Chapter 63 - Ask And Ye Shall Receive
"Zen."
"Hn."
"Zen."
"Hrrwhut."
"Please wake up."
The small Scout slowly peels back one of her eyelids, then treats the worried-looking Raccoon-kin to a displeased frown. "Violet... whut."
"You said that if a decent smith came to town, that we should notify you immediately."
"So."
"So... one just teleported in. From the capitol."
"Really."
"Yes."
"How d'ya know he's good."
"Uhm..."
"Violet."
"N-no, uh, he just... when I asked, he said he was amazing."
"At whut. Makin' horseshoes?"
The pudgy teenager blinks twice, then quickly averts her gaze. "There's... different types of smiths, huh..."
Zen allows a tired sigh to escape, and though she wishes she could just go back to sleep and forget this entire episode, she still had the responsibility to thoroughly check out this lead. No matter how it panned out. "Alrigh'. First... help me outta this dog-pile."
Violet fails to stifle a grin as she looks over the tangle of founder-limbs, all inter-woven in a very interesting pattern. "Might take a while."
"Start with whoever's got a foot up my arse."
"That's Jo's knee."
"Yah. Whatever." Four minutes later, a very naked Cat-woman finally emerges from Jess and Mish's bed, then it takes another two minutes to find her enchanted pouch so that she can get dressed. "Okay... where's this super-amazing-smith?"
"Eating breakfast... though... he might be done, now."
"Yeah, well... that's how it goes."
The small Raccoon-kin hurries after her Master, but still manages to peek back three times at the remaining nudity. "H-how was Jessie and Mishone's trip back?"
"Huh? Oh... good, I guess. They were doing some extra training on the way. Three sand-suits apiece."
"Oof."
"What. It's not that heavy."
"I'll... stick with one."
"Since you're not diving into the Dungeon, it'd be fine to not wear any at all."
"No, I want to wear one. 'Cause then it keeps me close with the other girls."
"Good for you. Oh. Reminds me. I need you to teach me how to enhance my body with magic, later."
"Okay."
"Probably take all afternoon."
"Okay. Can Daisy come, too? She always wants more practice."
"Gods... what's wrong with that cousin of yours. More punishment."
"I know... she's getting far too slim..."
"It's not affecting her tail, right?"
"Not... no. But it's getting thinner, too."
Zen offers an absent nod at the thought of the Coon-cousins' oddly-fluffy appendages. Strange that they were among the softest things she'd ever felt. And that included Skyler's sultry Fox-tail. "So... that him in the corner? Looks pretty shady..."
"No. That's Missus Farfenbeck. One of our educators. It's the man in the middle. Who's... speaking to Matron Applegate."
"Well... she hasn't hit him yet. Guess she approves."
"I'll get back to my chores, alright?"
"Reminds me. Stop doing everyone else's duties, too."
"I... like to clean, though..."
"No-one likes to clean."
"I do."
"Fine. Kiss." The short Cat-woman leans over to trade a quick smooch, and also rakes her fingers through the cute Coon's tail as she lithely whirls around.
Once she returns her attention towards her quarry, Zen finds that the Matron had moved off into the kitchens, leaving the burly, black-skinned Panther-kin to the rest of his rather large meal.
Judging by the state of his muscles, this smith apparently worked hard in his craft... but the fact that he chose Jozejemi as a place to relocate to must mean either trouble or delusions... both of which probably meant a head-ache for herself.
The small Scout allows a sigh to escape, then she trudges across the long dining-hall and flops onto the bench opposite of the gorging male. "Hey. So Violet tells me you're a self-proclaimed amazing smith."
"Huh? Oh. The cute Coon-kin, eh?" The Panther flashes a wide smile as he reaches for a huge mug of juice, served piping hot with plenty of imported spices. "She's a good kid. Reminds me of my niece. I'm Rolfe."
"Yuh-huh. I'm Zen. The owner of the two hotels here, another pair in Kileah, one 'f the founders of Jozejemi, and completely fecking exhausted, so excuse my lack of any social graces." The short Cat-woman flags down one of her human girls and makes a curt motion for food-stuffs and drinks, then returns her attention to the frozen male across the table. "'F yer wonderin' how I got so feckin' rich, I'm also an S-ranked Scout."
"Gods. How old are you?!"
"Twenty-five."
"Really."
"Yup."
"You don't look a day over sixteen."
"Then you've been starin' into the forge too long." Zen offers the pseudo-charmer a frown while mentally docking another pair of marks for the attempt at flattery. "Anyways, Violet said you're from th' capitol, huh?"
"That's... where I was doin' my apprenticeship, yah."
"Where."
"The, uh... frmmvlne..."
"Where?"
Rolfe allows a soft sigh to escape before quickly taking a sip from his mug. "The former Vulcan Iron-works. The old man, Master Tvastar, died a couple weeks back. An' his dim-wit son sold the foundry." He half slams his cup against the table in a clear display of his inner-most feelings on the matter. "Three hundred years of history... gone. Jus' like that."
"That's a name I've actually heard of. They make some good blades."
"Made. They've already dismantled the forges and scattered the remains... buncha ingrates..."
"How long were you there for?"
"Nine years. The past three I was working under Master Tvastar, himself. Treated me like a son... a beligerent idiot of a son... but, still..."
Zen offers an absent nod while watching the male begin to lose himself in his thoughts of happier times. "You ever mess with mithril?"
The Panther-kin quickly blinks himself back to reality, then glances around to ensure that they weren't drawing un-necessary attention from the other early-morning customers. "We... had the occasional commission, yeah. Mostly high-ranking Adventurers that needed to alter something they found. But that was always kept quiet."
"Because you'd keep the spare material."
"We... it's common, y'know. For those that can work it. Couple inches here an' there. Do a dozen swords and you've got enough to make a nice dagger." Rolfe offers a shrug, but his eyes still continue to dart around the room. "That's the good thing about that metal. Unlike steel, you can re-forge it as many times as you want, an' it'll never affect the composition."
"You're actin' rather shifty."
"Y-yeah, well... we... weren't authorized to sell it, y'know? But the old man always sold them off an' split the proceeds with th' rest of us. Enough that we'd be able to spread it around our families... but 'f anyone ever found out, then we'd probably all be arrested."
The small Scout fails to completely stifle a wicked grin... both because she'd been given some great black-mail material, and because his story was probably the funniest thing she'd hear all month.
Weapons dealers needed special permits to trade in mithril weapons... but individual sales between citizens needed no such thing.
Although, since mithril was actually rather rare to encounter, when not deeply involved in the process, you'd simply never have need to know the particulars.
"Alright. Well, my lips will remained sealed, simply because I've got more damning secrets than that. First, though, tell me your thoughts on this..."
Rolfe knits his brows together as the thin girl across the table leans a little to the side, then he feels his breath stalling as two chunks of refined mithril appear below her hand still resting atop the long table. Or... "I-is that... was that a dagger?"
"Still is. Kinda." Zen slides the two pieces towards the smith, then relaxes into a bout of silence to see what he comes up with.
"What in the world..." the burly Panther-kin delicately picks up the two pieces, one being a custom-made handle with just an inch and a half of blade above the quillion, and the long, slightly curved other half, stretching out a good seven more inches.
He'd never seen a forged blade of mithril snap. Unless it was stretched out to be nearly parchment-thin...
But this was a proper knife.
"Eh? There's..." Rolfe lines up the pieces as to how they originally would have been, and immediately notices a thin depression at the edge of the split. "This... isn't possible."
"What?"
"It's been... sliced through."
"Really?"
"Yes. Look."
"Oh. I hadn't noticed that, before."
The muscly smith brings the length of blade up close to his eye, and peers in as closely as he can to scrutinize the cut against the grain. "Amazing."
"What is?"
"Well... just... whatever did this, it must have a superior composition. Anything less and this never would have happened." Rolfe lowers the piece of refined mithril, then blinks rapidly in order to refresh his eyes. "So, an orchialum sword, most likely. Heavy, but with an extremely-fine edge. Straight blade. And the person who did this would have needed to be exceedingly strong."
The small Scout raises her brows in surprise of how many things that this smith had gotten right in his assessment... which was basically everything except the type of metal used to inflict such catastrophic damage to her dagger. "Can you re-forge it?"
"Easily... is what I'd like to say." The burly Panther allows a heavy sigh to escape as he sends a forlorn look down to the gorgeous verdant dagger. "It would take a rather special forge, though. Glazed bricks that can trap and reflect the heat. Then you'd need a couple of trees-worth of white Ash, and nearly a ton of low-carbon charcoal."
"What would that cost?"
"Hmph. To make it from scratch? About a thousand gold. And for one dagger? It's just not cost-effective to justify it." Rolfe slides the pieces across to their rightful owner and offers a shrug. "Really? You'd be better off to take it to one of the major city-centres and sell it off. I bet you'd be able to get a good five hundred gold per piece."
Zen purposely makes no motion to claim her broken knife, and instead merely continues to stare towards the Sisterhood's potential exclusive smith.
"What? I'm not lying. Those pieces are still very valuable." The muscly Panther-kin glances from the stoic woman to the dagger and back, then hurriedly clears his throat as he finds her intense glare to be rather unsettling. "I-I don't know who the old man used to sell his stuff to... so don't... ask me..."
"Are you the type motivated by profit, or prestige?"
"Huh?"
"Greed or pride."
"I... just... pride. But, well... there's good coin in it, sure. Enough that I can help out my family when times are tight."
"And are times tight?"
"Y-yeah... kinda."
"So why'd you come here? You could have probably gotten another job in the capitol."
Rolfe deflates a little at the thought of his former home-city, and stays silent for a short while as a pair of cute human girls moving over to set out a breakfast spread for the woman across the table. "Too many memories."
"So?"
"So they're... it's... painful to think about. All those years I spent in the company of so many good people... and to have it all ripped away from me." The burly smith again lets out a heavy sigh as he looks down to his mostly-finished meal. "When I heard about this place, though... I thought it'd be perfect. Brand-new town for a brand-new start. A place to make new memories... an' where nothin' would remind me of the old man, or what happened to the business that he loved more than life itself..."
"Not much to do here, though. Hand-tools and the like. But we've already got a hack apprentice that came up from Kileah for that."
"Tch. Tools..."
"Well? What were you expecting?"
"I don't know... maybe more, somehow. But, well... if it's just one other smith in this place, then I can at least concentrate on serving any adventurers."
"So you specialize in weapons and armour."
"Yeah. Any make, any style, any thing. Except damned tools. They're just not worth the effort."
Zen offers an absent nod while working through a mouthful of light and fluffy eggs made just the way she preferred. "Alright. Tell me somethin'."
"What."
"If I bankrolled a forge strong enough to re-make mithril, and gave you a salary of fifty gold a month... how much loyalty would you give to me?"
"H-how much?! A-a lifetime."
"Hmph. Not good enough."
"It's not?!"
"Not by half. So... if I purchased land and build houses for you and whatever family you wanted to bring down, how much loyalty would that get me?"
Rolfe's jaw hangs low as he stares in utter shock towards the small woman across the table. Much as he'd like to, his brain simly isn't capable of processing her previous statement.
"Still not enough, huh? You drive a hard bargain." The short Cat-woman briefly wipes her mouth with a soft cloth napkin, then points a slim digit towards the broken halves of her dagger. "What if I told you I needed a person capable of forging similar things like that, or larger, out of raw material."
"Y-you... raw material?"
"Malformed chunks of the stuff. Single ingots or larger."
"That... uh... I, yeah, I could do that."
"Would your loyalty to my organization remain absolute? No side-deals? And you'd follow the Sisterhood's rules and regulations?"
The muscly Panther-kin's features relax into an expression of complete seriousness as he trades a long, silent stare with the apparantly-rich woman across the table. "To work with mithril every day, I'd cut off both of my legs with a rusty spoon."
"Dunno what that says about your loyalty, but, whatever. If you think you can serve the Scylla Sisterhood as our exclusive smith, then we're prepared to be extremely generous to both you, and your family. However. Our girls are off limits. You cannot flirt. You cannot harrass. You cannot covet. You do any of these, and we won't simply run you out of town. We need to keep our secrets, and the girls need peace of mind, which means that anyone who crosses us gets buried."
Rolfe's right cheek twitches a pair of times at the notion that he might have just stumbled into the lair of a mythical serpent. And, from the stories his mother used to tell him, he knew all too well what would happen to those that crossed a dragon. "Th... they're too young for me, anyways."
"I even hear that you were sending loving looks in my girls' directions... I'll cut you in ways that'll make you useless to a woman."
"I-I understand."
"Good! Now. How many of your family-members will be joining you in beautiful Jozejemi?"
The burly smith barely surpresses a shudder at how swiftly the little kitten could shift from deadly-serious to happily-care-free. "J-just... my brother, his wife and daughters, an' maybe her parents and younger sister."
"So, five houses, a large smithy... any occupations that any of them are good at?"
"Uh, not... my brother's a labourer, though I could certainly use his help at the forge. I guess his wife is fairly decent with laundry and the like. Makes her own soaps, too. And her sister is a bit of a clean-freak. Does maid-work."
"Your sister-in-law likes dried wild-flowers, huh?"
"Yeah. Smell it on me, eh?"
"You smell like a warm spring breeze. Which is both disconcerting and mildly refreshing."
Rolfe issues an amused snort at the odd compliment. "Can't stink of sweat all the time."
"Tell that to the humans." Zen rolls her eyes at the thought of just how many people she encountered that didn't wash daily. "Alright. So, inside the walls, or located outside?"
"Well... no side-deals, right? So I won't need to pick up any other business. Outside's fine. Better, actually. Less people to annoy."
"What about your family?
"Oh. Well... I don't think they'd mind a little walk. And we've all lived in the cities so long that we've forgotten what it's like to be near a pine-tree."
"Just don't go burning the forest down. We've got plenty of mages who accidentally do that with alarming frequency."
"Deal."
"Good! So!" The short Scout flashes a charming smile across the table as she lifts her mug in a toast. "To the Sisterhood's new exclusive smith! May your blades vanquish all those that seek to disrupt our little slice of Heaven!"
"Uh... cheers?"