[X] Gift of Tongues: The caster can speak and understand any language they can hear.
[X] Stealth: Makes the caster harder to hear and see.
[X] Plan: House Cleaning and Research.
-[X] Message for Gizza: Handsome reward aside, things haven't gone as you expected. You have a new mission now, and, more ominously, the chief's attention.
--[X] Wait a moment, what about the dead Troll? And the Squig? What about those Ogres? This story is making less sense by the second and you know too little about it. Better go ask someone in the Cavern about it. Write who you ask.
---[X] Hela, the Hag of the Garden.
-[X] Know your friends: The Grumbling Cavern is quite the lax place. Not exactly a tribe, the Trolls living in it are mostly left at their devices, at least until the chief need them. But that doesn't mean that making connections is impossible. Go out and make new friends
--[X] Hela, the Hag of the Garden.
-[X] Doubts and uncertainties: Overseers are said to wield strange powers. How do you trust the gifts of one, and a shifty one to that? Take a look at the mail and helm with your arcane senses.
-[X] The Dismal Cave: It's your home. For what it is. You're not going anywhere for the time being, so better get used to it. But it doesn't mean you can't work on it.
--[X] Better Bedding: There has to be something better than sleeping on sharp rocks. See if you can find it. For your soon-to-come siblings.
--[X] Homely Religion: The Troll Gods ask little, but they ask nonetheless, and you have been quite the lax child. Work out an altar from which to offer your respects and be watched in turn.
--[X] The Oily Stuff: Ew, what is that? Investigate the strange liquid. Just don't lick it.
-[X] Food!: You're a Frumm, which means you're growing. And growing Trolls need to eat to grow strong and healthy! But who knows what the future brings? Maybe a more careful approach is needed. (Doesn't cost an Action).
--[X] No need to indulge. Your mama and papa taught you better. Eat normally. (Consume 3 units of Squig Meat).
Alright, this is the day. You've put it out long enough, but no more. You wake up early, you splash your face in the pool and down a hearty, squig-based breakfast. A pull to hitch up your trousers, a bandana tied around your forehead and you're ready.
For today is the day you straighten up your cave.
Got something of a rhyme there. Uh.
So, Troll herds wander. Big and ravenous, they have to keep moving as hunting grounds are exhausted and hunger sets them back on the road. Foolish in your opinion, as many other habits your race, which has never been known for temperance, cling to and one you intend to put to rights in time, but that's not the point now.
The point is that Trolls wander, but they don't do so randomly. Yes, food and space availability are always a factor, and Bosses and Chiefs listen to all kinds of rumors before deciding where to aim their herds. But Trolls are creatures of routine; they don't enjoy wandering in new places, doubly so since it was the older and less prone to wanderlust who set the patterns.
So, instead of chancing luck, herds usually stick to the same migratory cycles, moving from place to known place, giving time to hunting and grazing grounds to recover while enjoying the relative certainty of finding unspoiled prey to feast upon.
And good nests.
Any Troll worth his skin loved a good nest. A warm, humid place to lay down after a day's hard work, put up his feet and snooze in peace, without fear of waking up with a bolt in the head. It was an integral part of the perfect life of eating, sleeping and entertaining any Troll dreamed for himself.
Down the millennia, as they trudged along the same-ish routes, the herds found the best spots for that, or as close as possible, and carved nests. The results are places that have seen hundreds of generations coming and going, and have been gnawed, smacked and manhandled into the closest Troll-kind could come to cities, hollows so steeped in Troll-stink that they may as well be theirs and theirs alone.
Not all Trolls clustered in herds. Only a Troll-Boss could gather enough to make a group worthy of the name, so many went in smaller groups, or even alone, congregating as their fancies hit them. But they all returned to the Hema, the Big-Nests, to mate, to congregate, to eat or just to take a nap. That's where Trolls always dwelled, and nothing but them was allowed to settle in.
Most of the time.
It spoke volumes about how important it was a nest to Trolls that, primitive with short attention spans as they were, spent so much effort on their haunts. Why, no wandering Troll would leave another Troll's nest different from how exactly he found it, doubly so for a Hema. Of course, what consisted as cozy for a Troll would probably have a humie vomit, but eh, the point stands.
The Grumbling Cavern is a nice spot, but not a Hema, you think, not even close. But it doesn't take away the fact that it's your home, and a home requires work to make it worth of the name.
You face your cavern, fists planted in your sides with resolution. Your eyes scan the plane, and, doing your best to ignore how horrible it is, you start picturing all the improvements you're going to bring. An altar there, a cozy fire here, chimes for a good night's sleep of course, a nice, warm bed, a trunk for your stuff; oh! And a few crystals up that wall for light. And food storage. And a small plot for planting. You also need bones to thicken the smell, maybe a basin for water…
You rub the back of your head, shaking away the growing list of things you need, most of which an average Troll would consider ridiculously fancy. But hey, you're the creative one there.
First, the bed. Trolls sleep long and hard to digest and keep their ridiculous metabolism up, so good bedding is essential. In the barracks, you saw Brutes sleep in their armor on slabs of stone molded into body-shaped depressions, piled on with dried grass, animal skin and their own discarded hair. Wrestlers, more careful with their bodies, preferred to nest in depressions dug in the ground and packed with moss and fungal fibers.
Nice, but you want better.
Gathering what you need takes work. Lots of it. While the other Trolls wrestle in the pit or trundle out of the cave with clubs in hand, you sniff every centimeter of the cave for materials. In a stroke of luck, you find two wedges in the abandoned blacksmith, the heavy iron spikes as thick as your wrist. Another you get from Hade, the old Troll giving it to you with a mix of distrust and curiosity. A rough fourth comes from hours of hammering a particularly tough bit of strangely luminescent crystal sprouting from a wall.
Next, you buy from a wandering Goblin merchant a large canvas made of Squig hide. You've never heard of a Colossal Squig, even less seen one, and it breaks your heart to give your hard-earned food away, but the skin is incredibly tough – the merchant gleefully says that it was meant for making siege machines – and both taller and larger than you are.
Getting the quantity of rope you need is tough. Rope is valuable, and you don't get deals that are less than exorbitant for even a smidge of it. Hade, by now your go-to Troll for anything solid, make his position about handing out more stuff clear by showing you how far a Frumm can be launched with a kick.
Thankfully, the garden you found underneath is more rope-providing than your kin. A bunch of strange plants resembling spindly columns made of dappled slate dangle with forests of hair-like strands. You lack the tools to cut it, but again luck is on your side: a bunch of them pile on the cavern floor in tangled heaps, discarded by whatever lifecycle those plants – is that the word? - follow. Eager, you gather them all up in bundles and lumber back to your cavern.
In the next days and weeks, you wait for more to fall but end up disappointed. The strands don't budge and the plants neither. Grumbling, you make a note to come back with tools.
Gathering moss and fungus, glowing and not, is easier: the Cavern is a glut of it, no matter how much the Trolls chop and rip at them. A commonality with Greenskins?, you wonder with no little curiosity, hands covered in slime and juice as you sink them into spongy beds. They too had mushrooms and more that follow them anywhere they went. But Trolls had no Squigs though. Bah. Another matter you'll have to discover.
As you sit cross-legged in your caverns, surrounded by heaps of strands and fibers and your squig-sheet, you feel quite the enterprising young Troll. What you don't feel is making rope. Rather, after all that hauling left you quite starved for a nap. But you're trying to shake off Troll laziness, and since you're not keen on entertaining cut-throat business practices, you make necessity virtue and get to work.
Making rope, you realize after a couple of days, is hard. Untagling strands is hard enough, even with your Troll strength, and thankfully your fingers are long and nimble and the strands themselves thick enough you don't have problems holding and separating them, but when you try to twist them together, vague memories of watching your mother doing the same in your head, you can't make them stick together, no matter how much you twist and pull.
It doesn't help that after a while, Hade takes the habit of lounging by your cave's entrance and chuckling at your "faffing about", as he calls it. What he doesn't realize is that his laughing puts a fire into you, and you redouble your effort, to spite the old pebble if nothing else.
Nobody says that steady effort doesn't pay off. It takes you weeks, but eventually, you find a somewhat reliable method to make rope by twisting one strand clockwise and then wrapping another around it, counterclockwise, then repeating it for bigger and bigger ropes and then tying it at the end with knots. You suspect that no Troll felt as much simple joy as you do when you manage to twist something together resembling a rope.
The result is… a result. Two thick, long bundles of strands, lined with knots and fraying spots. Still, you have it. Sure, your arms and shoulder are sore to hell and back, and you suspect you managed it only because you are a Troll and have Troll strength and resistance, and by how tough those strands are. Still, you're satisfied… alright, you're giddy with happiness.
The next step sees you climbing to the ceiling to hammer your wedges into cracks in the rock. You have to snarl and hiss away investigating red eyes more than once, but thankfully there's no lack of stony protrusions and stalattites, and these are all cracked enough for the job.
You're careful, fearing to trigger a collapse, but thankfully, the worst is a handful of falling gravel. You're relieved but not surprised. After all, no nest could endure centuries of Troll living without being very, very tough.
Once the wedges are in place, you tie your big ropes at them, leaving two thick strands to dangle down to the floor. These you grab and then you start to panic, because you realize only then how insanely tough the squig-skin is, and you have no idea how to puncture it.
You gnaw and munch at the thing, soak it in water, beat it with your cudgel, jump on it, splash it with any kind of mushroom juice you can find. All for nothing. The thing mocks you, repelling any attempt without a scratch.
That's when Hade surprises you, the old Troll pushing you aside with a grunt and dripping something on the skin, which, to your astonishment, immediately leaves a perfectly round hole. Without a word, the Troll repeats the miracle three times, and you're left with four perfectly serviceable anchoring points.
You're still gawking as he handles you one long, flat stone, and pick up your jaw from the floor to tie it up to one end while he does the same with the other.
The stone has a hole in the center, and thorugh this you pass your rope, then divide it into two thick strands which you tie to the skin. As Hade finishes doing the same, you step back to admire your handiwork.
The hammock is large and airy, the tensed cords keeping it steady in a way that it rocks gently as you push it. The expanse of squig skin curves softly, forming a perfect nest for you to curl into.
Excited, you barely resist the urge to try it immediately – and don't notice Hade lumbering away without a word -. Instead, you load it with rocks and almost squeak in happiness when it easily holds your weight and more.
You load it with soft, perfumed moss mixed with fungi beds, gravel and dirt, because no Troll could sleep soundly without some dirt against his back. You then hide your satchels, the most important of which is the one containing your food, among the stuffing, so that you don't need to get up to pick the stuff you need. You also add some of the glowing mushrooms, so that you're never out of comforting luminescence.
The result is so beautiful that you could start weeping. That wouldn't do, so you instead hop on your new perch, delight in the gently rocking motions and then contentedly drift off to sleep. Promisingly, you dream, but not of chasing prey or inventing new things. You dream of future dreams, each of them a drop of calm waters like a pool in the silent world beneath.
When you awake, it's back to work with renewed energy.
Your papa and mama promised they would remain in touch, and you made sure they'd be able to by telling them where you intended to go and the general direction. Old Rockgut instinct would make the rest. And that meant that you expected to have guests sooner or later. Welcoming them to sleep on sharp rocks won't do.
The obvious solution is to make piles of soft stuff. Moss and fungi, the cavern is filled with it, and you doubt one hundred Trolls like you could exhaust them. But the idea doesn't satisfy you. It wouldn't feel right to sleep in that nest of happiness while your kin snooze as your average Frumm. There's something of a point of pride in there as well, but you're going to focus on the problem first.
You once saw, in a Shaman's dwelling, a heated bed. How hard could it be to make some of your own? A lot, it turns out. Memories give you the gist of how to make one, but reproducing it is tricky. Still, you try.
The floor of your cavern, which horrible features you're getting painfully aware of, is solid rock, and you have no tools to break it apart, so you have to get creative.
Choosing a patch high enough not to be invaded by the "oil", you carefully layer it with dirt, hiding the bedrock underneath. That done, you dig three small chambers in it and set a small fire in each. Very carefully, - fire is a finicky beast, ready to lash out at the first disrespect – you blow the flames for a while, then, when they look hot enough, you cover each chamber with a large, flat stone. In theory, now you wait until the stones are warm, then open the chambers, smother – gladly- the fire with an avalanche of dirt and then reseal them. The stones would then make for warm beds for tried Trolls, even comfy ones if layered with more dirt. No mushroom or anything though, you don't want to risk something catching fire.
It doesn't work. To your frustration, smoke keeps escaping through the fissures between the stones and as much as you manage more or less to stop it by packing them with dirt, the stones themselves don't heat up as much as you want, nor do you dare to lower them closer to the fire, since you don't want to cook your siblings.
To your eternal surprise, Hade comes to your rescue once again, unloading a mass of reddish dirt from a basket and then tromping out to get more. From there, the work consists in you following his grunted instructions in a bewilderment and him ignoring your questions as he brings basket after basket of the stuff, alongside pit pots filled with water.
Trying your best not to choke on your questions, you do as you're bid. Spreading the reddish dirt on a flat stone, you break apart any clump hiding inside it until you get a mostly homogenous mass. After soaking it in water, you knead it with attention, mixing it with Troll hair as you do and adding water to keep it malleable. The result of your work is a growing line of humid, brick-shaped masses of grey dirt.
You watch with greedy attention as Hade takes them. The Old Troll grunts at your fire-chambers, eyes turning baleful as they lay on the fires' remains. The following hour is you getting the scolding of your life for daring to think that bringing fire close to a Troll bed was a good idea.
"Fire hates us, stupid!"
"It burns the Mother's blessings!"
"Did you want to turn your family into roasts?"
"Lemme catch you doing this again and see what happens!"
Admittedly, you didn't think it through. Maybe, just maybe, the success with your hammock may have gone to your head. Still! You saw a shaman with a heated bed once!
You regret mentioning it as, right after, Hade's scolding turns physical.
"He didn't use fire, stupid!"
Following his instructions, and making sure to keep your mouth shut, you layer the walls and floor of the three chambers with rocks, which you then cover with clay – nice name - . The results are… pleasing to look at, a strange kind of fulfillment rising inside you as you cover the chambers with the flat stones, and again after mortaring the fissures with more clay and covering them with layers of pressed dirt, when you're left looking at a smooth, soft-looking surface.
Hade dug three short tunnels in the mound, each connected to a chamber. As you watch, he pushes porous-looking, black stones in it. He lets you touch one, and you're vaguely surprised to feel it quite warm. The old Troll puts one in a bed of fungi of a vibrant rust, and you watch with rapt fascination as the stone sink in it, the fungi steadily losing volume as the black stone sizzles softly, growing hotter.
"No smoke," the old Troll grumbles. "And no hurt." And to show it, he touches a sizzling rock with a finger and then shows it to you, the burn on it already on its way to recovering.
From that, it takes little to complete the project, and you're left with three perfectly serviceable heated beds that are sure to make the happiness of any sibling on its way and to be the envy of any Troll in the neighborhood. Speaking of which, you hope nobody comes to throw you out of the cave now…
"A Troll's cave waits for his Final Dream," Hade sentences when you voice the doubt, meaning that once given, a cave lasts until death, and his eyes glimmer with a hard promise of violence that you don't think any Troll, not even a Steel-Eater, would dare to cross.
It relieves you, but you don't get to offer your thanks. Hade glances at your hammock, then at the beds you built. He grunts in a vaguely appreciative manner, claps you on the shoulder and lumbers out of the cave.
[Making a bed: Roll, 100. CRIT! Making THE bed!]
[Looking at the Frumm work: Hade Roll: 86+10 (Work Does The Heart Good), Very interested and helpful.]
[Making more beds: 1-8 (No tools) BAD-CRIT! Fire+bed+Troll. What can go wrong?]
[HADE INTERRUPT! Roll, 91. Not like that, stupid!]
[Impress him: Roll, 76. He's quietly impressed.]
You lost 1 unit of Squig Meat!
You built the Supreme Bed of Absolute Comfort!
Thanks to superior rest conditions, you're able to digest better and faster as well as improve your body conditions. As long as you sleep on this bed regularly, you add 1 Food point to what you eat. The added point replicates the special features of one food type, if present.
You built Coal-Stone Beds for your siblings! You still have no guests, but they're sure to love the accommodations you prepared for them. Better not mention that fire bit though.
Hade Relationship improves! "Work does the heart good. Can't be a bad boy if he has an eye on it". Relationship moves to Indifferent (Good attitude).
AC - This one definitely got away from me, but dang, those rolls. You guys got insanely lucky with that first Crit, since it attracted Hade's attention enough that he was there to stop you from committing future Troll-cide with fire. And now you know that a Troll nest is his life. The better facilities you have, the better long-term advantages. Something else for you guys to keep in mind. Also, I decided to change the turn timeline a bit. Now, each Time last TWO turns. So a Time lasts two months, while Turns remain unchanged. Next turn will still be Fight Time. You'll get your food each turn instead of each Time but the quantity doesn't change. Also, don't get too used to this kind of length (please). See you with the second part of the results.
