The Valley, Part 2: Goblin Hunt

 

Once again Landis gathered you together.  As you are still not married, you are still expendable, so he has volunteered you to help search for a monster near Riverton.  Some sort of goblin has been seen lurking around farmers fields and they need help capturing and/or killing it.

“Go to Riverton and report to High Priest Anna.  She will give you further direction.”

At Riverton, you found many folk eager to gossip.  Nella the water-worker was banished just a few days ago, and this is considered especially sad since her husband took his own life a few years ago.

Townsfolk were also eager to gossip about the goblin.  The general consensus was that it’s small, green, and sneaky.  It’s been spotted stealing food.  There were many stories of how crops blackened and died and fresh-picked crops rotted in baskets after only a few minutes.  One fisher claimed to have hit it with a rock, but lost it when “the little bastard took to the river.” 

High Priest Anna was short, plump, and condescending.

“Ah, Rocktoners," she somehow managed to look down on them from a lower height.  “How brave of you to lend us your time.  We’ll use your, ah, talents at the southern fork of the river near the mountains.  If you catch sight of the little beast and you manage to capture it, bring it to me straightaway.” 

Brother Snoopdoge gathered that while she wasnt wasting their time, she assigned the Rocktoners an area to search that she thought would yield little result.

 As it happens, you found the "goblin" exactly where High Priest Anna told you to look.  A boy, maybe 7 or 8 years old, with horns and a tail, spotted stuffing his filthy shirt with tatoes.  It turns out that the farmer in Riverton was telling the truth about hitting "the little bastard" with a rock, because he sported a limp that made him easy to catch.

The “goblin” in question is Maffer, tiefling son of Nella the banished.  He knows his momma has been “sent away” and she can no longer sneak him food or clothes.  His momma told him the Priests say “the harvest bounty is for all” – a direct quote from the Book of Christ – so he doesn’t consider what he does to be stealing.  He even tried growing his own crops – he showed the party his “farm.”  He plans on growing his farm “real big,” so he can give back twice what he takes.

Nella told him that if she was sent away, he should go through the mountains and look for the Wizard.  She directed him to a tunnel entrance at the foot of the mountain, but it is guarded by a “yellow monster."

As he was shot at in the initial encounter, he broke down into incoherent sobbing while trying to hide his horns and tail, requiring some patient effort from Brother Snoopdoge to bring him down to humma-humma-wuff-wuffs and hiccuping speech.

Bigpalla gave him a healer's examination and found three salient facts.  The boy was:

1)  Filthy.  The people of the Valley take sand baths.  Maffer has been trying to emulate this by rubbing dirt on himself.

2)  Malnourished.  Not only for the last few days, but probably his entire life, he hasn’t had enough to eat.  Initial assessments of his age put him around 7 or 8.  Maffer is 10.

3)  Abused.  The encounter with the fisher was apparently the most recent injury suffered.  He has bones that were broken and didn’t set right, and defensive scars on his hands and lower arms.

It's important to note that the party decided to take Maffer to the tunnel--where he would supposedly find a Wizard to take care of him--without hesitation once they realized taking him to the High Priest would assuredly mean his death.

Maffer led them to the tunnel entrance guarded by the Yellow Monster.  Ranger Elric identified it as a robot, with a good chance that it would not be immediately hostile.  It wandered back and forth at an Ancient construction site, occasionally piping out announcements like

WARNING.  UNION VIOLATION DETECTED.  IT HAS BEEN 9999 DAYS SINCE LAST BREAK

HARDHATS REQUIRED AT ALL BUILDING SITES.  PLEASE WEAR YOUR HARD HAT

WARNING.  THIS UNIT OVERDUE FOR MAINTENANCE

It roams the area of the job site, searching for tasks that are long gone.  It was not hostile, even going so far as to walk around characters that stood in its path.  When Elric discovered a hard hat and put it on, it said THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

A search of the area will turned up a long-dead pile of feral ghouls that wandered out of the tunnel to be bludgeoned to death by the bot and set in the designated trash area.  One carried a still-intact satchel full of shiny plastic disks.  The Billnojoe recognized these as handy (if stinky) when melted down for bits of filler.

Ransacking finished, the group descended into The Tunnel....