fandomhigh | A New You, Tuesday, Period Two

Entry tags:

new you

A New You, Tuesday, Period Two

Today, students, you would enter the danger shop to find yourself and your merry band of fellows sitting on the outskirts of that same seaside community, near a particularly large but depressingly sparse-looking farmer's field.

"Congratulations," Fjord said jovially once it looked as though everybody had arrived. "Warden cut you a deal... you all get to clear your name together, innocent or otherwise, if you do the town this one particular favor. You see, apparently, there have been some kobolds stirring up hell on the outskirts of town. They tend to show up around the same time every night, digging up farms, ruining crops. Now... we can't have that. Yes, this town does also have a fairly active fishing industry and the hunting on the outskirts isn't half bad. The locals aren't necessarily going to go hungry, but winters are long this far north, and people need the grains and other such things in their diet, and a good deal of the town's economy comes from trading their harvest."

He didn't figure most of the class necessarily cared. He was still going to share what the Warden had said. Important backstory, and all.

"So, to clear your names, you'll need to find out what the kobolds want and deal with it, or just kill the little fuckers and get it over with. Up to you. Warden doesn't care how the job gets done, just so long as this gets put to a stop." He lifted his chin and smiled pleasantly at his little adventuring party. "So... what do you do?"

[OOC: Open!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

~~Keyleth~~ Yelden cracked her knuckles. “Time to go crack some kobold skulls!”

It could’ve come out much more fierce, true. But she was trying here!

She was also scouting around the edges of the field, assessing its defenses (such as they were) and likely weak points for the kobolds to go after first; after a while, she nodded and lumbered over toward the house to knock on the farmer’s door.

Possibly a little too hard, because of course now would be when she tried to lean into her role some more.

There was a gasp, and then a kind of awkward scrabbling within the house before, finally, the door opened, and a fairly fit (if slightly frazzled) dwarf gentleman, approaching middle-aged and with a dark beard that fell to about mid-chest, peered up at Yelden.

And up.

And... up.

"Well," he commented, blinking. "Would you get a load of you?"

“I know, right?” Well, apparently Yelden was just a really bubbly and excitable kind of fighter, the kind who would spread her hands and beam at the comment, because Keyleth was going to roll with that now. “Oh wow, this is quite the height difference — I mean, uh. Hi. I just wanted to ask you a few questions, you know, about any patterns you’ve observed in the kobolds’ behavior when these incidents crop up?”

An awkward pause.

“Heh. Crop up. I didn’t — that was probably in kind of poor taste. Sorry. Carry on.”

That dwarf was squinting a little at the joke, but there was just something about a good-natured very large individual who was coming to assist that he couldn't quite hold against them, and so he gave a chuckle (faintly nervous; you try not being when swarms of lizards came around, well-armed and steadily destroying your livelihood), and gestured out to the field.

"Every night," he complained. "Every night they come by here, soon as the sun sets, and a group of the little bastards keeps watch while one digs. Digs and ruddy digs, back and forth, doesn't matter if there's something growing there or not. Ruined my turnips last week. It was the cabbages yesterday. I tried to chase them off the first night they came through, but they damn near took my arm off." He frowned a little. "They don't seem to have any interest in the house, though. Only the field."

Edited 2019-01-15 15:20 (UTC)

“Only the field,” she echoed, drumming her fingers against the pommel of her morningstar. “So they’re not interested in hurting people, just — huh. Digging. And not necessarily trying to steal crops, either? Do they leave with anything, or just leave everything dug up and ruined?”

She was being a bit cerebral for the party fighter, true, but you could have fun with character archetypes, dammit.

"That's the hell of it, innit? They'll ruin the crop, but leave it. They haven't left with a single damn thing! All that digging, and they aren't even interested in the food!"

It was enough to drive a dwarf to madness, Yelden. Madness.

"That's — hmm." Yelden started to bring her hand up to her mouth to chew on her thumbnail in thought before Keyleth realized it and decided that wasn't something her character would do. "Have you been going back into the fields to repair the areas that they dug up? Or no, better question, do they tend to dig in the same spot, or different ones?"

"What's dug is dug," the dwarf sighed. "My wife's been salvaging what she can while this arm of mine heals, and she'll fill in the holes and she'll set to rights what might still grow, though it's terrible bloody sickly right now. Next night they come by, they dig somewhere else, ruin the next patch of perfectly good crop."

Yelden — no, it was actually Keyleth out of character who did this — made a small distressed noise.

"I could — " she began to offer, all her instincts as a druid and a generally sympathetic person coming to the forefront, then reminded herself she was in character and shook her head. "Maybe someone among my, um, colleagues over there might be able to do something about that arm of yours, at least. I'm going to take a look around your fields if you don't mind, and see if anything unusual jumps out at me, okay?"

"Fine by me," the farmer agreed with a nod. "Isn't as though you're likely to do much more damage than those little bastards have been. If you can put a stop to all of this without roughing the place up too much, there might even be a little something in it for you lot from us, too."

You know. If.

“We’ll see what we can do.” Yelden was probably more self-confident than she was, so Keyleth tried to make her smile as assured as possible.

As she made her way across the fields, trying to examine the dig spots for anything that might hint at what exactly the kobolds had been doing, she crouched down beside some of the remnants of crops and murmured, “Hey, listen. I know you’ve had a rough time of it lately, and you’re going to need some time to recover, but you can make it through this, okay? You’ll be healthy and thriving again soon. I believe in you.”

Firbolgs could communicate with plants; she remembered that from her studies.

It was difficult for the danger shop to actually make plants give an answer in reply, what with the plants actually being hard light projections and all, but if the deep light of the setting sun seemed to gleam off their leaves for a moment in acknowledgment, and if a light breeze seemed to whisper against their stalks, well, all the better, right?

The dug up earth itself didn't seem to be revealing much of anything, at a glance. It was good soil, and a good deal of it had been overturned. Further investigation would probably be necessary to potentially get to the root of what was going on here.

[OOC: If you'd like to do some further poking around, feel free to roll investigation and let me know how she does/what Keyleth chooses to do from here!]

This sort of thing probably wasn't what you might expect to be one of the party fighter's strengths, especially since Yelden only had a +1 to investigation, but ~~Keyleth rolled a 17~~ it was worth a try anyway, wasn't it? She knelt down in the dirt to reach out and take a handful, let it sift through her fingers, then got up to go look at several of the other dig spots to see if there was some kind of pattern.

The little smile and gentle pat to one of the plants' leaves before she got up, though — that was all Keyleth. Some habits were a little too ingrained, even if she wasn't really sensing these simulated Danger Shop plants the same way she would real ones, and it was a little disconcerting.

Apparently, Yelden had an excellent eye tonight, since, in the growing darkness, those Firbolg eyes managed to notice one very interesting sort of pattern in the digging; or, at least, in the digging that hadn't been buried over and repaired by the farmer's wife.

The digging seemed to be evenly spaced, the holes all of a uniform size, beginning in one corner of the field and then spreading out in rows that formed a square from there. The soil that had been stirred up from them was strewn about seemingly at random, likely unimportant, but every hole sat a good three or four feet apart with no regard for what had been growing there before, and was about two feet wide. They weren't randomly placed at all; these holes were most certainly dug with purpose.

Yeah, realistically Yelden probably would be needing a torch soon, but Keyleth tended to take her own half-elven darkvision for granted — and it likely wouldn't be something the Danger Shop could temporarily take away from her.

"What are they doing here?" she muttered to herself, trying to rack her brain for some kind of guess as to what the kobolds' purpose might be.

But with a 9 on a nature check, she was probably going to be literally and figuratively on the dark in that one. Not having proficiency on nature checks was hurting Keyleth's soul.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A New You, Tuesday, Period Two

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts

Re: Adventure - The Farm's Outskirts