˝Well...no? I asked him why he thought that! He said...he just knew... He was cleaning and felt a little different... I tried, you know, to tell him he would be in a different place. A different time. It wouldn’t be a feeling; there would be no question. He’s been insisting more and more, but when he tries, he fails. Little failures like with the knife make him really, really upset. Ah! I don’t know what to do. What if it gets worse?”

Slart grasped Karp’s left forearm with both hands and stared wide-eyed into Karp’s eyes, as if pleading. 

˝should i talk to him?”

˝Can you talk to Korg, maybe, instead? I think Nort just takes that uh...training too too seriously.”

Slart gripped Karp’s forearm tighter. The thought of asking such a big favor from her master combined with the pain of Slart’s grip made Karp wince. Slart slacked and took her hand off of Karp. Karp remembered what had happened while she was at The Whitecoat’s compound.

˝he’s probably on his way to the village of the bog djinn by now.”

˝What happened there?”

Changing the uncomfortable subject of Nort’s impending disappointment came as a relief to Karp.

˝while i was talking to korg earlier, a convoy returned to his compound with news from the waypoint at the village. they stopped to get traffic and stores reports for the whitecoat and found the village destroyed. most of the buildings either burned down or had fire damage. the stone vault was blown apart and all the weapons were gone. the strangest part is that all the people were missing except for one old man they found dead and stripped naked outside the village.”

˝That’s a cursed place!”

Slart then spoke in a low, raspy voice, but was clearly half-serious. She spoke of how local legends described a djinn who lived in a swamp north of the village. The three-hundred-year-old djinn granted wishes to the desperate. The desperate then lived out the rest of their lives while the djinn then took everything they ever loved after death. The djinn had supposedly built the school Nort attended, so every child in the area grew up hearing the legend.

˝i wonder if this has anything to do with the person i saw when i shifted.”

˝Uh...how could that be?”

˝well... time in the shift world is strange. sometimes you shift for a month and age one month, sometimes it’s three months, sometimes six months. what if that old man was a young man caught in a time anomaly and became old and died? could that anomaly have affected the town, though?”

Slart just shrugged.

˝i think korg knows more about this than he lets on.”

˝Oh?” Slart raised an eyebrow and puckered her lips at the genuinely juicy piece of news.

˝well, a few months ago, he told me not to go back to the shift world. he said i wasn’t ready to fight stronger monsters, but then why did he almost break my ribs when he saw i went back? he also seemed to know more about those people i saw that he didn’t tell me. something is going on...”