[coronatiger]

Thoughts on July 3rd (continued)

We searched for Lady Karita for a while, first at the Red Mansion, then at the guild hall. We didn’t find her, but Kine and Magnar were at the hall, so we stayed with them to chat – Lady Karita could be anywhere, and we’d probably meet at dinner a little later.

I asked the others what they thought about getting a cool name to call our adventuring party, and gave them a couple of silly examples like “Magnar’s Madams”. Magnar suggested “Magnificent Magnar and the Others”. While that name illustrates his experience as an adventurer, as well as everyone else’s lack thereof, Lady Karita would never accept it, and I’m not particularly keen on it myself.

At dinner I asked Lady Karita, too. So far, we’ve not been able to find a good name that everyone can agree on. I also asked the question that I originally had sought to ask her: Now that the show was over, Olivia and I are more available to help with her investigation, so if she has any tasks for us, we’d be happy to take them on.

Lady Karita found a lawyer, Ferdinand Gudbrandson, who can investigate the Law of Mineral Quotas, as it’s called, for her. That will take some time, so we decided to find a couple of quests, and hopefully be back in a fortnight or so.

After dinner, we went back to the guildhall to look at the quest board, and found three quests not too distant from each other. It’s hard to assess the exact difficulty of quests based solely on the description available, but hopefully these three aren’t too dangerous – we’re still novices, I feel. Except for Magnar, of course, but I think he’s a little too confident in his own abilities, or maybe he’s just trying to impress us girls.

We told the guild master, Malfinn Kandus, about the quests we’re taking. He reminded us that we are expected to finish quests we take in a month at most, since other adventurers may be dependent on the completion of them. As an added incentive to return soon, there will be a secret auction of “unique objects” on August 2nd.

I bought five potions of healing, since we’ll probably be gone for a while. I also sold my magic arrow to another adventurer, which prompted the others to comment that I seemed desperate for cash. I’m not really all that poor, but he offered a good price for it, and the only time I could have used it since I got it was against the cold dwarves, and at the time, due to the chaos of battle, I forgot that I had it.


Thoughts on July 4th

Everyone purchased enough food and lamp oil to last for three weeks, and Kine filled up her water barrels. I fetched Olivia’s present, since it’s less than a week to her birthday and I figured we’d still be down under then.

At the check point, the guards asked if we had seen a suspicious-looking dwarf sneaking about the mine entrance. We hadn’t, but someone started telling of the cold dwarves we had encountered earlier. I remembered that the guild master had said that they were to be kept secret, so I said “didn’t he tell us not to speak of them” or some such. Everyone’s eyes focused on me as the guards asked “he who?” Lady Karita pulled a fast one on the guards, though, and they told us to proceed.

As we left, Magnar handed one of the guards a bottle of exquisite liquor. The clergyman promptly seized it and handed it back to Magnar, saying pointedly that they didn’t take bribes. By the looks of their faces, the guards would have been more than pleased with the gift.

It seems Kine and Magnar have made themselves unpopular at the Mild Mole inn, so we pitched our tents a few minutes away.


Thoughts on July 5th

Lady Karita, Magnar and Kine were in a sullen mood, having been denied the comforts of the inn. None of us were looking forward to weeks of sleeping on hard rock, but Olivia and I have our own comfortable way of becoming too tired to mind, so we were positively buoyant compared to the others this morning.

Taking a few sips from the bottle of attempted bribery, and seeing Lady Karita in a fouler mood than usual, cheered Magnar right up, however.

After a couple of hours of travel, we met another adventuring party coming the other way, and we stopped to have a chat and let Kine sell them some stuff.

At the quest site, we discovered that there had been a cave-in, and we had to climb across a rockslide to enter, only to find the way blocked by a huge portcullis with metal bars several inches thick. Three meters beyond the door, we could see a lever protruding from the wall, obviously in the “up” position, as well as a giant wheel that we guessed could be used to raise the portcullis.

We decided to try to switch the lever first. Since it was too far to reach by any solid object we possessed, I tied a rope to a rock and tossed it in an arc to knock the lever down. It wasn’t easy to hit the lever, and when I did hit, it wasn’t with enough force to move the lever noticeably, but I kept at it until the others came up with a better idea: Tying Magnar’s war hammer to one of the tent poles. It took him a few tries, but he finally managed to move the lever, thus removing the bolt that locked the portcullis into position.

Even using a potion of strength wasn’t enough to lift the portcullis, so we considered the wheel. A heavy chain stretched from it into a hole in the ceiling, and we could see that to open the gate, we had to rotate the wheel, either by pushing at the handles on top of the wheel, or by pulling at the handles on its bottom. The latter option would be difficult, as the wheel was so large it went into a depression in the floor, and anything attached to the wheel, such as a whip or rope, would be stuck.

A third possibility dawned on us: We could try to pull at the chain. We managed to get Magnar’s heavy rope around the chain, and while we girls pulled at the rope, Magnar tried to lift the portcullis. It moved a little, but not enough to pull the vertical bars out of their holes in the ground. Magnar felt that he didn’t get a good grip on the bars, so we tried something else. The rope was long enough to lay double, and two of us could then pull on it, Magnar in front, sitting on a large boulder that he had carried there, bracing his feet on the portcullis, and me behind him. Both Lady Karita and Kine are rather feeble, so they didn’t contribute much anyway.

Finally, we managed to pull the portcullis out of the ground, and Lady Karita and Kine put some rocks under it, to prevent it from lowering again. The farther we pulled the chain, the harder it was, and the rope snapped before we could get the portcullis any higher. At this point, we were all exhausted, so we rested for an hour. I used the time to splice Magnar’s rope.

I looked at the opening beneath the portcullis. It was a little larger than the distance between the vertical bars, which was a little too small for me to stick my head through. Confident in my ability to get myself unstuck if the opening showed itself to be too small (I’m a contortionist, for heaven’s sake!) I tried to squeeze through. My head went through easily enough. I’m not excessively endowed in the upper torso area, so that part of me got past once I exhaled. Apart from my muscular arms and shoulders, I’m really quite slender, so once my head and chest were through, the rest was a breeze.

I then discovered that the wheel had rusted stuck, but after scraping at it for a while and applying a generous amount of oil, I got rid of enough rust to rotate it. Unfortunately, I proved not strong enough to lift the portcullis by myself, but by jumping on the handles, I was just able to raise the portcullis a little. The others put gradually larger stones under the bars, and when the opening was large enough for Magnar to get through, we were able to work the wheel to let the others through; his strength potion was still in effect. We also found a way to lock the wheel so that the portcullis didn’t fall down when we released it.

We searched a couple of rooms, which we believe must have been guard rooms back when this place was inhabited. Then it was getting late, so we returned to where Olivia had set up camp outside the rockslide. We said good night to the others, trusting Kine to take the first watch, as usual.

Wanting to know what we had found inside, Olivia suggested a game of kiss and tell – she’d keep kissing as long as I’d keep telling – but there wasn’t really that much to say, so the game soon degenerated into something else. Olivia had wisely set up Lady Karita’s tent on the other side of our camp.