Finding the Spark (Pathfinder 1E Quest)

The Season of Still Stone

Water is already a lure to beasts and the carcasses would only make it more enticing, but Gorok assures you than between the four of you and Warty's obviously carnivorous bulk he could be able to carve them up unmolested, yet Mina is uneasy still about the beasts acting unnaturally, a worry you cannot dismiss from your own mind. As for Cob, he scrunches his nose. "Water spider tastes like water, boring meat, have better." Though you do not think it's the lack of flavor that has him lead Warty away before the slurk can partake. Maybe he's more worried than he looks...

The notion that the loud little goblin is also worried about looking weak is a strange one, with all the mad feats he has performed in battle and out of it. Perhaps they are expected of him among his own people, though if that is the case you question how any of them live past their second decade.

After the path parts ways with the stream the bare rock of more spacious delvings is a relief for all of you, though you will miss the fire beetles. At least one cannot get lost on so straight a road. Thus as Gorok scouts ahead and Mina studies more of those scrolls you had recovered from the mine up on the platform with Cob you are left on cat watching duty.

Granted the cat is much more clever than a spider-lizard, not liable to run off into the dark and get eaten, but it does get bored easily. Eventually it falls upon the notion of teaching you the Burnlander script, 'Taldan' as he calls it, a thing made somewhat more complicated by the fact that he cannot speak, but his claws are more than sharp enough to mark the signs in slate and drawings for that matter. Soon the attempt to learn a script had devolved into linguistic puns for their own sake, the sort of silliness your own teacher, the grey-eyed matron of the Hall who had only taught almost as much with the rod as with tongue and chalk, would have found wholly unacceptable.

"Writing is funny?" asks Cob, whom you had not even noticed getting off the slurk, even though it takes some doing.

He almost sounds weary of the notion so you do your best to explain how 'to dance footloose upon the earth' can apparently mean both 'to get drunk' and 'to partake in formal dancing' in the older form of the tongue. According to Pepper the headman of the Ustilavic town of Vautil had once been invited to a carefully ordered dance in honor of Abadar as part of the opening ceremony of a new bridge across the Raiteso River only to show up already quite inebriated culminating with stumbling off the bridge, taking one of the ceremonial tables which marked the dance floor with him. This had allowed him to float safety into the town itself, leading to the tradition of the Vautilians to henceforth call their headmen 'Captain of the High Table'.

Caught up in the story Cob starts giggling himself.


Alas that good cheer, like fine meat and fair light, cannot last forever. As you continue along the tunnel you start to see strange grooves in the floor, almost like sudden ripples in a still pond frozen in place. At least none of them look overly large, barely more than five feet from and end to end at most. So Gorok leads on, at a low and cautious pace, abandoning the notion of hunting for Warty for now. Instead he gobbles down the morloc provisions with gusto as you near the mine. Yet as the last leg of the journey nears you see something peeking out of the stone... a hand attached to that a small arm, grey-skinned but clearly not stone... and just as clearly dead.

Without a word passing between you everyone sets their hands to their weapons as Gorok and Pepper, for his sharp nose, advance to make sense of the thing.

"Stone Gobbler, died inside the rock," the hunter calls back. "Dead for three Long Sleeps."

"Something tells me we are not going to get that trade," you mutter under your breath.

"If something can kill stone swimmers in stone we should know about it," Mina speaks up. "We have a pick and the rock here is soft."

Now it is Gorok's time to be cautious: "Soft stone still stone is, will take long time and make much noise, might draw goblins, might draw worse."

"We should give him a decent burial, not..." she waves at the pitiful sight. "Like that. Do you think someone can rest easy in that state? Cob, what do you think? Should we bury the goblins?"

"Already buried," he replies with a twitch of his ears. "If you want to bury all cut off arm, throw it down pit."

At this the sorceress seems taken aback by the answer, though she cannot deny that this would fit the least definition of a burial. The question is, would it help to know what could slay those who dig through stone like a trekker through mud? On the one hand the long straight tunnel gives excellent lines of sight, one the other...

You are not alone in giving a suspicious look at the stone under your feet.

What do you do about the goblin body?

[] Try to dig it out, see what could have killed him

[] Cut off and burn the arm

[] Write in

OOC: No rolls in this one, it's not like the dead arm sticking out of the rock was hiding.