Fodder Squad- Chapter 5

Fantasy/ Warrior Wednesday

Azira scribbled his name on the parchment and handed it over to the site supervisor, a dwarven fellow who bore the unfortunate nickname 'Stilts'. He was tall for a dwarf, standing four-foot-four and weighing a stunning two-hundred pounds. Azira had always found himself a little uneasy around him; even the dwarf's eyelids seemed to have sculpted musculature. 

"No reason not to approve it," the dwarf said, affixing his stamp to the document before sliding back in his rolling office chair to a dented filing cabinet and pulling open the bottom drawer. "Any idea when you'll be coming back?"

"Not just yet, no," the goblin skirmisher replied. The office for the mining operation was little more than a plankboard shack situated near the southern entrance of the tunnel network, lit by a pair of electric braziers. The smell of the shack matched that of a small workout room, likely emanating from the site manager himself. "Do you need notice before I start back in?"

"Twenty-four hours, that's all," said the dwarf, fidgeting with the name plate on the desk. It simply read 'Darjack- Dig Site Manager'. "But it don't need to be in writing or nuffin' like that. You come back, tell me you're ready, and you can come back in the next day to get working. That’s one of the benefits of working for one of the crown’s projects,” said Darjack, leaning back in his creaking wheeled chair. “There’s always a need for able-bodied folks to work them. Now, let’s see if you’ve got holdings to pay out,” he added, getting up out of his seat and heading over to another filing cabinet, this one to his left in the back corner of the shack. He pulled open the third drawer down, rummaging around for a moment before squinting down in. “Well, you’ve been pretty smart about this, it would seem,” said the manager, pulling out a small wooden box and bringing it over to the desk, setting it down and opening the lid, revealing several rough-edged precious gems and several dozen gold coins. “These gems, you find them while digging anywhere in particular?”

“West offshoot 19,” Azira replied, opening a mid-sized leathern pouch he had brought for this particular moment. He set the gems aside on the desk, pouring the gold coins into the pouch, and when they were all in, he put the gems back into the box and shut the lid, which bore his name burned into its hinged lid. Others might have put a lock on there, but Azira reasoned that if anyone wanted its contents badly enough, they would just abscond with the box itself. Besides, if someone was going to steal it, they would likely have to get past Darjack, and Azira just didn’t see that happening with any kind of ease. “There’s one in here, though,” he said, popping the lid back open for a moment and reaching in delicately, drawing out a smooth-edged piece of what looked like glowing sky-blue glass. The gem, whatever it was, pulsed with a kind of queer heat between his fingertips, and he held it up for the dwarf’s inspection. “I’ve no clue what this is. Do you?”

Darjack reached out with his thick fingers and plucked the gem from Azira, holding it close to the electric brazier to his side and squinting carefully at it. He sat down at his desk and pulled open one of his drawers, pulling out a bizarre, multi-lensed contraption, holding it up to his face and peering intently at the stone. After a moment, he put the eyepiece down, then the gem beside it, shaking his head. 

“I’ve never seen anything like its like, Azira,” said the dwarf. “And that’s saying something. I was born and raised in Traithrock, far to the northwest in the mountains. I’ve only been living here in the Kingdom of Graneck about thirty years, give or take a few months,” he said, putting away his lensed viewing device. “Back in the mines around Traithrock, I’d seen just about every stone and mineral that exists in these realms- mythril, adamantite, titanite, copper, silver, gold, iron, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, even a vein of transteel,” he said. Azira let out an appreciative whistle at that, and Darjack nodded with a grin. “Aye, lad, pure transteel. I even recall once, on a lengthy dig, we found this vast underground village, abandoned for gods know how long, but there were these narrow vents that twisted through the stone all the way up over our heads until they reached the surface. With mirrors and magic, we assumed, whoever had lived down there had been able to flood the entire area with natural sunlight from the surface world, and that light allowed them to grow a grove of ghostwood trees.

“Yet this, my lad,” he said, pointing at the bluish stone. “This, I do not recognize. Were I you, I would try getting this to Palen at some point.” Azira nodded, but he put the blue gem back in the box with the others and handed the box to his boss. “Well enough. If you don’t mind my asking, what sort of holiday are you going to be taking here?”

“Possibly taking a bit of a trip, maybe an adventure of sorts,” said the goblin, standing up and adjusting his belt of pouches. “But it all depends on my friends and I making a stop to see Marty the Mystic.” The dwarf scoffed aloud. “Something I said?”

“That man’s a bit of a tosser, if’n you ask me,” said Darjack. “All those trinkets and baubles he sells, most of them strike me as a bit useless. I mean, who needs a broom that sweeps all by itself?” Azira thanked Darjack for the time and his payout, and headed out of the shack, out into the early morning light. The parade had concluded the night before with an all-welcome public gathering in the town square, and the ale had flowed freely from many denizens’ private supplies. Now, as he headed away from the dig site, Azira passed fellow miners who were grumbling and holding the sides of their heads or rubbing drink-blurred eyes, the men and women of Bronze Pot having partaken perhaps a touch too much the night before. Wouldn’t be shocking to see a lot of folks taking the day off, he thought with a touch of amusement. 

Constable Bruce Swinton had told Azira and Melissa about the local enchanter, Marty the Mystic, and his collection of intriguing trinkets for sale out of the small shop he kept on the eastern edge of town. Melissa had already been familiar with the enchanter and his wares, though only tangentially through word-of-mouth of some of her customers, and Azira, despite having been a resident of Bronze Pot for nearly three years now, had never come across the man’s store. “It’s easy to miss,” Swinton had remarked. “The man doesn’t have any signage out front, so it just looks like a cottage on its own out there.”

The three of them had agreed to meet up at the Rusty Tankard Tavern the next morning to head to the enchanter’s shop, to see if perhaps the man had something among his wares that would allow the rat poking its head at that moment out of Azira’s rucksack to speak with them in a meaningful way. The skirmisher reached into one of his many pouches and poked a thin slice of apple up over his shoulder, which the rat snatched up greedily with his tiny paws. “Come on, then, let’s see if the officer and barmaid have decided to keep their word,” said Azira.

To his pleasant surprise, as Azira approached the tavern, he saw that he was the last of the trio to arrive, with Swinton and Melissa already seated on the bench on the tavern’s front deck. When they spotted him, they rose together, both looking out of their elements. The constable wore his patchwork armor, but no official uniform singlet or coverlet, and Melissa had on instead of her usual dress and apron a pair of loose trousers, a padded leather cuirass, and a long, dark green traveler’s cloak, clasped shut at the throat with a black pin in the shape of a leaf. 

“You two look a curious pair,” Azira said, lifting his shades to peer at them more closely. The goblin skirmisher was himself dressed in one of his nicer scarlet vests, a chain link shirt beneath and tarik hide pants over his legs, the toughened skin of the beast providing a modicum of protection against slashing or stabbing weaponry. On his feet he wore the same steel-toed boots he had worked the mines in, worn in and comfortable for whatever the trio would be up to. Quartet, he mentally amended, thinking on the rat riding on his back. 

“No more curious than yourself, Azira,” Bruce replied. The dark-skinned constable placed one hand on the handle of his longsword, sheathed at his left hip. “Come, Marty doesn’t have any kind of regular hours that I know of, so we may be able to just knock and get this oddment going.” Azira and Melissa followed closely behind the constable, who explained that he had spoken at length with his commanding officer that morning in order to take some time off of his duties. To his surprise, the captain of the town guard had instead offered him ‘early’ retirement, taking into account his time served in Harip. “Which I must say, surprised me. After all, all of the records of my service had burned to a crisp, along with nearly everything else in my hometown. But I decided to accept,” he said. “So, I’m officially retired. I’ll be getting a stipend every month, reduced from what I should be getting, and by a rather goodly sum if I say so myself, but it’s enough to get by on, so that’s good enough for me.”

“I see,” said Azira. “And what about you, Mel? How’d you wrangle the time free to entangle yourself in this potential nonsense of ours?”

“Easy,” she said with a beaming smile. “I handed Diana my apron this morning and told her I quit.” Azira halted in his tracks, and it took a moment before Bruce and Melissa realized he wasn’t right behind them, so they turned to look at him. “What?”

“She’s going to blame me for that, you know,” said Azira, feeling his gut tighten. “That woman’s already terrifying, and then you poke her by quitting?” The goblin skirmisher wrung his hands and peeked around, as if expecting the red tribe werewolf to leap out of cover to choke him. "Well, you know where this Marty's shop is, Constable," he said.

"It's just Bruce now," said Swinton with a grin. "Bruce Swinton. Feels kind of nice not to preceed that with anything." The retired officer headed off then, Azira following close behind, Melissa to the goblin's side, and the rat riding along with his head and forepaws sticking up out of Azira's backpack.

The main arteries through Bronze Pot were not yet filled with townsfolk, and given the celebrations of the night before, Azira assumed they wouldn't be for most of the morning. What few merchants he saw actually setting up for the day largely possessed the shadowed eyes and drooping mouths of the caffeinated hangover; with Bruce's course taking them by the town's only sizable cafe, he could see that they hosted a sizable crowd already. 

The goblin quirked an eyebrow at the sight, asking over his shoulder to Melissa, "You ever think about going and working the cafe instead of the Rusty Tankard? Mostly the same kind of gig, except you'd probably get groped less."

"I'd also get tipped less," the hume woman replied sourly. "Besides, Diana was always good at dealing with customers I informed her were getting too handsy." Melissa brushed her hair out of her face and smirked. "My favorite was when this one half-elf tried saying he was just trying to reach over to pat one of his friends on the shoulder and happened to cup my ass cheek. Diana told him he was just going to happen to be thrown face-first through the door if he didn't leave."

"She's a violent one, isn't she," Bruce asked.

"Most red tribes are," Azira answered. "It isn't that they're ever looking for a fight, from what I can tell. I've only ever met about ten or eleven of them, and they all seemed pretty level-headed, but when the heat turns on, they're probably the nastiest of the werewolf breeds I've seen." The group passed beyond a small residential area, out on the edge of town, and Bruce angled them onto a well-worn little track of crushed stone which led to a humble cottage, smoke rising in wispy tendrils from the chimney.

"This is Marty's," Bruce said, hitching up about fifteen yards from the front door. "The last time I was here, I was inspecting his vendor's license, so he might not be keen to open up for me. Melissa?" She nodded and took the lead, knocking on the ovoid door fronting the cottage. There came a muffled reply from inside, followed by the clack of locks and chains being disengaged before a pale, bespectacled face, that of a human man in his mid-30's with a beakish nose, poked out of the cracked doorway.

"Can I help you, young lady," asked the fellow, his eyes swiftly darting to the two men with her. Melissa gave him a warm flash of a smile, and shoveled one hand toward Azira.

"My friend here would like some magical assistance," she said. "We understand you're a talented enchanter, yes?" Marty nodded and drew the door open more, revealing a quaint and cozy living room/vestibule space behind him.

"Please, come in," he invited, leading the way into his abode and business. Marty the Mystic was wearing a heavy black bathrobe, patterned with images of caribou, snow owls and pine trees, fuzzy pictures that conveyed an almost cartoonish style. Short and wiry, the bathrobe billowed around a frame covered in a loose white undershirt and red-and-black pajama pants, his feet covered in black felt slippers. This man radiated pacifism and a total lack of threat.

Yet as they stepped into his living room, Azira could feel the heavy presence of magic in the home. His race had for millenia been known to be able to detect the presence of magic, regardless of whether or not the individual goblin could command it. A brief look at the furnishings in the living room gave him a sense of Marty's abilities; every stitch of fabric, piece of wood, and every inch of the floor was imbued with arcane power. Marty's entire home was quite likely enchanted, affixed with a permanent thrum of mana.

"What brings you three folks to my doorstep at this early hour, if I might inquire," Marty asked, turning to face them from the archway connecting the living room to the dimly-lit kitchen toward the right side of the chamber. 

"Azira, if you would," said Bruce. The goblin gently brought his backpack around, letting the rat scamper out onto his shoulder. "It's the rat, Marty. We were hoping you might have something among your trinkets and enchanted items that would allow him to speak with us, in the common tongue," said the retired constable. Marty raised an eyebrow at him, then held up one finger to pause them, slipping into the kitchen for a minute and returning with a steaming cup of coffee. After taking a sip, he grunted.

"I have a couple of bangles, mostly intended for cats or dogs. Common pets, you know, for folks who are a touch lonesome," said Marty the Mystic. "I don't have one fitted for a rodent, but I can shrink one down to fit your furry friend here," he said. 

"How much would that run us," asked Azira. "Between the bangle and the magic you'll be using to shrink it down." The enchanter took another sip of his coffee, eyes aimed down at the floor, head bopping from side to side, mentally calculating.

"Fourteen gold," he finally said with a shrug. "There isn't much demand for them, after all. Let me go fetch it." Marty disappeared down a hallway off of the living room, humming to himself before returning with a palm-sized copper bangle, its surface ribbed with small, semi-rounded indentations around its circumference. Marty walked to the middle of the living room, silently waving one hand in a loose circle. The trio took the unspoken cue, backing away to give him space to weave his magic.

Azira noted that the humming from Marty now seemed to be throbbing from under their feet, and the lights in the lamps around the chamber flickered. Holding the bangle in one palm, out in front of himself, Marty used his free hand to sketch arcane hand movements over it. The room filled with a sudden aroma of lemons, and the bangle flashed with an orange light, retracting in on itself, shrinking before their eyes. 

The entire spell took only half a minute to perform, but Azira sensed that this minor enchantment represented only the barest fraction of Marty's abilities. Such an unassuming man, though, the goblin skirmisher thought. This fellow could have given Pel Droma a real fight. Marty held out the bangle to Bruce, and the goblin opened one of his coin pouches, counting out the enchanter's price. He handed it over, and then brought his hands together out before him. The rat, seeming to understand what was required, scampered along Azira's arms and thrust its head forward, and Bruce slipped the bangle on over it. The trinket settled around the rat's neck, and it sat up, sniffing the air.

"I don't feel no different," the rat said in the common tongue."