“Look around or head for the on ramp?” Darksider asked as we passed through the gate.“Might as well have a look around while we are here,” Jacobs said. I nodded in agreement.
The quickest route to the on-ramp was to our right, and that way looked to be the stables and people taking care of the animals. We went left. There were a lot of traders in the settlement. It felt like a busy open-air market. Stalls were laid out with a huge variety of goods. I got the feeling there was no real organisation in the layouts. The path between them curved about like it was just a coincidence that it formed as it did. Traders shouting out what they had to offer. Others were trying to encourage people to go in and see their wares. Some were just peddlers with their goods laid out on a piece of cloth. Others had more established carts to display theirs. The rarest had full tents, and it was a real mix of traders getting in where they could.
“Fresh fish! Get your fresh fish here! Caught just this morning at Porttown!”“The finest in silks! In Cottons!”“Artificer timepieces like you have never seen before!”
We passed a cart which was filled to the brim with books. Peachy and I slipped away from the other three and started perusing their stock. I found a book on the Ancients’ language. Peachy got a little squeamish about the two books she picked up. She refused to elaborate on what she got, merely that it was important research.
We found the other three had found a cafe and had decided to rest their feet. Our slipping away hadn’t been as discreet as we had thought.
“No weapons or armour…” a disappointed G commented when Peachy and I sat down.“We did a quick tour of the market area while you two looked at the books,” Jacobs said. “If we were crafters, there might be things of value…but no gear,” contributed Darksider.“Inside the old building?” I asked, indicating the service station’s building.“Only place we haven’t looked. The other side of it has housing for the people who live here. We found out this place is a hub for hunters and a midway point between two of the major settlements…well, three if you include Landing. According to Charles,” Darksider said, nodding at the man at the counter, “The road over that we used has only recently been cleared. Used to be considered too dangerous.”“Surprised when we said we hadn’t seen anything hostile on the road. The jungle to the north of Landing is full of hostile creatures, so the usual route was to head south and around the coast. So it looks like a new trade route is opening up. If we want to get into trading, there is also a Traders Guild we could join, which apparently has its headquarters here.” Jacobs said, nodding his head at the concrete building. “We’d want to have some kind of transport for that, though, need to be able to carry more than what our Inventories can carry if we want rep in them. From talking to members, it opens up discounts with some vendors, so it might be worth one or two of us exploring it, not sure if we all would need to.” Darksider added. “Put it up on group chat. See if there are any takers? Then we support them in grinding the rep?” I asked.“Yeah, there are a few who enjoy that sort of gameplay more than I do,” Jacobs agreed.“Shall we check out the services? See if there is anything we want.” I said.
I’ll be honest, the inside was not what I was expecting. The armed guards on the doors looked more professional than the two we saw on the way into the town, but other than giving us a look over, didn't move to interact with us as we walked in. The inside was clearly once a service station. Two floors, with the upstairs only taking up half the space, so it had a wide open seating area near several serving counters of a food court and a balcony overlooking that seating area. Those food counters had been repurposed, and signs before them declared them for different sorts of trade. Discussions between traders were happening on and around the tables, and banners behind some of the chairs made me think it was a way for people to identify different traders or companies. The people sat before the banners stayed; others came and went. Some of these tables had been decked out in finery and were offering refreshments to the people joining them. Others seemed less organised.
The stairs up to the first floor were guarded by some tough-looking guards. I assumed that was where the management of the place could be found, and we had no reason to visit them.
In the place where I would have expected to find a general goods store in the service stations I had been to, there was a weapons and armour vendor, which we made a move towards.
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There were various styles of armour available on crude mannequins. They looked cruder than the armour we had seen back in Landing, but no less robust. Nothing that benefited spell casting, but enhanced travel stamina and carrying capacity on the trader set. A desert nomad trader set offered better heat protection, while a thicker, furrier snow trader set offered better cold resistance. Interestingly enough, there was a Trader Driver set, which also offered bonuses to animal handling.
I was surprised to see the four of them buying new legs and boots.“Bonuses to overland speed and long-distance stamina drain,” Darksider told me at my raised eyebrow. “We’ll swap back before combat.”
The other half of the store had the weapon selection, which, to my disappointment, didn’t have any magic implements. “Sorry, my dear,” the elderly man behind the counter said at my enquiry. “We don’t see many mages out this way and don’t have enough demand to justify stocking their tools. You might have better luck to the south at Toreck, the few mages who don’t travel by boat sometimes stop there on their way east along the coast.”
G found himself a two-handed polearm with a hammer head on one side and a spike on the other. He called it a Lucerne hammer and insisted it would give him different damage type options. Peachy found an upgrade for her shield. Where I would have expected to find an arcade, we found the quest boards. Different jobs were posted on little cards on these boards. It seems you find a task you want to do, take the card to the counter and then you get assigned it. One board had tasks for shipping cargo to different destinations. Another for hunting local resources. One board was labelled Deliverables and had several cards listing items that people were requesting and the reward you would get for delivering it. One ongoing task was asking for teeth from a giant worm. Sadly, nothing which looked like an easy, quick job or one that was going in the direction we were, that didn’t require our own cart. The bored woman on the counter didn’t even look up from her book the entire time we were there.
We grabbed some food from a street vendor, some kind of spicy meat on a stick, before we followed the road out of the service station, up the on ramp, past a few guards at the entrance from the highway, and out onto the open road heading south. “Where's our next point of interest to explore?” Peachy asked.“If my map is accurate, in two on-ramps time. Something not far to the east of it.” I replied. “We should skip,” G declared.
I hate that, despite how embarrassingly childish it is, skipping is fun…and doing it as a group of five in an unintentional formation is hilarious. The way the faces of the travelling merchants we passed went from shock to confusion to amusement still puts a smile on my face.
Around the first off-ramp, we found our stamina starting to get low, so we decided to take a break and catch our breath. At some point in the past, the ramp had been barricaded to stop anything coming up from the plains below. Some water catchers had been rigged up here to create an impromptu rest spot, and we found a few of the traders resting their beasts of burden. “The barricade?" one responded to our query, “Been there all my life. It’s to stop some of the more bothersome beasts down there from coming up and harassing travellers. The raised road is a blessing. Between the worms, the wolves and some of the things we don’t name, trade would be almost unknown between the north and south. No one would survive the trip. Going the long way around just wouldn’t be worth the effort. The final stretch to Toreck is back on ground level. Normally, we cross in convoy to protect each other. None of the big worms that far south, fortunately. Otherwise, even that would be impossible.”
“What do you know about the next off-ramp?” I asked.“Crossroads? Small waystation. Little more than this watering hole, bit more established. It’s not far from a forest with a sawmill. Most of the wood the south sees comes from there.”“Cheers.”
We got back on the road shortly after. I managed to convince the others that mixing it up with some less embarrassing jogging would be more effective than constantly grinding the same exercise. Don’t know if it was true, but it certainly sounded convincing. I got a strength point out of my effort, so I like to think the system supported me on it.
We paused briefly with some more traders along the way to watch a geyser erupt from a pool just off the side of the motorway. The traders told us it would erupt hourly, accurately enough that you could set your watch by it, they claimed. The eruption was impressive. Shooting water thirty metres into the air and leaving that unmistakable rotten egg smell of sulphur in its wake.
Crossroads was unmistakable. Someone had built a base over an entire lane of the highway. A small trading hub which mostly consisted of a cafe and the facilities to feed and water animals, but was also clearly the home of a small group of people. Someone had set up a bit of a bunkhouse as well. We took a short rest to make sure our stamina was back to full. My party switched back out of their new gear and into their more combat-ready stuff, and we headed down the ramp to follow the road east, heading towards the point of interest we had a quest to explore.
