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[Salmeuk]

My name is Sumost Twoblunts, and I am a forest bandit. Or, at least, I used to be, until the King posted a gigantic bounty on my head for looting one of his royal caravans. Pretty soon I got word that a horde of treasure-seekers was headed my way, and although none of them knew exactly where I was, it was only a matter of time when half the nation was looking under every stone and behind every bush for Sumost's famed forest gang. I was forced to flee, leaving behind an army of followers, my forest hideout that had taken years to construct, and a pile of loot fit for a king. Literally, since we stole it from him.

I called upon my followers to join me. I was surprised that even six of them stepped up to ride with me; I held no illusions about where the loyalty of these thieves came from. Those six were

Boki, the thick-skinned ranger who preferred silver over gold,

Uzin, the obsessive-compulsive bookkeeper with whom I had entrusted the finacial side of my operations,

Oli, the axe-weilding ox-of-a-man who always insisted that he would much rather be writing poetry about unicorns,

Rorte, who was an unremarkable axefighter but truly the most kind, respectable and genuine friend I've ever had,

Ibu, an archer who never stopped thinking about the big picture. He once proclaimed, after a few too many beetroot wines, that "I personally don't respect a society that has settled into harmony without debate and strife." He also likes really big turtle shells.

and Pestrat, the introspective spearman who seems overly-conflicted about every action he takes.

With nothing but our weapons, our packs, and our horses, we left the hideout in the dead of night. I had spent 7 years accumulating the treasure we left behind, but avoiding prison or death is priceless. I did, however, stash a hefty bag of gold coins in the bottom of my pack. Should we manage to survive long enough to make it somewhere people aren't trying to kill us on sight, the coins might prove useful.

***

Spoiler: Click here for the story of how we managed to escape to the northern continent. It only took an entire year. (click to show/hide)

 Our first challenge was to flee the immediate boundaries of TNOM (The Nation of Mortifying), since the unknown wildlands would deter the majority of our pursuers. We spent a week riding through the coastal grasslands. We traveled off the roads, leapfrogging from thicket to thicket in an attempt to avoid notice. One morning, we woke to five missing horses. Rorte, our second watch that night, had fallen asleep. Some beast had spooked the horses, enough for them to rip themselves from their bridles  and run into the night. Rorte apologized so profusely we couldn't help but feel sorry for her, she seemed to take the guilt of the matter to heart and that's all I could really ask for. There was no time to search for the missing horses, so we loaded up the remaining two with our packs and set out.

That day the wind picked up, a real mean-spirited gale, and we were stuck trudging through the bitter cold. It was still blowing come nightfall and we couldn't manage a fire - that is, until Boki took notice and brought out a pair of items - a small wooden splinter, and a leather pouch. The splinter was coated in a waxy  substance, and when it made contact with the greenish powder Boki removed from the bag it burst aflame. At last we could boil some water for the tea and the yams.

Another few days passed, the wind let down, but we were running low on food. We checked the road chart and saw that the small hamlet of Springgroves sat a day to the northeast. We were still well within the boundaries of TNOM, so we timed our arrival for just after midnight. Ibu scouted ahead, and returned quickly with the location of the farmers market.

We snuck through the back window and filled our packs with potatoes, stale bread, dried fish, garden vegetables, and even a whole ham shank. There was a keg of ale standing against the wall, looking awful lonely. We had no glasses but we took turns drinking straight from the tap. I wouldn't call any of us lightweights but we probably should have eaten something first. Stumbling through the unlocked front door and right into the enraged shopowner was a surprise, though I think he got the worst of it. We held him at swordpoint until he told us where the stables were, then tied him to the ale-keg and sprinted out. We stole five horses and, with gleaming smiles, galloped out of town and into the foothills.

The next month was spent skirting the mountains to the north. We had been followed by a small party of horsemen after raising the alarm at Springgroves, but managed to lose them over a few days of fast riding. We finally arrived at our destination, Munchedferry, the easternmost town of TNOM and our best bet for escaping the continent. We met with a number of ship captains, seeking passage across The Ocean of Pillars. The first one seemed interested, and left to discuss it with his crew, but never came back. I worried that he had recognized me and gone off to alert the local guards, so I rushed the next meeting and probably spooked the guy. You can't rush these things.

The third captain was more than willing, as long as I payed him upfront, and promised a significantly faster passage than the other two. His cost was half our coin, but worth it if it got us out of this place. His name was Geno and his ship was called The Salty Fly. We sold our horses at the tavern and embarked with the setting sun.

Two days later, we arrived. I had specifically asked him to drop us off at an unpopulated beach, so he personally rowed us out to the shallows and wished us luck. He had the strangest smile on his face as we disembarked, like we had just done him a favor or something. The sun was bright that day, and we all felt antsy after being on a ship, so we set out immediately with Boki leading the way.

After only an hour we reached. . . another shoreline. That was our first clue that something wasn't right. Another two hours and we had circled the island, yes, island, and Pestrat burst out crying. We all wanted to cry at the realization. Geno and his crew had dumped us barely a third of the way across the straight on some strange island, pocketing our money and no doubt returning to the mainland to find another group to scam.

We spent six months on that island. We ate mangos for the first month, then Ibu figured out how to trap turtles. We ate turtles and mangos for the second month. At that point, we had completely depopulated the local turtle population, and so for the last four months it was just mangos.

In one way or another, we all lost our minds.

Boki started climbing trees for no other reason than to climb trees, or as she put it, "What else are we supposed to do?". She wouldn't even pick mangoes, instead choosing to sit and stare at the horizon as if she might will a ship into existence.

Uzin held out for a few months, then broke down and started to categorize every mango we ate by shape, size, weight, taste, and an obscure "mango-ness" that seemed to depend entirely on her mood at the time. She wrote her data with charcoal on palm leaves, which were then bound together with turtle sinew and further organized. Things got really dark when she made an abacus and began to mumble about "percentiles" and "confidence intervals."

Oli started making things in the sand. First, it was just a small drawing as we were waiting for the tide to go out so we could empty the turtle traps. It was always unicorns. Then, he started going out to the beach at night, drawing for hours. He was obsessive about the sticks he used to draw, called them his "implements" and hiding them underneath his leaf-bed. One morning we woke up to the oddest thing of all: a larger-than-life unicorn statue made from leaves, sticks, and a carved snail shell for the horn. We still have no idea how he built it in a single night, or how it managed to catch fire, or why it burnt so quickly. He stopped drawing after that.

Rorte, bless her heart, attempted to keep everyone sane by creating a strict duty schedule. She thought the structure would keep us rational, but it backfired when one by one we gave up on it. She reacted by issuing official demerits in the form of mango leaves, the more leaves you had the more duties you were supposed to perform. This was a bit silly since mango leaves literally covered out campsite and no one bothered to keep track of their own. She kept at it, though, and got Uzin to write down the tallies after a while. Before we escaped I think my personal count was over two thousand. . .

Ibu did alright until we stopped catching turtles. He had been stockpiling the shells, and after it became clear he wasn't going to get anymore he set about on some grand project. Over the next few weeks, he assembled the hundreds of shells into a strange hut-like monstrosity, with four spokes stretching from the center. He finally finished whatever it was, moved his leaf-bed inside, and we didn't really hear much from him for a while. Boki finally realized, during one of her climbs, that the shells were stacked in such a way as to look like a giant turtle. Ibu managed to make it waterproof, and after that realization we all moved in to the turtle-hut and slept much better than before.

Pestrat took it the best out of all of us. He was always a reclusive individual, and never cared much for material goods. At one point he stripped naked and threw his clothes onto the fire, then ran out to the beach and chucked his spear into the waves. He took to reciting poetry about the island environment, and got pretty good after a few months. In fact, his poetry might have been the only thing keeping us "together," since no one wanted to miss his nightly readings around the campfire.

Personally, I can't say that I remember losing my sanity, but I asked Rorte once and her eyes got really wide and she blurted out, "You're better off not knowing!" Perhaps she is right.

Then, when things were really falling apart (the roof of the turtle-hut caved in one night), rescue came. Boki screamed out "Ship! A ship!" and we all rushed to the sand. A smokey fire was made, and sure enough the ship slowed and out came a boat. It turned out to be the ship of first captain we had attempted to purchase passage from, his name was Sesta. He had a personal grudge with Geno and the crew of The Salty Fly, who apparently took a sadistic pleasure in marooning passengers on empty islands. Sesta, though not exactly happy to see us, was generous enough to bring us to our original destination.

The rest of the journey was comparatively uneventful. We no longer had a destination in mind, and as such we roamed freely amongst the cultures of the northern continent. Some of us dabbled in trades, while others took up singing or writing. Pestrat kept up his poetry, and earned quite the reputation. No one recognized us across the water, and it kind of felt like just the fresh start we needed. It was around this time I realized that my one true dream in life was to fall in love.

***

(Click for the full map)


***

We eventually found ourselves camped outside a dwarven fortress, lazily watching the ox-carvans plod by. Uzin, bless her brain, casually mentioned something about the absurd quantity of alcohol consumed by a single dwarven fortress. She performed a little thought experiment: "If a single fortress consumed even 25 barrels of spirit a day, you could multiply that by the days in a year and get close to 8400 barrels a year. If you're selling those barrels at 100 a pop, that's 840000 bucks being spent every annum. That's more than three times as much wealth as we had ever even owned back in TNOM.

And that's just one fortress. These mountains are full of them. There's no way the current demand for alcohol is being met."

It was then and there that I decided to open a brewery. With the last of our coins, I purchased a wagon-cart and some draft animals, a pick-axe, a wood axe, some cheap food, a bundle of leather, and most importantly the seeds for our enterprise.



I also inquired about the best methods for brewing but every dwarf I asked got this strange look in their eye and wouldn't say a thing. I got the feeling that I wasn't the first to try this sort of thing, but that couldn't discourage me. The pastoral lifestyle was just what my crew needed after almost a year on the road, and an operational brewery would provide the income for a luxury here and there. Before I left I ensured that the local trade guild knew about our plans, and the dwarf behind the counter promised us a caravan by the end of the first year.

We threw a celebration at the tavern, and thanks to the cheap plump helmet wine we all got massively drunk by the time we crawled into bed. And so, the next morning, we set out to find our new home with the worst hangovers of our lives.

***

We made good progress across the grasslands, fording streams as needed, but somehow took a wrong turn at the mountain range known as The Dented Barbs and ended up at the edge of a white-sand desert. Realizing our mistake, we went to turn around and broke the axle. Thus decided the location of our new brewery: Beerfates. We had taken to calling ourselves The Wayward Bandits, so Oli came up with a little logo for ourselves. It was the seven of us lifting a keg high into the air, laughing all the while.

Standing there in the sand, with the wooded stream at our backs and the white dunes ahead, I started laughing. It was actually going to happen.

Rorte gave me a look before asking, "What now, Sumost? What do we do first?"

Huh. I hadn't really given it much thought. "Well, we need someplace to sleep tonight. We can get water from the stream, but these dried turtles aren't going to last us very long. We should gather some food from the forest. The earlier we sow those seeds we brought, the better, and we're going to need to construct a still. . ."

So it began.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is just a solo story for now, but PM me if you're interested in writing as one of the characters!

[Salmeuk]

I thought best to segregate our tasks according to ability. I had spent some time around a woodworking guild during our  stay with humans east of the mountains, and cobbled together a makeshift toolbench. With a flat enough workspace, properly aligned measures, and a sharp axe, I could manage to make just about anything we might need.

I gave Oli the pickaxe. He grunted approval and got to work digging a cellar.

Boki was the obvious choice when it came to foraging, since she already knew quite a bit about the subject. "I'm up for it, really, but you should know that I'm not very familiar with the plants around here. I recognize a few, but the majority are foreign and potentially poisonous." Good. To the rest of us, a leaf was a leaf, a root was a root, and a strange bulbous growth sprouting from the trunk of a cactus was just a strange bulbous growth. I trusted Boki to make the right call.

Ibu said he would help out by moving stuff around, since he didn't know how to do much but talk politics and shoot things.

Rorte surprised us by claiming to have skill in masonry and architecture; she had apparently been studying the subjects before getting caught up in banditry. However, until we could dig a safe quarry, there was no stone to be carved and not much use for her skill. For now she was also put on hauling duty.

Uzin said she would help move stuff, but frankly she isn't all that strong or fast or really all that motivated to do physical labor. I know she'll prove herself once we get a simple office set up. I can see her mind already working over the numbers, counting stockpiles and calculating potentials.

Pestrat was fairly useless in almost every regard, so we told him to go catch some fish. He spoke:

"When I was so young,
my song yet unsung,
a fish was just a fish.

Now that I am old,
my words sit in bold,
and yet
a fish is still a fish."

Then he trundled off to the muddy bank. I don't know what that means.

---

The air feels like summer, though the actual season is still a month away. The desert heat is oppressive, with the mirror-like white sand doubling the rays of the high sun. It was never this hot back home in the shaded forests.

Following the designs crafted by Rorte, we constructed a small cabin, with two floors and a shallow undercellar that sits mostly empty. We cut down almost every tree this side of the stream to build it, excepting the custard-apple tree that is just now blooming in the late springtime. We didn't have enough wood to finish the roof so I asked Rorte to design a small bridge to cross to the north bank.

Spoiler: Sumost completing the bridge. (click to show/hide)

A bridge is really a simple construction, just a few anchors and covered crossbeams, but takes quite a bit of physical labor. I was sinking a post when I happened to glance down the waterfall and spotted something monstrous: a gigantic, grey thing swimming just below the surface. I dropped my tools and ran to get Boki. We carefully approached the cliff that overlooked the conflux of the two streams and cnuck a peek over the edge. The beast was not alone, in fact there was a whole herd of them casually moving about beneath us. Boki didn't recognize them, which put me on edge because Boki had never not known the name, grazing habits, trail signifiers, and dung consistencies of every animal we had ever encountered together.

Spoiler: The grey-backed beasts milling about underneath the flow. (click to show/hide)

She suggested we keep our distance, though she pointed out that they looked to be eating the grasses that grew underneath the water. Later, the creatures moved off downstream. When they swam as a group, their size was so great that the resulting wake rode up the bank and soaked the surrounding soil.

---

For now, we survive off of silty riverwater, cracked river-mussels harvested by Pestrat, and the occasional wild fruit that Boki deems safe to eat. We could use a well. Our gang seems content with the state of life, but things aren't amazing by any definition of the word.

Spoiler: The cabin and surrounding land. (click to show/hide)

Uzin and Oli have been spending a lot of time together.



I'm not sure what brought them together, but it seems like one of those relationships you're better off not trying to explain. I always imagined that getting close to Uzin would be like pairing up with an almanac, and I never took Oli for being the sensitive type. Seeing them together kind of gets to me, though. Some nights I can't sleep and go out to walk. I sit by the stream and feel rather lonely, thinking of everything I don't have, everything I haven't done, everyone I haven't met. I want so much from this life, but most of all I want someone to share it with.

One night I fell asleep out by the water, and woke up to Pestrat standing over me. He had this great smile on his face, the grin that he gets when he's about to say something weird and poetic. He looked me right in the eyes and asked

"You're in my way, Sumost. Can you move over a bit?"

I glanced left and right, surveying thousands of feet of potentially-musselbearing riverbank in less than a second, then sighed and rolled over. Sometimes it's easier to just not say anything.

[Salmeuk]

With the bridge completed we had access to more plants, more trees, and more space to stretch our legs. We didn't really have much time to spare, with all the work we were rushing to complete, and even when we did have the time to relax the most exciting thing any of us could do was take a walk. The dense woods of the far side of the stream were wonderful to wander through, however, and I soon grew to love the time spent inside that forest.

Dallisgrass and satintail carpeted the floor, and occasionally you might find a patch of dog's tooth sprouting from underneath one of the massive shale boulders that peered out from the undergrowth. You could often spot one of the tiny speckled lizards sleeping in a patch of sun that had somehow managed to poke it's way through the canopy. Monarch butterflies would flit about my head in a friendly, aimless sort of way. I had never stopped to think about the motivations of butterflies, I mean I never really had the time, but after a number of quiet hours of intense contemplation I can confidently say that I still have not a clue.



 Boki reported all sorts of tasty discoveries, including peppers, muskmellons, horned melons lentils, kumquats, sweet potatoes, and something called a "Bambara groudnut," which sounded like something out of a book I read as a child. As the days grew warmer, different kinds of plants were appearing and so Boki was spending almost every day foraging through the tangled undergrowth. She also reported finding a hive of honeybees! The bees had built a great nest in the hollow of a tree stump, and seemed to be doing quite well for themselves. I made sure to mark a trail to the hive since I had heard great things about the profitability of mead.

We also started on the quarry, finally. Our goal is to dig up enough sand to reach bedrock, and from there we'll rip out rough chunks of solid stone to haul up to the surface and carve into more manageable pieces. We can then use the rock blocks to build walls, bridges, floors, and roads, and all of those things are going to be necesary if we ever want to claim status as a reputable dealer of fine alcohol.

---

We struggled at first to even dig a simple hole, since the sand was predisposed to, well, being sand, and collapsed inward every time the hole sunk more than a few feet. I split a few logs into slats that, when anchored against the sandy slopes by stiff cross-boards, did the trick of keeping the sand out of the pit. Oli then made significant progress, taking only a few weeks to churn through the many layers of sand, and he finally hit a cool layer of granite around the 1st day of Summer. Rorte had designed the open-air quarry with a central, spiralling ramp, which made it pretty easy to retrieve the huge speckled chunks of granite from the most recently mined layer.



At one point, Oli struck a vein of some purple stone.



He called Rorte over to take a look, and when she couldn't place it they asked me if I knew anything. I didn't, so I asked Uzin just in case it might have been worth something to someone at some point (which makes it something she would definitely know about) but she didn't know and pretty soon all seven of us were standing around the vein scratching our heads. Eventually we decided to mine it out and save it somewhere just in case it turned out to be highly-sought after, or something like that. Oli got back to work. Later, the stone was all but forgotten after Oli struck a recognizably-shiny cluster of Prase Opal.

---

A few weeks into summer, Ibu spotted a strange group approaching from the south. We didn't know who they were or what they were doing here, so we avoided them at first, hiding in our cabin and barring the door. We watched them walk into our camp from a gap in the wall of the second floor. As they closed the distance, we could see their lumbering yaks were loaded down with barrels, bolts of cloth, and buldging satchels full of other goods. At this point we realized how silly we were and left the cabin to greet the traders.



The liason's name was Oli Ongicusith and had heard about us through a contact in the dwarven empire, so he had taken a risk and travelled the long journey just to sample what we had brewed so far. This was a surprise, certainly, and would have been an awfully good opprotunity to spread the word about our fine brew. The fact we had no beer to trade soured things a little.

"Uh, uhm, I'm sorry to disappoint but we haven't really, um, brewed anything at this point in time. We haven't even, uh, built the still yet."

"Huh. Well, do you have anything else to trade?"

"Well, there's this this strange purple stone we dug up, does that interest you?"

"Let's have a look."

I hauled up that mysterious chunk of magenta and set it next to one of his yaks.

"Well, what is it?"

"I was hoping you could tell me that."

"It's certainly purple. If you had three of them I would trade you, let's see here, a couple of fish or maybe a few seeds. . ."

"Hold on, I've got an idea!" I really did have an idea. I quickly found Rorte and asked if she could hurriedly carve a statue.

"What should I carve, boss?"

I pointed to Oli, the caravan master, and ordered "Do your best but go quickly, they might leave at any time!"

Rorte worked hurriedly and soon produced the final product: a lifesize depiction of Oli Ongicusith that was accurate in every way, except it was decidely purple.



As we struggled to haul the statue over to the depot, Oli took notice and burst out laughing.

"I thought you folks were supposed to be simple brewers, not sculptors of fine art!"

Oli was greatly pleased and offered nearly 6 times as much for the statue. However, I looked over the goods and realized that we didn't really need much of anything at this point. I didn't want to let the statue go to waste, so I offered to set up the statue in a permanent position next to the depot, in honor of Oli and his generosity.

He was kind of shocked, exclaiming "I've never been greeted with such hospitality, even in the wealthiest of towns! I'll be sure to come back next year." What could have been a great disaster was been successfully averted with just a single stone.

We asked the traders to bring, next time they visited, some

hemp cloth for bags, clothes, and uniforms.
wood, in case we run out of easily-felled trees.
iron bars, for our front gate as well as ammunition for our bows
seeds of all varieties, in case our current stock rots away
turtles, a special request by Ibu
and parchment sheets for Uzin's recordkeeping fetish

In turn, they promised to pay us half-again for any beer we sold to them.



"Though, if we show up again and you still haven't any alcohol to purchase, I'm not certain I can justify making a third trip. Your brewery is just so far out of the way, and having to dodge all those goblin patrols doesn't help much."

"Goblin patrols? What are you talking about? Are there goblins nearby?"

"Well, yes. West of the mountains is goblin country, didn't you know? This area has probably the densest population of dark fortresses anywhere on the continent, maybe even the world. Hell, only two days west of here the land sinks into a gruesome pit full of the evil creatures."

"Oh, no . . ."

"To put it bluntly, you've settled right on their doorstep. I'm surprised you're still alive. In any case, I hope you're around come next summer - I have nothing but high hopes for Beerfates!"

With that, Oli and his caravan left the way they had come. The rest of us, energized from the encounter, got back to work.

---

A few days later I was walking through the forest and came up to the western riverbank, which took the form of a short, sandy cliff. The western river had a stronger flow and would be dangerous to swim in (and those grey beasts might still be lurking below), so I still wasn't sure how we were to get a bridge across the thing. As I sat pondering this dilemma, I looked up and saw two butterflies. But the scale wasn't right. . .



"WHAT THE FUCK, THOSE ARE HUGEEEE!"

[Gwolfski]

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