"In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration." -- Ansel Adams
Aven stuck around for another day or so, answering some basic questions for me and vetting some of my general plans. I began a multifocal plan of my own. On the one hand, I continued expanding on the surface to cover a more uniformly shaped area centered on my core (albeit, still blobbing a bit from the circular to incorporate the larger area around the nearby ruins). On another, I was sending the eagle out on a systematic survey of the flat surface at the base of the island (up to about 100 meters above edge level). At the same time, I was opening up a base array of large and empty rooms in the second level in a broadly spiraling pattern and expanding my library by adding an array of basic level science textbooks (with a number of noticeable redactions centered on concepts central to devices of mass destruction). Aside from those edits, the eidetic memory I’d been provided seemed to be retroactive, and I could retrieve the full text of any books I’d read in their entirety. I’d also generated a few classic fantasy and science fiction novels and a few works of humor – including a fan fiction homage I’d once penned to one of my favorite comedic troupes. I wasn’t planning to show that one to anybody – too obscure and embarrassing...
Quest Completed: Transcribe Lore - 1000 Pages; Reward – Archival Restoration Tool Blueprint
Quest Reissued: Transcribe Lore – 10,000 Pages; Reward – Scholar Blueprint
Oh yeah! Another quest I hadn’t given much thought to. Still, nice to have my efforts recognized, and the reward was pretty sweet, if not immediately useful. The archival restoration tool would enable me to repair and stabilize books from a wide range of nonmagical damage; it wouldn’t let me recreate any missing portions, but faded spots, water damage, and even overwritten text could now be corrected.
Progress was steady, but largely unremarkable for the first few days. Test pits in the imperial ruin turned up little of interest, aside from demonstrating that, high ground notwithstanding, the site had seen at least one scouring flood prior to that occupation. Had anyone occupied that spot prior, any evidence had been lost – likely swept over the edge of the island. Expanding surface excavations did turn up several other small structures – mostly residential – suggesting the central household had supported smaller crafters and farmers in their own homes and workshops. I’d found evidence of basic pottery production, weaving, and, along the cliffside, even a small tannery and chandlery. Those structures were mostly attached to small households, except for the tannery. As in other civilizations, the smell of tanneries probably led it to be banished to the outskirts of the settlement.
Increasingly, the picture was one of a kind of manorial estate, though at least one with no evidence of outright slavery. Relatively small scale and self-sufficient for the most part with limited evidence of external connections, which, frankly, seemed reasonable enough given the logistical difficulties of trading with a constantly moving flying island. I had managed to trace some evidence of former roadways, leading both deeper in towards the center of the island and suggestions of a peripheral road running north and south through the flatlands. Perhaps most interestingly, there were some cut-stone piers a bit south of the tannery suggesting they had once anchored a dock for skyships as well as some basic cranes for shifting cargo. Excavations at structures nearby revealed what might have included some basic storehouses and a small administrative office.
The artifacts recovered did provide a number of additional blueprints for my growing collection, though nothing I thought would be particularly helpful – ranging from basic leatherworking tools (awls, stitch groover, burnisher, and skiver included) and beef tallow through some additional types and varieties of ceramic containers, wooden crates, and agricultural produce (from aubergines to yams) from seeds captured in the crevices of various containers and storage areas. Interestingly, I mostly recognized the general names of those cultivars, though it’s certainly possible some of the other plants I recovered blueprints for had some economic value that I was missing. I wasn’t quite to the point of triggering the third iteration of the naturalist plant quest, but I was getting closer.
The ceramic assemblages from the smaller households seemed to suggest a peasant diet heavy on hearty breads and stews – things that could be left largely unattended while people worked elsewhere. Stray bones provided additional blueprints for Lesser Aurochs (black) and Grassland Elk; I wasn’t sure if those were domesticated or hunted wild, though. Their presence near the tannery and chandlery suggested they were probably at least semi-domesticated, though if present in large enough numbers that wouldn’t necessarily be the case. I immediately added a group of four elk to the surface group of dungeon creatures; they seemed like a good choice, both to defend the entrance and to provide food for visitors. I was kind of hoping to find an armorer’s workshop somewhere nearby but had no luck. It seemed like it would have been near either the tannery or the farrier, had there been one, so possibly there simply wasn’t enough demand to support a specialist of that sort.
I wasn’t really sure that anything I’d uncovered would be useful in my second floor dungeon, but I did spin off a room alongside the cliff edge that opened onto a reconstructed skyship pier constructed from native stone and hardwoods through a fairly large open space framed as a warehouse (albeit a generally derelict one populated by Lesser Skeletons (human), a cluster of Lesser Dungeon Kobolds, and another Shade Owl in the rafters. The floor of the warehouse was deliberately decayed, with several weak spots created that would drop the incautious onto a lower layer of splintered wood, mouse droppings and slime molds alongside Lesser Pestshrooms. I’d set the local microbiota to a fairly frantic level of growth on those splintered elements, and while the fall shouldn’t be lethal, it would lead to fairly dirty wounds, including some potentially concerning infections without proper and immediate treatment.
Blueprint acquired: Discouraging Pit Trap (infectious)
I was cheating a bit, archaeologically speaking. The specifics of the skyship pier and warehouse were basically fictionalized due to the fairly limited physical evidence I’d encountered. They tracked with the observed scale and spatial footprint of the originals, but the specific architectural elements were fictionalized and basically extrapolated to be similar to the better preserved central structures. That said, there didn’t seem to be anyone about who was likely to complain about my flawed reconstructions. I’d largely limited myself to a stripped-down, no-frills version that seemed likely to be close enough, given the prosaically functional nature of the buildings. Any stylistic lapses could be corrected later, if I found additional evidence, and in the meantime the faux-decayed nature of the setting could help cover any more obvious issues. I was hoping to be a bit more accurate than Aven suggested most dungeons were, but I could only work with what I found (or otherwise learned).
The room itself opened on the cliff side about 30 meters down from the surface, with the opening mimicking a natural cavern that had seen some modification around the entrance. The skyship pier was cantilevered into the cliff face and extended outwards only about 5 meters – meant only for smaller transport vessels, really. I’d also set up a trio of Lesser Cave Wyverns to roost in amongst the cantilevers as a surprise for anyone trying to use the pier as a docking point. They’d come out to hunt at night, but the wyverns were otherwise too light sensitive to function properly in broad daylight. I’d tucked a few jewel vipers into the cliffside vegetation growing around the base of the pier to serve as additional discouragement for intruders. The pier itself was sturdy, though; I didn’t want to drop anyone off the side of the island unless absolutely necessary, of course.
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Janelle Graysdottir, groaned as the alert chimed once again, and ran her long, agile fingers through the fine, silvery fur of her tail. It was something of a nervous tic for her. Normally, the library alert system triggered only rarely – maybe a handful of times over the space of a decade. The beastkin archivist from the monastic order of Almeidra, goddess of knowledge, rolled her pale blue eyes, and glanced over from her desk in the main archives of the High Elven Academy of Talendra towards the magical interface with the central archives of the Order itself.
“Another book containing knowledge unrecorded anywhere else has appeared, failed to autotranscribe, and AGAIN, I’m the closest licensed librarian collector? That makes a dozen in the last two weeks! Must be another outworlder or maybe someone from the outer planes? But who cranks out a dozen books in two weeks? They’re going to issue me a mandatory quest pretty soon at this rate.” She snarled to herself, long tail thrashing the air as her expressive ears laid back along her silvery hair.
It wasn’t her favorite part of this job. Travelling the world to seek out new knowledge had sounded exciting as a librarian novice. Sadly, mostly it involved convincing paranoid mages and other collectors to share their latest prizes – a tough sell at the best of times. Those sorts of people were not only generally opposed to freely sharing their knowledge, but actively resented attempts to break their monopoly on secret lore – and usually, it wasn’t really even that secret! It had been a long time since the library had recovered any truly novel information from those works – usually it was just a random loose page or two, or even a partial palimpsest, that triggered the alert and not the whole tome. Very few researchers, after all, were content to spend their life gathering new knowledge only to both write it down and NOT share it with others. Either they kept it entirely secret, or they sought out publishers for the fame and resources it could bring. At the very least, those private records tended to become public upon their death – and the Order of Knowledge could afford to be patient.
The central order had developed a rather ornate divinatory system over the two millennia of their growth – one focused on the recovery of lost knowledge from past civilizations but also tracking newly recorded information. They had, over the years, come to agreements with all the known publishing houses to secure copies of new releases upon their issue through autotranscription, and the divinatory system flagged unknown works recovered from dungeons and ancient ruins or released from storage places warded against scrying. Usually, if you were going to get multiple new titles at this point, they appeared all at once as a ward was released from some old private collection. Having been gathering such works for nearly two thousand years, though, few indeed were the titles that hadn’t been documented before. The titles here mostly suggested that a single individual was responsible for the new knowledge, but it was coming too fast to reflect a normal authorship. The language was one known from earlier outworlders – so English wasn’t a particular barrier to the translation magic. That said, what in the name of the Goddess did “Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying” even mean?!
Many of the titles flagged by the alert system were clearly related to an obscure branch of academic study labeled “archaeology”. References to that field were scarce but present in certain outworlder-generated tales – apparently focused on the retrieval of mystic artifacts from trap-laden dungeons? The fact that neither the name “Indiana Jones” nor the title “Tomb Raider” appeared in the new works suggested these weren’t simply entertaining stories but contained potentially practical knowledge was particularly exciting – at least for an archivist at an academic institution!
The source of these documents had been annoyingly difficult to track down, however. The divinations were typically precise to the point of overkill, but for whatever reason, the exact location of these works were imprecise. Whoever possessed them appeared to be traveling slowly westward through the elven kingdom of Zaipruniel, and the divinatory system would merely provide loose geographic coordinates when the title first appeared. Janelle had struggled to make sense of those coordinates, though, as they didn’t seem to match up well with existing towns or even roads – they were moving in a not quite straight line, and at an oddly regular speed. Too fast for a person walking, or even riding most transport animals. The path suggested flight, so perhaps a somewhat slow airship, but it hadn’t tracked with any registered shipping line’s schedule. The lack of an obvious destination along the predicted flight path was an additional point of confusion.
In the end, she’d resorted to consulting with a specialist – Rangvar Smithsson, the half-dwarven head of the magical geography department. She’d intended to ask him for his insight into potential tracking spells, but that had turned out to be unnecessary. He’d taken a look at her set of coordinates and almost instantly lit up with the satisfaction of a resolved puzzle.
“Ha! No doubt about it – your missing books are appearing on the Tel Dorinth Sky Island! Oh, that brings back memories... I haven’t been there in something like 80 years now – it's home to a dragon (or it was, at least), so you’ll want to be careful. Even odds the dragon’s got your books, though maybe not; she’s been there for several centuries, and I’ve heard no rumors of a library there. Maybe someone’s tunneling in the old elven or dwarven settlements? Taking their life in their own hands, if that’s the case – dragons tend to be pretty territorial.”
“Maybe. That doesn’t make much sense though, since the titles are all in an Outworlder language. If so, the dragon would have to be keeping the Outworlder hostage and making them transcribe their knowledge. Wouldn’t think the dragon would have an interest in this academic field, though. Any valuable artifacts she wants to collect she should be able to sense herself, and an Outworlder wouldn’t be able to point her at any accessible ones. Maybe they came with some specialized detection skills? Maybe that’s where quantity surveying comes in?”
“I'm sure I couldn’t tell you. Well, I don’t know that I can contribute much more information to your search. I CAN give you route information on the sky island – they're all tracked pretty closely; at a guess, it’ll be at its most accessible from here in about two months, when it comes out of the twin kingdoms into the Orc lands. and before it hits the Coldspires The orcs have a lot of respect for the goddess of knowledge, even if few of them pursue a scholarly career, and shouldn’t give you any trouble. You might have trouble getting a commercial airship to run you over though; dragons tend to get put on a no-fly zone for all but the most desperate captains – for obvious reasons. You might end up needing to buy some sort of flying transport of your own. No one’s going to teleport you into a dragon’s territory either, even if you could afford it. Dragons might or might not bother an airship; they WILL object to spatial magic unless you’ve arranged permission in advance.”
“Well, I haven’t actually been tasked with seeking out the new volumes yet, though it’s almost certainly coming. I’ll check to see what kind of information the central archives have on this particular sky island and its resident dragon. If it seems risky enough, they might just hire a contractor or send out one of our rare Paladins. Thanks for the help! No telling how long it would have taken me to make that connection. I’ll consult with the adventurer’s guild as well, just to see if there are any recent reports of visits. I suppose I should have guessed the sky island would be the most reasonable explanation for these coordinates, but I’m not used to the notion of book collections that move without being carried by someone.”
“Don’t fret about it. Almost everyone forgets about the sky islands, since most of them float freely and only appear for most settled folk for a couple of days every few years; only the most adventurous of folk bother to explore them, even when they’re not home to a dragon. They’re on a lot of adventurers' lists of obscure places to visit, but there’s not much actually to draw people to them most of the time – except for some of the flying folk.”
