Waking up on the soft fur mattress is like always, extremely nice. Although it usually consists of me just dying mere seconds beforehand but it’s still a nice feeling.
I look around but don’t see either of my two new colleagues
...
..
.
Nevermind.
I see the two of them shine into existence, lying on their mattresses. So they died huh.
“Ah Kal! We were just checking something out” Says Husky as he spots me
“Gannor?” It’s the only thing that will really pose a threat to two of us, well even all 3 of us together
The two of them nod. Well I won’t say it out loud, but that’s what you get for going without me (though I thank that you did because I don’t want to lose any more xp here).
They quickly fill me in with the details how Gannor is still laying about in the forest. They logged in a couple of minutes ago themselves so they haven’t been up to much.
We all find it a bit strange how Gannor is still stalking the forests as he really should be chasing Frishha
“Maybe he lost her track?” Inputs Jöt.
“You may be right but that doesn’t explain his grudge” I muse
“Well we did try to kill his woman” Suggests Husky
…
..
.
Nah it can’t be that he’s hanging out here killing us multiple times because we tried to attack his love…That actually sounds like it may be the reason, scary.
We entertain that possibility but that doesn’t do much for our certain situation; we’re stuck on the plains for now.
We’ve finally gotten to the level needed to hit the forest and there’s this rare mini-boss guarding the borders. That’s not good for us at all.
“So what’s our plan for today?” Asks Husky while he scratches his head
“Grind like crazy?” I suggest
“Since we can’t get through the forest, might as well” Jöt answers
“How about we try take on 2 wolves”
“What, you take one, Husky and Jöt take the other? I mean I’ll probably be more useful herbing”
“True, although you do no damage you’re good meat” Jöt says quite apathetically
“Nice you think of me that way” I smile at him sarcastically
Well it looks like we’ve decided then.
Since we get 11 in-game hours before night comes we should hit level 10 no problem.
We walk outside and say another hello to Gerard. Wait a minute. I stop the others and take them back to the village.
We make our way over to the skinners first (I figured out we may be high enough level to learn skinning too).
Inside is a huge tanning rack that takes up a whole side of the house. A table laid bare is in the middle of the room and a large chest full of furs is over in the corner.
There is a woman (I hide behind Husky) working on the tanning rack; a short and petite figure wrapped thickly in fur. From the back I see her green-tinted arms as well as her short brown hair.
Upon us entering she puts down her knife and turns round to face us.
Oh, a goblin…female?
The woman(?) in question is a small goblin with a claw scar taking up the right side of her face.
“Who are you? Looking for some leather?” She(?) says with a gruff accent
I’m being serious here when I say I’m not too sure she’s a woman. The only thing that gives her away is the red lips, but apart from that her face is very…wrinkly. It’s almost impossible to tell what gender she is just by looking. Her deep voice doesn’t help the distinction either.
“Bezia, we’re here for some work, if you’ve got anything that is” Husky walks over to her with a raised hand in greeting (he was the one to meet her before)
“Ah, big’un…Husky was it? Hmm you look strong enough, but who’s the pipsqueaks over there?” she points towards us
“Oh my fellow warriors of the snow, Kal and Jöt”
He got a bit dramatic when introducing us! After the introduction we move forward with a “hi”.
Bezia looks us up and down once and me twice *shiver* (I swear she stopped at…nevermind). Seemingly pleased she nods her head
“Well I was running out of some of them Wolf furs but I heard there was a big black one out there.
Wouldn’t want to mess with that one I heard. SO if you could bring me back about 30 wolves then I’d be set for a few days.
QUEST:Bezia's FursBezia has asked you to deliver 10 wolves to her doorstep. She also warned you about a dangerous large black wolf that was rumoured to be aboutReward:
4 silvers
“We will get right to killing those wolves for you!” Announces Husky as he leaves
“Just wait a second. Bring them back you hear, don’t reclaim them.”
Well at least we don’t have to run away from other wolves with a dead wolf in tow….not
Waving her off we leave the place. Hmm that was oddly uneventful. I’m not sure if I should be glad or not.
Anyways, we move next door and walk inside (there’s a signpost since it’s a shop, so we can walk in normally).
Inside is well…fabric hell. That’s a good description of what is in front of us; The entire place is littered with bolts and bolts of cloth. There are a rainbow of colors stacked on top of one another and I had to squint my eyes at the gaudy sight. I cannot see any tables or anything, nope, all there is, is cloth and a lot of it.
“Hello hello?” A small cutesy voice appears in our vicinity.
…
..
.
We all look at eachother before we all shrug. I guess no one knows where this voice came from (at least we all heard it so I wasn’t going mad, phew!).
“You three!” The voice gets a little angry, but it’s already sonata so it just makes it sound cute rather than angry
We all point at ourselves a bit reluctantly; we are hearing voices so we’re a bit weirded out ok.
“Yes. Can you help me out of here?”
...
..
.
“Umm, where exactly?” Husky asks looking confused (Wait a second didn’t he already visit the place?)
We all look around to try find a bulge in the piles of cloth, but the whole place looks like a mountain range so it’s pretty impossible.
“I’m under here. Just follow my voice”
We listen to her small voice and it seems to come from the right side of the room.
“Oh oh wait, stop!!” She hurriedly says, I think she forgot something important “Don’t touch my cloth please, but come over quickly”
We look at the mountains of cloth in front of us. Not a speck of the floor is left uncovered. Riiight, we won’t touch a thing (That is not feasible, sorry).
Shaking our heads we do some spring (although its eternally winter here) cleaning.
We start to move the bolts of cloth to the sides of the room packing them in small pyramids, by color. We don’t talk about it but we all know that this room was too gaudy, made our stomachs churn at the sights. We also all may be a little OCD as we end up putting the colors in order of the rainbow on the left side of the room while the other colors by their palette brethren (so Turqoise with Cyan etc etc).
After a good 4 hours (Yes, we’ve just spent a whole 4 hours cleaning up an entire room of cloth. We took a quick snack break in the middle though. However there were around 200 bolts worth of cloth so we did it in good time) we finally sort out and stack up every bolt of cloth, except for the last corner with a very irritated voice coming out (She does have all the right, we did take two hours to get to her) and asking us to be quicker.
We consider just leaving the voice covered but we want quests so we reluctantly take the bolts away
*Zip*
A small bright thing just flew past us with a “Yipee I’m freeeee!” and we all look up in shock to see…a Tinkerbell???
Ah, almost. She is a fairy at least but the similarities end there. She wears an omni-colored dress (AAH MY EYES!!!), no I’m serious, it’s omni-colored. Every color possible is on that dress. I don’t know how she wears it without feeling the need to barf but apart from the extreme gaudiness it’s quite a well made dress. Even though all the pieces are different there’s no obvious stitches and the colors mix (although horribly) into one.
“Ah to be free at last! Phew, I was stuck there forever and-” She suddenly stops her relieved smile as she looks around the room in complete shock
We put flash our proud grins and stand grandly to show it was our hard work
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”
…
..
.
“Eh?”
“MY MASTERPIECE, HOURS AND HOURS OF HARD WORK…all gone!” She zips around the room and then turns back to us with tears in her eyes. With a “Aaargh” (which sounded and looked quite cute indeed) she charges Husky headbutting him beautifully (Although she is literally the size of his forehead, so it wasn’t effective).
“Who are you?” WAIT A SECOND THERE HUSKY. You came to this place; shouldn’t you know who she is? Maybe she hit him harder than I thought?
“I’m Izzy of course” She said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world while she rubs her head in pain.
“OH, IZZY!” Did he forget or something? “So that’s who you are” Nope, he never knew her. Make up your mind will you Husky.
“Wait how do you know me?” Wait didn’t she just act like everyone should know her a second ago??
“Rogzad told me”
“Oh Roggy! So you’re here to see him?”
“Well we’re just looking for something to do” Husky just shrugs
“Oh, perfect. I was needing someone to…” She looked around excitedly and then once again fell into shock (Did she forget that she was shouting her head off about her masterpiece already?) “My-my masterpiece…”
“Um, sorry(?) but we had to clear it up to reach you. By the way why were you under there, did you get trapped?” Husky rubs the back of his head with an ‘oops’ face
“I was putting the finishing touches and one of the bolts fell and caught me. I’ve been stuck there for days now!”
As she exasperates her former plight I lean over to Husky and whisper
“Didn’t you come here before?”
“Nah, Rogzad stopped me at the door saying it’d be closed for a day or two.”
Izzy has gone and zipped over the mountains of cloth bolts sniffing sadly as she sees them all color coordinated.
Jöt is pretty speechless right now; actually he hasn’t moved an inch for the past minute or so. Looks like he goes for fairies too then?
Now that you mention it…I take a look at Izzy as she scampers around and do notice the well shaped body emphasized by the sleek dress; her proportions are quite good (although technically they are still tiny, just saying).
After about a minute she flies back to us tears in her eyes (wow, cute…oh god, is this what I look like when I’m tearing up???).
“WHY? Why did you have to destroy my maste-” Her eyes fall on me and she immediately goes silent (Wow, did she just notice me?)
*Shiver*
…
..
.
I think she took some lessons from Thalia because I swear I just saw a tiny tongue lick some tiny red lips. DANGEROUS…ok well not that dangerous; I didn’t shiver with the same intensity when she licked her lips as when Thalia did. Guess she doesn’t have hundreds of years experience (Wait that’s a good point; just how old is Thalia???).
She shakes her head vigorously and the continues her berating
“You know how long I spent doing it? 3 years, 3 whole years building it! Day by day, month by month, I even had to throw Roggy out last month because he was getting in the way. And you guys just ruined it all. I was so close, when I was about to finish my masterpiece!”
She pants for a second regaining her breath but before she begins again I quickly divert her mind
“So are you and Rogzad married?” I mean kicking him out of the house for a month, ouch that’s got to hurt.
“Pfft no, he’s just a work partner, quite good at his job too” She flitters about showing off her dress (Izzy I think you’ve got to see an optician, but still the dress is still quite high quality). Ah ok so it’s not that bad for him then (although still kicking him out of the house for a month is still pretty cruel).
“Good to know. So tell me what was this masterpiece you were making?”
“Y-you didn’t see it? I thought you would at least see what you were destroying but alas!” She pretend faints in the air
“I saw a lot of mountains” Jöt speaks up finally, recovered from his daze it seems. But mountains? Well there were mountains upon mountains of cloth everywhere.
“Oh, I had given up hope there! Seems like you did see it, well part of it at least”
Wait, mountains and she say’s correct? Was she making a map or something?
…
..
.
“YOU WERE MAKING A MAP?? OUT OF CLOTH???” I think I yelled a bit too loudly there, although it looks like Jöt already figured that out..or he just did(so he was just saying there were mountains of cloth…)
“Yes of course! What else would I be doing?” She once again has that ‘it’s obvious’ tone.
“Just what do you do? I thought you’re a tailor?”
“No, Rogzad’s the only tailor in town, he told me himself” Husky inputs shooting down my idea she’s just a wacky tailor.
“I’m a clothtographer”
Cloth…tographer? So cloth + cartography??? Well at least I’m not the only one confused as we all synchronously cock our heads to the right.
“So you make maps out of cloth…interesting” Jöt had a tone clearly suggesting he thinks she’s a bit loony. I’m there with you Jöt.
“Yes it’s an extremely fun job! I travel around the country creating maps bit by bit with cloth. Over the years I was creating my masterpiece, the map of the entire frozen kingdom; North of the Ice Needles. But now, it’s all gone. All my hard work destroyed by a trio of strangers”
“I was wondering Izzy, how would you create your map because I didn’t see any distinctive features, except the mountains of course” Seems like Jöt actually became interested in this bizarre person (Or he’s just turned into his elf-lover, well elf/fairy-lover persona).
“I used different colors to mark specific locations that I would have Roggy sew the details I’ve collected into” And here I was thinking she had no eye for color (well I still think that but it at least seems she had a reason to make it look so gaudy).
Husky and Jöt actually looks quite impressed and I think I am too although mildly concerned for the possibly loony Izzy. Who spends 3 years building a map out of cloth that can get destroyed in hours? Well it was our fault how could we know that the massive piles of cloth were actually mountains and that, I’m supposing, the blue cloth marked water (I think I’m wrong there, she probably made yellow or something water...).
“Well…what will you do now?” Husky, please play your cards better.
“I…I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to travel round once more and spend more years travelling through dangerous forests and the harsh cold to find where everything should be once again. Hic”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Husky made a fairy cry (Well we’ve already made her emotionally unstable, although it seems she’s mentally unstable too. Why? Have you not seen the way she just changed her attitude? It’s like a switch!).
“Don’t worry my dear Izzy, we shall scour these lands for you, don’t worry your precious little heart” Jöt valiantly exclaims
I lean over to him and whisper.
“Umm Jöt? Have you forgotten about our little situation already?”
“…I have a plan” I do not trust you in the slightest with that hesitation of yours my friend.
“Oh really you will?!” She gives us some giant puppy eyes (I just noticed but her eyes are Huge! Comparatively of course) and Jöt immediately says “Of course!” while me and Husky shrug our shoulders with a “Why not”. We are hopefully going to travel around the place, might as well have a reason for it.
QUEST:Izzy's MasterpieceIzzy Cinn, a Fairy Clothtographer has been creating a map of the land north of the Ice Needles. However it seems you dismantled teh map and thus forced her to start over again. However you have asked to do it for her and she willingly accepts.
She asks you to build a rough map of the country and the locations of everything and bring it back to her once it is completed.Percentage completed: 0%Rewards:
Izzy's trust and faith
‘rough map’ huh. Seems like the system doesn’t think we will make a good map which is a bit mean, I’m not that bad at art. However it does have a point.
“How are we going to do this? None of us has the cartography skills” I point out to the others and they nod
“What are you talking about? You use Clothtography of course!”
…
..
.
Damn, I did say one can never have enough skills but do I really have to pick this one up?
Izzy zips over to each of us and places her finger on our forehead.
Izzy Cinn has given you the teachings of a new skill
You have learned the skill: Clothtography
SKILL:Clothtography [lvl1]This skill was derived from the mad tailor Drenk Jenshin who decided to create a map from cloth. Many tailors followed Drenk's teachings and became clothtographers. However the profession quickly lost populairty due to it being practically useless since cartographers did things quicker and better.Clothtography allows you to create maps using cloth. The skill level will improve the quality of the maps created
Wow, even the system said this skill is useless. I cannot do anything but shake my head in woe.
I guess I should make one can never have too many skills the fifth rule.
I let out a sigh
“So I guess we should buy some cloth for our travels. How much is a bolt Izzy?”
“50 silver”
…
..
.
We ran out of that store like our butts caught fire. We are not doing this quest for a loooooong time! Why? Well if it cost just 50 silver it wouldn’t be too bad but Izzy’s map had around 200 bolts worth of cloth. And that was just for landscape, the cloth to be sewn in for details would be god knows how much. So simply, this quest costs a minimum of 100 gold to complete. No siree.
Shoving that quest to the recess of our quest journal we head out of town.
After spending 5 whole hours in town (wow that was quite a long time for just two quests) we finally make it to the fields and being our grinding.
So first on our list is collecting wolves.
While Husky and Jöt massacre wolves one at a time I jump around collecting Frost Grass where the elks are grazing.
At my third collection stop I hear a growl as I finish up and I immediately sprint towards the others who literally just two-shotted a wolf (If you count the 4 icebolts as one).
I arrive at their location after narrowly dodging the wolf’s pounce and Husky takes up the vanguard.
-40 (52/150)
Stopping the wolf with his axe, Husky pushes the wolf away before activating ‘Slash’
Crit -161 (159/320)
The wolf is stunned for a second as the axe embeds itself in its head (how it’s not dead, only the game knows). But within that time I turn round and slice the wolf in the flank
-9 (150/320)
The wolf regains its senses and starts to claw Husky who blocks as best as he can with his axe handle
-23 -17 (12/150)
I barrel into the wolf causing myself more pain than to it but I interrupt its flurry of attacks.
-5 (105/110)
-2 (148/320)
Husky slashes the interrupted wolf once more with his skill although only hitting its flank this time
-86 (62/320)
“Awooo”
The wolf calls for help before pouncing at him before he can raise his axe
-38 (-26/150)
“Ah damn, guess we can’t fight against 2 yet” Husky spews out some wise words before he dies and disintegrates into light.
The wolf finishing its kill, turns to me and I sprint away.
-62 (53/110)
It only grazed me but that damage!
I sprint away towards the town with the wolf chasing me and Jöt running behind. The other wolves luckily appear from behind us and slightly away so they will probably only get 1 attack before we get to town (although I’ll die from one attack).
-60 (2/320)
An icebolt flies into the wolf’s back and it yelps but doesn’t die.
-2 (0/320)
However the wolf turns round and immediately gets a dagger in the face.
Jöt without stopping grabs the head and starts running with the dead wolf being dragged behind him. A true loot whore, but then we’ve already had to leave one behind; we don’t want to leave both our kills, that’d just be terrible.
However this slowed him down a bit and about 100 metres from town the wolves pounce onto him dragging him under.
Thanking him silently for the sacrifice I sprint to the village
DIVE-OUCH
I seemed to have face planted on something extremely hard. Oh its Husky’s plate mail boot. Man that’s hard.
Rubbing my nose I get back up to see Husky looking angrily at the wolves as they devour the corpse of their fellow wolf (nothing gory, it just disintegrates where they bite it). Guess they’ll even eat their own kind out here, nasty.
Waiting for half a minute, Jöt joins us again and we give Gerard a wave as we head back out.
As a full party this time we pick off a couple of wolves one at a time and when we had killed 6 we sprinted back to the village unceremoniously dragging the wolves back to Bezia’s. She collects them and tells us to get more.
With pleasure.
We head out again and repeat the process another 5 times before I level up and the others reach late 80’s in their xp bars.
It wasn’t really eventful killing since Jöt and Husky pretty much just murdered them. So since I had nothing to do I took a page out of Jöt book and started hacking myself. It felt a bit strange for the first hour or so but I got quite into it after 3 hours.
Yes once again we spent an exorbitant amount of time on a small number of monsters. Our fights only last about 3 seconds now but we then have to rest for 2 minutes to regen health and then spend another 2 finding another wolf. Not to mention running back to the village (ok about a minute, maybe 2 if we’re dragging the wolves) as well as taking snack breaks every 30 minutes to keep our satiety up (sprinting everywhere really consumes a lot). But all in all we’re doing good time.
And finally after 3 hours of hunting and dragging wolves through the village, causing more than a few stares (although most were focused on me, damn I’d almost forgotten the feeling), we finally finish the quest…not.
Once we gave her all the wolf pelts she asked us inside and now we’re skinning the things. All 30 of them (10 each so not too bad).
The skinning itself isn’t too difficult but it feels more like a minigame rather than skinning an animal; there are illuminated lines you need to trace with your knife. The more accurate the trace, the better the quality. I found it quite fun and we had a little in-house competition as to who could draw the best face on the wolf’s stomach (that pelt’s quality was so bad it didn’t even have a rating).
Turns out Husky won with surprisingly delicate finger and artmanship as he made my Jöts face with a tongue sticking out (Did not suit him at all). I made Jöt face grinning for the record (He looked like he’d gone mad) and Jöt drew his face as is (normal with little expression, oddly suitable). I don’t know why we all drew Jöts face, just some bizarre coincidence.
Anyway that earned us a small clubbing from General Bezia.
I dub her as such because she’s going round us telling us how to skin with her deep, gruff voice making each sentence sound like a command. Also after our face trace game the name stuck in my mind:
“DO you think this is funny? This is a war between you and that corpse, between you and the enemy!” I respect her passion of skinning but still to liken it to war is a bit over the top.
Well then again she does have a scar from a clawed beast? Maybe it revived on her and clawed her or something, or she tried to skin undead? Thinking that was it could most definitely be likened to war.
Continuing on. We finish off our wolves after a good half an hour but all we’re left with is 30 square sheets of wolf hide. It was strange that when we skinned the wolf it got reclaimed and it left 3 of those hidesquares behind. Just for the record only Husky got medium quality hide, the rest of us had poor. I can tell we’re not going to be skinners.
BUT…we still take the skill anyway as we get our 4 silver reward and she clubs us giving us the skill.
Bezia Gan has given you the teachings of a new skill
You have learnt the skill: Skinning
SKILL:Skinning [lvl1]This skill allows you to skin animals and collect their hides. Quality is increased with skill proficiency
One can never have too many skills. But I can sure have a bunch of useless ones.
Oh wait, this is actually extremely useful!
I take a knee before Bezia
“Bezia please teach me how to turn these squares of hide into something of use”
“And why should I?”
“Because I’d like to wear the skin of my enemies as a reminder of our battle together as well as a trophy of my victory” I don’t wear it as armor. If I did I’d be wearing some body armor so that I actually have some defense.
...
..
.
She muses for a bit before conceding to my honorable intentions
“5 silver and I’ll train you” Goblins always make a profit. Dammit.
Luckily we still get the copper coins after skinning the wolves so we have enough.
The other two take a knee to Bezia and ask for the skill too. I think we’re just becoming skill whores honestly but I must emphasize once again: rule number four; one can never have too many skills.
She does allow them to train in it too seeing as though it’d look bad if she denied them for no reason (especially when she was being paid to teach).
And so all three of us start learning how to leatherwork (once we pay almost all our money to the goblin).
It wasn’t that difficult but it took a decent amount of time; First we had to tan the hide by stringing it up and rubbing salt over it. Then we brushed a gooey liquid (I’m just going to call it tanning oil because I missed what she called it) onto the hide. The hardest part was here; we had to wait.
Because they are only small squares we’re told it’ll take about an hour for it to become leather, however we’d need to reapply the oil and salt until it reached the right softness. However Bezia told us that she’d do the reapplying this time. So with nothing to do for an hour we decide to hunt 5 more wolves and spend 1 silver 20 copper on repairing our slightly damaged items (8 copper left in the purse, how terrible).
Returning to Bezia’s we find the hide has gone extremely soft and Bezia tasks us with creating a couple of pieces of leather armor. Because the hide (well leather now) is so soft it’s easy to meld the leather and we easily make bracers, boots and helmets.
Getting a needle and thread, we are told to cross-stitch our pieces while she cuts one of our squares into strips. After we stick the leather somewhat she has us bind the leather more strongly together with the leather strips.
After a short while the leather seemed to harden naturally and a window popped up saying our armor was complete.
All in all, our first batch turns out pretty nicely. A bit over-sized and crappy looking but it’s a start. Even Husky is pretty bad at it.
Bezia looks at our work and gives it a “pass” to which we rejoice slightly.
And so all three of us get another club to the head (just a meaty fist but it hurts a lot more than her small fist looks like it could do).
Bezia Gan has given you the teachings of a new skill
You have learnt the skill: Leatherworking
SKILL:Leatherworking [lvl1]You have learnt how to turn simple hides into pieces of clothing and armour suitable for use
That lesson took 2 hours which is a fair time for the price of only 5 silver. Also nothing strange happened. I mean she did gaze at me a bit more often than the others but that was because I was usually messing up slightly here or there.
Leaving Bezia’s we see the sun is slowly setting and we head back to our home.
Playing rock paper scissors on the way back home with Jöt, I of course lose.
Going inside I fail to dodge Cindy’s bear hug and after I finally get loose, I regain my breath as the rest of them sit for dinner.
Jöt however does the cooking while being instructed by Cindy.
Today is roast elk.
Jöt does a decent job and the elk is thoroughly cooked (By the way Varg came in a couple of minutes before dinner was ready and sat down with us. Just what does he do all day?), If a little burnt around the edges.
We all eat it happily though because it is a warm meaty meal that makes me sweat quite profusely from my eyes (Oh spice why must we have such a bad relationship?).
Finishing our meal, Husky and Jöt go to their beds and log off telling me they’ll be with me in the morning.
Varg and Cindy head off to their room and I…get out of there preemptively.
I step outside into the chilly night.
“So what should I do now?”
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Author's Corners: Aight, so for people who read my other fictions. this is just a downtime things not feeling the Joat/L1ONS vibe, so this'll have a couple of updates today to pretty much finish this arc.
-TRUE NORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRD