A Second Chance at Martyrdom

21 Eleint

I’m cutting it close on actually having enough by the deadline, and today doesn’t look to be productive.

It’s Brightswords today, which means yet another bout of martial tourneys across the city.

This one seems to be more oriented towards the city’s military and police forces. A showy display to make it appear more preferable to join what would otherwise be a dangerous profession. What’s a random guard to do if some angry wizard has a bad day and casts a lethal spell in a marketplace?

I’ll have to see if I can get out of the various social gatherings with the other kids to just focus on scavenging over the next few days.

Something that hadn’t yet been impressed on me in my time in Waterdeep, is the specialist police force. The city employs a few squads of highly trained soldiers that ride griffons through the skies, specialized in taking out aerial threats from wizards to manticores.

The festival was their chance to more publicly show off their skills in front of the crowds. From acrobatic stunts to facing off against illusory creatures high above the rooftops. Apparently it wasn’t enough to simply ride the gryphons either, part of their standard operating procedure also included leaping off of their mounts through the air to plunge down upon targets only to be caught before they fell to the earth.

I guess this is the equivalent to an airshow in Bet? I never went to one, but the idea of planes flying by as a recruitment advertisement carried over. I think this was more impressive though, given the more human acrobatic feats they were performing. Half airshow and half circus performance perhaps.

Pelsot seemed to have quite a bit of fun though, he was old enough this year to join in a handful of junior mock battles and drills with the City Guard. Exhausted afterwards of course, but high spirited. He was gushing about how he wanted to become an adventurer when he grew up as we went home. I could see the tension in Virla and Tulgor listening to him, a personal issue with the idea or a simple dislike of their son picking a dangerous profession?

29 Eleint

Talk about cutting it close, there’s only a day left before the end of the month. Still, the coin was more than good enough for Malverk, he had even worked on some additional features to advertise to me.

Beyond what was discussed before for security measures, he offered a possible future improvement to let it scan other pages to be saved, mostly as a way to more easily transfer my current contents. Naturally it would also be helpful should I need to take a copy of pages of other books, but he cautioned against it somewhat when it came up. The enchantment itself wasn’t difficult or rare, but logistically most people would consider it to be of little practical use.

There were better ways to copy books, either by being scribed and copied by a professional, or via some obscure spell. It sounded handy though in a pinch, so I’ll probably try and invest in it if nothing else catches my eye and I have enough excess funds.

3 Marpenoth

The Day of Wonders is dedicated to the faithful of Gond revealing to the public a variety of their works and inventions. From assorted automata and golems, to new tools and construction techniques.

Interesting how they dedicate an entire day to such an endeavour. You’d think they would want to risk a dozen runaway experiments going awry near each other, but Virla said that she’s never heard of such a catastrophic event in all its years.

That doesn’t speak to being that long though, Virla and Tulgor are only in their mid twenties. Virla was my old age when she had Pelsot. Would Brian have tried to have any with Cozen? They did retire after the last battle, so I suppose it’s possible.

Today was certainly impressive in a lot of ways, but also… Certain inventions seemed relatively mundane to me, comparative devices already existing. A projector to display images via light, some sort of self drawn carriage, a self lighting pipe.

The things that did impress me though, were truly something. Automata shaped like life sized elephants, cats, even people. Some were much more clockwork in design, exposed internal gears turning, and some were certainly more magical in nature.

Surprisingly among all the various new inventions, there was only one major failure of note for the day. An inventor named Marchell had created some sort of levitating chair, freely moving through the air. He apparently forgot a downward option and had to be rescued by the Griffon Cavalry, the chair floating off in the sky like a helium balloon.

7 Marpenoth

I am very sore, today I was allowed few breaks. Today was a celebration called Stoneshar, a day in which everyone insists on being “productive”. Most adults were doing actual construction work, new houses, digging out basements, painting a new coat on the walls, things that actually make sense.

What did the kids all do? Dig holes and make mud forts, mostly.

A dozen shovels, a bunch of buckets, and thirty kids resulted in a good bit of productivity. We worked just a little outside of the guard barracks near the southern gate to the city, just off the Waterdeep Harbour. The children divided up into groups, some to dig up the soil and make the holes, some to go back and forth fetching water from nearby wells, and the rest to try and shape the piles of dirt with the water into walls. The groups weren’t actually all that set for who did what, people switching between them on a whim.

Lunchtime came around and an older city guard came out of the barracks, introducing himself as Sergeant Saeth Crowley. He offered to pay to order us all lunch from a nearby smokehouse, if we were to redirect ourselves to something productive to the guard. Naturally with all the work the kids were quite hungry, so as a group we took him up on the offer.

He had us digging trenches and forming obstacles for some sort of training course. Some of us taking up nails and hammers to build some basic structures under his direction. By the end of things though, a surprising amount had been done. Enough that I would have found it satisfying before as a ward to run drills through anyway.

By the end of the day, he let some of us run drills on it as well to test it for him. Few took him up on the offer due to exhaustion, mostly the older kids. Pelsot tried it too, but ended up having to stop part way after twisting his ankle, much to his chagrin.

I’m still a little annoyed at him because I wasn’t able to slip off to scavenge the Rat Hills again today like I would have wanted, but I can’t help but feel bad for him getting hurt.