POV Koto Thatcher
Koto was a simple merchant from a family of farmers that wanted to hit it big.
He had grown up in a small town on Notia, the continent with two different names. It was a bleak, quiet life that Koto never wanted. He always craved adventure and wanted to become an adventurer. When he was 16, with the encouragement and a bag of silver from his grandfather, Anderson Tonatho set off to accomplish his dreams.
He purchased some basic adventurers gear and followed his dream to a dungeon town ten days away, called the Winter Town. The dungeon, The Frozen Forest, was one of the largest on Notia and was where Koto started his adventuring career. Well, a career that lasted a couple of minutes.
When he reached the dungeon town, he registered as a rank F adventurer at the adventurers guild. He joined another rookie group who were making their first dive into the dungeon. Unfortunately, none of the group, including himself, had any clue about what you needed and what it took to be a dungeon adventurer. So they took a basic plant collection quest that brought them into the very beginning of the first floor of the dungeon. Then, of course, it went horribly wrong.
Out of their group of ten, the group thought the more people, the safer it would be. But only four survived that quest. It turned out that the dungeon scaled the type and amount of monsters on the capability and amount of people in the group.
That little fact was an open secret amongst the town. Only after a person's first couple of dives were they usually clued into this if they were really stupid and did not look into the information provided by the guild about the dungeon. Koto and his group, unfortunately, did not really think to go get basic information from the dungeon. As a result, they were met by a wave of ice tooth rabbit monsters, and most of the group was killed before they could escape the dungeon.
Luckily Koto only needed a bit of healing, so the cost of getting healed at one of the temples cost only a couple of copper coins. But this encounter led to a different type of injury, the injury of broken dreams.
Seeing what happened to his group and what he experienced completely turned Koto off from wanting to continue being an adventurer. The profession really wasn't his cup of tea, but he didn't want to go back home in shame, so he got a job at a strange stall shop called The Puzzle Goose owned by a woman called Persphenoe. The puzzle goose was a shop that basically bought, sold, and traded objects of any kind that were found in the dungeon or surrounding areas for coins or other types of goods.
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It was a good job, and Koto realized that he had a knack for this type of work.
After about two months of working for Persphenoe, she informed him that she was hitting the road again. Since he was doing an excellent job, she asked if he wanted to come with her.
Koto did not know beforehand, but Persphenoe did her business by staying in one place for a while before heading to another with different types of goods, making her a travelling merchant. He saw the potential to get even better at his job and agreed to go with her to see the world.
Over time, his previous dream of becoming an adventurer was replaced with becoming a merchant himself.
During his time with Persphenoe, he explored many new places that Koto probably would not have seen, even if he was an adventurer.
After five years of travelling, Persphenoe pulled him aside. She told them that she had decided to hang in her merchant threads and retire, and she was giving the store to him.
The puzzle goose was an interesting store, not just for its name. It was soul bound to the owner and could shift to take on the type of store or stall to suit the owner's needs. Apparently, Persphenoe, who Koto thought was around her late 20s, was a lot older than she appeared and had been looking for someone to replace her for a while now.
That person to replace her was Koto. Over the next year, she taught him all that he would need to know to operate and own the store. Eventually, Persphenoe gave him the deed to the shop and replaced Koto as the one to who the store was bound.
After Koto was left on his own, he started wandering through the continents, trying to find a good thing that he could latch on to.
One day when he was drinking at a bar in a random dungeon town, he heard a group of adventurers talking. They were talking about this newly discovered dungeon with a portal that was situated in an iceberg that moves around. And how the adventurers guild was building a floating town for it that they control to follow the dungeon around.
As soon as he heard this, Koto knew that it would be a goldmine. It was a newly discovered dungeon that could move around. As for now, it was located in a part of the world that most adventurer and merchant groups do not go to. So if he could establish himself early on, then he could make a killing. But, he couldn't rush into things rashly like he did before. First, he had to make sure that this information was correct. So, Koto asked and paid a bit of money for the new dungeon, recently named The Floating Dungeon.
Everything that he heard from at the bar was correct. Except he had to apply for a merchant spot on the dock town, which he did. Quickly he calculated his savings in his head and decided that he had enough to buy a magical self-operating and automatic repairing boat, the supplies that he would need for the trip, and pay for an adventurer team to escort him and his ship up to the floating dock town.
As soon as his application for a merchant spot was approved, they set off.
Koto had a gut feeling that this venture would turn out great. As he stared in the far distance, he knew that this floating dungeon would prove to be very useful.