Dragon Harem Quest - Or: Saying You Were Gay Wasn't The Conversation-Ender You Hoped For

Alright. Okay. The irony of looking for a map without a map is not lost on you but you don't need one. Your memory is absolutely flawless, your spatial awareness impeccable, and with your two known reference points you can triangulate that the place you need to go is precisely abouuuuut... there!

You proudly hold your foreclaw out, one massive scythe-like talon extended towards your goal. A moment later you remember that you still don't exactly know what you're looking for or how long it'll take. The sun hangs low in the sky, so close it's almost as if you could reach out and pluck it like a burning fruit, or the most brilliant coin of all. What you wouldn't give to be able to clutch it tight to your chest, feel its warmth- no, focus. No time for fantasies about treasure. Especially when, you realise glumly, you have none on you right now.

Look at you. All the way out here all by yourself and not even a bag of money to sleep on. Just grass and leaves and twigs like a... like some mossy, dirty, tree-loving green dragon. Ugh, what you wouldn't give for a nice violent thunderstorm. You sluggishly pick your way out of the trench you gouged in the earth, accompanied by a few booming, splintering smacks as your tail carelessly cracks open more trees that didn't have the courtesy to get out of your way.

Should you take off right now, just keep going? No, no the sun's too low, and you feel drained enough already. You should sleep on it, try to recharge, try to make sense of what you're doing in the morning. Try not to think about how much ground Takara could cover while you sleep - they're just some demon fox thing, no way they can outpace a dragon in hot pursuit for long. Then... where will you sleep? Not out here surely. Will you have to buy a bed for the night in some roadside inn? Like a mortal? Have to lie down in all those thin sheets and soft blankets crushed down into a soft-skinned disguise all night? With what money? You start pacing, going around and around in circles until you're making a second trench with your heavy footfalls, tail smacking on the surrounding trees again and again as it lashes anxiously to and fro. You'd have to pick a disguise and keep it, but what? It'd have to be something that could use your line of credit from House Elding, that'd lead to questions, maybe give you away, no no you can't do that it's too much to think about right now then what should you- aaaauuuuuuuuggghhhhh!

Crack. You veer off-course a little and your armoured shoulder ploughs straight into another tree. The ancient bark buckles beneath your bulk, the whole thing tilting backwards as gnarled roots come free with an earthy rrrrip.

"(fuck)" you mutter.

No. No disguises, no credit - at least not yet. You're doing this as a real dragon and that means learning how to sleep places you don't like. You'll feel better in the morning. It's just one night. You can do this.

As it turns out it's really hard to find good places to sleep out in the wilderness. You wander to and fro through the woods for so long in such endless looping circles that even you almost get lost. You feel like a huge clumsy lumbering oaf, awkwardly shimmying and shouldering your way between trees, gingerly pushing the springier growth out of the way in an attempt to be delicate, flinching and sagging in defeat as they crack or uproot anyway. There are no conveniently dragon-sized caves, not even mortal-sized ones for your bipedal form. You make an abortive attempt to build a shelter out of all the trees you've been knocking down before you realise you don't know the first thing about building anything more complicated than a sandwich and scatter the lot with a swipe of your mighty foreclaw. You take a break to hunt down dinner but the bear sits heavily in your stomach in one big, sour lump that refuses to digest. With the night falling in earnest and you at the end of your tether, you finally resort to shrinking down and wedging yourself into a small hollow beneath a tree, curled up in a scaly blue ball as the leaves rustle in the wind above you.

You can't get comfortable. You can't stop tossing and turning, twisting and squirming, trying to burrow into some measure of comfort and finding nothing. You can't stop thinking. You keep hearing Mother's voice, Jun-ho's voice, Takara's voice, Makram's voice, all so clear and hard to ignore it's like they're really there and not just in your head. You keep replaying things in your head, over and over and over again, not even to try and think of what you could've done differently but because you can't stop. What sleep you do achieve is fitful and stop-start, tracked only by the moon lurching a little higher in the sky during the gaps in your memory.

By the time the moon reaches its zenith you can't take it any more. You burst out of your sad little hole and take flight, stripping the trees to bare boughs beneath you in the wake of your mighty wings. You soar up and away, cold night air flowing over your impenetrable scales, the blanket of night as thin as gauze to your eyes. You flap harder, rise higher, until you break through the hanging layer of silver-grey cotton and skim the surface of the clouds. Beyond the reach of any but another dragon.

Your thoughts come with you. Your flight is lonely but you're never alone. This is why you hate flying too far.

Once the hours turn to days, the only solace is your exhaustion. Your thoughts grow too sluggish to bother you as much, the deep-muscle ache of too much flying in too short a time helps distract you, and while restful sleep is still so distant you feel more confident calling what you do 'passing out' at least it blanks out the world for a few hours. It's a relief almost as blissful as getting struck by lightning when you finally reach the area you came to search on the third day, sun already hanging low in the sky, and after only one turn of your exploratory spiral you spy something worth investigating.

It's like a part of the map was touched with a match, or maybe just a heated iron rod. Not enough to set the whole thing aflame but just enough to sear, to scar, to leave it scorched an ugly yellow that leaves no ambiguity to the notion that something happened here. The sign outside of town cheerily identifies it as White Table and welcomes you to stay, but even that lingering scrap of cheer is pitted and worn by the sea wind and no one has seen fit to repaint it.

It's definitely some kind of company town, sitting atop a coastal plateau within spitting distance of the ocean. It's got all the accoutrements you'd expect; housing and carousing, food and goods, storehouses and stables, a weatherworn Arosan fjörlaug with its silver wave icon tarnished yet still there, and the telltale signs of a mineshaft sunk into the earth. The cliffs are made of chalk - you heard something about it being really useful for making mortar, or maybe the bricks themselves? - and it seems they were happily mining away at the heart of it all until recently. It looks like part of the cliff collapsed at some point, pitching whatever used to sit there over the edge and smashing it into the mixed-up pile of chalky detrius that now lies on the beach, and from your vantage point you easily spy at least half a dozen sinkholes, but there's more to it than just mining accidents.

The whole town has an air of stillness about it. Stangant and half-dead, as if holding its breath waiting for its heart to beat again or stop for good. The green grass of the rolling plains all around it slowly shrivels and dies the closer it gets to town, withering to tinder-dry stalks of jaundice yellow around bald patches of dusty, gritty earth. What trees remain are like driftwood, twisted and gnarled and so brittle a townsperson could probably snap off a limb for the fire with their bare hands. Even the seas in the bay below seem lifeless somehow, sour and still as soup, fishing boats lying beached in the white sands. A manor lies further down the coast to the south, no doubt belonging to the mayor, but even from this distance it too looks too cold, too still, too empty. You wonder if it's even occupied at this point. Even the heart of town seems occupied only by a few stragglers like tiny black blots in the distance, flies crawling across a dried-out carcass.

A lead. You need to learn more, but you're not getting anywhere looking like a dragon. But then what form should you take?

[ ] Lord Elding. Make something up about being in the neighbourhood on a business trip and wanting to buy chalk and head for the mayor's manor.
[ ] Wandering adventurer. You'll have to come up with a pretty good lie to explain why you're all the way out here *and* unlicensed, but at least you'll have good reason to be ignorant about everything.
[ ] Local labourer. Fake it with the working class and see if you can glean anything about what happened in the mines or to the land.
[ ] Arosan priest. There's few things that could cause this kind of degradation, and an upset god is one of them. Maybe faking it into the fjörlaug can get you some answers there.
[ ] Plutocracy official. You know enough business-and-numbers lingo to fake that alright, maybe a look at the official records can get you an idea of what happened in this town.