[Picks up The Book of the Dragonborn]
"Damn, still can't read."
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"I don't understand what it is I'm doing here, miss," shivered the fur-coated figure. Lilly, uncaring, adjusted her head's angle, crouching down towards a point in the entrance's frame.
"I told you already, Borum," she eventually echoed back at him. "You're my readership."
His shivering actually stopped, for a moment. "Wh-when you approached me with th-this offer, I was expecting stories, or a proofreading assignment o--or something."
"And there will be many," Lilly reassured between repositonings. "If there's one thing I learned since traveling to this world, it's how many random items, page fragments and minutiae can be found in any unlikely location. I almost missed an essential document just passing through a town's escape tunnels, fleeing a dragon. Ignorance is death, and so a readership is an essential part of any adventuring party."
Borum gaped at the girl. This was
not what he had signed up for.
She seemed to detect his indignation, and finally glanced at him in full, a small smirk lining her face. "It's fine, Borum. I never asked about your combat readiness, or your wilds experience, because they weren't necessary. You can stay out here if you'd like," she waved him off, turning back, and suddenly--
"Woah!" he was a lot warmer. And immediately aware of the girl's attentions: what she was looking at, how her arms and legs were shifting, how her essence extruded into the entrance's locking mechanism--
The door slid open. Lilly stood up with a satisfied sigh, dusting herself off. The special division of stormcloaks split off from their main army, rendezvousing to relieve their impromptu ex-bandit divisi--wait, there were bandits?
Lilly shrugged. "I'm hardly about to explore a dangerous ruin in isolation. Learned
that lesson early enough. My powers have always been geared toward the synergy of the masses towards their greater purposes. Purposes like the stormcloaks' {REDACTED IN CASE OF MIND READERS}."
She sighed, her smile shining but somehow noticeably wavering within the connection. "Unfortunately, it seems that literacy is as rare a skill in this world as it was in my own. Which is kind of surprising considering the book fragments everywhere, but it is what it is. You can stay outside here, where Backup Squadrons C and D will be setting up their base camp." She grinned, and this time there was no hesitation. "Or, you can follow Squadrons A and B into the villain's lair, and have yourself a true adventure."
Borum didn't know what he was thinking when he accepted. Especially when Lilly herself consulted her Branch Predictor and stayed behind.
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Another thirty meters and you would have been in the spider's lair, surrounded. But you saw the SPIDER FARM glyphs, and because you could read them everyone else could as well.
"RAGH!" the eight swordsmen leaped forward, cutting down the Mother Spider's legs in one simultaneous swoop. The others were already setting torches upon the eggs.
"First battle, eh?" a thin rearguard patted you on the back, in good cheer from the steady progress. "Fear not, Master Reader; this campaign's been a nice, relaxing break. Not like our usual."
"The young man's got it right, Cyn," a larger, more grizzled veteran grumbled. "Battlefield's no place to be distracted.
Even if this barely counts, doesn't change the fact that these crawlies can kill."
He muttered, "essence healing helps with a lot, but not death; not yet."
"I just wish I knew what the Dragonborn was doing," someone else opined.
They knew where she was, striding the mountainside with one of the Backup Squadrons. What they didn't know was why. And, so said the veterans, she didn't know either.
"It's those damned precog powers," Cyn sighed. "Oooh, so mysterious. They have to know why they advised her to go that way, right, but they aren't telling. What arses."
...
There was a moment of panic, and then the castle exploded outwards.
Squadron A barely had time to brace, before the backblast rudely threw them against the wall. The initial vacuum would have popped their lungs, had essence not flooded through their connection in anticipation.
"Undead," Lilly sighed. "Need to learn not to freak out from undead. Good thing I didn't explode the castle from the inside."
