>Seeker's Insight: What would be our best approach to locate this Yuuka, her garden, or her potential source of water?
>Given the number of open questions about your quarry and its location, and your own inability to predict the future, 'best' is beyond your ability to venture here. Vacuously, you suppose the 'best' scenario involves the next person you speak with presenting detailed instructions on the exact route to Yuka's garden, but given how unlikely this seems, you should probably restrict yourself to more plausible courses of investigation. Of these, you can see several approaches that stand a non-trivial chance of finding what you seek, but none seem to come with any guarantees and your time is... limited.
>If you were to trek into the wilderness in search of Yuka's garden with only the information you currently possess, finding it would not be
impossible, but could require a substantial number of days searching; it is difficult to predict how many, but more than a week would not be at all implausible and any accurate estimate depends on many unknowns: whether geographical clues will present themselves from a distance, whether the garden is deliberately concealed rather than simply remote, and (perhaps most of all) whether the garden itself radiates some kind of magic you could detect from a distance. If it did, the time needed to search for it would be shortened considerably, but it's hard to guess whether this would be the case or not. Otherwise, there seem to be three broad avenues of approach to finding the garden: finding specific information on its location from some source who knows it, eliminating as many parts of the wilderness as possible which could
not contain it, and increasing your ability to detect it from a distance.
>Your efforts on the first front haven't been very successful so far, but it's possible you haven't been looking in the right places. Rumors of the garden's existence reached Professor Bosqueverde from
somewhere and Dai - the only other person you've met with concrete knowledge of it - seems unlikely to have been the sole source of it. Probably if word of it has reached Val Razua at all, then the matter would be better-known in Isir's Cross itself; in all likelihood, this is where the rumors would have started. Perhaps some hunter once stumbled upon the garden while in search of game; the texts you read in the library did mention in passing that some sporadic hunting was done in the region. Any first-hand accounts you could get from such a person would be far more reliable than anything the fairies might have to say - assuming, of course, that they're even still alive. Though perhaps even the fairies there could have
some value, even if you'd hate to have to stake your life on someone who might just lead you on a wild goose chase (intentionally or not).
>But even if no one in Isir's Cross could tell you where the garden is located, they could almost certainly narrow down the list of candidates; the wilderness may not be frequented, but people definitely set foot in it from time to time. In fact, Riza might have been some help on that front, if she'd been willing to supply a detailed list of the areas she'd covered during her time down there. It might help to keep a map where you can circle off regions not worth searching immediately; every place you can establish has been seen recently is one less place to have to look - unless the garden is cloaked magically in a way that's effective as close range, and then all bets are off. Dai or even some of the other fairies might be useful in this regard if they can establish the kind of geography that surrounds the garden, or what kind of geography does
not; the maps you've seen are sketchy that far out, but something may still better than nothing. Dai also mentioned that her sisters avoid the area where the garden is located, so if you can establish the areas they normally roam to some degree, that might also shave off large chunks of terrain.
>As for detecting it remotely, it is an open question whether your dowsing will find anything to work with until you test it against the garden in question, and Professor Morrigan said that conventional scrying couldn't normally find something with such a nonspecific location from so far a distance, at least without an anchor or focus. But that doesn't mean that
some approach in this field mightn't prove useful. While a long shot, if it were somehow possible to obtain an object connected to Yuka without finding the garden itself, someone skilled in scrying might be able to use this to get a fix on its location. Maybe one of the adventurous fairies brought something back with them? Of course, even assuming they did and haven't since lost or eaten it, that would require a trip to Isir's Cross and back which would itself take a couple days. This might still be quicker than canvasing the wilderness by hand nevertheless. Finding such an item without leaving Val Razua would be excellent, but the odds seem poor and you have no idea where to start.
>Of course, a more plausible route might involve bringing some kind of diviner
with you; assuming your dowsing would be ineffective against this target, there are still many other kinds of skills that might - perhaps some youkai with an affinity for plants that could detect those whose presence was out of place for the region, or someone able to sense the presence of youkai themselves from long-range, or a half-dozen other things that might be associated with this garden. Even Professor Morrigan implied that her own magic could be effective in this task if the region in question wasn't several day's journey away from the city. If you could convince someone with suitable skills to accompany you on this expedition - and you might even have enough cash on hand to entice them - they might be able to cut your search time to a fraction of what it would be otherwise. And you suppose there's still that apparently unpleasant magician with the tower outside of town who Professor Morrigan suggested might have an outside chance of being able to scry for the garden even at this kind of range. Though the professor also left you with the distinct impression it would be difficult to convince her to help you and that money would not assist at all in this endeavor, but who knows?
>Really, all of these are gambles of one sort or another, and the ultimate thing you are gambling here is time; you don't know how much you have to spend or how much each of these plans will cost, or how likely any of them are to work. But staying here in Val Razua until you have exhausted every possible information source is almost certainly worse than heading out with a vague direction and a prayer; one may leave a slim chance of success, but the other seems doomed to fail. So the question is... how much do you gamble, and where?
>
You have two insight points remaining.
