Enlightenment Through BDSM

The miner encampment itself was more rustic than I’d imagined, and more stone than I had imagined as well. Where the town before had been primarily constructed of wood save for the monastery, nearly everything here was made of stone. Tents? They were rocks with a tarp thrown over them, the tarp held down by more stone. Chairs? Either carved from stone or just a lone rock sitting next to a table made of, you guessed it, stone. What wasn’t stone was metal, including cookpots, tools, and a couple of the nicer tent frames, but for whatever reason wood was certainly out of fashion here, only used in the handles of a handful of tools and as material for a couple donkey-pulled wagons by the road.

And that’s not even mentioning the people. Everyone in the encampment was short, shorter than me, shorter than Emi, shorter than most people I’d ever met. They all looked pretty stocky too, but it was hard to tell for sure, because they all wore a ton of clothing, each looking like a kid whose mom had wrapped them up in seven different coats before sending them off to school because the weatherman had said it “might be kind of chilly today.” Half of them had giant bushy beards, completely untrimmed by the looks of them, and the other half all wore thick scarves in place of those beards, wrapped around their entire face many times over. They all had helmets with bits of fur lining creeping out the bottom, fluffy jackets, and a monstrous pair of boots on their feet, coming up almost all the way up their legs.

“What’s up with them?” I asked, looking around in awe before someone else stole our attention.

“Welcome to Wailing Cave,” a woman said, walking over to us with a clipboard that was made of stone, somehow. She had… eyes, for sure, blue ones, but that was honestly about it from what I could tell. There was the hint of long brown hair that almost melded with her leather clothes that she was completely smothered in, but despite that I could swear I heard a slight chatter from her teeth as she spoke through her scarf. “I’m the foreperson, Dynal. Are you three from the Guild?”

Emi stepped forward to answer, placing her bag down with a terrifyingly crunchy jingly glass sound,, but Kalia was the first one to speak. “Yes, we are,” she said, producing the work notice and handing it over.

“There’s a specialist requirement; your team meets that?”

This time it was Emi who got to the buzzer first, pulling her wrinkled Job Card out of a pocket and handing it over while saying, “That would be me, Emi the Extraordinary Explosionist!” while Kalia visually cringed next to her.

“Right then,” Dynal said, looking over Emi’s card for a moment than handing it back and turning back up to Kalia. “Cave Goblins, dunno how many for sure, though we’ve seen as many as six at once. Usually they travel in smaller groups, so you probably won’t find them all at once, and may find more than that total. Five miners trapped deep inside, past an obvious cave-in the Goblins caused. Cave-in’s pretty easy to spot, just follow the signs that say ‘current project’ that are on the wall and you’ll reach it in no time, assuming the signs are still there. If not, I have a cave map for backup navigation. Any questions?”

“What caused the cave-in?” I asked. I felt a little guilty right away, not giving Kalia and Emi the chance to talk first, also wondering if it was a stupid question to begin with…

“We think they have some sort of mage or shaman as their leader,” Dynal said, “but we can’t be sure. We just know we heard a loud ‘bang’ one afternoon while that team of five was down that hole, but no one was there to witness it.”

“Are your workers carrying explosives?” Kalia asked. “Not implying they caused it, just wondering if the Goblins could’ve gotten their hands on some mining materials to cause it.”

Dynal shook her head, showing no offense to the question if she took any. “Nay, just pickaxes and hammer for the most part. Some of the material we mine is fragile, and others flammable, so explosions aren’t usually something we welcome down there, but lives take precedent over profit here.”

“Goldfire powder?” Emi asked, eyes suddenly glinting in the sunlight.

“Aye, some.”

“Wait, can we trust you in there?” Kalia said, eyes squinting at Emi, “or are you gonna blow the entire cave network up?”

“Not enough for something like that,” Dynal said. “You could burn it up, and we’d lose out on some material as I said, but the worst that’d happen is that you’d smoke the whole place, so nothing to worry about.”

“What if we smoked up the area your people are trapped?” I asked, suddenly a little more worried about the consequences if we were a little too trustworthy of Emi. 

I didn’t get an answer though, not right away, just three stares, two of utter confusion, and one of the “stop digging yourself in a hole” variety, that last one from Kalia, of course.

“All the workers down there are Dwarves, lass,” Dynal eventually said. “No Humans or Elves or Animal-kin, so you can smoke it up as much as you want, so long as you can get out before you suffocate.”

“Oh, well, of course,” I said, trying to hide my blushing. “Just, you know, making sure there’s no non-Dwarves, you know?”

“Anyway,” Kalia said, blessedly yanking the subject into another direction. How was I supposed to know they were all Dwarves here, or that Dwarves could breathe smoke for that matter? “I think we’re ready to get started. Just double checking though, your people aren’t in desperate need of supplies or anything, right?”

“Nay, I’d’ve mentioned that before. They’re probably mighty hungry if they didn’t manage rations well, but not deathly so, and we have water stations filled up at all the work sites, multiple of them. I don’t know if any of them were hurt in the blast of course, but if that was the case, well, probably too late to do much about it at this point.”

“How long have they been down there?” I asked, once again cringing at myself. That information was probably on the job notice, I was pretty sure. 

“Three and a half days now,” Dynal said though, not thinking it was a terribly stupid question apparently.

“In think that’s all we need to know then,” Kalia said, nodding to Emi who picked her pack off the ground and slung it back over her shoulder. “Just give us the map, and we’ll be off.”

Most of the other people there didn’t acknowledge us as we went by. I couldn’t really tell if they were speaking either since I couldn’t see any of their mouths, but between the sounds of an anvil clanging close to the cave entrance and a plethora of stones being ground against each other in others, I couldn’t hear them if they were. 

After the quick trip to Dynal’s tent, one of the nicer metal-framed ones, we were into the cave. There wasn’t really a point in waiting, I knew, especially since it was only late morning, but I still had a bit of trepidation walking into the dark, even as Kalia lit a torch and held it up as we walked forward. 

“So,” Emi said, after a little ways of walking, “never seen a Cave Dwarf?”

“Of course I have!” I said, standing up straight and sticking my chest out.

“Trick question, no such thing as a Cave Dwarf!” Emi replied, stepping in front of me and turning to walk backwards while leaning over to me. “Just regular Dwarfs, who all live in caves of course.”

“Don’t make fun of her Amnesia,” Kalia said, a lot more nonchalantly than I was feeling. How did she do this all the time, pretend she knew all this stuff? I mean, it probably helped that she did know a lot of it from games, books, movies… It was a real shitty feeling, honestly, kind of like moving to a new school where everyone around you had some sort of rapport, some understanding of each other and how things worked. It was only kind of like that though, because this was honestly much worse, more like I’d been hired as some engineering expert on a fluke, with everyone throwing around jargon and expecting me to know things I had no experience with. A combination of those two, yeah.

“I’m not making fun of her,” Emi said right before sticking her tongue out at me and turning the right way around again. “But it is weird. Maybe she doesn’t know Dwarves can breathe in smoke, sure, that checks out from the couple Reborn I’ve met, but I don’t even think she knew what a Dwarf is. Isn’t that weird?”

“Not as weird as someone who keeps prying into other people’s business,” Kalia replied. “I thought you learned your lesson about keeping to yourself last night; was I wrong?”

I saw Emi go to reply, but she fortunately thought better, realizing the question was probably rhetorical and lowering her head as we walked.

“Signs are still up.” Kalia pointed to one as we came to a fork and then turned down that path, leading the way with the torch.

“Wait,” Emi said, looking at the fork with a puzzled look. “I thought the map said we go right at the first fork?”

“The map’s just our backup if the signs are down,” Kalia replied, but nevertheless she pulled the piece of paper out her inventory, holding the torch up to it. “Here it is, left at the fork,” she said. 

“No, that’s not a fork,” Emi said, tracing her hand along the piece of paper, “it’s an offshoot from back there, but we just went straight past it. The first actual turn we make is here, a right.”

“This is the first fork we’ve seen, Emi.”

“No, there was the path back there, you just didn’t see it probably cause it was behind us. I saw it cause I was walking backwards!”

Kalia let out an audible groan before putting the map back in her inventory and walking off. “The map says we go left, the sign says we go left, so we’re going left.”

“Kalia, I swear!” Emi said, “I was walking backwards cause I was making fun of Mai, and then—”

The sound of skittering claws on stone echoed throughout the cave.