"I guess that'll do it."

Beach camp beach camp beach camp. "Do you usually just go till someone calls a halt, or till someone can't get up, or what?"

"They're usually the same thing but it's over as soon as someone says so, or looks like they couldn't say so."

"Cool. Starting distance? Signal?"

"Obviously the starting distance should be three hundred feet."

"You want me to go easy on you, huh?"

"Oh, what's your suggestion?"

"Did ten paces when I did this as a kid - stand back to back, count ten, go at it with your favorite combat cantrip."

"Cute. Okay."

"Kids died."

" - they - god.

We did - similar stuff, sometimes - because half the adults around had healing."

"I mean, yeah, we did this with clerics on hand, you don't wanna kill half your mini wizards, but there was a lot of it over a long time and sometimes a couple kids would break off their assigned pairmate and gang up on one, or the cleric would be a little slow or turn out not to have prepped enough healing - you have to prep it, if you're evil -"

"Right." Shiver. "Those kids're in the Abyss?"

"Yeah, we were like, seventy, not little little."

- nod. "'m sorry."

"Thanks. I promise not to use my concerningly lethal combat training to murder you. Ten paces?"

"You've got it."

They pace, and she starts with a haste.

This is a reasonable thing to do if you are a wizard. If you are a ranger you are stuck firing arrows at people, but if you're a good ranger you can fire four of them in the time it takes her to get a spell off and you don't miss much. His merciful bow isn't as accurate as his normal combat weapon but attributing any misses to that would be terrible sportsmanship.

He gets her with two and grazes her with one but she's still up and fires an "Admonishing Ray" -

- and then "wait, wait a second -"

"- hmmm?"

"Hang on, I need to check something.

Admoninshing Ray -" (this is aimed out over the ocean and fizzles in the air).

"I got a fucking sorcerer level? How in the world -"

" - huh. I don't know much about being both a wizard and a sorcerer but it's not - supposed to work like that, right -"

"It's not! I've been straight wizard since I first picked it up, all my sorcerer levels were from fucking around with spells when I was yea big -" Gesture.

"Bizarre."