answer was a bit mixed. [The answer is yes, I think, but it’s sort of out of the way. Obviously where you were is straight on, but the new island is up and too the left... quite a while up and too the left. I think you’re well out of the clouds.]

Lily glanced around and what she saw was complicated. The waterfalls created a mist that hung around... but Kat was right those weren’t really the same thick cloud cover that they were looking for. Glancing around as best she could and utilising the odd angle they were standing on, Lily was able to spot the cloud cover... and it wasn’t too close. It really did depend on the size of the safe zones.

The big cloud line was easily a kilometre or more away, but there was a thinner, if still massive bit of cloud that stretched up towards them and several smaller clouds along the way. If Kat followed the path, she’d be most of the way there just from the big one, and then could easily hop between the smaller ones, all while being exposed for no more than a few seconds...

But that was still a risk they weren’t sure if it was ideal to take. Would the small ones be enough? Would any step outside of the clouds end with Kat being attacked? Then there was the fact that it wasn’t all that much closer. It was a lot of risk for what might only be an hour’s less travel time at MOST, because of how winding the path would become. Ultimately... It’s not worth it I don’t think. It might save you a little bit of time but not much and the risks...

[Alright no problem. It should be fairly easy to keep heading directly straight at this point. I don’t really mind if you want to explore the area you’re in now. Just be ready to duck back for a bit if I need to go out of the way for something or I get knocked of course.]

Hmm... Appoline doesn’t seem to be having a good time with the altitude I’ll ask what the other two want to do. So she did, Lily outlined the info she’d just gone over with Kat and waited to see what they wanted to do. Wiggles was shrugging, seemingly fine now that he’d taken the time to do... something. He seemed to have wind affinity so he was probably using that to help.

"I’ll be fine," insisted Appoline. "It’s not ideal but I can still function and I suspect it’s still at the level where I can get used to things. The real issue is I’m not sure how risky it would be to swim through the lakes here, and freezing it over to create a path might just set off the fish. Though hmm..."

Appoline touched a finger to the water here before shivering. "Yeah, this water here might look normal but it’s got a lot of mana in it. None of those fish down there are normal and I’m not entirely sure I CAN freeze it. It’s already quite cold as it stands so I won’t just be able to make it colder... hmm... would be ideal to have Kat here unless... maybe the high jump potion? I don’t have a good grasp of how effective that is but perhaps with your help?"

Lily nodded slowly. "Right... well... there are enough spots around the place that I can likely create platforms from them if you need. Though you might want a slowfall potion as well just to give me time. The lake also isn’t too deep at most points so I can just stretch them down to create a sturdy platform... assuming I can’t just let my shadows rest on the lake. HMmm... might be able to do that if you give me some time to test things..."

"Sure," agreed Appoline. Wiggles, for his part just shrugged. It wasn’t really his business. Now that he could breathe just fine this place was nice enough to rest. It wasn’t muddy, the fish were staying in the water and the air was fresh and not at all stinky. Great when you were shovelling so much of it into your lungs.

Seeing that agreement Lily started to work on floating platforms. Firstly, she tested to see if her shadows could float on water and the answer was... sort of? Obviously if she wasn’t using them as platforms she could place them wherever she wanted, and standing on them wasn’t a problem... if she started the platform from the solid ground. This is where a problem came up in testing.

The only way to properly test them was to do so herself. If she was on the ground, so was her shadow. If she was in the air the shadow might drag her down or it might just hang from her depending on the weight. Nope, sadly she had to stand on it. Lily was foreseeing a lot of wet fur in the future. For now though, she was lucky enough that the potion to keep the rain off worked well enough against lakewater as well. It didn’t let you breathe underwater and it made swimming harder, but it kept her dry and she had wings and shadows to get out of the water so it was fine.

So, first real test just to check? Normal shadows ended with her straight into the water. Expected, and even better the fish didn’t instantly rush to attack so she wasn’t going to need to fend them off every time she fell. So, test two, logs. Lily tried her best to imagine a log complete with all the details and then dropped it into the water. Lily hopped on a moment later... and sunk. Once again.

Still, she was fine with that. The next idea was to go with some big water jugs, empty of course, and then have a platform over the top of that too. This idea would also fail swiftly. There was no buoyancy to be had... why? Lily did a few more tests with these ideas and found she could just... push the things into the water. Which was fine sure, but it meant her shadows weren’t really reacting to the water properly.

Appoline decided to throw out an idea. "Why not try to imagine capturing a bunch of air? If you can do that, it will probably keep the shadows afloat right?"

Lily nodded and tried to go with that, and it... sort of worked. Back in the water Lily went, but soon she was investigating a better version of the idea. It just took a bit of setup. First, she had open bottles of shadow, then she swung them around a bit to gather a bunch of air before capping them off and THEN putting them in the water. "YES!" Lily yelled.

She was in her human form, floating on a platform of shadow, connected to barrels made of the same thing. "IT WORKS!" It was also, kind of exhausting to do things this way. She needed to maintain a fair bit of focus on ensuring that the air stayed in and the water stayed out. It was an odd form for her shadows to be in.

The surprising thing was that it didn’t cost too much mana all things considered. The main cost was just maintaining the size of the shadows but with so much of the structure being hollow and the fact that the trapped air was doing a lot of the heavy work meant that Lily could keep this up for hours easily. Well, assuming the mental toll of doing so didn’t get to her first. That was always going to be the issue. One little sneeze or potent enough distraction and suddenly everyone riding it would be sent into the water.

The other issues was that of where exactly it would be best to go. While the lake was clear and there wasn’t much cloud cover the waterfalls did kick up a decent amount of mist and they blocked a good deal of everyone’s vision over longer distances. It seemed, just based on what they could see, that the portal was towards the ’back’ of the island with not too much lake behind them. There was no obvious portal further on but the island itself was clearly large enough that it wasn’t a guarantee of anything just from the glance they had.

"Welp, ready for a nautical adventure?" asked Lily.

"What... does that mean? It got translated but I worry I’m still missing concepts," offered Appoline with a wink. "I mean, what even IS a boat?"

Lily grinned back and decided, "This," Lily tapped her shadow construct. "This is a boat. Well, technically it’s just a raft but..."