Luckily, the Church of Immaculate Conception was one of the few buildings still standing. Garath's Raid Group, The Band of the Hawk, had set up a base camp inside the sturdy, red-brick, converted school building. Gary, an Armoron by class who had joined The Band of the Hawk with his two sons and three nephews during The Culling, had taken the initiative to fortify and rearrange the building to accommodate everyone as much as possible. In the days that followed the horrendous event, Gary and his five boys worked tirelessly to board up the windows and empty the rooms of the three-story building to free them up for living spaces. Shelter, check.
In the Pacific Northwest, water was never far away. Unfortunately, in Everett, there was little in the way of freshwater and July was one of the few times of year that rain was not a regular occurrence. Fortunately, a few members of The Band were gifted with cleansing Skills, such as Sharon's Cure Poison, that made ocean water safe for consumption. Water, check.
Food was easily the biggest concern. Although Garath and Athios were able to transport large amounts of packaged foods - though, largely it was just crates piled with packaged military rations - from the basement of a nearby Salvation Army location. That was the only salvageable food they found on multiple scouting trips around the decimated city. They all knew the rations wouldn't last forever, especially with well over one-hundred mouths to feed and more survivors in the area joining The Band each day.
Another boon of being in the Pacific Northwest were the salmon. As they always had been, salmon were the lifeblood of the evergreen state. In addition to the salmon, the PNW was ripe with blackberries in the late summer and, with the fish and berries supplementing their limited supply of military rations... Food, check. For now at least.
***
On a beautiful evening, the sixth day following The Culling, in the purple-ish twilight of a Pacific Northwest summer, Gary and his five red-headed boys were joined by the young Elementalist, Daisy, on a rickety wooden dock stretching over the calm ocean. Each of the seven adventurers held a long, flexible stick with varying amounts of fishing line connecting them to the dark blue waters of the Pacific.
Daisy had begun to grow impatient about thirty-seconds after her bait entered the water and handed her pole to Brandon, the younger of Gary's two sons. She stood and marched to the end of the dock where Gary and his elder son sat with the oldest of Gary's three nephews.
"I think the Dragons must have killed all the fish," said Daisy in her most adult voice. The eleven-year-old girl thought she sounded quite mature and was happy to provide Gary with the information he needed to avoid the unbearable boredom of literally just sitting there for hours, staring at the water. The little girl blushed wildly when all three of them started laughing.
"Oh, I don't think so,” Gary said, smiling from behind his red bush of a beard. “Have you ever been fishing, Daisy?"
"No."
"Well bring your pole over and sit down. I'll teach you," Gary said patiently. "There's a bit of a trick to it."
As Gary smiled warmly and nodded encouragingly at the impatient young girl, the tip of his pole dipped hard and he instinctively yanked back to sink the hook. Without proper fishing poles there was no way to reel in his catch, so the lumberjack looking man got to his feet and started to back-peddle toward shore. His makeshift fishing pole danced wildly as what appeared to be a very large fish yanked this way and that, breaking the otherwise rolling waves into foamy white splashes. When his bare feet reached the white sand at the end of the dock he handed the pole to Daisy, who had followed him excitedly. Gary grabbed the line with both hands. With little effort, the bearded man manually reeled in the fighting Chinook Salmon, pulling it in one hand over the other with his muscular arms until it wriggled and flopped desperately in the sand.
After Gary managed to make the first catch of the day, he explained to Daisy that the trick to fishing is patience. A quality of which the young Elementalist had very little.
Daisy was, however, determined to bring fresh fish to the Raid back at base camp. Her Gran had refused to eat the food rations on the basis that they ‘tasted like old sneakers' and Daisy knew the old bird needed her strength if she was going to make it on this new Earth.
After three painstakingly long minutes of being patient, Daisy still hadn't gotten a bite. Again, she handed her pole to Brandon and marched to the edge of the pier. Frustrated, she gathered her will and released her anger with a simple spell-cast and shouted a high-pitched, "BLAST!"
An orb of orange fire the size of a beach ball shot from her outstretched hands and detonated into a ten-foot explosion on the water's surface.
"Daisy!" Gary reprimanded the girl. "You just scared away every fish within a mile of here!"
Daisy's golden curls covered her face as she stared down at the steaming water in shame. "I'm sorry. I just..." she started to apologize but was distracted when a massive Chinook bubbled to the surface, motionless. Then another surfaced, and another. Daisy, Gary, and the boys watched in awe as more than twenty fish surfaced and lay bobbing up and down in the tide over
