That was one way to make an entrance, I thought. Argeth and Kendra came jogging back to the group, all smiles and excitement. If elves hadn’t been seen on the planet in thousands of years, I could understand their giddiness. I think seeing dinosaurs would have the same effect on me. Wait, were there dinosaurs here?
“There’s a hill to the west, about a quarter mile. On the other side, in a valley are a set of gates with two watchtowers. There are elves manning the walls,” Argeth said after catching his breath.
The woman that had been asking me the most questions, Dengin, introduced as Wenri, grinned, poking me in the shoulder as she looked out at the forest to the north. “Ruins out there, huh?” she asked. “Maybe even information on what happened to them?”
I blinked, thinking about that. How would historians back there react, having ancients from Rome or Chichen Itza available for a conversation? Even if they were just a memory of them? This world, with these dungeons… they could probably get an almost perfect recollection of the events from that time period. Yeah, I was starting to get more excited myself.
Dengin had pulled Argeth, Wenri and Talok to the side and were talking to them. Kendra had gathered with Orthan and Delava, so I joined. “It’s not any kind of major working,” she was saying. “Timber palisades and gates, the watchtowers looked like they were using cut wood.”
The young woman was grinning from ear to ear. A successful scouting trip, and seeing beings from out of history? “The gates are closed, but there were a couple of doors to some small buildings attached on the outside,” she continued. “We didn’t get close enough to see details on the elves. Heck, the only reason we’re saying elves is because you said that they’d be in here, Ian.”
Eyes went to me, and I gave a shrug of my shoulders. “That’s what I was told. If that statue is anything to go by though, somewhere in here might be other races of people. Anyone ever heard of a snake-like race?”
“No, but I don’t think any of us have studied those kinds of topics,” Delava spoke up with a shake of her head. “Anderis didn’t mention anything more than needing to have someone here to help you. Not that I was told, at least.”
We stood there in our little group a while longer, listening to Kendra go over the details she’d seen. She told not only of what we were calling the elven outpost, but of the land around it and what she’d crossed to get there.
The grass was that green with brown often seen during a dry period, or especially hot summer. She was a city girl, so could only tell that the trees they’d come across weren’t pine or some other coniferous type. We’d seen hints of those back towards the mountainous looking areas to either side of the chamber.
While we were talking, the older groups had finished their discussion and called out for everyone. “All right, Mimic Bait is going to set up a fallback here, while we take you young ones over to the outpost,” Dengin was saying. “If it looks safe, meaning we don’t get attacked by these elves, we’ll send someone back to grab them. If it’s dangerous, we’ll fall back to the camp and fight back to the exit.”
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We all nodded in agreement. It was a sound plan and one that would hopefully keep us alive. Though I thought everyone was hoping it would be safe. Everything is relative inside a dungeon, anything could attack you when you weren’t expecting it.
The members of Mimic Bait started pulling items from a pack one of them had hauled in. Barricades, wooden spikes, stones. “They’ve done this before?” I asked.
Talok answered up, throwing me a quick grin as he helped set up. “Adventurer’s aren’t just hack and slash, regardless of the image we try to show,” he explained. “While it was more practical application than theory, we all here probably have as much training in warfare as the young lord there.”
He nodded at Orthan, who merely nodded in response. “The Guild does it’s best to stay out of the politics of the nations it resides in, but can’t always stay neutral.”
A lot of grunts of agreement were the answer to that. I’d kind of wondered, and now had more questions about that. They’d have to wait though, Dengin was giving us our marching orders.
The ‘young ones,’ would be centered, with Delava close up with Dengin. Kendra and Argeth had ranged a little to the sides of us. Orthan, Wenri, myself and a man that introduced himself as Couture, followed behind.
There wasn’t much conversation as we went. The occasional question from Dengin to Argeth or Kendra on what they could see. We paused a time or two and waited as one or both of the scouts checked on something the leader of the party from the Order of the Sacred Helm had seen and wanted details on.
By the position of the sun, if that was a sun in the sky, it was nearing noon when we topped the hill the two scouts had mentioned. Sure enough, at the bottom of the hill was a small valley. One end opened out towards the forest, the other had our destination.
A timber wall, two watchtowers built at the corners and a set of double doors centered into the walls formed the outside of an outpost. The walls on the east and west sides stretched back to the rock wall. From our vantage point, we couldn’t see too far beyond, but it did look like smoke coming from a couple locations further beyond the rock.
“Think the outpost goes into the wall?” Denging asked.
We’d paused at the top of the hill, everyone using whatever they had to try and get a better look. “Faction, you had said, Sage?”
I looked over at Wenri, nodding. “Yeah, the sources I think the System used had them. Quests or killing certain monsters would give points towards the faction. Though sometimes you’d gain from one and lose from another.”
Couture looked at Wenri, then at me. “So, we’ll have to choose our sides carefully, yes? Especially if we don’t want issues to crop up from other parties or guilds.”
That was something I’d not thought about. If there were competing factions inside the dungeons that had changed, how would that ripple through the Adventurer’s Guild? Even more problematic, how would that affect the nations that the dungeons were in?
Crap, couldn’t have made things easy, could you?