Chapter Four Hundred and Forty-Five - Find One to Find Another

One moment I was in the Mage's Guild, the next, I was elsewhere.

Which is about how teleportation was supposed to work, but I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be so gut-wrenchingly unpleasant. I landed and felt as if the world had turned about ten degrees to one side and a little bit back. So not only did I have to deal with this super strong sense of magic magic magic all around me, I had to deal with a sudden wave of vertigo.

I stumbled to the side for a couple of steps before catching myself and standing still while the world spun around me.

"Huh," someone said, but I really didn't feel like losing my lunch on their shoes--which would have been impolite--so I kept my eyes closed while my inner-ears settled.

"Okay," I said after a while. Blinking, I took in the space around me. It was... a rather mundane building, with walls made of hewn logs stacked up atop each other with a bit of mortar between each. A little painting of some nice hilly mountains hung on one wall, and a spartan wrought-iron chandelier was hanging from the ceiling.

Even the magical rune-covered circle on the ground wasn't anything too special. It was made of iron bands, carefully welded together and inlaid with sturdy wood. This was a far-cry from the fanciness of the Mage's Guild.

There was a grenoil standing to one side. The other side of the room had a little office space with a few desks and assorted books on shelves. A very cozy little workspace for this grenoil dressed in a button-up shirt and slacks, but who had his shirt untucked and his topmost buttons undone.

"Hi," I said.

"Hello," he replied. "The Guild wasn't supposed to transfer anyone else until this evening," he said as he checked on a loose pile of papers.

"Oh. I came here after spending a favour with Mage Procko," I said. "I'm from the Exploration Guild." I tugged the pin stuck through my bandoleer so that he could see it better. "I'm actually here to find the previous team that passed through?"

He nodded along. "That makes sense, I suppose. In any case, they came through a few hours ago?"

"Right... we are in Rockstack, right?"

"Yes?"

"The little outpost in the Dark Forest? Not too far from Port Royal?"

He nodded slowly.

"Huh," I said. "Well, alright then. Did you see a bun go by, by any chance?"

"A bun? Like you?" He pointed up and down at me. I nodded along. It was interesting how grenoil pointed at all of someone while more human-ish people mostly just pointed at the ears. I supposed that it did make some sense. "Nope. Haven't seen anyone like that."

"Alright. Thank you! Do you know which direction the other Exploration team was going in?"

"Shouldn't you know that?" he asked.

I puffed my cheeks out, but he wasn't wrong. "Well, guess I'll have to find them. Thank you! We might be teleporting back a little early, if everything goes well and I find everyone."

"I'll keep that in mind, ma'am."

With a last friendly nod to the nice grenoil. I slipped out of the office and right out of the building. As it turned out, this... branch of the Mage's Guild? I turned to stare at the building. It did have a Mage's Guild icon on the front, but almost looked like a medium-sized wooden home from the outside. Something built quickly.

It fit in with the rest, at least.

I spun around, taking in Rockstack outpost with a sweep. There were a few dozen similar buildings, all placed in neat rows, with a few more going up slowly at the end of the row. To me, the grenoil workers seemed to be taking their time, but maybe they just weren't in any rush.

The rest of Rockstack was eerily familiar, and yet not. There was still a large stack of stones in the centralsquare just past the gate into the outpost. The inn was off to one side, looking like it had grown a little, and there was a general store and a government office plopped down on the far end of the square.

The walls of the outpost looked like they had been pushed back, and recently, clearing out a larger space for Rockstack to maybe go from just a pitstop and outpost to a proper frontier town.

I bounced my way over to the gate. I wanted to stop by the inn, because I could remember the innkeep here being nice to me, but my mission was pretty urgent, and chances were the gate guards would have seen the group leaving first.

"Hello!" I said as I came up behind a pair of grenoil guards.

They turned, looking at me casually. "Yeah?" one of them asked.

"Have you seen a group from the Exploration Guild leaving recently?" I asked.

"Exploration Guild?" The guard tilted his head, eyes narrowing in thought.

"Yeah, a handful of zem came zrough earlier. Looked like zey were headed towards ze Freud-Slip Dungeon," the first guard answered while scratching his cheek.

"Did you see which direction they went?" I asked.

The guard pointed down the road. "Zat way, down za road. Zen right. You can't really miss it. Zere's not really a road to ze dungeon, but after a few dozen delvers went zere every day, ze path is hard to miss."

I looked down the road. There was a carriage way off in the distance, kicking up a trail of dust behind it, but that was all. "Are there delvers there now?"

"Nope. Dungeon's closed," the guard said. "You haven't heard?"

"I just arrived," I said. "Why did it close?" something leaden settled in my tummy.

"Something big went down. We had a bunch more delvers for a while, and zey were real excited about whatever it was. Zen ze dungeon got hard. Delvers don't do changes so good, and a few of zem died down zere."

"I zink zat's why the Exploration Guild was called in," the second guard said.

My heart sank. A sudden change in dungeon behavior, leading to erratic violence. That ... sounded a lot like Evil Roots. I do not have time for this! "Yeah, I guess so," I said, trying to maintain my cool. "Well, I'll be back. Thanks for the help!"

I gave them a wave before I started down the road at a quick jog. I didn't want to arrive tired, so sprinting was out of the question, but I was sure I was moving faster than a whole gaggle of Explorers would have. If the dungeon was far enough, then I'd catch up to them eventually.

The team had a few hour's head start, but I was sure they'd have wasted some time in Rockstack before heading out.

I kind of wished I had time to waste in town too. I had a lot of questions to ask and things I wanted to know. Maybe I could have found a chatty delver who could confirm things for me? But I didn't have time for that.

The road was currently unpaved, but it was still flat and even. Earth had been mounded up into an embankment, with a layer of logs laid over the top, then those had been covered in a layer of gravel that seemed resistant to the usual ruts and bumps of a road. I wondered if it would be paved all the way to Port Royal, or at least the smaller towns at the base of the mountain the city was on.

In any case, the road made it easy to hurry along, and with so many trees needing to be cut down, the space around the road was clear of brush, so the Dark Forest didn't encroach upon the road at all.

It took me a good half hour or so of constant jogging to find the side-path the guard had mentioned. Fortunately, it was hard to miss.

There was a small temporary bridge over the ditch alongside the road with a path stomped into the ground beyond that. It led right up into the forest, with some planks laid out on the ground where it became too swampy and muddy.

I slowed down as I started across that path. There were some bootprints on the ground here, easy to make out in the mud. They were all heading in the same direction, away from the road, and they looked pretty recent. I didn't have much experience tracking or whatever, but that much was easy enough to tell.

The path went on for a while. There was a hill not too far in, and atop it were some small temporary buildings made of local wood and a few abandoned pavilion tents that were falling apart with no one to care for them.

The rest of the path continued on into the swamps where hungry clouds of mosquitoes were waiting to nibble at me.

I wondered if Cleaning magic would keep me unbit...

***