Stella had decided that they were going to do something fun and social that afternoon so she had roped in Sophie.
"So one person is the werewolf?" Sophie said. "I know the idea you all try to figure out who is the werewolf each night, right? I don't know the particulars of the game but yeah I'm down."
"It will be a good team building exercise," Stella said.
"So you think that people who have been basically tied at the hip for the past two weeks for fear of being eaten need a team building exercise?" Sophie said, tapping the table lightly.
"It's for morale purposes!" Stella said. "Like those pizza parties in an office? I never worked in an office but I'm sure that it would be great for morale."
"They give pizza parties because they're not willing to give you raises," Sophie said. "They didn't want you guys organizing."
"That's not...wait what?
Sophie sighed. Of course she was dealing with an idealistic bestie.
"Bestie. Pizza parties are like participation trophies. If they wanted to help you they would pay more. Speaking of which, did you get your card pieces for this week?"
The arrangement that Finley had set up was give everybody one uncommon piece each week that they were with a Caravan. This meant that after a few weeks they could craft their own uncommon cards.
"I haven't. I assume you haven't either?" Stella said.
"I haven't."
"Yeah let's get together and talk to management," Stella said.
"Isn't your boyfriend in management?" Sophie said.
"I mean yeah but I'm pretty sure that means that he will side with me."
"Alright. We can try to unionize the caravan after we play a few rounds of werewolf."
Stella explained the rules for werewolf. There wasn't much that Sophie needed to know unless she was the narrator. They gathered whoever wanted to play, which was about ten people and began. It was about the most relaxing thing that Sophie could imagine.
Being able to just take an afternoon off and play a game where one person was eating another felt a little bit close to home but it was all fun.
Stella kept picking people to be the werewolf who were definitely not prepared for the role. As it turned out, a lot of people had guilty tells and felt bad about fake killing other people when the group went to pretend sleep. The circle grew a bit larger when the watch shifted, but it wasn't until Borgan and Song joined in that it became a party.
By that time they've been playing for three hours. Stella kept picking Song and the orc was pleased to be above reproach. He had to filter his rebuttals through Bob or his brother, both of whom trusted the orc implicitly.
It was the third time that he was the werewolf that people began to suspect that he had a talent for social deduction. Borgan explained that he had a very good grasp on body language. It was essential for him growing up.
Now? Song shined.
He played people off each other like they were in a dance off. Sophie had never really considered how his person could be so front and center here.
He seemed so reserved on his own but that was probably due to him being unable to speak. When he was able to communicate with two people, he was turning into a loudly, quiet social butterfly. The claims he made in game, once quickly dismissed now carried the tone of an orc getting away with tax fraud and then releasing a hit book series about how to do the same.
"Oh that's a sign for what we determined is quote 'skill issue'," Bob said, trying to show the group the chopping sign.
"It's very similar to wood cutting," Borgan said.
Everyone was learning a bit of hand talk after that. As the werewolf sometimes had an accomplice, Stella had to make Borgan or Bob Song's right hand man.
Now everyone was trying to intercept their communications so Song was going further afield with his hand talk.
His lessons with Bob had borne fruit and that fruit had turned into the ability to pass messages that would make both giggle. Sophie later found out that the gibberish to normal hand talk ratio had been cranked up to eleven.
They had started taking to into account that people might be able to intercept their messages. Even when they weren't on the supposedly evil team, people started to think that Song was the mastermind behind everything. It was unfair to characterize the orcish bard as evil in the game. But he was winning a lot and so they took note. He was a quick study of all the humans around. If Bob was learning how to do hand talk, then she would too.
When it was time for dinner, Stella stepped out and let Sophie take over as the storyteller and for the first time, even though she knew how to run the roll, she was stumped. By this time everyone knew each other's tells. She had a captive audience, so she asked someone to get a round of beer before she made an impassioned plea.
"For too long, us the little people have lived at the whims of the fat cats who take our labor and give us less than what we deserve! We need to join together as a united front and demand more pay!" She said to the attentive crowd. "That's why I propose we join forces and unionize, to put ourselves in a better position to negotiate a rate change!"
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There was a weak cheer from the group.
That was exactly the moment that Anthony and Bob returned with the beers. Finley trailed behind with two warm bowls of stew.
"And those guys are the ones we are going to bargain with!" She said.
Finley placed both bowls down.
"Oh I love to bargain!" Finley said. "What are we bargaining for?"
"Better working conditions!" Said a voice from the other side.
"More card pieces!" Said another.
"Oh! Splendid!" Finley said. "How about we double the amount of card pieces?"
Sophie blinked. Was he just going to fold like that? That took a bit of the wind out of her sales.
"Okay but when you negotiate with one of us, you negotiate with all of us and-"
"Oh! A group negotiation? Excellent!" He said, flicking his hand. "And my barter skill just went up! Thank you all so much!"
"What?" Sophie said.
"Anthony and I were just talking about how we need to incentivize people to do hard work, do he came up with the idea of hazard pay. More risk means more rewards, right?" Finley said.
Sophie had to sit down. That her gambit had succeeded beyond her designs led her to believe that she could have asked for more.
"Well that's excellent. Caravan Workers local union number one, I put it to a vote: do we accept these terms?" Sophie said as clearly as she could. "May I have a thumbs up for acceptance? Thumbs down for no."
The vote passed unanimously.
"Now," Stella said, returning to the laughing group. "All you lot need to eat this stew or we will have some issues!"
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The day off stretched into two until Anthony was able to get a sense that everyone was rested enough to consider their next steps. So he brought in Valerie to see what she had been cooking up.
She had been busy. Her overlay skill showed three branching paths that they could fall on.
"Earlier today, I grabbed Bob and used him as a human measuring tool," she said. "I plotted out three points for us to determine how close each of the three death knights are. Bob told me that he had a fourth target that Mork gave him, but little information about it. Presumably, that is the being who causes this mess."
"That makes sense. What did you find out?"
"Of the three that he is certain are death knights, one is directly south, or very nearly so. Some ridiculous math put the death knight at about five hundred span or a very similar amount of kilometers."
"That's good to hear. How many span can we go in a day?"
Anthony shifted to the map, which was an overlay on the wall of one of the sides of a building. Using her skill Valerie illuminated the three routes.
"We can do fifty if we really push it. We went thirty span just to get here but that took all afternoon and into the evening yesterday and as you can see we are recovering from that. It's manageable but seeing what we have? We travel three to four hours in the early morning, to account for the temperature getting warmer as we go further south, then we are there in a few weeks. But Anthony... You should be aware that this death knight is either right in the middle of or next to the capital of what was the orcish meritocracy."
As she spoke a mostly straight line lit up on the map connecting where they had to be and where they guessed that the death knight was. Valerie said that it was within a five to ten span radius, but she didn't know if it would move at all. The route bypassed the inland sea that they had been heading towards.
Anthony turned back to Valerie. She was dead serious.
"Where are the other two death knights? I take it that they are further away. We wanted to make it to the inland sea here so we could retrofit an airship," he said.
"An air ship? You have been reading too many elemental romance books. They don't actually copulate in the ways that the books say they do and their gazes aren't nearly as lustful," Valerie said.
"That... is a very odd and strange thing to say. It's almost like someone was reading said steamy romances and had a passing understanding of them?" He said.
"That's absurd!" She stammered.
Anthony gave her the dad state and the long silence that followed. Really, she should have learned this trick by now. She wasn't hopeless, just hyper fixated on her one favorite thing. That thing right now, was the map. He turned his attention back to the map. He tapped the inland sea.
"Does this sea have a name?"
"They just call it the Iru. Well the dwarves do at least. They orcs have their own word for it. Any boat there would be able to transport most of the group here, but I'm not sure about the horses," she said.
"We can figure out the horses' disposition later. First we have to get there and then if that is our next objective, would we be able to take any of these rivers down to the southern coast?"
He ran his finger down several rivers that ran north to south. The map didn't have nearly enough detail where he wanted it to, but it was at least something.
"You're really serious about this whole making a sailboat fly thing, huh?" Valerie said.
"Even if we have to have the horses pull it, yes."
"That would... It would be so much more efficient to use magic."
"If you know of any way to transport everything we have, tell us. The gate spell has a few severe portal limitations, I'm open to hear any suitable workaround. Aren't there railways that lead to the capital?"
Anthony was happy to have the dwarf as his new campaign manager. He was exceptionally pleased with her work this far and knew that she was going to do a lot for the cause. She had given him a lot of options. She had thought through each option before presenting it. It was almost like she had prepared for this kind of battle before. He hadn't really asked her about her family life but she had volunteered a few tidbits.
Her mother and her father were very expressive and loving but also dedicated to their own jobs. It was the same dedication that brought her to apply to be in the academy. She had the singular focus of someone who had been preparing for a role for so long that it was beyond the time for them to launch.
"There are railways but how would you use them without a conductor?" Valerie said.
"We make it work? Honestly, at this point I don't think there's anything that Andrew can't do with his artificer powers."
"Okay boss. I didn't think about that. There was a line that goes to the capital. In fact, there are a couple. There is a shipping line that links up a bit south of Herisberg. I guess we could go steal some trains?"
"See, that is thinking outside the box."
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Sonya decided that it was about time to call up her old friend and have a word or two with her. She had traded her boon to fix Finley and the elf had turned out to be only mostly biologically an elf.
Summoning her patron bond in one of the unoccupied areas, she waited for the ritual to take. The first impression was that of a teenage girl who had been stuck in study hall for way too long. She was over it.
"Ah! My lovely sugar baby. What can I do for you today? Are you ready to go after your next death knight?"
"I was going to talk to you about that, actually. Why exactly did you ask me to do it? Mork is the one who has seems to have a grudge with them," Sonya said.
The goddess sighed, flipped to another page in her gossip magazine and then put it down.
"It's always a bit of a give and take. If one of us can say that our chosen is the one to land a killing blow then we get a lot of street cred for a while. You're thinking that you don't really care about that. But you know who does? The one that has the power that you so rely on. So I don't want to say it. But dance!"
Sonya wasn't impressed by the goddesses antics. She would accept any help so this moment was a particularly interesting one. She could dance. But she stood her ground.
"I want my boon," she said.
"Then let's have it with the special requests."
And so Sonya began to tell her what she wanted. The longer she spoke, the more Cara smiled.