Bruises covered my left shoulder and side the following morning. Nothing had swollen during the night, but everything felt sore and ached. Sasha’s music would without a doubt wash away the pain and restore me to peak condition, but my left hand refused to close around the fretboard. I’d need to give myself time to recover naturally or find aid elsewhere.

I wanted nothing more than to stay in bed and rest, but seeing Hruk carefully extract, powder and mould aetherite, I couldn’t in good conscience sit around and do nothing. So I set out to find a venue where we could sell our wares.

First, I checked the areas around the Adventurers’ and Hunters’ Guilds. After all, they were our primary demographic. Much to my disappointment, shop space in the area was in much too high demand. Regardless of whether they had customers—looking at the dust covering the stalls, most of them likely didn’t—none of them entertained the idea of selling their business space. Neither my Charisma nor Brokering Mastery helped make any headway. They saw right through my attempts to sweet talk them.

To make a decent profit without the Seekers or any regulatory body shutting us down, we needed a location where we could sell our wares in a single day. The longer we took, the higher the risk of them discovering us would get. Besides, from what I understood, there were plenty of vendors selling second hand tools and weapons. The guilds couldn’t clamp down on everyone and were focusing more on raw materials, processed aether crystals, and magical weapons. So, as long as we were quick, we’d likely get away with sporadic sales.

Afterwards, we hoped people would recognise the uniqueness and usefulness of Hruk’s creation and approach us with orders. Then we could sell to them directly without drawing the Seekers’ ire.

Focused on making money and becoming a king of industry, I hadn’t given Tracy’s champion much thought. My instincts suggested they were either in league with the gnomes or behind the Seekers. However, I needed to learn more about the organisation and their deity.

Since I was making no headway with the stall, I tried taking a break at the city’s library. It didn’t come as a surprise when I found the building in disrepair. When I asked the librarian for books on Oth, her aged eyes widened. She mumbled a response and advised I visit the library in the Mages’ Guild. Hruk didn’t yet have the privilege to take me into the establishment, so I found myself with nothing to do that was until I heard a familiar voice in one of the more derelict part of the city.

“What do you mean you won’t accept my help in disposing of the corpses? I’ve got a license for it, and a cart! This is discrimination, isn’t it?”

It was Bonegrinder Stonebreath, the cemetery troll. He wore a pair of trousers held up by suspenders and nothing more. His trusted cart sat behind him, spotless and polished. He looked no different from when I first saw him in Grog’s Table. Except this time, he wasn’t scaring the public by claiming the Champions of Pestilence were en route to the city.

“Bonegrinder, that you?” I called, approaching him.

He paused mid-sentence and spun to face me, left hand clenching into a fist. The dust under my feet stirred for a moment before settling down. Bonegrinder’s mouth spread into a wide grin. He dropped his current conversation and marched away from it, making a beeline for me.

“You did it, you mad lad!” He exclaimed, picking me up and swinging me around.

“Easy there, mate.” I gasped for her breath under his powerful arms. My ribs hadn’t yet recovered and the hug likely set their recovery back by a week. His rough skin felt like sandpaper against my forearms, too. “I don’t exactly need any exfoliation.”

He looked at me with his brows furrowed for a second before bursting out laughing. “I’m buying you a pint and you’re telling me everything,” he declared, returning to his cart. He dragged it down the street away from the busier parts of the market.

“I don’t think a single pint will do, Bone. It’s a hell of a tale.”

“Well, I’ve got time if you do.”

“Unfortunately, it looks like I do.”

It came as no surprise that Bonecrusher knew the city better than me. He led me to a back-alley pub dominated by mostly the ‘lesser’ races. I didn’t like the naming’s connotations, but apparently, thanks to the elves, it was widely accepted. We weaved past goblins, hobgoblins, gnomes, a ganglier version of a cemetery troll, and several skinks. Bonecrusher appeared to predict my curious intentions and advised against using spells like Analyse or Identify in the establishment. They had rules against it and an enchantment to highlight those who dared.

After settling into a private room, we ordered our drinks and got talking. Once again, talking to someone from Earth reminded me of home. He’d grown up in Hackney and I lived for quite a while in the neighbouring borough of Islington. The speech patterns and colloquialisms took me back. However, during our conversation I discovered that even though he’d only spent ten years on the disk, it was the nineties when he left Earth. Which meant the transmigration likely messed with time. I was left wondering whether Lucas had entered the disk at the same time as me or his entry had suffered some temporal distortion too.

I thought it best not to mention my hypothesis and focused on my time in Grog’s Table. The tale left Bonecrusher laughing his butt off. He got so loud, the wooden table shook, and the goblin barmaid stuck his head in to check everything was fine. When I told him about how I beat Kraine, his eyes widened.

“Who’s your patron now, then?” Bonecrusher asked after I finished.

“I don’t have one yet.”

“What?!” He looked horrified. “All that and a shrike for a pet, but you don’t have deities lining up for you yet?”

“Well, I had this one entity helping me liaise with other lesser entities, but I haven’t seen her or heard from her in a couple of months—lunar cycles now,” I replied.

“How do you feel about joining me as a Champion of Chaos?” Bonecrusher’s eyes lit up as he spoke. “You’re a chaotic little arsehole and she digs stuff like that. Chaos gives out pretty incredible powers. You’ll need to surround yourself with pandemonium to charge them up, but once working, they can get you out of a pinch and then some.”

“I appreciate the offer, mate, but I’d like to find my own way in this new life,” I replied.

“That’s fair.” Bonecrusher sighed. “What ever you’re doing got you two relics, so it’s clearly working. Just don’t go around telling other champions about it. They’ll kill you in a heartbeat.”

“Thanks for the advice, mate. So, what are you doing in Eldar’s Port? After the local champion too?”

“No. Chaos has no beef with anyone here. Plus, they’re making things rather chaotic. I don’t have to do a thing to charge up my abilities. What about you? Are you here chasing someone?”

I nodded. “I don’t know where to start, though,” I replied. “I’m looking for a stall to sell my wares and make some money, but having no luck there. I have no clue who the champions are, and my investigation into the Seekers of Oth is going nowhere.”

“What’s there to investigate?” Bonecrusher asked. “They’re a cult trying to bring Oth the Consumer to the disk. They’ve been trying for centuries apparently, but have made no headway. Recently, their operations have gotten more expansive and their grip on the city is surprising, but I doubt they’re close.”

The tidbit of information confirmed my suspicions. Oth the Consumer sounded like an entity connected to Tracy the Devourer. Her champion likely had connections to the organisation.

“As for a stall, have you tried the area around the mercenary guilds? If you’re selling tools for adventurers and travellers, you might find your solution there. I believe the families around there have suffered major losses recently after a failed incursion in the swamps. So, you might just get lucky.”

“Thanks for the lead,” I said. “I’ll do just that. There’s one thing I wanted to discuss.”

“Go on, mate,” Bonecrusher said, signalling for another flagon of mead.

“Have you come across any method of sending messages home?”

“Interesting you ask me that instead of a method home.” Bonecrusher chuckled. “I won’t pry for the reasoning, but no, I haven’t. Is it a girl or family?”

“The latter,” I replied. “We weren’t on the best of terms and hadn’t spoken in a while. They relied on my paycheck for my sister, though. I’d just like to let them know that I’m okay and didn’t just abandon them. So have you ever come across anything—”

“Honestly? I never looked. Most champions are people that didn’t have many connections in their home worlds or much going for them. I was a failed stand-up comic and weed dealer, believe it or not. Promises of wealth, power, or more interesting lives is enough to win our loyalty.”

We talked for what felt like hours before Bonecrusher’s stomach started rumbling. I offered to buy him a meal, and he explained that while cemetery trolls had excellent Brawn and Arcana; the race came with several disadvantages. He called his intolerance of normal food the worst of it. Apparently, it had been hard at first, but now he had developed a taste for rotting flesh and ate little else. Crushing bones and masticating them into paste was his favourite. I let him loose to track down food and headed over to the mercenary guilds, hoping to find a stall.

In the end, I ended up settling on a spice merchant’s stall. It stood between an aged but popular bakery and a vegetable merchant, facing two medium-sized mercenary guild houses. Looking at the state of the stall and merchandise, I could tell that the merchant had sold nothing in days. He was all skin and bones, and his family appeared to live in the wagon behind the stall.

He wanted fifty gold coins, but I didn’t have half as much. Buying immediate materials, the advance payment on the inn, and giving Tom money for materials, a guard party, blacksmithing fees, and incidentals had set me back. Fortunately, the merchant’s wife put her foot down and came to my rescue.

“That’s enough to get us out of this damned city and away from any place with gnomes,” she said. “You take it, or I will, take the children, and leave without you.”

The merchant appeared crestfallen but caved.

Brokering Mastery has progressed to Novice Rank 3!

I didn’t have the skills to fix the stall and didn’t want to spend more coin doing so either. So, I picked up brightly coloured tapestries from another struggling merchant. My haggling skills failed. I guessed that they had enough Wit to resist my Charisma’s effects, or their masteries gave them traits or passive abilities to counter people like me. When I walked away from his stall to try another merchant, desperation got the better of him, and he sold a rug and two tapestries at market price—Identify confirmed the claims.

Brokering Mastery has progressed to Novice Rank 4!

Draping the cloths over bits of the stall masked its derelict state.