The oasis was real. The water elementals were also real, which complicated things considerably.
There were two of them, Level 7, patrolling the oasis edge in the overlapping pattern I had designed for guardian encounters at resource nodes: one completing a clockwise loop while the other moved counterclockwise, creating a window of roughly eight seconds when both were on the far side simultaneously. Eight seconds to get to the water, fill a vessel, and get clear before one of them completed its arc and found me crouching at the edge.
Eight seconds was not enough time to drink properly. It was enough time to fill one vessel.
I knew their weaknesses because I had programmed their weaknesses: water elementals were vulnerable to earth-type attacks and to temperature differentials, the same t
