Tientrich helps with repairs at the glassworks and buys a farm.
At the Glassworks[]
Tientrich stood in the furnace room of the glassworks and realised the enormity of the task he had set himself, and his inability to complete it as simply as he had hoped.
Seeing Ameiko that morning at the Rusty Dragon, eyes red-rimmed from a night of grieving for her lost father, he had offered to help repair the damage at the factory. A few simple mending spells, he had thought, and the job would be done. Little had he counted on the fact that to mend the damaged equipment, he would need to at least be able to work out roughly how the pieces went together. And between his lacks of knowledge on the subject, and the thoroughness of the goblin’s destructive mischief, he had no idea where to start. And of course there was no way known he could repair any of the damaged products, although the glass could presumably be melted down and reused. Couldn’t it?
Of course he wasn’t the only one here. Not all of the glassworks’ employees had been present when Tsuto had led his goblin raid, and those that had escaped were now here sifting through the wreckage. And he soon discovered that while the knowledge they possessed could help with some of the equipment, the expertise to repair some others was missing.
It proved to be a long, tedious, and tiresome day of sifting through debris, sorting the pieces into piles, trying to roughly reconstruct where everything should have been on a given item, and then hoping his magical prowess could draw it all back together. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not, usually due to not all of the pieces being present. Then more sifting and sorting was required before trying again. By the end of the day, however, some semblance of order seemed to have been restored to the room, though he was told production couldn’t restart until a few more critical devices had been repaired. And how was he going to do that when nobody knew quite how to repair them?
“Magnimar,” one of the workers offered. “There are people there who would know. They won’t come here free though.”
“Just get them and I’ll sort it out.” The druid replied. To be honest he had been wondering what use he had for the gold that he had acquired as his share from his adventures here in Sandpoint, and was sure he could spare enough to hire someone to spend a day or two continuing to help him with this task.
It would likely be several days, however, before help could arrive. That suited him just fine though; after the events of the past few days he was keen to remove himself from the town for a little while and return to the calming influence of his forest.
Twitch buys a farm[]
Before heading off on the Long Coast Road toward the whisperwood, Tientrich returned to his room to don his armour and collect his spear, now showing far more variety in the characters carved around its haft after the events of the past few days had unfolded. While his elven heritage gave him no problems with visibility travelling as the day waned, it could obviously no longer be assumed that the roads were safe. He also took up his backpack and scroll case, freshly stocked with a pot of specially prepared ink and half a dozen fresh sheets of vellum for scribing some of his less-used, but still valuable spells as scrolls.
As he headed south past the Ashen Rise, the danger presented by the recent goblin raid became more apparent, the first farm south of the rise now showing nothing but a burned out husk of a building, and the crops mostly equally burned or destroyed. Tientrich did not know the residents of the farm, but overwhelmed by concerns for their safety made his way to an adjoining property for news.
The news was, unfortunately, not good. Tientrich remembered the ranger’s story of ransacked buildings and murdered families as the story of the farm unfolded, the farmer and his wife not having survived the goblin raids. The one positive was that the children, hidden away in a cellar, had survived. The children were now with relatives in Magnimar ,who had no interest in farming nor wanted any reminder of the disaster that had occurred there, and had offered the land to this neighbour for sale. Lacking the means to either purchase or work extra land, the farmer had instead offered to assist in selling it for them. Thus did Tientrich walk away nearly bereft of gold, but now the proud owner of a stretch of land along the Long Coast Road. He was unsure what he would do with it as yet, but thought the opportunity using the land more thoughtfully than the average farmer was one too good to sacrifice. Deciding to spend the night on his newly acquired land, the druid walked to the top of one of the hills at its southern edge and looked out over the hinterlands, as he cooked himself a pot of goblin stew (it seemed foolish to let all that meat go to waste, and nobody else seemed to know what to do with the attackers’ corpses. Unfortunately he had had no luck at convincing others of the advantages of making use of such natural resources, so it seemed the remainder would go to waste).
Sitting down to his meal, Tientrich soon had to admit that the general populace may have had the right of it this time. While he had used his talents to free the meal of any harmful nature, it turned out that goblin was not a particularly palatable meat. Sighing, he tipped out most of the contents and settled down to his scribing.
The following day saw the druid deciding that restoring the farmland was probably too big a task for him to perform himself, particularly as he was as eager as his newfound companions to continue following up on the things they had found out in light of the raids. Instead he decided to work for the next few days on starting a garden to grow some of the herbs and other reagents he often struggled to find in the Whisperwood.
He spent the next few days travelling to and fro to Sandpoint to hire tools and work animals while digging over a likely stretch of soil, and three days later had something that looked like it was ready for the beginnings of a garden. He didn’t have time at present to begin gathering plants, but that was okay- a bit of time for the goblin corpses he had ploughed in to start breaking down into good fertilizer would be beneficial anyway. In the evenings he continued scribing his scrolls, and only had 2 remaining by the time he had to return to the Rusty Dragon to meet the expert he had bought in from Magnimar and finish his task at the glassworks.
Another two days of mending in the glassworks and Tientrich felt, if not rested, at least that he had had a break from the unusual events that had begun with his arrival in Sandpoint. When the council of Druids in Mierani Forest had sent him here he had certainly not anticipated that he would be battling goblins and demons, but if he was honest with himself he had to admit he was beginning to enjoy the path the spirit totems of his people had set him on when they guided him from the Storval Plateau.