Miithra stretched her arms. She’d been behind her desk for ten hours already, and with the amount of paperwork still piled in front of her, she’d probably end up falling asleep in her chair before she finished.
Felinarians were not built to go more than six hours without sleeping, nor were their bodies suited to go more than four hours without sprinting towards prey. She expended all the built up energy into flicking her tail back and forth, a rhythmic stimulation that kept her from going completely mad.
She reread the acquisition form again. She recognized the handwriting, Henry was the cheapest scribe in the city, and between his watery ink, dull quills, and shaky penmanship, he was also by far the worst.
She would have banned his services years ago, but the scribes union would throw a fit. They struck out over a supply change in the shipments of paper from the elven lands, and of course it ended up being Miithra’s responsibility to resolve the issue, because nobody else in this godforsaken city took the responsibility to keep it running.
Miithra slid the sloppy handwriting into her ‘resubmit’ bin. Whoever had hired Henry would get the form back with a sly reminder of why he was the cheapest scribe.
Extending a claw from her paw, she cut open the next envelope from the top of the pile. Thankfully the writing was clean and steady, the mark of a scribe well practiced with gnomish fountain pens (which of course the union had banned the usage of).
Along the top of the page was the headline, “Dangers in the P’komisth tunnels: Gorgon, Tunnel Collapse, Kobold Sorceress”. Purring with interest, Miithra continued down the page.
The form was scribed by Nyalkuuj, a young gnomish man who had been venturing into the ‘tame’ tunnels under the P’komisth hills. It seems that kobold activity in the area attracted larger predators, and now monsters from the deepest underdark were close to the surface. In his encounter, Nyalkuuj was separated from his wife and child, and forced to teleport out along with the mercenary he had hired.
For having been separated from both his partner and his only kid, his report was remarkably level headed and well written. He requested that the adventurers guild use his full recovery insurance as the quest reward for whoever slayed the monsters in the tunnels and returned with his wife and child. He didn’t blame the guild for the unforeseen danger, nor did he imply that the fate of the world hung on the cleansing of the dungeon.
Miithra began writing up a new form. She cross-referenced the insurance form attached to the report, and redid the calculation for the value of the payout. The form had listed a bounty of one million gold pieces. The number was obviously wrong, so she took a sip of coffee and flipped through to see where Nyalkuuj had made his mistake. Probably in the classification of expected level.
Flipping through, she looked. The level multiplier of payout was three times base. It was an expensive premium, but that alone wouldn’t explain such a massive discrepancy. She flicked through to the evaluation section. Two bodies, each worth five hundred grams of diamond dust. Then she saw the list of magical items carried by the woman and her child.
A crown of true light. A pair of slippers handcrafted by fey artisans. Not one, but two bracelets directly channelling the elemental realm of fire? They were carrying hundreds of thousands of gold worth of magic items into a beginner dungeon. Where did they get this much money?
Srana Lwimuusmúmas was the listed name for the female gnomish wizard. The name wasn’t one Miithra knew as a seasoned adventurer, and with this kind of equipment, if you hadn’t been adventuring for years, then you had to already be rich enough to buy it as your starting equipment, or be the kid of someone truly incredible.
Her feline curiosity mixing with her studious nature, Miithra decided she’d earned herself a small break. She jumped down from her chair and let her body return to a more natural form. The druid magic that pulled her bones into an upright posture finally let go, and she arched her back on all fours, cracking her spine into a more comfortable shape.
Pushing through the flap at the bottom of her office door, she crossed the guild hall, dodging nimbly between the bustling adventurers coming too and fro with chests of loot and stretchers loaded with the wounded.
The guild library was in a separate building. More of a shack filled with books and a single sleepy elf who was stuck sitting behind their own desk. Miithra jumped up on top of the counter that Brairbath was sleeping on and batted them in the face, claws still sheathed.
“Mmmiithra?” They mumbled.
She meowed, not wanting to waste the magic to build a set of vocal cords when Brairbath was still half-sleeping.
“I’m up. What do you need today?”
Miithra cleared her throat, “Who is Srana Lwimuusmúmas?”
“The gnomish princess?”
“I’m the one asking you, Briar.”
“I read a book about the Lwimuusmúmas family, some very wealthy gnomes who recently expanded their kingdom after a war with some deep gnomes. I think it’s somewhere in here, if you’d like to read it.”
“That’s okay, I just need to know about her. We’ve got a bounty for the return of her and her child. One million gold pieces. They were lost after a gorgon attacked her party beneath the P’komisth hills.”
“Srana was exiled after eloping with a common gnome, abandoning the wedding between her and the last living heir of the deep-gnome kingdom. She took with her a number of wedding gifts worth quite a fair amount of gold. Of course, now her cousin-“
“Thank you, Mx. Brairbath.” She cut them off before they could launch into one of their endless rambling tales assembled from a dozen dusty tomes.
Brairbath had their eyes closed and their head resting on their arms before Miithra even left the library.
Walking back with her tail curled high, Miithra thought about what she could do with the payout from this quest. With a ten percent cut of the bounty, the guild would finally have the cash to pay for some much needed improvements. Miithra could hire a permanent secretary to handle the paperwork. There’d be money to provide the healers with everything they needed to restore the early retirees back to health!
She returned to her chamber, and expended her last wildshape of the day to assume the necessary limbs to sit and write out what she needed. Her quill danced across the form. The energy of a sprint channelled directly into her wrist as she wrote out the quest log. In minutes, she had everything down and ready to go up onto the public board. At the bottom, in massive swooping numbers, she wrote out.
900’000 Gold Pieces reward.
That would draw in adventurers from every corner of the world, let alone the city. The draw of such a reward brought in a lot of new guild members, all of whom would not only pay the signing fee to join the guild, but also supply up from the partnered gear and ration shops. For every adventurer that joined, it averaged ten gold pieces for the guild. The last time she posted a bounty a tenth as big as this one, they got over a hundred and fifty new members. She was swamped with the application papers for a month after that.
She’d post the quest, close up for the day, and go hire a secretary. First thing tomorrow, she’d have a brand new stack of applications already piled up.
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