Fait Accompli: An Unwilling Tutelage

[Seperallis]

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. . : : Table of Contents : : . .

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Lesson 1: Practical Practicum
Lesson 2: Fundamentals of Magic
Lesson 3: Conservation of Reality
Lesson 4:

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Lesson 1: Practical Practicum

Such a curious phenomenon, how the world seemed to come alive in all its vibrant splendor the further Elke distanced herself from Sidgard and the heart of human lands. The land itself felt like it could stretch forth, relax, be the nature that nature was intended to be without being stamped out or controlled. Out in this part of the world, "nature" wasn't some scoffed-about otherland spoken in tones that hinted of an amorphous bogeymonster out to give good little people a Bad Time; the brush seemed thicker, greener, the water clearer, the rough trail upon which the caravaners traveled scars of a green giant whose domain they traveled within instead of through.

Or maybe it was just a mild thrill of adventure tinting the young woman's vision.

Such as it was, anyway, this "adventure." While tracking her prey hadn't proven especially difficult, the process had eaten the better part of the past months and been filled with explanations of "Oh, you just missed..." and "Oh, just went to..." and other frustrating nonsense. Such is the nature of hunting an ever-moving quarry, one could suppose, but spending a week on the trail with little to go on besides "try that way" can get rather tense when one wanders alone. Well, not entirely alone, but young wagoneers are often taught at an early age to avoid stopping for strange hitchhikers, lest they fall victim to a grand theft oxcart.

Or maybe they're just rude around here, hard to tell.

Not that it mattered much, thankfully, as the weather remained dry, a thick forest canopy sheltering creatures and travelers below from an otherwise be a scorching midday sun. No clouds, and only a slight breeze flowing between the trees with the path to gently push Elke, to say "come, come, this way. You're almost there." The birds and branches cheerily sang their agreement.

The forest abruptly thinned into a large clearing, or at least something that looked like it might have once been a clearing long ago; the ancient woods through which the young mage had been traveling stood tall in stark contrast to the smaller young growths that attempted to overrun man's home. An eight foot wall of earthwork, wood and stone outlined in crumbling relief what may have once been a grander settlement before the unkind passing of both armies and ages reduced it to a functionless monument. On one entire side, this testament to the past completely collapsed into a nearby stream that had dared to wander into town, while much of the remaining earthworks appeared to have been methodically dismantled over the decades, no doubt by the villagers themselves in efforts to fund purchases from passing merchants or for supplies to repair their homes.

Such as they were, those repairs; as one passed the unguarded suggestion of a wall, one could clearly see that the forest's reclamation of the clearing hadn't stopped simply at the hamlet's perimeter, but had permiated into the fabric of the village itself. So complete was the state of "disrepair" that one could quite clearly see that no more than half of all the standing buildings were even in any habitable shape, in such a state of abandonment that saw them completely succumb to the vegetation that embraced them...to speak nothing of the homes that had already been systematically dismantled by the inhabitants themselves, creating a patchwork of masonwork hovels terspersed with plots of loose stones and greenery. Some enterprising men and women had even taken to creating gardens within these patches, adding splotches of color and variation to an otherwise overwhelming fabric of greens and greys. Even the habitated buildings were snugly hugged by the encroaching growth of the forest, but their caretakes did combat with their shears and shovels, keeping the eventual tide of reclamation at bay for maybe another generation or two.

Habitants were few and far between. Some men and women stood together, sharing the news and gossip of the world and their lives in equal measures as if the two shared equal weight in the grand scheme of the cosmos. Still others sat within their aforementioned gardens, outside their homes, wandering to and from heres and theres tending to the day's myriad needs. Few paid mind to the oddly dressed lady from out of town, aside from an occasional "'Day" or a nod in greeting and acknowledgement of her existence, at the very least.

No haughty welcoming party, no greeting at a gate that didn't exist, the people here caught in a land the world forgot and living their lives having forgotten the world in kind.

[Sal]

"Waugh!" droned exhaust’s victory wail as Elke plunked herself down - an appropriately descriptive term for the gracelessness with which she had flopped down had not yet been coined – onto what appeared to have once been the cornerstone of a rather impressive structure no less than two stories, now in the form of two and a half derelict, semi-standing walls and a whole lot of rubble. The weedy yellow-green grasses that had soldiered their way up through the cracks in the stone monument to Man’s Futile Efforts tauntingly tickled the exposed skin of her thighs and elbows as she relieved herself of her heavy bags.

Despite first glances, the young mage was rather thrilled to finally have come across a pocket of civilization. She had been so enraptured by the change of scenery – foreign birdsong and rivers not polluted by human activity and thickets so dense the entire air around them seemed to be poured from molten emerald – that she had forgotten how much she valued life’s little pleasures. A bath would be nice.

A bath, well, and finally capturing her target.

With much less enthusiasm than she’d come initially prepared with, she drug her haversack closer to her, brushing the crumbling bits of mineral and lichen off its leather bottom, and pushed back the flap to browse its familiar contents. The one item she honed in on in particular, of course, was her journal. A gift from her mother and father for having been accepted into the university a few seasons back, nearly a fifth of its bountiful pages had been filled with the girl’s mad scrawlings, peripheral thoughts and formulas forged in a shorthand legible only to Elke. More recently, to the gifters’ mild disapprobation, the pages had taken the form of a travel log.

Several pages and some weeks prior to happening upon the tucked-away village, the mage-in-training, half bored with the usual tedium her Intermediate Magical Histories lectures seemed to produce on a constant basis, had felt the urge of adventure spark inside of her the very moment her professor had mentioned that Very Horrible Thing. Something So Terrible, it was, that the powers that be had given it its own name, a politer pronoun that had taken on an unspoken wickedness of its own. She’d first penned its sinful syllables into the margin of pages sixteen and seventeen, even underlining as if to burn it into her memory.

It was beguilement at first sight.

Over the days that followed, her interest in the usual curricula waning even more thoroughly, Elke had stolen away into the papery chasms of the university’s modest library, poring over every written letter of text she could get her hands on in order to learn more about what she was now convinced was Magic’s Best-Kept Secret. Though diligent in her studies, it availed her little. Ultimately, she had to admit, it was not surprising; this topic was taboo and the taboo would not be divulged without a fight. When she was able to make it to the dinner table, she turned the conversation to that topic often, attempting to pry bits and pieces of information from her mother and father between dispassionate bites of her meal. Again, not surprisingly, they remained unyielding stalwarts of silence and thwarted her attempts with long-suffering sighs and reminders to “eat your supper before it gets cold, Elke.” And as for the faculty, there was no point in trying. There was no hope that she would get any more from her professors than what she had already – a snarled lip when they said the word as if it left a foul taste on their tongue and a rushed transition into a new topic.

The compounding rejections, of course, did wonders at feeding her curiosity.

So, with no other clear options, Elke did what so often comes natural to young ladies, and even more so to scholars: her shoulders laden with what she hoped would be the right balance of academic tools and survival equipment, she’d practically charged into the forestlands in which her hours of research and long nights of divination had assured her she’d find her target. Her father, decidedly the worrywart of the family, barely had her attention long enough to assure that she’d packed the necessary charms she’d need before she was completely engulfed in the dense green beyond.

Though her journal had become her key tool during the trek, four or five pages in from the stiff back cover was tucked another vital apparatus: a map. The wear along the creases of its folds and the numerous rips at its edges spoke of its frequent use and perhaps a bit about her naïveté in thinking this would be a stroll in the park. Still, she had put it to good use, and now she was here.

Wherever here was.

“Okay,” she sighed to herself, running a finger along the winding snake of a trail she’d been inking out. She’d left off there yesterday, and over here was the brook – that must be the one she’d crossed as she was coming through the town’s gates (not that they could rightfully be considered that in their woeful state of repair), which would place her just here. Untangling the strands of hair from around her quill and reminding herself that tucked behind her ear was perhaps not the best method of transportation for an important instrument, she moistened the point between her lips and connected the abrupt end of her marked path to where her finger indicated she now sat.

“Myerleigh.” Elke hadn’t heard of the town before, but then again, she had never before been so far from home.

She swiveled her head, taking her surroundings. Perhaps the town’s inhabitants took to the forests for work – perhaps a village of lumberjacks? Maybe fur trappers? Or was this really all of them? Ah, but no matter, over there was an inn (at least the sign proclaimed it was an inn – it appeared to be someone’s home where a vacant room was being rented per diem), and by her standards, that was enough to consider this a thriving hub of civilization.

Surely, surely her prey would have stopped here for the night, too, to restock on supplies and to take advantage of a proper mattress.

Hoisting her things onto her back and strutting confidently towards the inn, she decided that it would be as good a place as any to begin inquiring about the appearance of another mage in these parts.

“Hello? Is anyone here?”

[Seperallis]

"Yeeeeeeeeees?"

The reply coincided with the slow squeaky opening of the hovel's metal door, and sounded as if the propogators of both noises were one in the same, foreign, rough and slightly irritable at the prospect of having to move from its comfortable place of rest. Both noises ceased as the door swung wide enough for Elke to peer inside, and notice the broad form standing at the entrance.

Or rather, notice the pungent odor that swept in upon her like a second invisible door slamming shut in her face, the vile musk of years of unwashed body muck joining forces with the stale vapors of cheap backwoods perfumes in a vicious assault upon more civilized senses. Before her stood a marsh troll, dressed in what one could probably assume a very tight-fitting and unshapely homage to what once passed as the most dapper of fashion trends amongst the most stuffy of gentry some two or four generations ago. Standing a full three head-heights above the young scholar, and nearly that far around, the grey-skinned beast had to hunch slightly to see beyond the short doorframe, an act that would have certainly caused his - for the scragly, unkempt beard certainly made one assume the beast was a he - slicked-back black unguentine mass of "hair" to fall before his face, were it not solidly held in place by the extreme viscocity of its own oils.

Olden tales in human lands were oft told of trolls by nurses and mothers to unruly babes, particularly of their ugliness and penchant for eating naughty children who didn't do what they were told. Bards also sang of the trolls to an older audience as the antagonists of many a tale, of their terrible strength, smell and disposition, amongst fouler descriptions. Many an army had been waylaid and crushed, many a farmstead razed and their cattle stolen, many a goat family too frightened into crossing bridges for greener pastures. However, the beast before Elke did not seem similar to any of those old tales, ugliness aside; with what could be called an attempt at a bow, it reached up and adjusted a pair of spectacles much too small to be of any actual use, and flashed its best mud-brown toothy smile, thankfully mostly hidden behind most of its beard-stache and bulbous nose.

"Ouuuuh, a bissit-tour!" The troll excitedly croaked in a pitch several octaves higher than one would expect as capable from such a creature, its painfully measured and practiced accent severely hindered by the beast's oversized fangs and noticeable underbite. A dismissive grunt, deep and guttural, issued from further within the building, as the troll at the door continued, "Foul-come to hh-our...hmm...shhup p." It seemed to have a habit of pausing and popping every "p" it pronounced, and holding its "h.' "Hh-ahberdahss-airy, eben. Ay am...ah...Ualdo."

"Chubb," Grunted the deep guttural voice from further within, as it introduced itself with a huff.

"Aye and ay're...mm...hh-ahberdahss-yours, ass you may hh-ave de-deuce't." The welcoming-troll straightened itself, rather pleased in introducing itself and its profession, or maybe in just putting to practice the ability to speak so very eloquently. Still smiling in what it certainly thought was a warm and inviting way, and very well might have been without the fangs or the general ick of his entire outward appearance, it continued, "B-lease, do comb in. Hh-ow wood it be hh-our b-lease-your to serb?"

Waldo - or maybe it actually was Ualdo, so difficult was it to discern from his speech - stepped aside as he spoke, revealing the interior of the shop to his visitor. Within, one could clearly see all the windows solidly boarded closed, creating extra wall space upon which shelves upon shelves were lined with all manner of haberdashery, small baubles and trinkets, various odds of a myriad types and uses: crafts, arts, hobbies, tools, supplies, charms, jewels and other ends littered just about every single usable surface within. The shelves rose to where the ceiling should have been and then rose even further beyond, said ceiling and the subsequent flooring of the second story having long since been removed to allow the current inhabitants the freedom of standing at their full height without having to stoop all the time; this of course meant various sturdy ladders lined the walls, riding along on wheels and tracks much like those prominent libraries might have. In a corner, as an afterthought, the proprietors arranged a few wares not fit for a typical store of their kind, evidently to satisfy certain other clientele, some books and various other larger everyday items.

And of course, in the middle of it all, yet another troll stood behind a desk. While otherwise similar in appearance to the one who answered the door, this one was completely bald, save the scruff around his chin, and he dressed in modest work attire. Much less personable, he deliberately seemed to keep his attention on his work as he cleaned and refurbished a worn out hanging signpost that read "O-U-W-T" and looked very much similar to the "I-N-N" sign dangling outside.

[Sal]

"Ohh... wow!" Elke forced, expertly hiding a gag by instead forcing the interjection. "What a nice shop you have!" The urge to clap her hands over her nose or to reach for the little pouch of potent spices she'd brought along with her was almost overwhelming. Almost a primal reflex, in fact. She'd once caught an unfortunate late-summer whiff of an opossum that had fallen into her parents' seldom-used spare rain barrel and had in its watery casket remained until the end of the season, its skin having rotted off its bones and its organs having become grotesquely bloated, and having turned the entire reservoir into a warm, soupy broth of putrid fluids prime for the breeding of an array of larvae.

This odor was worse. Far worse.

To be rude to a troll, however docile this one might have seemed outwardly, certainly warranted a punishment more severe than being forced to smell what the inadvertent patron could only hopelessly wish was swamp gas or, with any luck, a pot of cabbage boiling away in the back room. As disgusting as the palpably organic scent might have been, it couldn't really do her any harm other than perhaps giving her stomach contents a good churn. But to actually upset a troll - and Elke was almost certain from the descriptions she'd been given throughout her life that she was now dealing with a troll - was essentially a request to have one's bones ground into meal for bread and their entrails turned into sausage. Being courteous was likely in the best interest of her own survival at this point.

Assuming the role of an interested customer and certainly not a girl who had clearly wandered into the wrong storefront, she marveled openly at their wares and exclaimed, “It is a very fine shop, indeed, um… Waldo. Yes, I….” Her voice trailed off as she peered around the room, searching for the item that would become her lifesaver. It was the spot on the wall dedicated to cards of buttons that gave her what she needed to craft her grand escape. “I broke the toggle off my pouch here, you see?” She reached for one of the many bags slung over her shoulders, untangling it from the criss-crossing straps of the others, and held it up high enough for Waldo to see. The beast looked like it might have been a bit nearsighted, so she strained on the tips of her toes to hold the pouch up to eye level with it. Anything to keep it from bending down and breathing on her with that disgusting mouth.

Sure enough, upon observation, one would find two frayed ends of a cord that told the story of a lost clasp.

“I would appreciate it,” she continued, subtly burying her nose in the sleeve of her outstretched arm and thanking every force of nature that her father had perfumed the laundry well last washing, “if you would be so kind as to see if you have something I could use to secure the flap, and maybe a needle and thread as well? I think I saw a button on that wall just over there that would do the trick.”

She didn’t dare budge until the beast moved first, letting it take all the time it needed to study the broken pouch so that it would just go far from her and not come back until it had picked what it needed from the back room.

“Also,” she mused after a few moments more, casting quick glances at the second troll, Flub-or-whoever, and its painting project, “I was wondering if you two, ah, haberdashers would know where a traveler could find a room for rent for a night or two.” If she was going to buy a product – one that she didn’t really need and hadn’t actually budgeted for, her mind nagged – then she felt it would be acceptable to ask a question like that. Surely she wouldn’t become the paté in their sandwich for a traveler’s harmless inquiry.

“I’m new to Myerleigh, see? Just passing through, and need a place to stay for just a while. So if you could provide me assistance, I would be more than grateful.”

Her nose was aching for a breath of fresh air now, but she was positively convinced that if she decided to breathe through her mouth that she would actually be able to taste this disgusting atmosphere. Why, oh why had they decided to board up the windows?

[Seperallis]

Of course, the anser to that question would have been quite easy, had Elke spent more time in her bestiary classes and less time "frolicking in the meadows," as certain instructors may have put it. While not entirely common knowledge everywhere, certain myths and legends made tell of trolls that, having been outwitted by many a guileful hero, were caught in the sun's burning rays and turned to stone. While the validity of such claims were always in question and it was clearly not a feature of all trolls, they certainly were known as beasts of the night; no doubt the bright light of the sun would prove a painful annoyance, to say the least.

The troll who evidently called himself Waldo, comfortable as he was in his lovely perfumed shoppe with no burning rays of sun to cause him any discomfort, throatily "ah'd" and "hm'd" as Elke related the heartbreaking tale of her loss. The beast regarded the missing clasp in much the same way - or maybe he was regarding her in light of whether or not she would make a good midday meal, it was difficult to tell with trolls - all the while the heavy breath of its hairy nostrils burned a heated vapor upon the exposed skin of her hand as it leaned in slightly to better perform its inspection.

"Yeees, yes," Waldo nodded after a short period of deliberation, the bulb of its nose bobbing with the movement. Whether it somehow didn't notice the girl's haphazard attempts at trying to disguise her desperate search for less fumigated air, or perhaps thought something else of them, it made no action or mention of them either way as it turned to fetch what it thought the best material for the job at hand.

If one was hoping for a stereotypical stay-with-us-for-dinner reply from the two trolls when asked about a place to bed for the evening, apologies are in order, as the fancily-dressed troll made no such remarks. The ladder upon which the beast climbed protested loudly under its beefy mass, but it paid the noise no mind as it scoured the shelving for just the article that it felt would suit its young customer's needs. "Ooh, dear's a b-lace ouith beds, yes, but de name. Aye fworget..."

"Forlag's," grunted the bald troll named Chubb in its gutteral voice without looking up from its handiwork. "Down road."

"Yes, east-ouays to...ah!" The Waldo-troll uttered a noise of triumph from atop its perch mid-explanation. With a flourish if speed and agility that no entity of its size and bulk should possess, it let loose of its feet and performed a free-falling slide down the ladder, ending in a heavy flatfooted ~thud~ that rattled nearby shelves and their contents, despite the drop only having been a few feet. Turning around, it clodded back to where Elke awaited her unneeded merchandise. In one hand it produced a needle and thread of a hue remarkably similar to the color of the pouch. In the other hand, it produced a fine gold-lined clasp inlaid with emerald-like glass in the shape of a single ash leaf.

"A ffine clasp-p for a p-retty lay-dee."

Chubb-troll snorted.

[Sal]

“Ooh!” Elke squealed in dramatized delight. “It’s gorgeous!” And truthfully, it was. The silhouette and color reminded her of the lone Winged Wahoo tree that had declared itself at home in the middle of old Farmer Haidder’s barley field sixty three summers ago, as the story goes. She could imagine now the man’s overly sunned face and wiry tobacco-streaked beard as he rambled on about that stubborn-as-a-mule sapling that just seem to come back year after year.

“P’rtected by faes, eh ‘tis!” the old man would declare to a wide-eyed (and even more naïve than the present day) Elke. “Ah cut ‘t down, but th’ likkle imp joost springs back up e’en bigger ‘n stronger the next day!” Although Elke now held somewhat of a dubious trust in Farmer Haidder’s wild tale, there sure enough was an uninvited elm big enough to provide shade for a small family smack in the middle of his field. She had climbed that tree a hundred times in her youth, and when it was in full leaf, its foliage was remarkably similar to this lovely green toggle.

But her strong desire to sense the freedom of the sunny, pleasant-smelling outdoors was her primary focus now, and her praise for the trinket and the complementary goods being offered were less in sweet nostalgia for her homeland and more so that the great myopic beast would have no reason to return to the storeroom to find better wares for his customer.

“It’s absolutely perfect,” Elke reiterated, nervously brushing away a few long strands of hair from her face that had fallen out of their assigned place as she’d turned to look hurriedly for her coin purse. “Now where…?” She could hear the muffled jingling of coins from a bag within a bag, but her tendency to overcram her luggage meant she would have to do a bit of mining. Layers of charms, medicinal balms, survival equipment and for some reason a half-eaten fruit (which had turned just about everything in close proximity disturbingly sticky, which - in combination with the rank stench of this place - meant she was fighting back gags) had settled over the wallet like sedimentary rock. She would be better aided by a pickaxe than a wand at this point.

At last, the mage-turned-prospector unearthed the small leather wallet, breathing a triumphant and relieved, “Oh good!” It hadn’t occurred to her that these lumbering storeowners, in their culture foreign to her own, might request some form of currency other than little metal discs. Did trolls really spend cash? Largely ignorant to their facets not including those involving grinding humans into sausage meat, this was the first time the young woman was being presented with such a question. If trolls spent cash, what did they buy with it? She'd always heard they just took up residence in swampy caves and the weedy underside of bridges and other such unsavory locations, so it's not as if they would use it to buy decorative sconces. She'd also been taught that they had a penchant for eating any living creature small enough that they could kill by snapping in half - rabbits, deer, small children - so spending the money at the market seemed an unlikelihood as well.

With not many goods with which to barter, she could only hope that these two, seemingly expats in a primarily humanoid village, had adopted the local customs. Some aspects of their appearance certainly suggested that they had drifted towards a more civilized existence.

If not, maybe they’d accept a wilted, half-gone, covered-in-lint-and-dirt plum.

“How much, then?” Elke asked, and before allowing the others to get a word in, continued with a rushed, “No less than a few pieces of silver for something with that level of craftsmanship, I’m sure. And a couple pieces of copper for the sewing kit?” With a questioning pause, she glanced between Thing One and Thing Two.

[Seperallis]

How much, indeed! Civilized as these two seemed, the concept of counting and mathematics was still alien to them, an unfortunate circumstance when it came to running something of a storefront. Trolls, you see, have no need for such thing out in their natural element, and have no need of numbers, at least no the kind of numbers and counting we, as civilized folk, are used to. Yes, they understand the concept of one and none, as well as a couple, few, several, many, etc, but one finds little use for mathematics in the life of chasing and eating errant goats and children, if that is indeed all trolls do, and minds not familiar with such concepts generally find them difficult to grasp.

To speak nothing of the concept of money. Trolls did barter, yes, though mainly amongst themselves; fighting could be dangerous, you see, and even a victor could suffer grave wounds, so even trolls had developed a system of trade whereby both may get something they want with considerably less risk of harm. But, the concept of money, the idea that a group of people could come together and agree that a thing has value in trade even though it was intrinsically worthless made absolutely no sense. Only by living amongst the fleshling community had the duo long reconciled the fact that exchange of the tiny worthless disks was how goods were normally exchanged in this community, and thought they generally...aquired what they needed through their own efforts, the two still at least needed some coin to pay for services from others.

So of course, Elke's question perplexed the Waldo-troll, for despite all outward appearances, a troll it still was and a troll's mind it still had. Truth be told, the two beasts regarded the entire haberdashery charade, dressing in "fancy" clothes and pretending to be a shop proprietor, as a hobby; rather, the Waldo regarded it as a hobby, and the Chubb-troll begrudgingly went along with it for lack of a more engaging preoccupation. Very rarely did anyone actually enter the fumigated store, and rarer still did one decide to leave with a trinket that the question of "how much is this worth" rarely entered Waldo-troll's mind, such that when Elke posed the question of him, the beast couldn't help but look to its companion.

Of course, Chubb-troll knew even less about the entire affair than its compatriot expatriot, such that, catching each other's gaze, he simply shrugged with a deep gutteral, "Eh." Waldo, looking back to its tiny patron, mulled the question over further, vainly attempting to hide the fact that it didn't know how to properly respond. "Uhhhhh," it involuntarily responded as it attempted to remember the differences between the silver disks and the copper disks, "Um, yes. Yes."

[Sal]

There was a pregnant pause in which the interior of the little shop fell discontentingly silent, leading Elke to fear that, worst case scenario achieved, she had offended them by offering too little cash and now they were trying to suppress their boiling rage long enough to remember how to construct something akin to proper human syntax. To tell her, of course, exactly how they planned on roasting her. Attempting quick calculations in her head to figure how far back paying double for a sewing kit would set her, she hoped that she would have enough to buy herself out of becoming an ingredient in tonight's stew.

But when the troll in charge of customer service spoke again, anger was one of the few things not present in his tone. The syllables he managed seemed largely uncertain, perhaps a little embarrassed, but certainly not angry.

"Yes?" Elke repeated, not all too convinced at first that she'd heard correctly, nor that Waldo rememered the fine nuances of strategically utilizing the unisyllabic "yes" and "no" to indicate an affirmative and a negative, respectively. With the unusual shape of the beast's cranium, it certainly gave her reason to believe trolls' brains must develop in a manner unique to humans. But not wanting to give him the chance to think it over and realize that he'd grunted the wrong grunt, the mageling quickly followed with an assertive, "Yes!"

In a blink, she'd taken the goods from the clerk's massive, grubby paw and had scooted the coins closer to the store side of the counter, effectively finalizing their agreement as far as she was concerned.

"Thank you for your assistance, Mister Waldo," she added, nerves easing though not quite entirely. "You've been all too helpful." Leaning around the hulking form of the more social troll, she looked to the one sat in the back working diligently away, and tacked on a, "And you, too. Forlag's - got it, thanks!"

"Now if you'll excuse me...!" With the subtlety of a nervous cat, hackles all raised and tail puffed out in telltale sign of fight-or-flight deliberations, she giggled and backed towards the door. Even when she felt her backside connect with the solid door, freedom lying just beyond its oaken barrier, the danger felt nonetheless present. Her feeling around blindly for the doorknob and using her rump to push the door open, bags worked up into a melody of leathery creaks and metallic jangles as she failed a few times and ended up just smacking bodily against the wood, confirmed her existence as a complete loon.

But a live loon she would be.

Nearly tumbling heels-over-head when the door relented and swung out into the fresh outside world, she stuttered out another little trill that was either a giggle or a farewell, or both, and closed, literally and figuratively, this chapter of her journey.

Safe!

As a free woman, Elke's first decision was to give a rather wet snort to clear her nose of that foul, musty odor that still plagued her sinuses. Her clothes, which had undoubtedly absorbed the stench, would need to be hung out in the sun to bake for at least one day. She gave a testing sniff.

Make that two days.

Cloud of noxious fumes hanging around her aside, she was still undigested, and she had gained a piece of valuable information from those two mostly-bipeds: Forlag's would be a great place to search for other out-of-town travellers. If her suspicions were correct, she might even find her target's lodging.

Making sure that she'd taken all her belongings from inside the store, and deciding that if anything was indeed missing she was willing to donate it to Waldo and Chubb, she set her mind on the prospect of soon encountering her person of interest and set off "down road", as advised. Hopefully this Forlag's place would be a legitimate establishment, preferably ran by sentient beings that didn't smell like a summer swamp. She couldn't imagine having to spend an entire night in an inn that smelled like the haberdashery.

Better to sleep under the stars, she agreed with herself, giving a nod of finality.

Now, exactly how far down the road...?

[Seperallis]

While Elke certainly could have sworn she was in the haberdashery for hours, struggling for life against the warm embrace of the troll musk upon her senses, the truth of the matter is that the entire ordeal with the civil beasts surely lasted for no more than several minutes, the sun high overhead having barely moved from the time she entered the village to the time she desperately closead the heavy door behind her and breathed deep gasps of life-sustaining air. Clean air, or at least as clean as the fumes coming off her sun-beaten clothes would allow; the breezes from earlier having died to nothing, the waves of heat coming from overhead would not allow her to fully escape her noxious prison.

Thankfully, not a soul stood nearby to partake in Elke's minor purgatory; she found herself alone in the "road," a few stray strands of tall grasses ticking the sides of her shins between what most surely used to have once been some frontiered vision of a proper cobbled road at some point in the past, now near fully overgrown along its myriad cracks by a lush verdant carpet. The locals, such as they were, probably mostly vacated to their chosen jobs and chores for the remainder of the day while the student sage has busied herself with the two towering trolls and in so doing migrated to portions of the hamlet beyond Elke's immediate surrounds, though there still existed the same group of about three plainly dressed gentlemen back towards the way she entered this tiny patch of civilization. Apparently farmers of some kind, they clutched the tools of their trade, talking in a diction and dialect unintelligible to Elke both in their distance from her and in the foreign undulations of the language, though one might guess weather woes constituted the bulk of their conversation by their constant glances towards the sky.

As to Elke's destination, "down road" could surely only possibly mean that this "Forlag's" place resided somewhere along the stone-based carpet upon which she currently found herself; what used to once pass as some manner of roadway certainly seemed like the commune's widest thoroughfare, all other pathways either sporting packed dirt, not nearly as gracious in width, or both. Indeed, one end of the road seemed to extend beyond the talking farmers and out through what once resembled the idea of a town gatehouse thorugh which Elke previously entered the town; having seen no sign of a "Forlag's" that-a-ways previously, Elke could only assume her target could be found further in town, and so with a deep breath and readjustment of her personal effects, the mageling started her saunter further along the rustic hovels.

Sure enough, her intuition proved correct, as she found herself before a building that certainly did not entirely match the roughly daubed exteriors of the nearby homes. Indeed, the place resided almost completely on the opposite end of the village whence she left the trollshoppe. Aside from a few people tending their vibrant vegetable garden patches and a group of merry children chasing a slightly confused-yet-okay-with-it canine, Elke met no one along her way.

The building itself, which must have been owned by this Forlag person based upon the convenient fact someone previously affixed an embossed brass placard reading "Forlag's Cozy Canker" above a heavy oaken doorway. The entire building itself was only two stories tall, but quite clearly at least four times as big around as any of the buildings past which the wayward witch had wandered; similarly outstanding, the building seemed primarily constructed from whole interlocking fir logs - as opposed to the daub plaster most of the local construction favored - carved with intricate designs of shapes, knots and creatures within the rough bark along the various edges, doors, and windowframes. As opposed to the other homes, this building sported expansive windows on both stories, their casements cast of dark iron and inset with vibrant shades of mostly opaque glass panes.

From the outside alone, it was clear that whoever this Forlag person was, he certainly was either a man of means, or a man of connections.

Inside, the first room in which Elke found herself made Forlag's seem a typical tavern: a large expansive space populated by several long, heavy oaken and benches handcrafted and carved in much the same fashion as the meticulous designs on the outside of the building, the floors of a smooth polished gray stone so flat and fine that no simple masons could have fashioned their faces. Along the various walls hung various decorations from simple colorful banners to large calico and gobelin fabrics embroidered in exquisite scenes and designs...save for the wall behind a long counter, which saw itself home to a host of tapped barrels, from massive floor-to-ceiling affairs to stacks of many dozen barely larger than a bucket, and anything between. All was lit by the dancing lights of the colored glass windows, the mammoth hearth at the far end of the room dead and cold, the hanging braziers long since extinguished from the last night's revelries.

This Forlag must certainly be a man of means, then...but how such means coul even exist in this manner of place might be a niggling question at the back of one's mind.

Conspicuously, the proprietor of the establishment seemed absent from the scenery, the dining hall completely vacant. The entire place seemed lonely, empty as it was; being the middle of the day, people had more productive tasks on their minds than to spend their paltry incomes at a place of bed, food and revelry, but even then one still at least expected the person for which the establishment bore a name might at least be in a place to greet or otherwise keep an eye on those who might slide open a heavy reinforced door and peek inside.

The creepy aspects of such a vacant scene aside, something felt...off, the nagging feeling that not everything was as it appeared. The tingling uncomfortable silent white noise many older mages refered to as the feeling of magic.

[Sal]

Although its name plucked a discordant tune with Elke's senses, the inn itself, thankfully, seemed much more respectable an establishment than had the previous, more pungent boutique. Waldo and Chubb's place had been left, apparently, up the road. It was as much a concern to the young woman as last night's bad dream. For all intents and purposes, she was done with the two gentlecreatures half-competently - in the distraction of her delicious smell, no doubt - working the storefront. They were little more now than notes in her journal, characters with which to entertain her friends as she recanted the tales of her travels.

Not appearing to sport an aesthetic anywhere close to that of the sludge-infested quagmire in which she'd found herself moments prior, Elke gave her approval of first experiences followed by an experimental tug on the heavy timber doors. The hollow jangle of the chimes hanging over the door served as a welcome.

And it was the only one she'd be receiving.

The place was deserted. Only the spirits of past revelries seemed to hang around in the lonely room, swirling with the dust on rising billows of warm air created by the tinted pools of light spilling in through the windows. The faint smell of char from the fireplace and something that might have been smoked meat told of a bustling tavern full of music, laughter and many good memories. But there was nothing now. Elke looked up. Even the candles in the wrought iron chandeliers were extinguished for the day, cold drips of wax like icicles suspended indefinitely and awaiting a heat source to send them on their desired path towards terra firma.

As she stepped cautiously - cautiously, for desire to boldly venture into parts unknown had been dinged a bit by earlier stressors - through the dining hall, the light smack of the soles of her boots on the stone floors echoed in the emptiness.

"Hello?" the student called out in a voice unable to cloak her rising disquietude. Surely a place this in vogue, or at least relatively so when compared to its neighboring facilities, should have some bubbly welcoming committee on staff to greet incoming clientele. While, true, the sleepy little village of Myerleigh appeared as though vacationers were few and far between, this building had been the biggest Elke had seen thus far. It had to be the in-spot of the town; every other building she'd seen was in such a sad state of disrepair that it was either growing algae in the cracks of its waterlogged beams or crumbling from the cornerstone up. Forlag's, on the other hand, appeared to be well-maintained and even recently used, but the current cemeterial atmosphere made her now doubt the assertion that this Canker was quite so Cozy.

Passing by the rows of benches worn smooth by years of friction from heavy backsides and observing the gorgeous tapestries hung along the walls of the hall, Elke made her way towards the far wall where another door stood embedded just to the left of the bar. It made sense that there would be multiple entries to Forlag's; she had simply entered through the wrong one. For those not taking up temporary residence in the hotel, locals and travelers preferring to make their bed under the stars, there would be no need to enter via the inn. That was the door she had come through - the one specifically for the tavern. Had she gone around the back, Elke had no doubts that there would have been another entryway and another sign specifying that all visitors were preparing to enter the inn.

Once in front of the door, the curious girl tested the knob, feeling the slightest sensation of relief when it gave with no resistance, and pressed. The hinges sighed out a weary creak; like their proprietor, they, too, seemed unused to working during the daylight hours.

The door opened up into a separate room where, as expected, a concierge desk sat nestled in one corner.

Finally, she thought, trying to keep her hopes in check; it was easy to get excited as each step through Forlag's seemed to bring her closer to finally capturing her prey.

A hurry took over Elke's gait as she bounced over to the desk, admiring the lovely blonde maple gilded in front with a delicate floral latticework. The desk stood out so much from the rest of the Cozy Canker's decor that the young woman wondered if it hadn't been a gift brought in from some faraway land with a more refined palate for interior design. Or maybe Forlag had settled down with a pretty little wife who didn't quite appreciate the industrial, unpolished look of stone and iron.

Not allowing herself to become too distracted by thoughts of what this Forlag and his petite bride with a taste for goldwork must look like, Elke continued her sleuthing. There was no maitre d'hotel on staff even at the concierge desk - frustrating, but, at this point, not surprising. The place truly was dead. There did seem to be a door behind the desk, smaller and less showy than the one she'd entered through in the tavern and the one she'd taken to move from the tavern into the inn's office. It was unlikely, given its location, that it led out into the fresh outdoors, making her all the more confident that it provided an outlet, instead, to a lounge for the employees of Forlag's. Perhaps it even led into Forlag's own personal quarters - there was no reason an innkeeper shouldn't make his home in his own inn.

The door, however, was closed tight and had been fashioned with no window. The mystery of whether or not the owners were home would remain as such.

A girl such as Elke, however, being the brave explorer that she was, came to the conclusion that speaking to Forlag of the inn and tavern was not quite so very important. What would this man be able to offer her that she could not figure out for herself? Advice on whether or not someone matching the description of her target had indeed partaken of this establishment's hospitalities? Well, certainly, but the small rack of room keys hanging on the wall just behind the counter already told her that at least one person was checked in here; three of the pegs were void of their key: Room 11, Room 14 and Room 20. In a town now well established in her mind as not exactly being bustling, one of those rooms had to host her rare game.

After casting a more than slightly shifty glance around the room to ensure that no one was present to bear witness to her next maneuver, she began backing towards the staircase, eyes fixed on the window of the door behind the counter half expecting to see a face appear. When her heel collided with the bottom step and she had yet to spot a set of whites behind the glass peering in an incriminating glare into her own, she turned and booked it up the flight.

Each of the doorways appeared to be identical - unpainted wood polished smooth enough to prevent splinters, simple rustic fixtures, and a wooden plaque affixed at eye-level and carved out with the room number. The inn was a craftsman's dream, and Chubb and Waldo could stand to take a lesson.

"Eleven, fourteen, twenty," Elke repeated, verbally marking down each of the room numbers whose keys had been loaned out, lest she forget. Casting a glance to the left, and then to the right, she determined that the landing of the staircase had brought her to the hallway between Rooms 13 and 14. "Fourteen it is, then."

Bouncing over to the door, she straightened her back to look as professional as possible, and then gave a quick series of raps on the doorframe.

"Housekeeping! I'm here to, ah, check for mold!"