An Owl's Rise

Once the pigmy owl who was in charge of the detailing the map had finished going over a few intricacies and the main points of the route that they would be going, she looked back towards the leader and nodded.

With her work done the little owl stepped back and the leader came forward to announce something.

"Now I hope that all of you were paying attention, because this was all important information that we hope to not repeat too much. But now I have someone special who will be indispensable to our mission. I would like all of you to welcome Neve. A very recent addition to the Roost, and an original resident of Falisgisa." The head owl said.

Slowly an owl with bright white and gold feathers stepped forward tentatively.

It was quite obvious that she was very nervous to be standing in front of such a crowd, especially since she had been living in the wilds on another continent not too long ago.

However, as she tried to use the magic tool that projected a voice across the room, she found herself unable to do so even after making attempts for two minutes.

She then looked pleadingly back towards the commander of the group, and he sighed before coming to help her out.

Another five minutes later and she managed to get the tool working and began speaking incredibly shyly.

"I-it is good to meet everyone here today. I am, uh, Neve… oh, but you already knew that."

Getting flustered and not knowing what to say exactly, she looked around frantically for a moment and caught the eyes of one of the owls in the crowd who was giving her a reassuring look.

Eventually she managed to muster up the courage to begin speaking again after getting encouragement from this other owl.

"Um, as commander Deshal said, I am from the continent that you are calling Falisgisa. I was chosen to be your guide since I have traveled around quite a bit and know some of the areas you will be looking into. I… I hope to do well to help you all out now that this is my new home. Please take good care of me."

After saying this, she swiftly moved back to the leader whose name was apparently Deshal and handed him back the voice creating and projecting magic tool.

In return, he just rolled his eyes obviously not happy with the display of the timid Neve.

"It is as Miss Neve has said. She will be our guide on the new continent where her experience will be quite helpful in areas she is familiar with. But I would like to preference this with that she does not know everything about all of the places we will be scouting out, so do not put too weight on her knowledge and get sloppy." Deshal said with a stern tone.

He then passed the device off to another one of the lead owls who was by far the largest here and had dark brown feathers all over his body.

"Now, while everything you have heard is important, what I am about to say is going to be a matter of life and death." The huge owl said as he looked out over the room. "I am security chief Roark, and on this expedition, it is my job to make sure that as many of us as possible make it back alive."

Going on, he told all of them what type of gear was going to be distributed to them along with whatever else they had prepared.

"Most importantly though is the squad makeup we are going with. As there are seventy-two of us in total, we have decided to designate twelve groups of six. In each of these groups there will be at least one awakened beast though in some there will be more. We have already assigned these groups and their leaders, so do not think you will be able to form them yourselves. This is not a vacation to have fun with your friends. We are trailblazing a wild area full of dangers we do not fully know yet." Roark said with deadly seriousness.

'Aren't the supplies they are giving us kind of lackluster.' Evelyn thought hearing what they would be getting.

Each of them would be given a low capacity storage ring that could only hold one hundred cubic feet, ten healing potions that were about thirty percent as good the best Evelyn could make, two bottles of six magical energy recovery pills that were of a middling quality, a single bottle of stamina recovery pills, a number of rations that could last three says, and an emergency signal flare talisman.

From Evelyn's perspective this was not even one percent as effective as the potions, gear, and other necessities she had prepared. Plus, even her storage rings that were fairly small for what was on the market were able to hold three hundred cubic feet each, while the cuff could hold around two thousand.

Of course, this was just Evelyn's skewed point of view, as she had such a great talent in alchemy to make what any other beast here, even the leaders, would have considered an absurd amount.

Most of the fiend beasts here did not even currently have storage magic tools, and getting these rings was one of the big boons that they had fought so hard to receive.

Continuing on, the leaders of the expedition all introduced themselves and talked about their roles in the upcoming mission.

'So along with the pygmy owl in charge of the map, Neve who is our local guide, and Roark the security chief, we have the scouting expert Keva, the inscriptionist Idris, the alchemist Adolophine, and finally the doctor Slaine. Oh, and the overall commander Deshal.' Evelyn thought going over the names an occupations of the leaders.

"That is all we have to say right now, so we will now arrange ourselves into our assigned squads." Deshal said as he manipulated the projection and showed the list of names in each squad.