Ch.27
After all of that set-up, I was sort of annoyed when nothing happened that night. The soldier’s fevers all broke during the night, they responded to the treatments, and by the next morning they were all well on the road to recovery!
The captain and his men all thanked me, of course, and I gratefully accepted their thanks. I would have been ashamed if I'd done anything less, really. These were people, after all, real people, not NPCs in some elaborate video game! Anything less than my best was unacceptable!
While I was glad that they were getting better and seemed to be cured, I still couldn’t get rid of the idea that something really, REALLY shady was going on with the mayor.
There were just too damned many odd things going on related to him for there to not be more behind it. I was honestly shocked when nothing happened last night... but really it just meant that whoever was behind this all wasn’t dumb.
I was starting to feel really tired. I considered getting a room at an inn, but I was honestly a bit freaked out about the idea of falling asleep in this world outside of one of the Hearthflame safe areas.
I don’t even know if I leave anything behind here when I fall asleep! I know I do on Earth, but here? Is there a Dream world version of me still here asleep? Do I *poof* out of existence the moment I zonk out? What are the consequences of any of that?
In the end, I decided to head back. I said my goodbyes and headed back to the caves with the first Hearthflame I had bound myself to. It took maybe twenty-five or thirty minutes to get back there, nearly ten of which was me searching for exactly where the hidden entrance was!
Only the fact that I was doing intense physical exercise the whole time had let me stay awake, really. The moment I walked into the cave with the Hearthflame, I essentially fell asleep on my feet!
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I woke up the next morning, and found out why I’d felt so tired on the way back to the Hearthflame in my Dream...
My alarm had been going off for nearly an hour!
I figure I’d probably been making Will saves or Concentration checks or something similar to keep from being woken up, though that’s one hundred percent pure conjecture on my part. Concentration checks seem a lot more likely, since it would work off of my shiny new Meditation skill, so hitting a DC 15 or even 20 check would have been trivial, meaning I likely didn’t even need to roll.
I got up and went into the basement of the house where our small gym was set up, and pushed myself through a circuit of timed exercises, similar to what’s done in CrossFit sometimes.
A lot of people seem to have an unnatural hatred for CrossFit, and I’d always wondered why... the only thing I’d ever been able to come up with was that it was a jock thing, or maybe because the CrossFit people tended to be in great shape and almost insufferably smug about it?
It wasn’t a style of exercise I did all the time, but when you wanted an intense workout in 30 minutes or less, CrossFit was a good way to go... as long as you were already in good shape!
I finished up my workout and headed back upstairs to take a shower.
The contractor is going to show today and get started putting up the new building and working on the walls! I know that it's going to take a couple of months, but frankly, I can’t wait!
It was hard not to be excited. While I loved being my own boss, and I enjoyed working with computers, I too often had to deal with too danged many people that were completely ignorant about IT and computers in general. Too often I’d been asked by ignorant customers, in the literal meaning of the words, to do the impossible; or at least something that was impossible with the systems they currently had.
Once the construction was all done, I’d be looking into to completely shifting over to crafting for a living... which would make me money AND Records! A lot of both, too, unless I'm terribly mistaken!
The number of times I’d been asked to install proprietary Apple software onto PCs was ridiculously high, and sure, there were ways to do it, but they were usually neither quick nor cheap! Getting asked to set up a system in a specific manner, which some office manager had read about or been told about by a buddy but was next to impossible on the eight- to ten-year-old hardware that customers were often using, was just ridiculous.
If I could get a job where I was both my own boss, made decent money, and was forced to deal with the public less often, that would be nearly perfect.
Making real medieval weapons and armor for nerds, at first, and eventually for Awakener customers who needed them sounded like a great idea to me! Common quality weapon I could bang out a few a day of, once I got set up. Masterwork weapons would take slightly longer, and really high QL stuff even longer than that, but when you could make a sword or a suit of armor that could be enchanted up to +5, +6, or even higher?
You were suddenly someone that EVERYONE wanted to buy from!
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe dozens of people were focusing on grabbing every Lore, Craft, Perform, Profession, and language that they could... but I doubted it. Even in the MMOs where crafting was simple and very profitable, players often ignored it. In Tabletop gaming it was even less common.
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People wanted to get on with the fighting! The only time most gamers thought about things like Crafting and Professions was when they were broke or when they joined a guild in an MMO that required it. I had learned, though, that most TTRPG GMs didn’t mind it if you set yourself up in a game to take advantage of Crafts and Professions, and you could make a LOT of money if you invested.
More than once in a tabletop game, I’d had players mad at me because I had tons of money when they didn’t, all because I knew how to take advantage of down time. While they were getting drunk in a tavern, or sticking their nose in book at a library, or heck, just trying to get laid, all time-honored adventurer options, of course, I was wrangling a contract from the local town guard to make them twenty masterwork spears for less than anyone else would charge them!
L&L had rules to try and prevent that, of course, you can normally only sell items for half of their normal market value. But when you can make an item for ¼ or 1/3 of what it costs to buy, and you manage to sell it for eighty or ninety percent of what it’s listed price is... well, sir, THAT is what’s called turning a profit!
I’d turn a few hundred gold in materials into triple that; sometimes more! Do that a few times... well, you get the idea. The skill investment you needed to be able to do that was way less than people thought, too!
Work went ok, and I was happy to see Chris at the dojo when I showed up after work! If he was going to take this seriously, it would make me feel a lot better, to be honest.
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Back in the Dream, the guard captain, his name was Raphael Grayson, had taken my private warning about the mayor’s sketchiness with a grain of salt, but he had at least listened. He’d been very grateful that I’d saved his life and the lives of his men, though, and we’d talked about a reward for it.
Grayson was a handsome man, in his mid- to late-thirties. Long blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin tanned from a lifetime spent outdoors, he was about six feet tall, maybe 190 pounds in his skivvies? He was in really good shape. The kind of good shape you only stayed in by training hard, every day. The kind of shape that actors who star in superhero movies and have a couple of scenes with their shirts off are in! His doctors, the medic and me, had prescribed bed rest for a couple of days for him and all of his men, but the priest from the next town over had swung by, hit them all with Lesser Restoration spell, and given them a clean bill of health.
It had been over a week since I’d taken out the cultists, and they were all back to their duties.
“I need you to let me give you some kind of reward, Ray. You saved not only my life, but the lives of my men, too! Hell, you probably saved the whole damned town!” Captain Grayson wasn’t happy that I was begging off from taking a reward.
I nodded, sighing. “Ok, ok. Can’t you just give me some money and maybe the location of a bandit camp or a cultist stronghold or something? Because unless you can get me access to the materials for making a psicrystal, or maybe a few pounds of mithril or adamantine, I’m not sure there’s a whole lot else you can give me that I’m interested in.”
His eyes got a bit wide when I mentioned the psicrystal, and then really big when I brought up mithril or adamantine. Then he laughed. “Wow. I told you I’d get you anything I was capable of, but those are pretty much all legendary crafting materials, Ray! A few pounds of adamantine, hah!”
I chuckled. “Look, I’m perfectly aware just how ridiculous that request is, Captain! Its why I was trying to get you to drop it. The things I need are way past what a small town like this is capable of providing, even if you want to. Other than a place that mines what I’m looking for, or maybe a capital city or something, I doubt I’ll be able to find it anytime soon. Good, old-fashioned steel will let me get by for a long time before I really need rare stuff like that... except the materials for a psicrystal. I really do need that, soon.”
The captain shook his head. “Psychics have always been rare, Ray, much rarer than Wizards and Sorcerers, for sure. People are generally very cautious of them, due to their mind-bending abilities. Be careful who you talk to about that kind of thing.” he told me with a frown.
I shook my head, not really surprised but still a little annoyed. “A magic-user is just as good a mind bender as a psychic, Captain. Between Charm, Dominate, Geas, and possession spells, there’s not much a psychic can do that a Wizard can’t!”
That was completely true, too.
Rafe shrugged. “Logic doesn’t have much to do with how people react to things, especially when it comes to the supernatural! That said, I know there’s a couple of shops in Crown’s Keep that cater to both psychics and magical types.”
Crown’s Keep was the capital of the Kingdom of Farinfel, the country Thistleglade was a part of. “Well, crap!” That wasn’t great, mostly because it was over 150 miles away. As fast as I was getting to be, it really wasn’t the end of the world, but I had no desire to run that far, even if I COULD cover it in three or four hours.
If I have to, I guess I have to! I really do hate being that far away from where I know I can find a Hearthflame. There’s probably one somewhere around here... maybe I should ask? Sure, screw it. What’s the worst that could happen?
Of course, I was capable of imagining some very bad things, but I’d already decided to ask and I had just saved the captain's life, so I was going for it. “Hey, Captain? Do you know what a Hearthflame is?”
The captain looked at me oddly, but it was more of a ‘Why is he asking me such a dumb question’ look as opposed to a ‘This guy is obviously a servant of evil powers and needs to die’ look. I felt that was quite the good thing!
“Of course, Ray. Have you not been shown to our town’s Hearthflame?” he asked, looking at me oddly, still.
“Uh, no, I haven’t. Not from around here, remember? Not familiar with your country’s traditions.”
In the end, he told me he’d make sure I got paid the bounty on the Cultists, which would come to a bit over two hundred gold crowns; crowns were the smaller of the two denominations. Money worked off of a base ten system, and each denomination material was divided between small and large coins, with the larger coins worth ten of the smaller, and the smaller worth ten of the previous metal’s large coins.
It went copper, silver, gold, platinum. 10 copper crowns (or small/little coppers) were worth 1 copper royal (big/large coppers). 10 copper royals were worth 1 silver crown. 10 silver crowns were worth 1 silver royal... and so on.
Two hundred gold crowns was apparently a LOT of money. A loaf of bread was one or two large copper, so I figured two hundred small gold was around $200,000 or so. Amusingly enough, some simple math told me that was about how much that much gold would be worth on Earth, too.
The captain called one of his men, and a few swift instructions got me 200 gold crowns and someone to lead me to the Hearthflame which was in the Adventurer’s Guild!
Apparently, the Adventurer’s Guild in the town of Thistleglade had fallen on hard times in the past few years, as the current guild master and the mayor mixed like oil and water; in other words, not at all. The conflict between the guild master and the mayor was actually why Captain Grayson had been recruited and promoted, because most of the guild’s most competent members had left town after the politics between the guild master and the mayor.
I can’t lie, I was really looking forward to seeing the Adventurer’s Guild! It's such a standard RPG trope, it was hard not to want to see what it looked like in real life... or whatever this was?
It didn’t take long to get there. The whole town was only the equivalent of a few suburban residential street blocks long and wide, under a mile across. A LOT under a mile.
The Adventurer’s Guild was simply enormous. It was easily the biggest building in town, looking quite a lot like a small fort or castle, to be honest. Three stories high and with walls made of thick, grey stone, the front door was set back into an alcove almost twenty feet deep, and there was an actual portcullis at the front of the alcove! The walls of the alcove leading to the door were even lined with murder holes!
The only thing the building had for windows were tiny, barely enough for a bit of light and some air circulation, and covered in thick metal bars on the outside! The whole place just screamed that it was a fortress!
The Guild building itself was apparently one of the main points of contention between the mayor and the guild master. The mayor wanted it to be turned into the town hall, in other words, to take it for himself. The Guild building had apparently been there since before the walls of the town were even built, at least according to my guide, who scampered off back to the captain after he made sure that I’d gotten my 200 gold crowns.
It didn’t seem hard to understand why a local politician wouldn’t want an organization already made up of many of the strongest warriors and users of magic in town to have a damned castle! Particularly not one parked smack dab on one side of the central town square. Both practically and politically, it seems like a nightmare waiting to happen!