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ATEE: Partners in Crime *Me (That Guy) and Alex64*

As if in answer, the door of the small hut opened just a little-- enough to see that the hut had an interior, but not so much that any useful details were apparent.
"More visitors..?" an apparent occupant of the structure wondered aloud, with almost comic slowness.
"Oh, wow, really? Is this a thing we're doing..?" Midnight mused to himself, the voice apparently familiar to him.

To confirm his suspicions, he approached and gently opened the door further, revealing more or less what he had been expecting: its singular resident, a generously-proportioned cat, of striped, violet fur, and long ears emerging from beneath a white head-dress. A neat row of, of all things, fishing-rods lined one wall, while the wall opposite looked out over the oasis. Aside from the fact that this was the deepest region of a desert, it seemed like a very typical dwelling for some kind of hermit.
 
There was a glint in the hermit's eye for just a moment, but it died as quickly as it had emerged.
"...Just call me Kabir." He tilted his head and smiled innocently. "Everyone else does!"
"Everyone...else?"
"Lots of travellers stop at the oasis on their journeys." His eyes drifted briefly to their feet, or perhaps towards the floor under the window; it was hard to tell. "What brings you out this far?"
 
"Ah...You, too? I should have guessed." Kabir rose to his feet. "I did have one, up until earlier today...but another traveller came here, and asked me to give it to him."
"And you just...did?"
Again, his eyes drifted towards the window, then back again.
"He was...very persuasive."
 
"I...shouldn't even have told you that much. I'm sorry." He turned to stare out of the window in earnest. "...A famous wood-cutter. If I said any more, that would dishonour his trust."

Rex's father smirks.
"So, any guesses, just from that description?"
 
"Rex?"
He rolls his eyes, folding his arms.
"Come on, I know you studied classical literature in your school days..."
"Yes, but I really don't want to believe you're about to tell me, to my face, that you had some kind of run-in with Ali Baba himself."
His father simply smiles.

"...Not Ali Baba, by any chance?"
Kabir wore a pained look for just a moment.
"I...can't confirm or deny. ...What do you even need the World Rings for, anyway?"
 
"We're collecting them to keep them away from those who would abuse their power," Raku answered. "I do not suppose you will tell us where this man left for?"
 
"That, he would not tell even me."
"He's heading west," Midnight interrupted, already having opened the map, and watching the yellow icon steadily head westwards. "At the rate he's going, we can catch him easily."
Kabir offered the group a worried look.
"He is a man of noble intentions. If you must take the Ring from him, be sure you do it for the right reasons."
 
Kabir nodded, sitting back down slowly.
"...Please."

"So...West." Back outside, Midnight turned on the spot a few more times than was decent. "That's...this way, based on how we got here. Here's hoping we don't catch up to him only to find he left it with someone else, and then they send us to someone else-else, and so on for a few days."
 
"If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say he might be trying to do the same thing as us. I mean, he's got the cave-thing going on, hasn't he?" He pondered for a second. "...That has happened by now, right? That's why he's 'famous', and not just 'some guy who cuts wood'?"
 
"Ah yes, 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves'..." Ellie nodded. "The story of Ali discovering a thieves' den filled with treasure, and his slave-girl foiling the thieves' plots to kill him... But if he has so much treasure, again, why would he want the World Rings?"
 
"We can just ask him when we catch up with him. I mean, he's not going to be totally unreasonable, right?"

"Oh, no, don't tell me-- the book takes a convenient turn for the epistrophic, and he turns out to be totally unreasonable...right?"
Rex adopts a cynical tone with particular emphasis on the last word, well aware that he has hijacked what he expected the book to do, by doing exactly that, himself. His father just grins, somewhere between smug and proud.
"There it is-- the classical literature student rears his head after all~"
 
And with that, the party set off to the west, in what they hoped to be hot pursuit of Ali Baba and the Ring-- rare circumstances on a good day, and not much more common even in the pages of amateur fiction. Judging by the map, they were gaining on him, and quickly.
Almost too quickly.
...Had he...stopped?
Then...where was he?

By now, they had put some distance between themselves and the oasis, so there was nothing but sand in every direction, undulating in the form of shifting hills of sand, which faded into a rippling haze in the far distance, blurring the horizon with the sky above. And, crucially, no immediate sign of the Ring, despite the map's insistence that the group was right on top of it.
 
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