Hastria put her face into her hands.
"Oh, Bierstout, not you too..."
The young dwarf doesn't bat an eye at the pretty little lady's disapproval. He's grown up his whole life being called a fool for having dreams bigger than his stature; for wanting to make a name for himself out in the big wide world instead of living out his life in this backwoods town. To become something greater than this country bumpkin who can only make beer and swing a hammer at a chunk of heated metal.
. . . but he has to admit that she
does bring up some good points. Preparations are necessary after all. He'll have to make
double sure that when he goes back to the compound and picks up his bug-out bag and other hidden supplies no one sees him and cottons on to what he's doing, so that the clan elders don't hear about it and come to stop him. He'll also have to finish putting together that axe . . .
"I hold no heart for promises of riches from some...some crackpot old fool! Conjurer of cheap tricks! Luring men away from their homes with honeyed words, leaving wives and children behind to fend for themselves! How long would you keep them away for?! How many youths must grow without f-fathers?! W-Without..."
Hastria's words fail her as her composure falters, tears forming around her eyes. Her neighbors could recognize the hurt of those yet unhealed wounds coming to the surface once more.
Ah, he remembers. This girl had lost her only living family in that plague a few years back . . .
And here he is, giving not even a second thought to the fact that he's about to abandon his clan to go out on the Wizard's adventure. To see others about to so easily discard what she's treasured and lost but they still have must be quite the slap in the face for Hastria. But it's different in his case. He's just one dwarf among many, a cog in the great machine that the elders have devised. If he disappears, a younger dwarf cousin will just take his place. And even to his parents, he's just a fourth son who they'd always said would probably get himself killed charging into the forest on same hare-brained guts-and-glory scheme — so really, in a twisted kind of way, he'd just be meeting their expectations if anything went awry.
No, he was going on this adventure, whatever it was — if it's from the great Gambledore, of course it would be worthwhile! — and no amount of attempted guilt-tripping was going to dissuade him!
"Splendid. Now, if you could all sign here I will give you your preliminary pay, you may take the cart and be on your merry way to a new life forged by your own hand!" Gambledorf hands you a set of papers, pointing to a dotted line at the bottom.
"Gladly!" Bierstout agrees.
Without even glancing at the contract, he scrawls a surprisingly-neat signature on the dotted line and thrusts it back into Gambledore's hands. There's no way that the Great Wizard Gambledore would be trying to cheat him after all, that wouldn't be very great and wizardly of him. It's probably a fair deal, and he's willing to do whatever it takes to go on this adventure anyway.
Hastria takes a second to calm down, wiping her eyes with a kerchief before replying.
"...And where would you have us go, sorcerer? What targets would you have us test these wands on?"
"I'm glad to see that you're coming around, Hastria. An adventure is just what we all need — the perfect medicine for what ails us, no matter what it is!"
With a hearty laugh, he claps the shoulders of his fellow confirmed adventurers — the librarian Varrys (
@GravitysMomentum), who'd recommended so many interesting adventure novels to him, and the drunk lizardman (
@Abyssgazer) whose name he couldn't recall because he'd never really been all that good at telling the lizardfolk apart from one another.
"Comrades! We must commemorate this momentous occasion with a drink!"
He takes a swig from his skin of dark winter ale — acquired just this morning from a brewer cousin — and offers it first to Varrys, and then to the lizard.
