Chapter 51 – Second Stop, Gladrock City (1)

Jamie was jolted awake as he slept in the truck carriage, causing him to look around the carriage, with wide, red eyes. He slowly got to his feet, rubbing his eyes, stretching and yawning as he looked around the carriage. Clustered together on the brown floor of the carriage, were four brown wolf pups with white flakes, with a red tip on their tails, curled up around Eve as they slept.

This was the fifth day they had spent on the road since their last stop, where they picked up the two Yellow Scale Deer fawn and the four Red Tipped Wolves cubs. Since then, on the road every six hours, the truck would pull over and they would shift who would spend time with the fawns and pups, with the goal in mind being to help the creatures become accustomed to a humans constant presence. Because the wolf pups were quite attached to Eve and Ivan's Black Horned Wolf, Menace, Jamie and Ivan would often swap back and forth, staying with the wolf pups.

As Jamie got up, stretching, he looked around the carriage. Noticing his movements, Blackwing darted towards him from the corner of the room, making soft growling noises, and Eve started licking the pups as they started stirring around her.

After having a good stretch, Jamie sat with his back to the wall, and started rubbing Blackwing's neck. As he sat down on the carriage floor, he started noticing the truck started to decelerate, and he rubbed Blackwing's neck absentmindedly as he waited for the truck to stop, while thinking about the next stop.

The next stop that was agreed upon by the trio of Battlepet Master's was a place called Gladrock City, and they wanted to get one breeding pair of Red Mole's at the very least. They usually had fire and earth energy affinity types, and were incredibly good at digging into firm and hot terrain, and, as such, had high demand for companies that focused on digging unique minerals on foreign worlds and selling them, along with Battlepet Masters in the military to help swiftly dig out patches of land to create a hasty defensive structure. As such, Ivan was initially willing to spend one week at this location, although Lennox ended up getting him to agree to two weeks in the end.

Eventually, the truck ground to a halt. Jamie got up as the truck, and the air con shut off. A gruff voice rang in his mind a moment later.

"We are at our destination. You can get out now."

Jamie made his way to the exit, slowly. After he took a couple of steps, he heard a howling sound behind him, which had halted his footsteps and had him frowning. It was....close.

He turned around, to see Eve following behind him, her tails wagging, and her mouth hanging open as she walked forwards, with her golden eyes focused on the door, and the pups were trailing behind her. One was nipping at her feet, and another had let out the howl that drew Jamie's attention as the pup watched it's three other siblings trail after Eve, before it hastily ran after them.

"Eve, wait."

Eve growled, then transmitted back. "Why? I want to see what this next stop looks like."

"It's not that. I need to check with Ivan first, to make sure that the pups would be fine in this environment."

"Fine."

Jamie looked forwards, and tapped into his Astral Energy, channeling one twentieth of the energy pool to the Astral Bodies left hand hanging down the body, focusing his mind on the image of sending out one small blue, transparent core that had a massive transparent light blue transparent bubble surrounding it. Once he was sure he got the image right, he sent it zooming out, while trying to maintain contact with the core with his mind.

His eyes opened and a faint, brief ripple formed in front of him. As the core zoomed past the carriages, Jamie's frowned as he received completed images of what he saw, of blurry transparent blue truck carriages entering his mind. Once the core passed the third carriage, he sent a mental command to it and it jerkily halted, and as it stopped, it moved slightly backwards and forwards. Jamie concentrated, and the core moved forwards jerkily, and descended slightly, as Jamie tried to get it to hover near the end of the carriage. Ivan's voice rang in his mind, causing him to lose focus, and losing contact with the core.

"Nice effort, but you still need practice. You need to try alter it's energy signature to fit the environment, and you haven't got enough control over the core. The jerky movements and energy fluctuations make it easy to notice. You wanted to ask about the pups? It's safe, you can bring Eve and the pups out."

Jamie grimaced. During the five days before, during, and after they had set off, he had focused on training his Astral Energy Pulse after discussing it with Ivan. Eventually, he had changed his approach, and formed a core with Astral Energy that maintained contact with his mind, and he practiced hovering it around him, trying to maintain contact with it for as long as possible. The next step was to construct the core with a small bubble that functioned as a scanner of sorts, scanning every object that it passed, and controlled through the core. He could do and control it easily enough when it was close, but the problem was when he moved the core away from him. It took a lot more energy to maintain it and keep in constant contact with him, and it was harder to control. In addition, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't find a way to alter it's energy signature.

The goal he had in mind was to send out a core, hovering above his head, with it's bubble surround him, while trying to extend it's radius. Anyone or anything that entered the bubble would be scanned, and the core, outside of the object or lifeform it was scanning, would receive the information and would be free to send the information to Jamie without the lifeform noticing. Hopefully.

For now, it was enough to serve his needs. According to Ivan, high level Battlepet Masters used the Astral Energy Pulse the way he did it previously, by sending out a pulse of energy, while creating a core in each direction in the pulse of energy to help them maintain contact with the pulse, and to alter the energy signature as it moved forwards. That was beyond Jamie at the moment, as he had trouble processing the information, let alone controlling that much energy at once. When he pressed Ivan for information on it, Ivan just mentioned it gets easier to process the information and control the energy when a person's Astral Body size and purity did, but he didn't know why.

"Jamie? What did Ivan say?"

Jamie snapped out of his thought, turning to look at Eve, who was watching him with her golden eyes.

"He said that it's safe to bring the pups out."

"Then let's go."

Jamie turned around, and walked towards the door. Once he was at the door, he moved to the side, where a glossy black screen along with a red and green button above it, with the red button lit up. He pressed the green button, and the screen lit up. He placed his hand on it, and a moment later, the red button started dulling, and the green button lit up.

Jamie opened the door, and the first thing he noticed was a gust of heat hitting him, causing his eyes to widen briefly in surprise. He leaped out of the carriage, to the side, and looked around as he took a couple of steps forward, ignoring the flap of wings and the low thud behind him.

Ahead of him, connected to the massive brown surface the truck was parked on, was two wide, tall yellowish glowing five storey building that was poking up towards the air, which looked like a cross in the middle, connecting four square blocks at each of it's joints. They had massive arch entrances with no doors leading to the entrance to the building. He looked up, and noticed the lack of windows screens, curtains and anything else. They just had curved holes to let the air in, and nothing else.

The large, five storey buildings, all had lawns just before the arches to the entrance of each 'small' apartment, four apartments to each storey. What Jamie found the most bizarre was that the second storey had two massive lawns before the two entrances on either side of the building, and the third storey he could only see two lawns before the entrances before the arch entrance to each apartment, facing out from the front of the building, and perhaps the back based on the pattern, although he couldn't see it, as the fourth storey had two massive lawns before the two entrances on either side of the building, while the last storey had the same situation as the third storey.