With a New Weapon! Visit the Armory

Just before the sunrise, you make your way through the sleepy town down to the armory, a squat building on the outer limit of the Humble's Western border. Helix, the town's smithy, had moved his workshop here due to complaints of noise; his tendency to hammer straight through the night till the morn had kept the town half-awake all throughout your youth. These days, you do not mind the walk through your own little town. You can smell the bread rising in the baker's oven as you pass her shop, the sound of families coming to life inside each house you pass. Your whole life has been these three-hundred or so people. Even with your parents gone, you feel blessed to live here. This is why, you remind yourself, you cannot sit back and relax into the peace of the town. It has not been only your parents that have gone missing. In addition to dreams of finding and recovering your family, you do not wish to see anyone else in the village suffer loss the way you have.

As the sun crested the bridge of the Western mountains, you approach the door of the armory. The building itself, ironically, seems to be a strong breeze away from falling to pieces. It's support beams have a strange sag to them, its stonework porous, as though any of the stones comprising the facade of the building could slip out on a whim and bring the whole place down. From inside, the sound of a hammer smashing the dents out of metal rings so loudly the door might as well not even have been shut. You knock a few times, increasingly loudly, until you are shouting alongside your pounding of the door -- a few minutes of this and you hear the metalwork from within slow to a halt.

A brief moment later and the armory's wooden door creaks open, revealing behind it Helix himself. Helix is a broad-shouldered man with a thick brown beard and hair to match, slicked back with sweat from the morning's work. He wore a set of dark leather overalls over his plain white shirt, damp and darkened from the heat of the forge that sat in the backroom of the stony building, effectively a cavern in the mountains behind the armory. You had seen it a few times as a child, your parents bringing you often to familiarize you with the weapons you might one day wield. Helix, a decade or so your senior, had worked the armory for as long as you could remember. He had always been kind to you.

"Hero," he said, his face a frown, clearly upset at having been disturbed. "What brings you here so late in the day?" You protest that it is not late at all, but actually exceedingly early, at which he brushes a hand through his dark hair. "Lost the whole night again, haven't I?" He smiles. "Well, you may as well come in and see if we can't fit you into something good."

You follow behind him, noting as you do that you are still a few inches shorter than Helix, though you are by no means short. You wonder why such a well-built man would choose to forge weapons instead of wield them, but perhaps not everyone is cut out for a life of adventure. Just as well -- the act of creating swords was at least as important as the act of using of them.

"The sword I sold your parents is top quality," the Smith expresses as he leads you through a cluttered workshop of shields and blades. "I could give you a shield, but without a squire to carry it on your travels, it would be more cumbersome than useful. If you find such an assistant, I'll be happy to supply you with said shield, and some plate armor, once you have help to don and doff it." You make a mental note of such an occurrence; perhaps you will return once you have become more renowned, once you have begun to craft a legacy for yourself as a hero. "As it stands now, the best I can offer you is an enchantment for your sword. A gem from the mountains that will give you a modicum of control over the an element of nature. Nothing too powerful -- for that you would need to travel far deeper than is safe. But I have some gems collected already, and others are merely a stones toss into the cavern."

He pushes open the back door of the armory to reveal his forge, a stifling heat overtaking you the moment you enter. You recognize the oven-looking structures lining the back wall, leading up into three separate exhaust chimneys, and wonder how Helix manages to work all three at once without burning to or collapsing from the stress of it. A stoney archway at the side of the room leads to a torch-lit path you recognize as the entrance to the cavern.

"Of course," he continues, "there is the matter of payment. If you delve into the cavern yourself and retrieve a gem, I am happy to inlay the gem into the sword for free. If you want to use one of my gems, however, I will have to charge you. I should warn you -- though they are not too dangerous, and will mostly leave you be, some gorgons are known to live at the base of the mountain. Nothing you can't handle, I would hope, but a fair warning to you all the same. If you'd like to pay, I'd need fifty or so gold."

It is a hefty sum, but not more than you currently possess. Alternately, seeking a gem for yourself could prove to be good experience; you have never encountered a gorgon before and would like to be able to identify them. You note, as you stand in the heated room beginning to sweat yourself, that Helix's eyes are traveling down your leather shirt, down your britches, all the way to your shoes and back. You doubt this is because he has an interest in your clothing. You wonder if this could be turned in some way to your advantage...