No, I do not want to slurp up any floj I run across and convert the experience into something more useful. That’s a pointless risk, and I’d rather find a better way to dispose of it.
“Not that I have any objection, but won’t this just get us in trouble?” Rowan asks.
“Don’t care,” I say.
“I mean, we still have to live in Tempest and Amroth is right here,” Rowan goes on. “It’s just a short stroll from our Hearths. What if we want to come back sometime?”
“Eh, the guards are useless,” Wren says. “And the shady guys can’t report it because then they’ll just find all the illegal stuff they’re peddling. If the guards look into it anyway, it won’t be us that’s in trouble.”
“I guess…” Rowan concedes reluctantly.
“We should probably plan an escape route first,” Wren says. “Also, there’s some stuff I want to get from my digs first.”
“‘Digs’ sounds like a good way to get an escape route,” Basalt says. “Wonder how far it is to the In-Between from here.”
“Alright, I was annoyed at them but yeah, it’s probably a good idea to think this through and make some plans first before we start in the on arson, murder, and jaywalking,” I say. “Rowan, you were the one that sketchy dealer guy approached. You think you can scout out the target?”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to go alone,” Rowan says. “I don’t trust this at all.”
“I’ll go with you,” Anise says.
“I’ll keep an eye out with Clairvoyance from outside. Or the roof, maybe.”
“I love roofs,” Wren says. “What’s your [Parkour] skill like?”
“I… do not have the [Parkour] skill yet,” I say. “But it does sound fun.”
“I’ll see if I can find the best way down into the caves from here,” Basalt says. “My [Stone Sense] will help with that more than your Clairvoyance. I’ve leveled up a lot and got this shiny new pick, so it won’t take me nearly as long to dig holes now.”
“The best part of all this?” Wren says. “I know none of you have a quest for this.”
I’m trying to give more thought toward skills before trying to learn and level them. My thought is that Athletics (Parkour) sounds like a fun and useful skill to learn and one that will serve me well through cities, dungeons, and skyships.
I’ve been dressed up in rags to look like she’s just training an orphan kid in the trade. Wren seems to have a little of everything in her apartment, and baggy hand-me-down clothes are one of them. The pants would have been too long if they hadn’t been torn so badly along the bottom, and Wren has to tie them with a string belt around my waist to keep them from falling off.
“Is this part really necessary?” I wonder.
“You gotta look the part!” Wren says. “Can’t have you running around town in your fancy adventurer duds. Great for killing rats at the guild. Less great for avoiding attention. We’ll be getting plenty of attention once you start falling off roofs.”
I sigh and concede the point. Even if these clothes are covered in stains that look like bodily fluids that never fully came out no matter how much they were washed.
“Alright, what are your [Climbing] and [Jumping] skills at?” Wren asks.
“Both at 4. I also have [Soft Landing] and [Rapid Healing].”
“It’s a start, I suppose,” Wren says with a nod. “Let’s start you off easy, then. I won’t have you get out on the balcony and have you free climb to the roof.”
“Yeah, thanks...”
“Hey, if you can change your own skills, can’t you change some of your useless ones into more useful ones?” Wren asks.
“Theoretically, maybe,” I say. “But the skill I used to do that is specifically for healing damage. Having Persuasion (Meekness) is just embarrassing, not damaging. I don’t want to go messing with it for stuff that’s not hurting me.”
“Fair. Hey, nothing wrong with being meek if it saves your hide. How’d you get that, anyway?”
“Convinced a Heroic orc I wasn’t worth killing,” I say.
We head outside and Wren takes me to a stack of boxes in an alley near the marketplace. It’s not snowing at the moment but a light dusting of frost on every surface promises to add an extra challenge to this exercise.
“Okay, now climb on top of this stack of boxes,” Wren says.
I oblige, and even manage to not slip in the process.
“Slow. What’s your Dexterity, anyway?”
“12,” I reply.
“At least it’s higher than baseline for your age,” Wren says. “Alright, hop down and watch what I do.”
I get back down and watch Wren as she demonstrates what I’m supposed to be doing. Her body moves fluidly, and she makes it look like one smooth motion as she ascends the pile of boxes and down the other side.
“Now you try it,” Wren says.
After several attempts at that which wind up being not completely hopeless, Wren moves on to the part about pulling myself up onto the roof. My small size and short arms do me no favors here, but I get up to the roof.
I don’t manage to stay on the roof for long, as I quickly lose my balance and fall off. I hit the ground with the feeling of a mattress, thanks to [Soft Landing].
“You don’t even have [Uncanny Balance]?” Wren wonders. “What have you been doing with your life?”
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“Very little roof climbing!” I reply, brushing myself off.
“Welp, it seems I have no choice but to bring you up to speed on the essentials,” Wren says. “You’ll need to pick what to focus on for your class choice, but that’s no reason to skimp on stuff that’s dead useful no matter what you’re gonna be when you grow up.”
General skills are easier to unlock than enhancement skills, so we will be working on [Parkour] first, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to get out of this without learning what Wren considers “essential”. That’s fine. Falling constantly aside, this is actually pretty fun. I have been spending entirely too much time sitting around staring at the sky. (And on the plus side, being able to see the sky from here does help, too.)
We spend the rest of the next few days teaching and practicing. I repeatedly fall off roofs. Which is to say, I get a lot of practice in [Soft Landing].
“Got it!” I exclaim aloud upon seeing the window pop up.
A couple of people nearby turn to look at me suspiciously.
“The skill, I mean! I didn’t steal anything! I learned [Parkour]!”
“Congratulations,” says a random bystander dryly. “Now maybe I can nap. Blasted kids running around like idiots…”
Rowan and Anise head into the shady back alley shop while Wren and I are “coincidentally” training on the roof. This is normal around here so no one thinks anything of it, and I know no one thinks anything of it because I have Clairvoyance and can detect people’s emotional states. (I’m sure there are plenty of skills that can mask one’s emotional state and I have no way of knowing if anyone in this building is using them.)
I scan the individuals inside the building and telepathically transmit the information gleaned about them to my party before going back to pretending I’m not spying on the place.
After crossing back and forth across the town a few times to keep scanning it (the town is not exactly very large), Rowan and Anise leave the building and head back to the guildhall.
Wren and I return to her apartment, where I change back into my adventuring gear. I don’t know if I’m fooling anyone, but whatever. Climbing into the balcony from the roof and walking out the door in different clothes is not exactly subtle if anyone’s actually paying attention. At least there aren’t any reincarnators in town except the two in the guild.
The party gathers back in our suite in the guildhall to debrief. Because “debriefing” sounds more fun than “meeting”. I didn’t become an adventurer in a fantasy world just to have meetings.
“I always avoided that place,” Wren says. “Was it as shady as it sounds?”
“Oh yeah,” Rowan says. “I got a level of [Poison Resistance] just from the smoke in the air. I’ve never been in a place like that before and I don’t look forward to doing so again except to destroy it.”
“Lots of floj?” Wren asks.
“A whole wall of the stuff,” Rowan says. “Plus a bunch of other questionable potions.”
“And that was just the store front,” Anise adds. “I spotted a door leading down to a basement that we didn’t check out. Probably storage of even more illicit goods.”
I rub my chin thoughtfully. “I’d like to have a chance to monitor the movements of the people involved in this operation, but I don’t think I can do so at the moment without attracting notice. We do not have the means currently to stop the entire floj trade in Tempest if it’s not produced here. If it’s coming in from another domain, at best we can inconvenience them and destroy some of their stock.”
“Still worth doing,” Basalt says. “I’ve been mapping out the town and where all the basements are, though I haven’t had a chance to get into most of them yet. If there’s one close enough, I could make us a back door. I haven’t yet figured out the best way to get out of here, though.”
“I’ll see about sneaking you into some basements,” Wren says with a grin.
“The Adventurers’ Guild would probably be unhappy if I were to start cutting holes in their basement, and it’s… weird,” Basalt says. “I might as well try pickpocketing Drake’s magic bag. I don’t want to try it. But there’s plenty of other more mundane places that I wouldn’t mind being annoyed at me.”
I would say that we’re probably not as subtle as we think we are, but seeing as we don’t think we’re subtle, I think we’re exactly as subtle as we think we are. I honestly doubt anyone cares enough to make note of what we’re doing even if they notice. We’re just a bunch of Basic kids and an Elite mom. Completely unremarkable and not a threat to anyone. Really.
I am relying on [Empathy] entirely too much to make sure we’re avoiding suspicion and am starting to get paranoid about whether any of these sketchy sorts can fool it.
Wren says, “Alright, if you need to get down low, that junk shop I used to work at has three sub-basements. Nobody ever goes down to the lowest one but there’s some right treasures down there. Y’know, the stuff that they don’t want to get rid of but they’re never, ever going to be able to sell.”
“So, high security?” Basalt asks.
“Nothing I can’t bypass,” Wren says. “I’ve been down there a few times. Tried to take something once. That’s when I found out there’s an alarm that triggers if you try to take something. Lucky for me, it gives you a warning first so I could put it back.”
“And that won’t be a problem if we’re not taking anything, but might there not also be alarms for digging holes?”
“Maybe,” Wren shrugs. “I’ll sneak our resident psychic down there and see if he spots anything. I had to turn in my keys, but, y’know, I made copies.”
We all head to the junk shop, where Cliff is working the front at the moment. He pushes up his glasses and peers over at us critically as we come inside.
“Don’t you usually do nights?” Wren asks.
“I did,” Cliff says. “Now, thanks to you quitting, I have to do double shifts because Fern Amroth can’t be bothered to help run her own shop until we find a replacement. What do you want, Wren?”
“Well, my new friends are rich and interested in junk,” Wren says.
“I love junk,” I say.
Cliff rolls his eyes. “Fine, by all means look at our junk.”
Anise and Rowan stay up top to keep Cliff occupied as Wren takes me and Basalt down below. Cliff, of course, is perfectly well aware that Wren sauntered in here like she owns the place and is no longer in line of sight, but his aura is giving off a distinct “not getting paid enough to deal with this”.
[Is there a silent alarm where Cliff can call someone for backup in the event of a burglary?] I ask telepathically as we descend.
Wren nods. “Yeah, here’s to hoping he won’t bother due to sheer audacity.”
“And we couldn’t have just snuck in instead of strolling right in through the front?” Basalt wonders.
“Nah, there isn’t really another way in.”
“Only one exit?” Basalt says. “That sounds like a fire hazard. Phoo! And these basements are definitely not properly ventilated.”
Wren opens a final door with her copied key and flicks a switch on the wall to turn on a crystal lamp on the ceiling. “Here we are.”
The room is so packed that the single lamp can’t reach into every corner of the room. Some of the items are in crates, but most of them have just been piled haphazardly on shelves as though they weren’t rare, magical items. I haven’t seen this many unwanted artifacts since I explored Corwen’s storerooms. While Basalt examines the floor and walls with [Stone Sense], I do the same with Clairvoyance.
“The detection wards are only on the door itself,” I conclude. “No one seems to have considered ‘home renovation’ as a potential danger. Or they couldn’t be bothered for the additional expense to prevent something so unlikely.”
All the items here are Heroic or higher, and the shelves have been carved with sigils to keep them dormant. On the floor sits a green glass vase with aspects of life and growth, which might be very useful for producing alchemy ingredients. On the shelf above it lays a gold pocket watch with aspects of time and speed, a silver-rimmed monocle that probably helps with seeing something, and a black quill pen dripping with concepts of blood and binding. Many of these things, I’m not sure that I would want to even touch.
“There’s a cave ten meters directly below us,” Basalt says. “I should be able to find it from below. Let’s get out of here before anyone gets suspicious. I can dig the tunnel up from the caves.”
The three of us quickly exit the storeroom and Wren locks the door behind us.
As we emerge from the stairs, a Heroic aura comes into range with a wary disposition and a suspicious mood. Well, crap.