Chapter Three Hundred and Seventy — Boltbound
Chapter Three Hundred and Seventy — Boltbound “And then,” I said, having to speak up a little over Tharval’s hooting laughter. The dwarf was a great listener. Well, no, he kept interrupting and liked to add his own tall tales to the mix, but he was a great audience, which counted for a lot when telling a story. “Then we went to meet these grenoil mafia people, and they were quite mean. We ended up scuffling with them in the streets, but Cholondee landed right next to us.”“And that’s how the dragon ended up ruling the city’s underground?” Willowbud asked. He wasn’t as boisterous or loud, but he was still attentive, and I think a little bit drunk, judging by the rosiness of his cheeks.I nodded. “Yeah! I don’t know what’s happened since, but I haven’t heard of Port Royal burning down or anything, so it can’t be that bad.”“That’s a good sign,” Tharval said with a nod. He was tipsy too, with ruddy cheeks and a bright red nose, but he wasn’t slurring his words any, even though the floor next to his seat was a sea of empty tankards. He must have drunk his weight in beer already.Willowbud grinned. “You girls, and sir, seem to have been on your share of adventures.”“We’ve only been adventuring for a couple of months,” Awen said. “I don’t know if we’ve had time to really, ah, get into the spirit of it the way uncle has.”“Bah, it’s not the time spent adventuring that matters, it’s the experience of it!” Tharval said. “You judge the quality of an adventure by people saved, discoveries made, and number of angry noblefolk.”I giggled at that. “Is that how you calculate things here?”“I doubt they can codify it accurately,” Amaryllis said.“What?” Tharval said. “No! Of course we can. ‘People saved’ is easy to verify most of the time, ‘discoveries’ are obvious, and we keep a record of who’s gotten the most angry letters written about them.”“And news articles, of course,” Willowbud said.Amaryllis shook her head. “Won’t that undermine the Exploration Guild in the Snowlands?”“Bah! The real people of the Snowlands know that it’s all a big game for us. The nobles will spit and bluster and complain, and for every big complaint they make, another toast is raised in every pub across the nation.”“What Tharval means to say,” Willowbud said. “Is that the Exploration Guild, at least in the Snowlands, has proven to be... politically divisive at times. But we have the will and have had the momentum to push for sweeping changes which were very unpopular with those who were established, and immensely popular with everyone else.”“What kinds of changes?” Caprica asked.Willowbud smiled. “Well, I could talk about it for hours, but we got several large infrastructure projects pushed through, then we trained explorers, opened several schools, successfully championed new reforms for education, and bankrolled several inventors and clever businessmen who were starting beneficial ventures.”“We dragged this entire country into the future, kicking and screaming all the way,” Tharval said. “And some stuck-up old farts complained the entire time, even as they reaped the benefits.”“That sounds annoying,” I said.Willowbud shrugged his shoulders. “It meant several huge changes to the status quo, and not every noble house and clan survived the changes. Their reasons to complain made sense, on a small scale. They were losing prestige, livelihoods, traditions, and power. In the end, I think it was all for the best. The Snowlands were a... harsh place, once. We needed those traditions to survive. Now we’re thriving. Ah, but now it’s us who are the old ones stuck in the past, aren’t we, Tharval?”“Speak for yourself, elf!” Tharval grumped. “I’ve got a century left of drinking and whipping these young brats into shape, mark my words in stone.”“Ah, speaking of whipping whippersnappers,” I said while holding back a giggle. “Do you think you could help us?”“With your baron problem?” Tharval asked. He tugged at his beard with all of its tresses and beads.I wasn’t going to say anything, but I was a little envious of his beard. It looked really fun to stroke and pull at it, and if I were ever to grow a beard (which would be a little weird) I’d want it to be as fantastic as Tharval’s.“Awa, we could use the help,” Awen admitted. “We don’t know anyone from Storm Tower and the baron has a huge lead on us. We don’t know what he’s up to but... but it’s no good, I’m sure. Rainnewt worked hard to make a lot of trouble for a lot of people, and I just know that he’ll be doing the same kind of thing here, and the baron works for him.”“Actually, we noticed a wanted poster with Rainnewt’s face on it,” Amaryllis said. “We might want to investigate that too. We know there’s a link between the baron and Rainnewt, so if Rainnewt was doing something troublesome here, then that might give us more clues to work with.”I nodded along.Tharval smacked his knees, then the dwarf jumped to his feet. “Alright! I’m tired of sitting back and drinking and collecting dust. Come on, Buddy, we’re going to my shop.”“I doubt we’ll find answers there,” Willowbud said as he stood.“No, but we’ll find eager young fools of the best sort who’ll jump to find the answers for us,” Tharval said with a grin. “Besides, Abraham’s niece seems to have inherited all of the mechanical wit that he lacks. She’ll like the place.”“What kind of shop is it?” Awen asked.Tharval’s grin was almost predatory. “The best kind! Where inventions that ought never see the light of day are hammered into being from the crooked minds of... ah...” he paused, arms half raised as he searched for what to say next.Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.“Wide-eyed drunks?” Willowbud volunteered.“That’s exactly it,” Tharval agreed. “Are you coming or are you going to sit here and wallow some more?”“I do like a good wallow session,” Willowbud admitted. “It’s a good way to introspect.”Tharval sniffed. “Only an elf would volunteer to waste time like that. I swear, if you lot had the drive of a proper dwarf the world would be a different place. Bah! Probably for the best that you’re all lazy tree-loving snobs.”The insults came on thick, but all they did was make Willowbud grin. “And you lot hardly do anything but work. I think I could make any dwarf happy by letting them bang a hammer on a rock and giving them a barrel of beer a day.”“Damned right!”My friends and I followed the strange pair as they left the lounge and headed to the elevator. “Ah, will we all fit?” Caprica asked.“Well, I’m not the one taking up too much room if we can’t,” Tharval said with a chuckle. “Come on, just squeeze in tight. Can hardly call yourselves proper adventurers if you haven’t had your friend’s knee in your nose at least once.”I was pretty sure we were breaking some safety codes as we squeezed in. Then Tharval ripped a panel off the side of the control level and flicked a little switch. “What’s that do?” Calamity asked.“Makes us move faster, and gets us to the floors under the guild,” Tharval said. “They’re off-limits, of course.” Then he yanked the elevator lever down, as if that wasn’t a concern, which I supposed it wasn’t for him.The elevator lurched, then started downwards. I was expecting it to basically drop super fast, but it was... about as fast as a normal elevator, maybe? We zipped past a few floors, then past the lobby area where that nice reception-elf looked up at our passing.I blinked as we crossed through a long, dark space, and then, finally, entered a bigger room. This must have been closer to the middle of the complex that housed the towers because the room was huge.If it wasn’t for all the gantries and huge machines all over, it might have been able to fit the entirety of the Beaver Cleaver. As it was, there were several airships parked around... sorta. They were much smaller than any ship I’d seen, even smaller than the Redeemed. Little more than planks and metal beams with engines and props and sometimes balloons hovering above.A constant whirring sound filled the space, sometimes accompanied by a loud clang as metal met metal.Big fans were pumping in fresher air, which I imagine was necessary since there were a number of things on fire and the air was currently filled with the scent of oil, smoke, scorched metal, and industrial chemicals.Heads turned toward us as the elevator slowed its descent and finally stopped. There were about half a dozen people in the workshop. Half were dwarves, but there was an elf and two... half-elves? They looked a bit tall for dwarves and too beardy to be elves.“I’m back!” Tharval said as he opened the elevator’s door and hoped out. “How’s the work going?”“Sir!” one of the half-elves said as he jogged over. “Pleased to see you again, mister Boltbinder. Things have been going well. Did you want a report?”“Later,” Tharval said. “Unless there’s anything liable to explode while we’re here?”“Ah, I don’t think so,” he said.“We’ve got company. This here’s Awen Bristlecone, my best mate’s niece, and these are her companions. They’re explorers from here and there.”“Hello!” I said with a friendly wave.My friends joined in with a chorus of polite greetings that the collection of... what were they, exactly? Inventors? Workers? They seemed to be tinkering with a bunch of different things, and while I wasn’t a mechanically-inclined person like Awen, even I could tell that most of the dozens of projects sitting around were unfinished.“These lads and lasses,” Tharval said as he gestured to the tinkerers. “Are some of the brightest minds in this world-forsaken tower. I don’t get out as much as I used to, but I have folk in all the schools that keep an eye and ear open for people with actual talent. Then I invite them over to my workshop.”“What do they work on?” Awen asked. “It looks like there’s a lot of, um, things going on all at once.”“Hmm? Oh, they’ll work on whatever needs improving, tinkering, or reinventing. Once in a blue moon one of ‘em will come up with an actual good idea,” Tharval said, chest puffing out in pride.“It’s a better deal than it sounds like,” the young man who’d greeted us said. “We get room and board and can spend all day focusing on our pet projects. That’s not something that we’d get to do if we needed jobs to keep fed. We get to practice all day, level our skills, and learn from each other. Occasionally, we even get to learn something from Mister Boltbinder.”Tharval nodded. “The kind of thing I wish I had when I was their age.”“That’s impressive!” I said. “What kinds of things are you working on now?”That was both the wrong and right thing to ask. Right because it started about five conversations at once, with lots of jargon and gesturing, and wrong because it started five conversations at once and I could barely follow one of them.“Quiet down!” Tharval grumbled. “These folk are looking for someone in the tower, and I figured you lot might know where to start.”"Uh..." the same guy started. "Sir, we uh..." he trailed off, exchanging glances with his fellows.They gave uncomfortable shrugs.He turned back to us. "We may not be of much help. Can't rightly say we... pay much attention to the goings-on in the tower." He gestured expansively around himself. "We, well, we don't get out much."It seemed as if Tharval’s plan had run into something of a snag already.
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Chapter Three Hundred and Seventy-One — Stop, Drop, and Shop
Chapter Three Hundred and Seventy-One — Stop, Drop, and Shop “I can’t believe it,” Willowbud said. Then he frowned. “Actually, I take it back, I can believe it quite easily.”Tharval huffed mightily. “Now, don’t get uppity with me, elf,” he said.“Pointing out your mistakes doesn’t make me uppity,” Willowbud said. “Now, if you want me to be uppity, I can show you what that’s like, and trust me, neither of us will forget that experience.”I raised my hand. “Let’s not fight, please,” I said. “Um, I don’t know why you’re being angry with Mister Tharval, Mister Willowbud.”Willowbud straightened. “I’m not angry, Miss Bunch, merely... exasperated. Tharval seems to have brought us down here under false pretences. He didn’t bring you here because you would find help here, but rather to show off whatever he’s been tinkering on lately.”"Now don't go slandering my name," Tharval groused, "I didn't ... well, I didn't only bring them down here to see this stuff! I really thought we could get some help from these tinkerers!""Hey, don't go blaming us for your inability to think things through," chided one of the aforementioned tinkerers.Tharval huffed, hands on his hips. "It was just a slip-up, I ain't gone senile yet.""True," Willowbud nodded his head. "You've been slipping up as long as I've known you, it has nothing to do with age."The dwarf rolled his eyes.Willowbud nodded to himself. "Well, I suppose we can afford to lose some time inspecting whatever greasy thing you’ve put together now.”Tharval chuckled. “There’s always time for that!”And so we were given a tour of the shop. Tharval pointed to all sorts of neat gizmos and inventions, many of which turned out to not work as intended or to be wildly impractical, but he seemed no less proud of those.“Invention is about discovering things that work, and part of that is discovering what doesn’t,” Tharval proclaimed.Soon, he and Awen became enmeshed in an increasingly complex and technical discussion that I tried to follow but soon lost track of. It was clear that while Awen was holding her own, the old dwarf’s own knowledge dwarfed hers.I had to hold back an inappropriate spout of giggles as I realized the pun I’d just thought up.The tinkerers, of course, returned to their tinkering, and I suspected that they were working with some extra pep since their sorta-boss was right there in the room with them.Eventually the tour ended though, and we were all left near the elevators while Tharval looked a little contrite. “So, Bud, how are we gonna find that Baron for these brats, hmm?”Willowbud looked unamused. “You are the brat here,” he said. “Now... ah, no, this isn’t so simple a thing that I can just snap my fingers and fix it. The guild might be able to assist though. We have a number of people with... certain talents when it comes to the gathering of information.”I gasped. “Spies?” I asked.“I think they’d usually rather avoid that label,” he replied.“But it’s so cool!” I said.“Regardless,” he said after a moment. “How about you all come back to the guild tomorrow... actually, how long have you been searching through the Storm Tower for the baron?”“We only arrived a few hours ago,” Amaryllis said. “We parked our ship at the dock, then after registering it came to the guild.”Willowbud nodded. “Then take some time for yourselves. You’ll need to eat soon, I imagine. And the Storm Tower has some of the best shopping around. Part of being a good explorer is developing a love for exploration, and that’s something you can cultivate even in a civilised place like this tower.”“Don’t know that I’d call it civilised,” Tharval said. “But the elf’s right. Give us a day, we’ll figure this out, we will. And in the meantime, the tower’s got a number of fine smiths and shops. Plenty of adventurous folk around here to keep them busy too.”“I don’t recall seeing all that many elven or dwarven adventurers,” Amaryllis said. “I think I might have noticed some in Port Royal, but otherwise...”“Oh, we’d see some in Greenshade sometimes,” Awen said. “Um, usually coming from or heading west?”Tharval nodded. “West’s where the adventuring’s at. Not in Pyrowalk, but past that. And to the south a ways too. There’s the north as well, if you’re keen on freezing off your extremities for months on end only to discover a new kind of dwarf-eating lizard that they’ll name in your honour after you’re eaten by one.”“I wouldn’t mind shopping,” I said. I glanced to my friends, and while there wasn’t unanimous cheering and excitement, no one seemed to think it was a bad idea either. “I think we could use some time to refresh some of our equipment, and besides, I think most of us need a bit of new clothes.”My own was... not that bad, actually. I’d kept it clean, of course, but at the same time Cleaning magic wasn’t Maintenance magic, and I’d noticed a few things getting a little threadbare in spots. The leather straps holding my armour together were looking a bit stretched too, and I suspected that I’d hit a teensy growth spurt lately because my skirt had climbed almost to my knees!“Awa, that does sound nice,” Awen said. “I’ve always wanted to explore the Storm Tower. So many interesting devices come from here.”“It wouldn’t be a waste of time,” Amaryllis said. “And we do have a fair amount of gold we can afford to spend, even after taking into account docking fees and the like.”“I’ve barely got a copper to my name,” Calamity said with a grin.I bumped my shoulder against his. “Don’t worry about that! You’re due some payment for helping us, and besides, you’re our friend, no?”“Thanks!” he said. “In that case, I need me some new clothes. These are starting to look ratty, especially with the company I’ve been keeping.” He tugged on the front of his shirt which was a little worse for wear. It was clean, of course. Even if he didn’t seem to put much effort into cleaning it, he was still in my proximity often enough that my Cleaning aura probably scrubbed away any sweat stains, but that aura didn’t do anything for the holes in the fabric or the bits that were stretched.The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.I looked to Caprica, who shrugged. “I’ll come along,” she said. “Though I don’t think I need much, and I don’t know if they’ll have anything for sylph.”“You’re also poor,” Amaryllis said. Her lips were a thin line, but I knew she was holding back a smile from the way the corner of her eyes turned up.“Poor?” Caprica asked. Then she blinked. “Oh.”Had she brought any gold with her when she snuck onboard the Beaver? I couldn’t recall. That might be a shock to the system, going from being a princess of a really rich place to a poor girl who had to sneak onboard ships.I gave her a hug, of course.“Why are you hugging me?” she asked, though she didn’t make any move to remove me.“Poor person hug of solidarity,” I said.“Broccoli, you’re not poor. You’re the captain of an airship with more gold onboard it than some entire villages have,” Amaryllis said.“Oh,” I said. “Well, ah, we should go?” I said as I tried not to feel so awkward. Caprica was giving Amaryllis a look and I chose not to get between them. I figured they actually liked each other, but in that sort of friendly-rival way that included lots of little digs and veiled half-insults.Not my favourite flavour of friendship, but I’d take it!Tharval and Willowbud bid us a nice day, and Willowbud told us to show up at the guild again the next morning. Then we shuffled into the elevator and rode back up to the guild’s lobby.The nice reception elf pointed us towards the shopping centre, which happened to not be all that far from the guild. It was just on the other side of the interior train station, which did require that we leave the guild, go down a floor, then back up one on the other side.The interior of the Storm Tower was essentially a maze of warrens, alleys, little side-passages, stairwells, and then the occasional cavernous room. It wasn’t organised in any way that I could decipher, and no one had bothered putting up helpful maps for lost tourists.Basically, it was a great place for exploring and adventuring because it was so easy to get lost in!Of course, since we were looking for something specific and not for a fun adventure, I ended up asking some nice locals for directions... several times.We found the shopping area eventually. A long row of stores and shops, all squeezed in next to each other on one side of a long corridor. On the other there were benches and thick windows looking out towards the industrial area and cliffs below the tower.“Oh, where do we start?” I asked as I spun around. “Should we do every place in order? Or run around back and forth, or just ask around and go exactly where we need to? Do you think they have ice cream?”“Let’s do things in order,” Amaryllis said. “That seems like the simplest way to go about things. And the best way to keep us from getting separated and lost.”I clapped my hands. “Right! If anyone gets separated then, uh... let’s all meet up at that place right there.” I pointed.“Broccoli, that’s a food stand,” Amaryllis said.“Yeah, that way you won’t go hungry while waiting,” I said. It looked like they were selling sausages and beer, which felt a little strange for a foodstand to sell, but it was run by a dwarf.The first shop right on the corner was a discount and used armour store. It was called the Half-Elf’s Half-Off Emporium, and it was filled from front to back with mannequins along the walls, each wearing full or partial sets of armour.The place had so much stuff and so little room that my friends and I basically filled the shop to capacity.It was fun though, we poked at various armours (most were for elves, unsurprisingly) and got into a giggle fit when we discovered some sets had very pronounced codpieces.Nothing looked like it would fit any of us, elves having very long legs and tall chests, in general, though a few pieces looked more human-sized. The proprietor was a younger gentleman, a bit shorter than I was and quite stocky, but with the long ears I’d expect from elves and very fine features, including a nice pointy chin.I got to talking to him and he said that there was a growing population of half-elf half-dwarves in the Storm Tower. For all that the two races had some pretty big cultural differences, it didn’t mean that love couldn’t flourish between them.The next shop was a general store that sold mostly tools and crafting supplies. I would have skipped it, but Awen’s eyes lit up when she saw it. Gnome Depot didn’t have much that we needed, but Awen still walked out of there with a few bags full of supplies for the Beaver and for her own projects.After Gnome Depot, we ran to a little shop called Arrow Smiths, where the owner, a grumpy dwarf, fussed over Awen and Calamity’s bows. He ended up giving Awen’s the thumb’s-up of approval, but Calamity didn’t get off so easily.“I’ve had this thing for years,” he said.“Oh, and it’s a fantastic piece,” the dwarf said. “Clearly hand-made, but well done even if it wasn’t made by a true professional. Well-maintained too.”“Well, I made it myself,” Calamity said a little sheepishly.“Oh-hoh. Well, you did alright. I imagine you’re not a professional though. We have bows here that’ll improve your aim tenfold and will have each arrow hitting like a lightning bolt!” He started to show off his wares and it didn’t take long for Calamity to be won over by the idea of something shiny and new.We ended up spending a few gold on a much nicer bow, one with a wheel and cam system that was made of metal and wood and seemed a whole lot more complicated to use and maintain, but Awen said that she didn’t mind helping Calamity.Grinning, we left the shop and continued on our rather expensive outing!
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