Considering the condition that Hallen is in and the hour of the day, it would be best to wait until morning before setting out.  As prepared as they are, however, it is quite easy for them to camp at the workshop-- or, of course, return to their apartments-- and set off before daybreak, while the cicadas still drone and the night birds' songs still echo like the wordless tales of old ghosts in the pre-dawn twilight.  It is no great task to designate one of them to wake the others in the wee hours of the morning... ((random rolls here)) Alphonse uses the water-trick... drinking a large pitcher of boiled herbal tea wakes him 'suddenly' at about 3:30 in the morning, and he's witness that Tak must have stayed up late sharpening his blade, as it sits tucked neatly under his chin with a gleaming edge readied.  Hallen is sitting by the window, staring into the starlit night, wearing her same blood-stained shirt and wool skirt, apparently having woken before him.  "Let's get going," she says flatly.<br/><br/>*<br/><br/>They arrive at the Riess farmland at mid-morning.  Like all the land here, the soil is sandy and holds little water, except where fed by irrigation canals that the men have dug.  Workers have been at the fields since well before dawn, and the way out of Quinza in the starlit morning is heralded by the sound of fire-coal being gathered, of stoops being swept, and shingles being mended.  For any outsider who might wonder at this practice, the heat of mid-morning is a stolid answer; where the splash of racoons and gators in the marshes was heard hours before, there is silence.  Where the rattle of a treeborne reptile called a Ratagon was earlier the only disturbance, now there's only silence.  Insects and frogs are active, strangely enough, and when they emerge from the marshy lowlands to the Riess' claim, it is to the vast hush of rustling cane fields.<br/>(http://i.imgur.com/2mugP.jpg)<br/>The farm house and workers' quarters are a fourth of a mile further in, the signs of recent violence present, but difficult to notice except by the trained eye.  The thatched roof and slat sides of the home are still perfectly intact, the yard swept.  A few lean, banty hens still roam the yard, pecking at invading pests.  A large, wooden cistern sits elevated twenty feet above the ground on poles.  A cart, with no mule, sits cockeyed in the yard.  The front door is sitting ajar.  (http://i.imgur.com/3pECL.jpg)  ((as the home would have looked being built))