>>5682725‘Shopping’ might be an overstatement, in the end. This is the scouting encampment of a race just as deprived as your own. It isn’t as if there is a bustling fashion scene present, and you do not have the time to travel all the way to Wevenore. Among the soldiers here, even JAZKARMEL us relatively simple in her materials and accoutrement, and she is the ranking officer and reigning noblewoman of the camp. Still, you muster what chitin and metal can be scrounged by the dark-skinned Drow. Your coins—hardly enough to add meaningfully to your hoard back home, but still valuable here—pay most of the way, and the tarnished weapons and armour taken from ‘liberated’ corpses in the rock-monsters’ grotto are useful sources of copper and iron.
“Make something for each of us three,” you instruct the dark elf artisans.
If you cannot treat your wives to a shopping spree, you can double down on the ‘arts and culture’ aspect of this excursion. The Novice is loudly bored and critical as ever—or pretends to be, even as she constantly finds excuses to interject her own design sensibilities into the manufacture of her new attire in proven Dark Elven—while Ekaterine is openly fascinated to watch the skilled feyfolk at work. These elves are a strange sort to her, and they lack the wealth of materials and formal academia of their surface-kin, but not even the most bigoted dwarf (or Reptilian) could deny the natural aptitude of the elven race for making fine things. If they are less skilful craftsmen than the dwarves, it is only because of the dominance of their aesthetic sense—the need to make things flowing, and graceful, or to experiment with style. You give them extra challenge-appreciated, you believe—as well.
“Make it… martial. Powerful. Imposing. Armoured!”
“Even for me?” Ekaterine asks, surprised and a little embarrassed when you nod.
“You will need all the protection you can get,” you say, and she pales a little; realizing your error, you squeeze her should in promised support.
“Do not bother with mine,” the Novice sniffs. “I don’t need ssuch sssilliness. I am a Sserpent Priesstessss.”
“You’ll protect yourself, you mean?” asks the Princess of Hawksong. “Or… Your status is such you fear none of your people will ever dare attack you?”
“No,” the Novice scoffs, and points to you. “I will enssure he isss between be and any threat. Either he’ll triumph, as he SOMEHOW alwayss sseems to, or he’ll ssslow them down long enough for me to essscape. It’sss hiss JOB, you know.”
“…Ah.”
