>>5364689You thank the Queen and depart. The course back to your base is an easier one—taxing physically, but even with your middling sense of direction you are able to retrace your steps to make it back in a much shorter span of time than the journey to the hive.
>72 vs. 50 for forage>14 vs. 10 for huntingAlong the way, you snatch up what herbs you can (including some of the stomach-settling moss, gifted by Glowie’s mother) and even a variety of mushrooms. You DO NOT eat any, deciding it best not to test your luck again—better to let the herbalist deduce what is edible and what is not.
Bundled in a cocoon of silk, you also bring back… A catfish, the OTHER gift from Glowie’s mother.
She saw. She knows. You are mortified.
You return to your people, and are immediately assailed by questions: where have you been? Why were you gone so long? Why would the Herbalist not give them details?
“I shared none with her,” you explain.
“Nor with any of us,” the Cartographer laments.
“Forgive me, Superior One, but you should have brought me,” the Archer asserts. “We have seen have dangerous the wild places of the underdark are. What if you had encountered some great monster?”
The Hunter, also present, scoffs, saying “There is nothing note so close to the base. Just fish, bugs, rats, newts, cave drakes… You have to go much further afield to find worthy quarry.”
‘Just bugs’? If they only knew…
“Where are the dwarves?” you then ask, not seeing them… Nor the kobold.
“The male is being minded by the kobold slave, and by some of your new recruits,” the Cartographer answers. “The note you left with you slave said that she was to requisition high-quality ingredients for some sort of meal?”
You confirm this, and your encourage exchange a few questioning looks. Nobody outright inquires as to your purpose for this though.
“She prepared some sort of thick stew with cow meat,” the Cartographer explains.
“The dwarf-slave asked us to taste its work,” the Steeltalon Bodyguard notes.
“Too rich,” says the Dragonblooded Researcher criticizes, sticking out her tongue a little at the memory.
“Not bad,” Olu the Archer says, more charitably. “Very MILD spice, by Southern Human standards.”
“Where is she now?” you ask.
