The Tale of The Ambers

Camp

"As we went through the forest, I soon saw something...

While we were walking, I continued to see smoke in the distance next to a cliff face... I wondered about this, but soon we came to what appeared to be a gate of some kind. It was made out of stone, each brick placed in perfect order, admittedly a crude structure, but it appeared to be strong.

"Halt! You there!" a voice called out, and I looked up to see some guards sitting on a terrace with what appeared to be a mace and an axe. I then saw I had went beyond the group, and was now facing them along.

"Wait, wait! Three, Four, back off!" Ambrosia called.

"One! Is he with you?" they asked.

"Yep, he just got a bit ahead of us! By the way, Two and I have new names, I'm Ambrosia now, and Two's Aamber."

"Well who's this?" Four asked. I then saw that every amber here had a character on their form which was meant to represent a number.

"The names Amber."

"Amber or not you, can come in." Three replied, I questioned how I understood how their numbers worked, and realized that Ambrosia must have transferred a copy of most of her knowledge to me.

The wooden door opened, and we walked in, and it closed shut behind us.

What I saw was incredible. In the center of the camp there was a fire pit, a much larger one relative to the one I made, but it was there. Parts of the cliff face in the camp were carved out, and houses were built into the stone, and I came to the conclusion that the stone was used to build the hemispheric wall surrounding the open area that connected to the cliff face. Within the wall were a series of cone shaped huts, which appeared to be made out of cloth, strung up with two long poles which were knotted at the top with some sort of fiber. The village had many paths to either the huts (similar to teepees) or to several platforms that went up the cliff face for many meters.

"Who's this?" someone called from the rock face, and then a figure jumped from one of the highest houses in the cliff face, followed by another figure. The first figure landed, and the second one landed gracefully.

The first one stood up to its full height, and she looked stocky (picture a gem like Bismuth), but she had a feminine face. She stood at most two heads taller than me, and was a multicolored breakout of red, orange, pink, a light yellow, and blue. Her hair was also cropped short, but was most curious about her was the growths on her shoulder and back. They looked tough, and were also multicolored, but one stalk was one color. Her gem was located on her right shoulder. The other figure, who was also more feminine, was smaller than the first one, but around the same height as me, and was wearing light shoulder dressings and had her hair in a similar style, but relatively shorter compared to Aambers. She was wearing a plain, olive colored garment, and her cream-colored skin was tinted green. Her gem, an clear oval, was located on her cheek.

"Hey Coral, hey Pearl. This is Amber, he's staying with us."

"Nice to have another one around," she said, "Is something wrong with your face, pal, because your jaw looks pretty loose."

"I've never seen any sort of gem like you before," I replied, "You sure don't look like any of us."

"Yeah, I'm really just a bunch of living organisms that live in the water merged into one consciousness, but we gained sentience one way or the other and we became, this, I guess. Pearl here was in some kind of shellfish, and I found her on the beach, she's kind of clingy, but shes a hard worker and builder. She's also very intelligent. We were walking along and found this place, it was rather incomplete, but we got it to the state it is now." she said, only to get playfully punched by Ambrosia.

"Oh come on, we did our part, and it was pretty large." she said to her.

"Hm, interesting, I recall being a piece of tree resin that fell into a river, hardening, and then emerging." I said.

"Interesting." she said, "Say, want to see something cool?"

"Sure!" I said, and then was grabbed on the arm and taken behind the cliff to be some sort of lagoon.