Chapter 44: 4- New Quest Received! New Quest Received!

Quest Completed! – The Secret Life of Magistrate Findell

Findell had himself quite the little shrine there, didn’t he?  

Quest reward: The rush was totally worth it, right? Sadly, now you’ve got more questions than answers. Ain’t it the way of the world? Here’s a bonus 100 xp as a consolation.

 

Kyessy demanded to see the pottery shard once they were outside the town, while Prissy turned the book over in her hands. Sadly, the back cover didn’t have a snappy blurb or an author bio with accompanying photo. It was just more of that badly wrinkled leather, with patches of what might’ve been ink. 

“Just make sure you don’t touch it,” Corbin warned with another involuntary growl. 

Kyessy gave him a small smile, which might as well have been howls of laughter, but she handled the thing carefully with the tail end of the Wight Hood. “Need to up my Inspect skill apparently,” she muttered. 

He pouted. “Me too.”

“It’s definitely a druidic text though,” she said.

“What? How do you know?”

“Pffft, come now. I know druidic when I see it.”

“Well that makes one of us,” he said. 

“You see the way these pictograms all include the leaf impression? The wiggling midline is like the tree, and each branch is a sentence, ending off in this leaf here. That’s the sentence ender, the period we call it.”

“We also call it that.” Actually, he was becoming convinced that whatever power had opened the portal between worlds, it had fundamentally changed the entirety of the world here so they could understand one another. In addition to the game interface, of course.

He wondered if he were still speaking English, or if the effect had changed his perception… he also wondered what would happen if the magic effect reached out all the way to, say, Mexico. Would everyone there begin speaking some universal language all the people of this other world could understand? He thought so. It also didn’t matter.

 

New Quest Received! – Mystery Of The Eerie Pottery Shard

What was it originally? Who made it? What’s with that gem? What’s with the inscriptions? Aside from its clear connection to Vethros, more is not known. Get the shard identified without getting killed for asking questions.

Quest reward: Answers, and probably more questions. But more quests? Plus, there’s a free level in it for you. 

 

“Do you know where we might find druids?”

“You want a wizard or a druid?” she sounded annoyed, but he knew better.  “I thought we were going to unlock this book and learn all its dark mysteries.”

“Best of both worlds? We find both in one place. Can’t we just go to a city and find them in a tavern?”

“Where did you get an idiotic idea like that?” Kyessy asked. 

“Roleplaying games,” he admitted.

Prissy snorted. “Kinky, eh? Well Corby-me-Corgi, I hadn’t had you pegged fer someone who likes ta get pegged.”

“I don’t… that’s not…”

She was busy slapping her knee and yowl-laughing in that incredible weird catlady laugh she had. 

When that died down, and after a brief lunch, Corbin had a sudden idea. 

“Didn’t you say there was a third city? The place where the portal popped up?” When Kyessy nodded, he went on. “What happened to it? I only remember seeing some traces of ruins… eesh, that’s what happened.”

Kyessy nodded. “The whole city disappeared.”

They ate in silence for some time. Kyessy had found some four-winged birds and shot down two of them, and roasted or not, Corbin ate heartily. Once the girls had had their fill, he ate the rest, until he had a stomachache. This being a dog situation had its own set of pitfalls and he needed to be on the lookout for them. For one thing, he needed to be able to stop himself from eating until he got sick. And then if he did get sick, he had to stop himself from eating that. 

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Being a dog was not awesome.

“I saw it,” Kyessy said at last, and nodded to where the portal stood southwest of their position. 

Prissy reached over and scratched between his ears, which was delightful. It took some of the shock and dismay out of the story as Kyessy told it.

“I was a good fifty miles distant, up yonder hill.” She pointed back west, to where a huge rock stuck up out of the plains and light woods. Corbin was pretty sure he wasn’t from a place with mountains, because it seemed gigantic, and it was days’ travel away from them, directly west. 

“Biggest spell I ever saw, a pink and purple explosion. Quiet, you know, but after a few minutes the hill shook. I nearly fell off and died then and there. One second there was a city, the next it was like a new sun was coming to life, only it was a sun the color of desert jiddaras. After that, it was just there, and the city wasn’t.”

“You ah…” Prissy started. “You have anyone, loike family or friends there?” 

She shrugged. “Some folk I’d worked with, some people I’d guided through the great southern forests from far out west.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“These two are connected,” she said, and held up the weird eye-hand with its oily glaze that didn’t reflect the light, but instead looked as though it was flowing. “I can feel it.”

“We can stop by the city on the way out to where we’ll find the wizard. Or the druid.” They needed answers and he’d get them from wherever he could.

“Druids,” Kyessy spat. “Yes, we will see about uncovering the secrets behind Ullennai.” 

 

New Quest Received! – The Mystery of Ullennai City

You’ve taken it upon yourself to investigate what happened to the city where the portal now stands. The mysteries keep piling up, do they not? 

Quest reward: Even more answers. And more questions? Plus 5000 xp for the knowledge. Totally worth it.

 

Quest overload was a thing, and Corbin didn’t want to sink into a quest log a dozen missions deep. Better they investigate Ullennai first, get some answers, and move on towards the druids. Maybe they could find a wizard or a sorcerer, but he’d had his fill of warlocks. No more warlocks, thanks very much. 

And from what he remembered of druids, they were shapeshifters, so maybe they had a solution for him being transformed into a pupper. Even a temporary one would be nice; he could spend a day as his old self, walk around on two feet, be understood by the majority of people. Opposable thumbs. He sighed mentally… oh, but to be able to handle a knife and fork again. These were the little things he was missing in this weird other world, in this weird other body.

Hope, in other words. He’d only spent about a week as a raven, and if he got his shit together, perhaps he’d spend even less time as a dog. 

Ullennai wasn’t far off, only a half day’s walk, meaning they were very near the portal by the time the sun was dipping below the horizon. 

The placement of this triangle of major city states, Fellwroth, Denspire and Ullennai, made perfect sense when you considered the terrain. All three were situated in gently rolling grasslands with a river feeding into a delta east of Denspire and Ullennai. With the forbidding swamps to the east, both Denspire and Ullennai were sheltered from invasion from anyone stupid enough to try to march an army through the muck and creatures. Fellwroth, Kyessy explained, was an island city in the midst of a huge lake. Not far south, a waterfall fed the great river Kethless, and it was a vital drop off point for wares and goods heading to the other two cities, or further south to the Spine of Creation. The dangers of the North Kethless River were the monsters, and of course the proximity to Vethros’s northern territories behind the Teeth. 

Low to the ground as he was, doggo Corbin couldn’t see the Teeth of Vethros towering some seventy miles or so north, but raven Corbin had seen them and was duly impressed with the swirling dark storm hovering over the Teeth. Impressed enough to never willingly head that way.

“Ullennai was the last stop before overland routes, or smaller river barges heading to the Parley,” Kyessy said. “All that’s nerfed up now.”

In fact, it was a completely nerfed situation, with Denspire and Fellwroth now fighting over supremacy over what had been a politically stable situation. The power vacuum suggested Ullennai had been completely wiped off the map.

Pockets of mercenary bands and army regiments augmented by battle wizards were still active here on both sides, but Corbin had no clear notion of who was winning. 

The signs of devastation weren’t so easy to see at first, but Corbin got a first indication when they skirted around a moss-covered boulder, only to find it was the size and shape of a large building. They set up camp just south of this boulder, nice and close to the portal. The hum and light coming off the mammoth portal were unsettling, but tolerable. The boulder though…

“Take a good look,” Kyessy said, and peeled back some of the hanging moss. Beneath he could see the large square shape of a window, and when she took one of the campfire sticks and made a torch of it, he now saw it was an entire building turned to stone, complete with stone people sitting down to their tavern meals, and one serving wench craning her neck to peer out the window. Facing the direction of the blast. Her arm, holding a serving tray, had broken off and lay nearby. 

“We could camp in there,” Prissy suggested, but Kyessy wouldn’t hear of it.

“Absolutely not. No. No stak’n way.” 

“But the entire building didn’t turn to stone,” Corbin said. “Otherwise it would still be a two floor tavern shape. Some of it probably changed into other substances, and some of it might be completely intact, especially if it was enchanted. We should take a look.”

“I don’t like this,” Kyessy said.

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