I am both surprised and worried to hear that authorities from the city of Diamond Lake approached our group with a request. As we are neither famous, nor powerful, I find their decision to do so alarming. Though to be fair, I would have felt the same way even if we were famous or powerful, being approached in an official capacity by a government in a world like this is worrisome because the likelihood and severity of blowback from refusing a request from local authorities are significantly higher than declining to assist in my own world would be. It's just not safe to say no when the people in charge are effectively untouchable.

Regina begins to explain the details of the request, “The city of Diamond Lake has finished interrogating the Orc captives we brought in, and they are worried about the answers they got. They thought these would end up being Orcs from the Goblinoid tribes southwest of here, but these Orcs come from across the Break mountains, and it turns out they are early scouts for a larger mixed goblinoid army.”

Pausing briefly to allow the significance of that statement to sink in, Regina continues, “They have several goals. They wish to locate additional tribes to subjugate and press into service, they wish to identify a good place to settle, to identify local threats and determine the optimum route for their army to travel, and so on. But the part we care about is that they are a small fraction of a much larger group, and their report will help determine the direction of travel for the main horde. The obvious follow-up question of course, is where is the main Horde? About two thousand kilometers north of Bhan Dorul, which is the closest major dwarven settlement in our region. Equally disturbingly, although they do intend to conquer along the way, their underlying intention is to settle. They are fleeing something. The Orcs we captured did not know any details regarding what they are fleeing, they only know that their leadership insisted that it was not something they could fight against. This commission is much like the last one. They ask that we capture a high ranking Orc whom can provide additional details relating to the size and composition of the main horde, as well as what the threat they are fleeing is. Diamond Lake will be mobilizing components of their military to distract, harass, and when and where possible destroy the scouts that are already in the area. But a scout patrol will not provide the answers needed. The target will need to be either a shaman, or the expedition leader for this detachment. This is, of course, very dangerous for us. But the pay is very good, they are offering 10,000 gold if we can offer complete answers to their questions, and 12,000 gold if we can bring back a captive with the desired knowledge. Beyond that, they are willing to offer us a 500g merely for accepting the job."

At this point Regina pauses for a few more moments to let us consider her words. She is still standing and clearly plans to continue, she's just waiting for us to fully catch up and speculate on the implications of what she is telling us. A pretty good idea considering that even though he has heard it before Joaqim is lost in thought, and Bucky looks like he's waiting for someone to tell him how he should feel about this.

Bucky is not dumb by any stretch of the imagination, he's just relatively normal in the mental department, which makes him seem slow when compared to the other members of our little group. As for what she has said though? 500 gold up front is nice, and 10 or 12,000 gold would be very nice. That's a bit staggering relative to our current finances, really, but…

Regina deems the delay sufficient, and continues, "Diamond Lake seems to be taking these findings seriously. Do we want to take this job on? My opinion is no, we are not nearly high enough level to survive a single mistake or stroke of bad luck, and if we fail, that 500 gold falls well short of the amount required to allow resurrections or otherwise change the balance of that answer. But. Due to the nature of the mission and its origins, Joaqim wanted to run it by everyone before offending the administration of the city by declining. If we say no, we will probably want to leave Diamond Lake for at least a few months and possibly a few years, because we are likely to start running into problems with the local guards for every perceived infraction of their rules. I don't know where else we would want to go, but I'd vote we flee to the Empire, I've never been there and it sounds interesting.”

I think about it for a few minutes, but I cannot think of a way to safely have our entire party infiltrate their Orc camp, take down one of their strongest people, and then escape without being noticed. We might be able to get one or two of our team close enough to attack, and if we play our cards right, we might even be able to take them down. But the odds of pulling it off without being noticed are just abysmal.

It might be a little different if we could expect fatal maneuvers to work the way that one would expect in a sane world. According to common sense, cutting someone’s throat open or bashing their skull in will kill them. But with class levels involved, people can be extraordinarily, unnervingly, impossibly sturdy. The unnatural vitality that possesses people with levels is, frankly, well beyond the bounds of common sense.

As an example of what I mean, let's pretend that we were to take an anvil and drop it on someone’s head. Most people on earth would die immediately, because that's more than enough to crack open the skull. Once their brain is spilling all over the floor, all you have left is a corpse.

Here, unlike Earth, it is not a guarantee that the anvil will kill anyone. Yes if you destroy the brain they will die, but even among the level 1’s, the weakest of possible human adults, that anvil may not be enough to smash their skull in, potentially bouncing off immediately after having caused some bruising and possibly bleeding, possibly even some light fracturing, but concussions don't exist here. Somehow the brain remains protected until their health has been overcome.

As for the specific targets we would want, the expedition leader or one of their shamans? I do not know what level they will be, but they will not be first or second. The leader of that last Orcish patrol survived more arrows than Boromir, and some of those arrows punched him through the neck. We can expect at least as much trouble from the leader of their encampment, and probably more. The patrol leader was just some schlub in charge of a small patrol after all, the guy in charge of the scouting camp is probably in charge of a dozen or more people of comparable strength to him.

Vitality aside, the comparative ineffectiveness of lethal strikes in this world is made doubly complicated by the strange physics of this world. Natural law here simply is not the natural law that is the truth of my home universe; there seems to be some sort of a will or design component to natural law here, which I believe is likely related to the existence of the system. There is an extremely high chance that if we dropped an anvil on the head of that Orc Chieftain, it would barely disturb his slumber, because an anvil is not classified as a weapon. It could and probably would cause damage, but probably only about as much as my claw would, and I simply lack the strength to be able to threaten or cause significant harm to most creatures.

Taking a great sword or an axe to his head or neck while he is asleep would be enough to wake their leader without a doubt, and it would definitely cause real damage. If nothing else it would be more damage than if he were awake and resisting, because if he were resisting it wouldn't be easy to line up a shot somewhere as vulnerable as his neck.

I think that those lethal attacks might actually be what is meant by Critical Hits, I think that maybe those are the attacks that should have killed someone if the system weren't busy futzing around with reality, though I don't know that for certain. As a whole the people of this world only know that critical hits exist because system mechanics make it clear that they do, and that there are ways to achieve them, and sometimes it's pretty obvious that an attack was significantly more destructive than normal.

Regardless, even targeting vital locations, for each of the leader orcs we have met up to now, all of whom are lower rank and it is safe to assume are weaker than the ones we would have to target for this mission, they would be able to survive multiple strikes.

If one of us were a thief or an assassin there might be something allowing them to one hit kill someone, there are plenty of stories indicating that assassins are incredibly proficient in killing people in one blow, but if we're at the point of speculating about different classes, we might as well be saying that an axe would be enough if we were higher level. Probably true, but irrelevant to the current situation. And sadly, for this commission, killing him would defeat the purpose of our mission. They want us to find answers and ideally kidnap one of the most powerful people in their encampment. How would we get them out once they were knocked out? Carry them in a bag? That would be quite a trick.

I can think of a few options for improving our odds, for instance the silence spell would allow us to have a few minutes where screams will not be heard in an area around the target, and the invisibility spell would make us much harder to notice coming in. But I cannot cast those spells directly and would have to put them into magical items, all of which would have a failure rate, a *very* limited duration, would cost money that would ideally be better spent elsewhere. In the case of invisibility, I would have to cast it once for each person effected, and on it goes the reason this isn't a practical path, because everything would take money that I don't actually have. Not in the quantities required.

There are objectively better spells than the ones I mentioned, for instance it's possible to cast invisibility on an area rather than a single person, causing everyone present at the time of casting to become invisible, but that is beyond my current magical item crafting skill. I'm not far from being able to cast that specific spell courtesy of those evil alternate spell lists, but it might as well require level 20, because this is an immediate request. The costs associated with infiltrating a heavily armed war camp is a major sticking point and while the ability to take one of their most powerful members down is probably something we could work through, that would only be true if we were able to somehow avoid anyone else noticing.

If we solve those issues, we might be ok. But even taking some higher risk maneuvers, like using magic to disguise ourselves as Orcs to get close, followed by using silence to try and prevent our actions from getting noticed, escaping is not something I have much confidence we could succeed at. We would need a head start, and we would need to hold onto it for an unknown length of time.

The truth is that even the bad ideas I do have would be too expensive to attempt on my 400g budget; I can only craft 2 more of the weakest of spells before I will run out of funds. The idea of magically disguising ourselves is more popular than I would have expected, but no one else has a way to be confident of a successful exfiltration either; the best we have is to somehow just not be noticed.

I third Joaqim and Regina's no, with Bucky rounding things out by contributing his own “no”. Moving onto the next topic, I'm not a fan of forced relocation, but while I agree that The Empire would be the ideal, moving all of us to the Empire would also be difficult. If we must flee, I suggest Riverwind as an alternative. I'm not a fan of their reputation, but trying to go to the Empire would be far more difficult given our current financials. Passage on a ship is actually quite economical by most standards, but the cost for all of us to take a trip that will require at least a few months of berth is another story. We don't know how many months, but Riverwind is over a month travel, and it's far closer than the Empire.

After reviewing our remaining funds and expressing our opinions regarding where to go next, Regina concludes the discussion by saying “How much would it cost to come up with a plan you thought might actually work”, which was as obvious as it wa… What?

“What?” I eloquently state.

“If you had more money would you be able draft a plan, using your current abilities, that has a decent chance of success? If so what would the plan be, how much would it cost, and how long would it take to prepare? For the most part we know each other's abilities. Sometimes we might have something new to talk about, especially Joaqim since he gets access to new spells every few levels. But you? Your class is weird. The rest of us only found out in the last few minutes that you can make people invisible, that you can cast silence, and that you could disguise the entire group to look like a bunch of Orcs. That's mage territory, and not all of it is novice level. We didn't know you could do any of that. But you know what you can do. So would a plan that might actually work be possible if you had the money, and what would that plan require and entail?” She clarifies.

“… Ok so first off, I cannot do any of those things right now. It would take time, effort, planning, and money for me to be able to do any of that. But yes, I might be able to come up with something if I had enough of all of those. As for the rest of it though, I’m assuming this is not hypothetical? That you have a way to acquire additional funds, and that you are interested if it would be possible with that financial support? What about using that money to get to the Empire?”

“For now just call it hypothetical. As to whether or not it stops being hypothetical, that depends on what your plan would be, how likely it would be to work, and how much money you would need to be able to execute it. From there, it's hypothetically possible that a less hypothetical discussion may follow based on the details of your hypothetical plan.”

“Well now, aren’t you a spicy meatball?”

“What? What does that even mean?”

Thank god, this entire conversation has gone off the rails and thrown me completely off kilter. Especially the weirdly political response when asked about whether or not she secretly had a bunch of money, though certainly that was amplified by her decision to poke fun at me for both prying into something that she obviously didn't wish to discuss, as well as making fun of my word choice.

This girl just never seems to stop surprising me. Knowing someone is competent is one thing, but even if it was by using a phrase I'd heard on Earth and she consequently wouldn't have heard it, I am secretly glad that I managed to throw her off balance in return. Even I have to admit that the "Spicey Meatball" meme is just silly so it's for the best that she didn't get the reference, but it was enough to confuse her so I'll take the "win".

“I’ll need a bit to be able to work out some details and give rough estimates,” I say as I pull out a folded paper along with some charcoal, and begin drafting a rough estimate on a soonest possible timeline with a cheapest cost for the best plan I can come up with on the spot and accounting for my abilities.

“Do you carry around paper and charcoal everywhere you go?” Joaqim asks.

“Of course. Well, the paper. Chalk is probably better overall, but sometimes I like to be able to sketch, and charcoal is more convenient for that since it allows for some lovely shading. Between those it can go either way for me. Everyone else should carry paper too, though. A few loose sheets are not as good as a full notebook, but relying on your memory for everything is a great way to lose track of crucial details.”

“That makes sense. Mostly. Well, let us know what ya can come up with. A few more minutes before deciding won't be a problem.”

Half an hour later the server is giving our table the stink eye, and I am ready to present a rough draft of what is surely a terrible plan.