Post
by Sharkforce » Sat Jul 25, 2020 11:59 pm
Orlam Rolfsom, Journal Entry # 2: The Farmer in the Dell
Note to self: don't eat any pork that comes from the mountains around Sosanopa any time soon. I am quite fond of my liver, it does all kinds of wonderful things related to keeping me from dying a horrible death, and I should very much like it to not get absolutely destroyed just because some loon thinks it is a good idea to feed his hogs poison.
A poster in the market indicated a pig farmer by the name of Arnold Ziffel was looking for help. Not my first choice, but adventuring is expensive, and the pay looked good. At least it was somewhere fairly new to me. Along the way to his farm, I met Lazulin again, who was also heading there, and another Troll by the name of Redsun Thandrun, an Archer. Also joining us was an Elf Shadow who would only give "Juniper" as his name, which seems improbable. We got a chance to show our skills when we were attacked by wolves along the way; nothing too troubling, we drove them off without issues.
Once we arrived at the farm, the owner indicated that he needed us to gather some materials so that he could feed his "domesticated" (and I use that word *very* loosely) wild boars something to calm them down. Further questioning revealed a variety of unremarkable grains and vegetables that could be found around the farm... and also perhaps the most lethally poisonous mushroom of which I am aware, a variety of amanita deathcap. Needless to say, I kept a very close eye on what he offered us for dinner; fond as I am of alchemy, I am much less fond of being poisoned, and his assurances that he always thoroughly washes his hands after he brews up his toxic concoction to feed to his pigs (which presumably are intended as food at some point) were not that convincing.
The next morning, nobody had died from dinner and so we set out to collect the various ingredients over the next few days, leaving the mushrooms for last as they were both much farther away and also dangerous even to handle. I impressed upon the others the importance of being very particular in limiting contact with the mushrooms, and of washing their hands very thoroughly afterwards along the way, and proposed that we might go so far as to suspend a sack of the mushrooms from a stick that could be carried between two people to keep it from touching us.
We arrived at the area indicated by Ziffel, thanks to my navigation skills, and found that the mushrooms seemed to be surrounded by a slithering carpet of a mixture of venomous and constrictor snakes. Well, fair enough; if it was easy to gather, I can't imagine we'd be getting paid much for the job. Lazulin jumped right in, and the rest of us started pelting the snakes with everything we had, after I protected everyone with Air Armour to hopefully keep their fangs from sinking in deep enough to envenom us. They proved to be no match for us, although one briefly grabbed me, but could not get through my Wood Skin, and so we returned to the farm in good spirits about a week after we had left.
The fellow went to create his feed mixture in the alchemy lab he had in his back room (I'm not jealous, I swear!) and the next day fed it to the hogs. Unfortunately, rather than calming the boars as he had claimed, it seemed to cause them great pain and made them angry. They charged at us immediately, but fortunately a combination of Shield Willow and Air Armour kept them from causing any serious damage while we attempted to subdue them, since Ziffel assured us that they would eventually calm down. Well, they got calm as the grave, that's for certain. We knocked them out, but it turns out that feeding your pigs lethal toxins can have deadly "side effects", which should have been a surprise to no one.
Naturally, Ziffel was surprised. Seriously, who let this man have an alchemy lab? This just feels like a disaster waiting to happen. One day, he's going to be too slow getting into his reinforced door and he'll be the pig feed for his herd of toxic doomswine, which will then be let loose into the wilderness and be a plague to everyone around, I can almost feel it. According to him, something weird had happened to one of the ingredients we had gathered to make it unable to neutralize the lethality of the poison. In fairness, he doesn't seem incompetent, only insanely reckless and entirely lacking in common sense, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt in assuming that his recipe normally works, and perhaps there is something odd going on up in those mountains. Apart from the dangerous loon with an alchemy lab creating poison pigs, I mean.
