"Huh. Well, be on the lookout, I guess. However one looks out for invisible things."

"We put on goggles and Mahdi casts glitterdust," Fazil says, tossing her a pair. "It's pretty annoying even with the goggles so we'll wait to see if they bother us."

"Neat." These guys are so cool. Not that her usual party isn't this cool. ...actually her usual party is maybe, yeah, more of a mess than this, but they would be, they're a bunch of random people who happened to be willing to fight the apocalypse. (...Shale is cool. Like, a complete and total disaster, but you can't say Shale isn't cool.)

She puts her goggles on to test whether they mess up her vision little enough to be worth having on all the time, or whether she should just be ready to put them on when people yell.

They're pretty annoying.

She'll keep them on top of her head until she needs them, then, better to be able to see.

And they can head off to the fortress!

Woo. She makes sure North is with her at the front, he needs to be in clawing distance of nasties to be much use. And she's ready to be a human shield and stab lots of monsters.

The fortress contains vicious batlike creatures with venomous fangs, some honestly fairly useless skeletons wielding rusted armor, some hardier zombies, half a dozen of the flying head critters none of which get within combat range but all of which hang out being annoying and occasionally forcing them to cast glitterdust, and a ten-foot-abreast lioness with piercing black eyes, which moves astonishingly fast. The party is nonchalant about all of this but the last, which they seem to think Aria should maybe back off from.

Well, is there a way to back off from the lioness without putting anyone else in danger? Because if yes she'll defer to their judgement, and if no this lioness is losing its head or getting stabbed through the ribcage or sliced through the belly, whatever's handiest.

It's possible they have a plan for an orderly retreat that can't be followed but if so they can't communicate it exactly. 

The lioness bites very hard and takes a lot of all three of those things to go down.

Well, that sucks, but you'd expect that of anything that big. The time they fought a dragon wasn't a cakewalk, either. 

When it's dead she winces and yells to Fazil for a heal.

He can do that. And once they've determined the fortress is empty he can do mutual comprehend languages - "holy shit, I've never seen anyone fight like that. The recommendation is to get the hell away from those things unless you're sainted, or of equivalent strength."

Oh good, she's cool too. "I can see why, they're really fast! I'm lucky I had you to patch me up after. Didn't look tougher than a dragon, though, even with the insane speed."

" - it is also not recommended to go up against dragons at our level of ability, yeah. Wow." He shakes his head. 

She is obviously very pleased with herself. "Well, I hope we don't run into any more. Probably that's enough real excitement for one day."

"Yeah, we should spend the rest of it checking if there's anything to be found here. And cutting off the bats' teeth, you can sell those in the city. Might be able to sell her carcass, too, I'll have to look it up."

"Cool. I can cut the teeth out but I'd probably wreck the hide if I tried anything with it. I guess we look around, then."

"Hagan's our guy for that, he's spectacularly good at it. Full price on everything. And yeah, let's look around."

There is a lot of rusty armor and three magical weather instruments that must be pried out of the watchtower with some spell that changes the stone around it to soap, and some wine in the wine cellar that Fazil declares to have only mediocre resale value. "The bats should do us nicely, though. A couple days of this and you'll be comfortable for some plane shifts, even if you need a couple of them. - plane shift's up to eight willing people, just so you know."

"Wow, nice. Maybe we can even find someone with the version that probably won't land us in the ocean. It's just me and the dog and my friend Draconis who need to go home. I'd love to recruit more, we're insanely shorthanded, but I don't know how they'd get home, and there is the thing where we're still all probably going to die."

"I'll have plane shift in a couple of levels. If you'd want us, I think we'd come."

"I would totally want you guys. Granted I want most people I run into who can hold a sword, but I think you guys would be really useful. I'm pretty sure a bunch of your spells are things we don't have at home at all. Increases our options a bunch. I can't guarantee a huge reward at the end, but, y'know, we'd definitely try to repay everybody who had a hand in saving the world."

"We're not really optimized for assisting an army in combat but we could look some stuff up when we get back."

"Well, between you and me, we're not so much an army as a band of a dozen random people who are traveling across the country trying to remind the real armies of the ancient treaties they signed with our order in case of another apocalypse. Like I said, really shorthanded. I guess we're also solving a bunch of other problems as we go, since, you know, apocalypse, everybody feels like they have their own problems. But I think you guys would fit right in. How'd you get into adventuring, anyway?"

"Joined an order when I was, like, twelve. My mother was dead and my father was, ah, distant, and we were hungry, and I mostly figured, god of wealth, that's probably the way to go, right? They have the novices run around doing errands and praying and studying and so on, and it paid anything, and we ate sometimes, and it'd pay enough once I was an adult. And when I was fourteen I got a miracle. - that's pretty rare. One in a hundred ever get it, maybe, and mostly not before adulthood. Suddenly I had a lot more choices. I could do healing or join the civil service or start to learn combat skills for the military or to be an adventurer - 

I wasn't - unusually directed, or unusually pious, or unusually diligent, and I don't think I trusted Abadar very much at all back then, so I couldn't quite figure out why me. Now I think it's because I knew what was important to him, and why it mattered. A lot of foreigners make some odd assumptions about the god of wealth, you know, it's a bit of a - temporary sort of thing, to be obsessed with. And a selfish one, you hear that a lot. But - Axis and the good afterlives don't have material scarcity but for whatever reason they are places you reach as people who lived on this world, which does. - I'm off topic.  I tried things out and I liked fighting and if I joined the military I wouldn't see much action unless there was a real war, and if there was a real war I could always join up anyway. I stayed around and did healing until my siblings were all grown up and then I started hanging out in adventuring places."

"Wow, cool. How long have you known Mahdi and Hagan?"