Chapter 92 – Blowing hot air

A/N: Sorry it's late, posted in the discord chapter releases channel that I was delayed due to a migraine last night. If you're not already on the discord, it's where any adjustments to schedule will be announced.

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Kori and Ortik continued their conversation for a while, talking about her, non-goblinoid, experiences on the surface and some of her newest creations. He was genuinely curious about the methods and herbs that she had employed and whether they could find alternative recipes using plants native to their environment to produce them.

While she was well aware that Ortik was a shaman, she sometimes forgot what that meant and saw him solely as the chieftain instead. He had decades of experience working with herbs and a completely different perspective on them than someone like Bolst, who focused more on inflicting harm.

By the time she returned to the brood chamber, Kori had a number of ideas on incorporating new ingredients, such as ginger or various mushrooms, or replacing the stinging nettles with stone nettles, though she wasn’t confident in that choice since they lacked the irritating property of its surface cousin. There was even a mineral that he’d suggested may prove useful, something referred to as Moonmilk, a decidedly odd name, that forms on the walls of some caves nearer the surface.

She of course was skeptical of anything with such an odd naming scheme, it wasn’t even a liquid and its only association with milk was its colouration, but Ortik insisted that it had valuable properties in fighting off infections when added to a poultice, which was exactly what the tincture of luminous moss did.

She made it home in time that she hadn’t entirely missed dinner, though most of her siblings were already done eating and occupying themselves with various forms of entertainment. Some were using her cavern defenders set, others the various sets of dominoes that had made their way into the youngling’s collection, the quality of which ranged from relatively well made to something she was certain one of her siblings had carved out of random rocks they’d found, to the favourite pastime of kobold younglings everywhere. Roughhousing. She was suddenly glad she’d stashed one of the pots of ointment in her bag.

Once she’d had her fill of fish and moss, or at least as close to it as she could manage with their portions, she joined Plk, Losq, and a few others playing cavern defenders. Her original advantage of having learned the rules before the others had evaporated in a single night. She still won more than she lost, but each game was much closer than it had been and the strategies that the others used were more varied than the last time she’d faced them.

She did manage to completely foil Losq’s ‘offensive defense’ strategy with a feint he hadn’t seen coming though, so she was mostly happy with the results. Plus, it was always more fun to have to struggle to win.

Unsurprisingly, her ointment was required before everyone called it a night. They all mentioned how much they’d missed having her, and by extension her pot of ointment, around for the occasional sprain, cut, or bludgeoning.

After two days of getting either fitful or no sleep at all, Kori was glad to be back in her own den that night. She took a few moments to clean herself up and fold her clothing so that it would be ready in the morning before flopping onto her mat and embracing her blissful, and entirely slime free, dreams.

Like all of the best nights sleep, Kori didn’t want it to end in the morning and overslept by a fair bit. Only the minder eventually hollering into her den from the main chamber finally broke the spell sleep had woven and forced her to admit that it was time to get up. Once she had, she remembered that she’d be working with Kora today and the excitement washed away any remnants that had clung on.

She was still munching on her breakfast when Korse arrived, Kora alongside, to fetch her. They had been spending their time waiting on her by catching up and discussing the topic that was likely occupying the minds of nearly all of the Elders, the moving of a certain volatile concoction.

“Finally awake, are we?” Korse teased with a grin.

“Itfs nmph thut laht” Kori mumbled with a mouth full of fish, to the tittering giggles of the others.

“Kori, don’t talk with your mouth full…” Korse muttered in admonishment while shaking his head and trying to stifle his own chuckles to appear more authoritative.

Once she had swallowed and had a quick drink of water, she offered a quick, “Sorry” before continuing to devour her meal. Thankfully, unlike most surface races, Kobolds weren’t worried about the bones in the fish, they liked the added texture.

While Kori was excited to get to her lab and work on basically anything at this point, Korse didn’t get to see Kora very often and sidetracked them for nearly an hour over a pot of tea. He asked her about everything from how it was working out with Bolst, to the conditions of their temporary work space, to, much to the young woman’s embarrassment, whether she had found a suitable mate yet.

When Kori laughed at her embarrassment, Kora reminded her that he’d be asking her the same questions in a few years too. That cut off her mirth pretty quickly. She wasn’t even remotely ready to contemplate such a thing yet. She’d rather face more goblins than give the subject thought.

They finally extricated themselves when the pot ran dry and Kori was happily leading the eldest of Korse’s chosen towards her new lab. On the way she, of course, brought out her many notes and began pestering Kora in the way only an enthusiastic younger sibling really can.

When she got to the part about alternative drying methods, Kora just groaned. “Oh, please tell me that he hasn’t gotten you hooked on that ‘heated gust’ drying method he’s been obsessing over?”

Her unexpected response to the idea, one that Kori had indeed gotten hooked on, surprised her. She of course replied in the only appropriate manner, tilting her head and asking, “Why?”

“Of course he has…” She groaned. “Did he tell you about any of his, many, attempts at getting it to work?”

“Uhh… not really?” Kori replied.

“Didn’t think so…” Kora responded, her fingers rubbing her brow.

“That bad?”

“Oh, worse… and guess who’s had the pleasure of cleaning up after each of his spectacular failures…”

Kori just mumbled a brief “Oh…” in response and waited for the young trapper to continue.

“The first time, he managed to coat half the lab, the actual lab, not the closet we’re calling one presently, in burning embers because both the gust and fire runes too powerful…” She cringed thinking about the event before continuing to gripe. “He ruined a weeks long experiment I had going to try to ferment unripe shrubverbena berries to extract their toxin…” Her voice carried a tinge of anger to it, even though it sounded like this had been some time ago. “And that’s not even the worst of his attempts…”

“Wait… so it doesn’t even work?” Kori asked with wide eyes. From the impression that Bolst had given her this was a viable method.

“Oh, it works… It just creates such a mess and wastes so much of the herbs you’re trying to dry that it might as well not.” Kora continued to list off the various failures, the best attempts resulting in a fine dust of herb scattered across the room and the worst lighting things on fire that were better left un-immolated.

She eventually tried to break the problem down to its basics. “The problem is pretty simple. You need to keep the herbs in something while you blow the air through them, but that something has to let the air through. So, no matter how you do it, you end up with escaping herb dust that makes a huge mess. Or a fire, fire is generally an option too...”

Kori lost herself in thought, trying to come up with ways to combat the apparently unavoidable dust issue. “What about a cloth bag? That’d let air through while keeping most of the herbs inside.”

“Lit on fire…”

“One of those fine metal mesh things?”

“Cloud of dust… which then caught on fire kind of spectacularly actually.”

“Put a really weak gust rune inside a metal box with the herbs, then put the entire box in an oven?”

“That… we never tried that…” Kora stopped dead in her tracks and stared at the younger kobold, her mind working through all the problems that they encountered and discarding them one after another. “That could actually work…”

The pair planned and designed the remaining trip to the lab, which wasn’t actually that long as they’d been nearly there already, before they ended up stooped over Kori’s writing table drawing out a potential design. Kori, had very little idea how to actually design something like this, it was well outside of her skillset, but when Kora looked at it as a specialty trap, her Skills provided lots of insights into the design. It took them less than an hour to have something at least resembling the idea on paper.

“I’m sure Bolst will spend hours modifying it to his typical overcomplicated design ideals, but this might actually work.” Kora sounded astounded at her admission. “What made you think of containing it all like this?”

Kori didn’t hesitate in her answer. “Well, it’s a lot like the enchanted oven that Imelda, she’s the herbalist I worked with on the surface, had, just with the gust rune added in to keep the warm air, and herbs, moving about.”

Kora just stared at her. The idea that the thing that Bolst had been obsessing over probably already existed and was even common enough for a small-town herbalist to have something similar to it causing the muscles around her eye to twitch.

Kori either didn’t notice or failed to interpret the twitching muscle and just continued on. “I think the glassblowers used something like that too, but much, much, hotter to melt their glass.”

“I… see…” Kora muttered. “Did Har know about these things?”

Seeing no harm in answering, Kori just nodded. “Think so, yeah. Why?”

“I’m gonna peel the scales off that conniving trader…” Her tone practically dripping with violence.

The sudden change in atmosphere shocked Kori, and her counterpart’s threat chilling her to her bones. “What?! Why?”

“He knew how much Bolst was struggling with that damned drying process… we’ve been at it for over a year…” She ranted. “And all this time, there’s been a scale-damned mana oven that he could have just bought us and we’d be done with it?”

“Uhh… maybe?” Kori, in an effort not to enrage her any further, offered a possible explanation. “Maybe they’re really expensive?” She paused while she scrambled for another explanation. “Or maybe they don’t sell them in Whatzakt, I think I heard someone complain they didn’t have any decent enchanters in town…”

“I’m sure he’ll have some creative excuse… but even if he couldn’t get us one, just knowing it existed and how one worked would have been enough to get us past all the failing and mess…” She was definitely not letting the matter go. Kori was certain that Har was going to be getting an earful from either Kora, Bolst, or both of them at the same time before the day was out.

“It doesn’t matter now.” Kora said, gritting her teeth while trying to dismiss the issue for the time being. “Let’s get that list of Ortik’s and see what we’re supposed to be working on.”

Kori hadn’t actually looked at the list the day prior, they’d been too busy with everything else and had left early since Ortik had wanted to speak with her. When they retrieved it from under the piles of notes, drawings, and other papers that were strewn about her writing desk she found that it was fairly extensive.

It was broken down to three sections in order of importance, immediate caravan needs, immediate clan needs, and monthly clan needs.

The first section was the smallest and easiest to accomplish. They could even get it done today if they had all the ingredients. She wasn’t entirely sure that they’d stocked any stinging nettles since Har hadn’t known about the flask before they left.

They needed to make five pots of ointment and five vials each of the Mending, Momentum, Fortitude, Resilience, and Vigilance suspensions, as well as a vial of cleansing solution. Those she knew for certain had ingredients on hand for. It was the five stinging cloud flasks and the rather surprising addition of five flame flasks that she wasn’t sure about.

“Wait… he wants me to make more flame flasks?” Kori looked at the last line on the list, mouth hanging agape.

“Seriously?” Kora was no less surprised by its addition, even going so far as to confirm that the entire page was written in the same hand to make sure someone hadn’t snuck it on after the fact. “Do we even have the right vials for them? The ones you made said something about using vials that were too sturdy”

“We can check the storeroom… there were some odd looking flasks in one of the boxes now that I think of it.”

When they checked through the stacked boxes of glassware Kori found the one she was looking for set off to a side, it was the same size as all of the others except that it had an extra bit of red paint on each side spelling out the word ‘Fragile’ in Varisian that none of the others did. Inside were over a hundred carefully arranged vials suspended in neat racks and padded in between with hay.

The vials themselves were nothing like the others that were for her typical suspensions. These ones were much shorter and had an almost bulbous shape to them. Each one sized that they'd fit comfortably in the hand, maybe a little large for her specifically but they would be perfectly sized for most others to get a good grip on before they tossed them.

“I think these are the ones…”

Har knew I’d be making these… Even before the goblins they planned to have me make flame flasks…

She was a bit hurt by the realization. No one had said anything or asked her, the first she found out about any of it was a line on a list.

Kora was a bit more socially aware than the younger kobold and picked up on the look she was giving the flask. “Damned schemer.”

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Meanwhile, nearly a kilometer above where the sisterly pair were gathering ingredients, a group of kobolds were moving slower than a snail’s pace upwards in a winding tunnel. There were multiple Elders amongst the group, Ylst at the head with a half dozen of her mages using earth magics to smooth the path forward. Ortik, following at the rear, aglow with invoked magics as he calls upon the spirits to warn him of anything and everything in their surroundings. Bolst, hovering about nervously looking over just about everyone else’s shoulder, serving no real purpose, not that anyone actually told him that. All of them were bracketed by a trio of warriors at either end, just in case something got in their way.

In the center of it all, panting as though he was hauling a cart full of stone by himself, Har. The small handcart that trailed behind him was indeed carrying stone. Though it was less than fifteen kilos of it total. Plus, another kilo or two for the real cargo that was hidden, sealed within the mana shaped rock.

To him each and every step felt like he’d walked a hundred meters, all he could think about was keeping his abilities active, smoothing out the impacts of the little bumps and dips that made it past the mages and putting one foot in front of the other in as even a pace as he possibly could. And the consequences of doing anything else. That thought was pretty prevalent too.

If there was one thing that could be said in favour of the whole endeavour, stress was an excellent motivator of growth. He’d already gotten points in a pair of Skills that hadn’t moved in over a year and they weren’t even at the halfway mark yet.