Stuck up at the front of the room as he was, Kaldalis was a little bit hosed. The double doors at the end of the room were large, but the crowd was even larger. Kaldalis watched as the back of the room became a huge cluster of bodies. He could see Balrim, Myrin, Reno, and SeventyEight on the left side of the room. They were being swept away out the door. But unless he was going to leap up and try to crowdsurf his way over the crowd, there was no way for him to meet up with them until the clog around the door dispersed.

However, in the last few days, his varying degrees of being hosed included facing down an army of monsters bent on destroying his new home, being isolated and attacked by an oversexed snake-spider woman, and locking lips with a megalomaniacal mastermind who swore a very personal revenge on him shortly after.

Being stuck on the wrong side of a crowd was a refreshing change of pace.

If he never got in more trouble than this for the rest of the week, he’d consider himself lucky.

“Kaldalis, a moment? I’ve been looking for you since the battle ended.”

He turned and was surprised to see Sivima step out of the crowd.

As he’d noticed before, the front row of the room had been mostly NPCs from around town, and Sivima was one of the few he had closer ties to. But she was one of the town’s crafters, perpetually busy at the forge churning out weapons as fast as she could physically assemble them. If she spent enough time away from her forge to attend this meeting, then she had to have a reason to be talking to him instead of shoving her way bodily through the crowd to get back to work.

“Well, you found me,” Kaldalis said, hopping down off the stage to join her on the lower floor. “Is everything alright?”

Sivima gave a dismissive gesture. “Yes, yes. Everything’s fine. The town upgrade included a few nice improvements for my workshop. Creature comforts, if you will. Though there’s still room for a little bit more improvement, which I was hoping you could help me with.”

“I have time to discuss it now,” Kaldalis said, gesturing at the crowd. The press of bodies had moved all of eight inches since they’d started talking. “What can I help you with?”

Sivima smiled thinly. “The upgrade to my workshop included a lot of space,” she began. “First and foremost, that means I was able to unpack all of my notes and journals from my mentor, opening up a lot of new resources and methods that are suited to the camp’s facilities. Rather than adapting what I was doing in Baimer, you see.”

“That’s good. Hopefully that eases up on your workload a bit?”

“It should,” Sivima said with a laugh, “but it won’t. If anything, it’ll make me even busier. Don’t worry about that. Worry about what else I can be doing for you adventurers.”

Kaldalis grinned. “I’m listening.” The idea of new gear options was more than a little enticing.

“My mentor’s notes include a long treatise on something he called ‘modification’ for weaponry,” she said, running a hand through her tightly-curled hair. “It’s a bit complicated, and it will take time and experimentation to figure out all the particulars, but I think it might be helpful.

“The increased space in my workshop means room for the modification workbench described in his notes,” she continued, “and I sent someone to fetch Bangen this morning to go over the notes to figure out what we can get here on the islands to mimic the materials available in a major trade hub like Baimer.”

Kaldalis leaned back against the stage, carefully arranging his tail so it wasn’t squashed in the process. “I never thought I’d say this, but a good old-fashioned fetch quest sounds really fantastic right now. In the wake of all this extremely stressful Infernal Horde crap, I would love to run around the entirety of creation to gather some extremely specific items for you. What did Bangen have to say?”

“That’s the catch,” Sivima said with a growing frown. “She explained that the materials that would be a best fit aren’t available in Mallia.”

“And Mallia is…”

Sivima smirked at him as she put a haughty hand to her hip. “The area here, around Cotanaku. I know your type aren’t great at geography, but I trust your legendary sense of direction will help you find what you need.”

Her words were a bit mean spirited, but the laugh that followed was anything but.

“Of course.” Kaldalis laughed as well. “Sorry. It’s been… Kind of a long day.”

“Week, more like.” Sivima winced, and her hand dropped to her side. “Forgive me. This is probably too much to put on you today, in the wake of-”

“No, no,” Kaldalis said, suddenly standing upright. “Please. Give me the quest. You got my greedy little adventurer heart absolutely salivating at the thought of weapon mods. You can’t take that away from me now.”

Sivima looked unconvinced. “Are you sure?”

“I couldn’t be more sure,” Kaldalis said. “Even if I can’t personally handle it, I know I could find someone who can.” His thoughts went specifically to Balrim and Myrin, whose larger goals seemed intently focused on exploration. They would also be game for weapon upgrades. Especially Myrin.

“Thank you,” Sivima said with a smile, though it quickly changed to a grimace. “I just need to get back to my forge to get Bangen’s notes so I can tell you what I need you to find.”

Kaldalis looked back at the crowd, which had moved about six feet throughout their entire conversation.

“Right. That’ll be a moment, huh?” He grinned at her. “So, uh... How have you been?”

The pair made polite - if awkward - small talk until they could get outside again. It took ages. By the time the crowd was thin enough for the pair of them to push through, he was about ready to activate his Jump cooldown and just aim for the windows. They made it out eventually, and while Kaldalis’s first instinct was to look for his friends, he figured they could wait a few minutes for him to pick up this quest first.

Sivima led the way to the crafting area.

After the upgrade from settlement to town, the entire town had undergone dramatic improvements. The crafting area was no exception. What had previously been a bunch of tents and lean-tos barely protecting anvils and workbenches sitting on bare dirt had become a bunch of wood buildings with large windows to let in the light, and reveal the workshops and tools contained within. Behind those buildings were actual shops marked with placards identifying them as shops for potions, charms, clothes, or weapons.

Sivima led him to the weapon’s shop, and he could see beside it was a wooden awning over a stone deck, protectively housing all of her work stations and materials. They had formerly just been crammed together under a tent next to a forge that had to sit out in the open to avoid catching anything on fire.

Inside the shop it looked like something right out of a fantasy videogame - which, Kaldalis supposed, it was. The walls were lined with racks of weapons of varying types, qualities, and descriptions. A particular glaive caught his eye - a simple design with a damascus steel head that looked almost like an exaggerated chef’s knife - but he tore his attention away from it. He wasn’t here to shop, after all.

Behind the shop counter, Sivima had a little bookshelf, though instead of books, it was filled with singed notepads and folders. On top of the short shelf there was a sheaf of more pristine notes that Kaldalis instantly recognized as Bangen’s work.

“Here it is,” she said, placing the notes on the counter and spreading the folder open to show him. “All of this should be in an area to the east that’s called Nos Meles. With the harbor in place, it should be easy to take a longboat there so that you can avoid the fuss of traversing a monster-filled jungle.”

Kaldalis nodded as he looked over the list. In typical Bangen fashion, the notes included extremely long-winded and detailed explanations of each material. There was a breakdown of the important and unique properties of the material from the mainland, outlining several different alternatives with pros and cons. Each one was circled and underlined, often with a large arrow drawn pointing to it.

A quest appeared on the left side of his vision, listing all of the items that had been circled and underlined. As Sivima had said, focusing on the quest just got him a vague eastward direction on his minimap, telling him he had an incredibly long way to go to find these things.

Are You A Mod?

0/1 White-Blossom Treant Core

0/1 Jeotops Frill

0/1 Likdon

0/1 Sanguine Diamond

Looking over Bangen’s extremely thorough notes, he got an idea of what he was looking for and why.

The treant core was the only type of wood in the region that would match the durability and flexibility of rare imported woods in Baimer, and was going to involve fighting a specific type of walking tree monsters native to the Nos Meles region. He supposed the mentioned white blossoms would be an easy way to identify it. And the fact that it would be a giant walking tree.

Not exactly subtle.

From his own inference, Kaldalis guessed the Jeotops was some kind of frilled dinosaur with a strong affinity for earth, whose frill would contain unique crystals and minerals needed for the more delicate tools. He imagined it at first as that spitter thing from Jurassic Park that killed Newman, and then corrected his expectations from the name. It was more likely some sort of ceratops, tri- or otherwise.

The Likdon was of the most interest to him specifically. Bangen noted that it was a serpentlike shark with rough skin that would become the ideal sandpaper. The fish’s enormous length would mean that only one would provide enough skin to last for months, even under heavy use. Her notes didn’t have a lot to say about where to find it, but the only place to look for something that size was the ocean.

He would have to think about asking Foturns for ideas on bait and lures for giant shark monsters.

The sanguine diamond was the most thorough of the notes. Apparently there was no alternative for the tool that needed it, and so the hope was that someone could just get lucky. Kaldalis read between the lines and deciphered that it meant it was an extremely low drop chance from any mining operation anywhere. While that meant he might be able to find it anywhere in the region, Kaldalis had the idea that the new town that the Zarans were likely to build might call for a lot of mining quests.

Wherever they decided to lay down roots was going to be the place to be for that.

“It might take me some time to get all this together,” Kaldalis said, glancing again at the notes for the sanguine diamond again. “But I promise I’ll do my best.”

“I’ll be here,” Sivima said. “Just keep your eyes open. It won’t be the end of the world if we keep going as we are. I just found the notes and thought it might be helpful to you folks.”

“I have total faith that it will be,” Kaldalis said, though he winced when he looked back to his minimap and was reminded that he wasn’t even in the same zone as these materials. “If I can get out to Nos Meles and find it.”

With nothing else to offer, Sivima got to work on some project. She practically shooed him from the shop.

Kaldalis felt chagrined about his growing list of obligations. Reno and SeventyEight took priority, and helping out Balrim and Myrin in any way he could was shortly after that. And even then, being Garyung’s surrogate neurotypical brain was also vital to the well-being of the camp. He wasn’t sure when - if ever - he was going to be able to break away from town and charter a boat ride to a distant land to hunt this shit down.

If nothing else, though, he could share the quest around. Weapon mods sounded like powerful progression options that he definitely wanted to have available for everyone as soon as physically possible.

It was more important that it get done than that he be the one to do it, right?

Kaldalis looked longingly towards the docks.

All the responsibility and trust he’d built up for himself was great, but it was beginning to feel less heroic and more like work. Like he Dylan’d himself.