I woke up sometime te in the afternoon and told Phildina about my uncle. Of course, I omitted certain facts, but she listened the entire time as we cuddled. Her comfort and emotional support helped me process any lingering feelings of grief, as I finally felt like I could move on.

  "By the way, Phildina, can I ask you something?"

  "Sure," She answered.

  "Would we die if the tent were to be compressed with us still inside?"

  She gave it some thought and said, "No. If it doesn't compress our items, I see no reason people should be different."

  "I'd love to test it with animals first," I said, getting up from the bed with some of my old oomf back.

  "I think you should take it easy, Daphne. I don't know what will happen to you if you keep pushing yourself like this," She expined with a look of deep concern.

  "I'm fine, Phildina. Besides, if we do nothing, the Kingdom's sure to lose." But just then, something felt off about that statement. How could I be so sure? Was I just acting based on my fears? Maybe. Hertz could be right and perhaps the Kingdom wasn't in any real danger, but we'd already come too far to start entertaining such thoughts. Let's just do all that we can to help them, I thought to myself as I began to organize the first set of experiments.

  I took Kimmel and Sarde's horses inside and had Phildina return the tent to its original, tiny size for some time. Then, with an incantation, the tent grew back to its normal size, and we entered to see the horses alive and well.

  "Phildina, where did you get this tent?"

  "I already told you," She said with a smile, and I nodded slowly, saying,

  "Whoever that man was, I thank him from the bottom of my heart." This will make infiltration a piece of cake. I'll just have to get Hertz to sneak us inside, and we're all set, I thought to myself with a smile.

  "Can the Company go inside?" was my next question

  "I don't think it can fit that many people," She said with a difficult look on her face. Welp, that's a shame. Our supplies are there too, so I'm probably asking too much of her. Just as I was about to give up, Lucia started inspecting the tent with keen interest. After some looking around, she turned to Phildina and asked,

  "Can I compress it?"

  "Yeah, any Mage could do it. You'd just need to learn the incantations," Phildina answered. She proceeded to teach them to Lucia, and she compressed the tent to the point that it was almost invisible on her first try.

  "Interesting," She said. "The compression depends on the magic of the user. If that's the case, then..." She whispered the incantations and this time, the tent expanded to the size of a mansion. If we were not careful, fliers could probably spot it from a distance, so I expined this to Lucia and had her compress it as quickly as possible.

  "Be more careful," I said with an exasperated sigh.

  "S-sorry, it's an interesting item, but I'll need to fine-tune it," She expined.

  "Can I help?" Phildina asked.

  "Yeah, I'll need all the help I can get for this," Lucia answered. It was nice to see the both of them get along like this, and even nicer to have our very own Trojan horse! Now, I'll just need to find Hertz and expin the mission to him.

  After a long day of fine-tuning, Lucia had finally gotten the hang of the magic item. She truly was a fast learner, and with several other experiments and Hertz's agreeing to help, we were now ready to commence the attack on Fort Zaraban.