Through these long trips, I’ve been trying to get a bit of crafting done, although the shaky boat adds enough of an additional challenge that I have not gotten anything especially good (or even Fair) crafted. And while just twiddling around with busywork, I’m not even managing to trigger [Labor of Love]. At least I manage to get a passable spear made. And since I don’t trust how passable my spear is, I make another three pointy sticks for when the first one inevitably breaks.
Uncle Falcon and his four party members are waiting under the tree when we return. (I mean, they’re not just sitting there the whole time, obviously. They’ve presumably been doing whatever they do in their spare time. Because other people do things when I’m not looking at them.) I haven’t even learned their names yet.
“Is there anything else that needs to go?” I ask.
Uncle Falcon shakes his head. “Nothing worth hauling. We let the farm kids and goblins pick through the scrap. Worked out pretty well. Anytime they spotted something they thought was worth fighting for, we’d step in to take it, because obviously if it was worth fighting for, we ought to be claiming it. That made them a lot more amenable to compromise.”
“I ought to go down to Hebron and see how they’re getting on there,” I say. “I can’t exactly ask you to sit around guarding my boat all the time, though. But if we fly the skyboat to a dungeon and park it outside, what’s to stop anyone from just walking up and making off with it just like we did?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Uncle Falcon says. “Your Aunt Savannah wants me to stick around for the time being anyway when you leave the village. You made a major blow to an inter-domain crime syndicate. They might well come after us still.”
“Won’t that take time away from your own adventuring?”
“Nonsense,” Uncle Falcon says. “No downtime is ever wasted when there’s skills to be practiced, resources to be gathered, and consumables to be made.”
“This will also make it faster to get to our own dungeons,” adds one of the other party members. “And frankly, I’m hoping those smugglers come after us. After seeing an Epic Druid at work, they may hesitate to send anyone that isn’t serious. Taking out an Epic criminal may well be enough to rank up our party.”
I am, once again, stumbling upon problems that I’m not the one who is capable of doing anything about them yet. I guess I can’t feel too bad about other people wanting to get experience too, though. And anyway, I’m 9 years old, close to home, and my family always has my back. One day I will do the same for my own nieces and nephews. Someday, I will be the one facing down high level foes that might threaten my home.
This also leads us to the absurd situation of a 9-year-old playing chauffeur to a man who is almost 60 and taking one last opportunity to reach Epic before he turns 63 and starts getting serious age penalties. Epic rank will essentially double his lifespan and give him another shot at making Legendary.
“So far as skyboats go, this one’s pretty low-end,” says Belladonna, the Rogue in Uncle Falcon’s party. “A super fancy one would’ve had security features Anise might’ve tripped when she blindly turned everything on. Could’ve gotten dicey for you.”
Anise winces. “Well, here’s to being grateful that the smugglers didn’t have a top-of-the-line brand new skyboat.”
“This one has likely already traded hands a few times,” Belladonna says. “Traded, sold used, stolen, borrowed, I don’t know. I’m not a [Psychic Child] that can read the entire history of items just from looking at them.”
“I can’t quite do that yet,” I say. “I can only tell that it was probably built by humans, but you don’t need to be a psychic to notice what physical proportions it’s designed for.”
“In any case, keeping watch on your boat is a fair trade-off for getting a ride,” Belladonna says with a grin. “While adventuring in Tempest, I’ve gotten entirely more levels in Survival than I ever wanted.”
“At least we didn’t decide to visit Thorn,” Uncle Falcon chuckles.
“I wouldn’t have minded the endless wilderness trying to kill you so much if we had a skyship. A proper one, with a nice interior.”
“We all can dream,” I say.
Anise, Rowan, Uncle Falcon and I make our way down through the Underswamps toward Hebron, leaving the rest of his party to watch the boat.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The tunnel markers have been shored up with the route more clearly delineated. With traders coming back and forth, making sure they don’t get lost has become more important than hiding from potential hostiles. Some Splott goblins have even put up helpful signs in crude Common warning people to beware of swamp monsters.
We kill a couple of Giant Cave Newts on the way down and bring their corpses with us. No sense letting perfectly good essence and resources go to waste. (Aside from the fact that I break two of my crappy spears in the process.)
We climb down the spiral staircase into the dwarven hold. In the entry room with Nessie the Newt’s pool, an unfamiliar voice echoes through the halls.
“Now come on, Nessie, eat your centipede,” a woman’s voice says. (For some reason, the auto-translator has assigned her a Scottish accent.) “Do I need to kill it for you, too? Ach, you fussy newt. Alright, alright.”
Next to the pool in the entryway sits a dwarf woman with fiery red braids. And a short beard, of course. She’s wearing a neat green dress with an apron that’s just gotten started accumulating a lifetime of stains.
“Ah, we have visitors!” the dwarf woman says upon seeing us. “A fine day to you lads and lass! The name is Garnet Hebron. Basalt said to expect you. Least I assume he meant you.”
We give a round of introductions.
“Basalt and Jade have told me so much about you,” Garnet says. “It’s good to finally meet you in person. Well, I say finally, but I’ve only been here a week.”
“How do you feel about being here?” I ask.
“Happy as can be,” Garnet says. “I dinnae want to go to the heaven the priests promised us, and certainly not the hell they told me I’d go to when they burnt me at the stake. Ach, fools, the lot of them. T’weren’t me who brought the plague on our village. It claimed me own children one by one, and why would I do that if I were responsible? The poor babes. But no. I had a black cat and I didn’t go to church enough, so of course I was the best one to blame.”
From her perspective, she died only a week ago. And what do I even say to that? Sorry that everything in your life was horrible?
“It sounds like this will be quite the adjustment,” I say.
“Oh, I love it here already,” Garnet says. “Rosemary has been so helpful. Basalt’s a stout man, and Jade’s a dear. ’Tis a strange land, true. But one I will be happy to call home.”
“Good to hear. So what do you plan to do now?”
“Keep the Hearth, of course. I’ll cook and brew, take care of the animals, and keep the place tidy and clean. And raise many generations of adorable dwarf kids. Oh, I can’t wait to see what we look like as babes.”
I guess Hebron did summon someone suited to the role required. We didn’t get someone who can’t even cook who would have to learn how, but someone who was already a Hearthkeeper of sorts. Somehow that makes a lot more sense.
“Ah, and you’ve brought dinner!” Garnet takes the dead newts from Rowan. “Thank you, dears. I’ll go get started on cooking these up for you.” She hurries off to busy herself in the kitchen.
We find Basalt at the dwarf spawner working on another statue, this one depicting a man a little smaller than him. He sets his tools aside when we enter the room.
“Good to see you!” Basalt says. “Did you get the wreckage taken care of?”
I nod. “It’s all safely back at Corwen. How have things been here? We met Garnet on the way in.”
“Oh yeah, things are humming along,” Basalt says. “It worked just like you said. I added grapes, jerky, a bowl of water, an apple from Corwen, some kitchen utensils and stuff, and bam! Hearthkeeper. Rosemary talked about how the Hearthkeepers are the glue who hold a Hearth together and it sounded like a good place to start.”
“So are you going to bed her?” Uncle Falcon. “You carved up some shapely curves there.”
“What, Garnet? No!” Basalt sputters. “That would be weird and awkward. For one thing, I made her look like my mom in my first life…”
Uncle Falcon chuckles. “I understand. In that case, I’m sure you won’t mind if I do.”
“Too much information, gramps.”
“How many dwarves are we going to spawn to start off with?” I ask.
“Well, seven is the traditional number to start off with,” Basalt says with a grin. “Then once they get settled, expand to thirteen in the next year.”
“Fortunately, you’re being named after rocks and not personality traits.”
We head to the common area to find that the layout has changed significantly. Instead of having a separate kitchen and dining area with a fire place to one side, there’s now a more spacious circular area with the fire place in the middle like a traditional Hearth. Of course, in a traditional Hearth, outsiders would not be welcome inside at all. There aren’t enough people around to maintain a separate Hearth for visitors and family members yet, though.
In any case, in the kitchen part of the hearth, Garnet has commandeered Jade to assist with skinning the newts and preparing them to cook. Aunt Rosemary is nearby ready to give advice if needed. We proceed to repeat the entire conversation we just had with Garnet and Basalt.
“I spent so much time going back and forth between two places that I got a level of [Fast Travel], for what that’s worth,” I say. “The 75% speed penalty hurts. Though not as badly as the 90% penalty did at first. How do I get my control rating up? It’s only at Weak now.”
“Practice your skills and be patient,” Aunt Rosemary says. “Your bond will gradually strengthen after regularly using it for years. Making your own modifications to it would give it a boost, too, but you’re not really ready for that yet.”
“The giant newts are cute, though I do miss having cats around,” Garnet says, carefully removing the newt eyes from the corpses and putting them in a jar. “Now if only Nessie would stop being such a fuss bucket and kill her lunch herself.”
Once the dead newts have been prepared and are cooking, Garnet frees Jade to come over and chat with us.
“That whole adventure was amazing,” Jade says. “It’s nice to have something interesting happen just because someone wanted a skyboat and not because they had a quest for it, even if it was dangerous. At that point, it didn’t even matter whether or not your Aunt Savannah had a quest to protect her nephew or not. It still happened because it was what you wanted.”
“I can still hardly believe we pulled that off,” I say. “We’ll be heading back out soon. Will you be coming with us, or staying here to help out for the moment?”
“I’ll stay for now,” Jade says. “Think it might be best if I disappear for a bit. All my stuff’s here now, at least. Once there’s more hands around here or I get bored, I’ll head for Corwen if you haven’t shown up again by that point.”