The Town Speaks
Session: 2022-05-18
Phandalin in the morning had a particular quality — the kind of quiet that wasn't peaceful so much as careful. Doors opened and closed quickly. Eyes moved to the street before moving away.
Respin had known towns like this before. He didn't need a second look to understand what he was looking at.
It was Blix who named them.
Three children had materialised near the inn's steps the way children do — suddenly and without explanation — and Blix, with the particular energy of someone who had recently been a gnome and considered this something of a fresh start, had announced that they were the Troublesome Bears. The children received this information solemnly. One of them, a girl with one milky eye, seemed to file it away somewhere useful.
Respin thought it was a fine name. He didn't say so.
The Lionshield Coster was their first stop with any real business to it. Linene Graywind received them warmly enough — the cargo had been recovered, and she was the kind of merchant who pays her debts promptly. Fifty gold, counted out and handed over without ceremony. She mentioned, almost in passing, that the Coster dealt primarily in finished goods these days. Respin stored that away. It was the sort of detail that might matter later.
What caught his attention, though, was the figure near the back of the room. Seven and a half feet of lizardfolk — at least — glimpsed only from behind before whatever errand had brought them here was complete and they were gone. Respin watched the door for a moment after it closed.
He didn't mention it to the others. But he didn't forget it either.
The inn that evening had the comfortable atmosphere of something trying. Elsa moved between tables with practiced efficiency — beers, mead, tea, water, take your pick. A man named Tolbin Stonehill was present in the way that certain people are always present in an inn: either because they own it or because they have nowhere better to be. At some point a man named Lenar walked in, shook a few hands, learned a few names, and didn't stand out especially. Phandalin was a small town. The party were new faces. There was a certain ritual to it.
The Shrine of Luck sat at a quieter corner of town, and Sister Garelle was not quite the picture of the serene holy woman one might hope to find there. She'd been wounded on a trip recently — she moved with the careful economy of someone managing pain — but her eyes were clear and her manner was direct.
She had a task.
There was a banshee, she explained, named Agartha. Located near a place called Connaberry, perhaps two days' travel to the northeast. Vain, as banshees tend to be, but not beyond flattery — a silver jeweled comb had been known to put her in a cooperative frame of mind. And in that cooperative frame of mind, she could answer a question.
The question Sister Garelle wanted answered concerned a spellbook. Bojentle's spellbook.
Respin listened, accepted the task, and filed the details where they needed to go. He had the feeling that a two-day walk to consult a vain ghost was not the most dangerous thing he'd ever agreed to. It was far from the most straightforward.
The Townmaster's Hall had a bulletin board that Phandalin used the way a body uses a fever — as a mechanism for making something known without having to do anything about it. The latest notice warned of orc raiders. Someone had pinned it up neatly. No one appeared to have done anything else about it.
Respin noted it and moved on.
Trilina found them, or they found Trilina — in a town this size it amounted to the same thing. She was not someone who could be described as calm. A woodworker's family had lived just down the road, she said. The husband had said the wrong things to the wrong people, or perhaps had simply been convenient, and the Redbrands had killed him. Dragged the body away so no one could find it. The next morning, his wife and daughter were gone too.
She pointed out the house on the party's map. Her finger didn't shake. It was worse, somehow, that her finger didn't shake.
Respin looked at the house on the map for a moment.
"We'll look into it," he said.
He wasn't certain yet what they could do. But they would look.
One last detail, gathered from a merchant named Frita as the day wound down: the Redbrands, for all their broad unpleasantness, did not touch the Phandalin Miner's Exchange. Everyone else in town was fair game. Not the Exchange.
That was the kind of exemption that meant something. Respin wasn't sure yet what. But he stored it alongside everything else this town had told them today — and Phandalin, for all its careful quietness, had told them quite a lot.
It had been a long first full day.