Devon noticed that the dwarves' eyes lit up at the word 'earthquake'. The entire dwarven convoy seemed to be excited like schoolchildren on a field trip. Some of them even began to take out their measurement tools and place them on the ground.
"Go! Now!" shouted the tan amazon beauty with a lewd body, tapping the ground impatiently with her spear.
Devon was inclined to follow her advice, seeing as how even the jaguars knew to retreat.
But the dwarves, on the other hand…
"Just a bit longer…" one of the dwarves with matte hair said. "This is a once in a lifetime chance to study the rumblings of the rainforest…"
The ground began to shake like mad, causing Devon to stumble. An orb-attached-to-a-string measurement bauble that one of the dwarves placed on the floor shattered completely, the instrument too sensitive for seismic activity of this magnitude.
"You stupid ingritas, you can do your measurements later! We have to go now!" shouted the tan Vesta.
"Alright, alright, we're moving," the braided beard dwarf said finally, as the others let out groans of disappointment. "But we are so close to finding the secret of the mountains…"
The dwarven convoy packed up its bola turrets and siege weapons through the violent ground shaking and began to trek forward once again, the mules and dwarves working extra hard to keep everything organized as the ground beneath them kept tremoring.
Devon hiked up to the amazon guides. Before he could speak, the large chested tan beauty Vesta turned to him, smiling slightly while still trying to keep her balance during the earthquake.
"Thank you for saving me, stranger. That jaguar took me by surprise."
"No problem ma'am," Devon replied. His old earth habits of excessive politeness to strangers were coming out again. "Driving away beasts is all I've been doing since I came to this world."
Vesta laughed at the cryptic comment that Devon just made, thinking that it was a joke. Her slender forearms and glowing chestnut-honey with a slight hint of burgundy tanned skin tone made her shine like a bright lacquered clay doll. "Oh, you're funny. Your name is Devon, right?"
"Yeah." Devon realized that he was staring at her face, taking in the beauty of her features and the strangeness of her tall stature and unearthly skin tone. How could someone living in the jungle have such perfect blemishless skin aside from a scratch scar here or there?
She had a petite, rounded nose, an elegant jawline that melted smoothly upwards into her cheeks and cheekbone, and light blue eyes that gave her face a striking appearance. Overall, she looked like… an MMO character from back on earth, where her face was perfect and yet she had the height width of a character whose maker was playing with the sliders a bit too much, to give her the most slender and curvy body possible while still maintaining a larger frame. Not to mention the ridiculous almost copy-paste-like nature of her eye color in contrast to her skin tone and hair color.
Now that he thought about it, she looked like a female NPC from the game Blade and Soul, a south korean MMO that was notorious for having beautiful and ridiculously proportioned female characters.
What a weird world this was. From the way the people were built to the sheer ridiculousness of all the events that occurred here one after another. Devon still could not wrap his head around the fact that he went from a battlefield to an abandoned village to a road with a dust storm to a rainforest with earthquakes. It just felt unrealistic.
He spoke again, curious about what was happening. "How come there are earthquakes here in the rainforest?"
The long legged tribal healer beauty paused, thinking. "There have been earthquakes for as long as I can remember, ever since I was a child raised here. It is one of the great secrets of the rainforest. The dwarves come here as a research expedition convoy every moon or so. We welcome them because they are hard working and honest folk, and they bring many of their inventions to trade in exchange for our hides and bones and twine."
"I see," Devon replied. "No wonder you guys get along so well."
Vesta nodded, as the gemstone green eyed Echo was on the other side of the convoy trying to direct the dwarves to move, as some of them were whipping out their seismological instruments again. "Yes, they do have their faults though." She laughed, stumbling as the ground shook again like a child having a tantrum. "A bit too inquisitive and lacking common sense at times. It is fine though. We are almost at base camp."
As she said that, the dense jungle foliage above opened up just a bit to allow sunlight to peer through the trees, and Devon nearly gasped at the sight of a near-vertical rock cliff that was smoothed as if half the mountain was chiseled off.
"Base camp is at the rock wall," Vesta motioned. "Let's make it there!"
more chapters at patr eon.com/melonball ~~~