Date: Eleventh of January, year 810 Post Seminal War (810 PSW)

... --- ...

Job grit his teeth, “I hope we have a few minutes. Forget the stone tablets, work on your scrolls, I’ll get the empty crate. Enra, help her please. Sly?”

“Nothing yet, but plenty of tapping in the walls. Other passageways perhaps?”

Enra shoveled scrolls into her pack with indecent haste, “probably. Kobolds are excellent tunnelers and trapmakers.”

“”

Job dragged an empty crate over to the hole in the wall, “ Enra, Index, how are we doing?”

“Sixty seconds!”

“Movement in the hallway, out of sight though.”

“”

“ Sly, Enra, grab the box! Index, lead off for Varr Barak. I’ll try to blab for time if we meet anyone.”

A sling bullet whipped by Job’s head and bounced off a stone shelf with a sharp crack.

“”

A barking dog-like laugh echoed down the tunnels, "”

Job took one look at the crate and its precious cargo, “yeah, naw, go kiss Bahamut’s ass. ” The fiery missile whips down the corridor and misses everything of importance, kobold and stonework alike. Canine yelps ad the scrabble of scale on stone herald the kobolds falling back for a brief moment.

“Index, go!”

And with that, the running battle was off. The kobolds tried slings and ambushes, but nothing managed to stick. Job got the distinct impression that they were too short of numbers to really press the attack home. Equally true, the kobolds never lost one of their own, either seriously injured or dead. Index took a couple hits from hastily improvised traps, but sustained no serious damage that quick Mending cantrip couldn’t repair. Job took a painful sling bullet to the shoulder, but kept on moving. Sly took another sling stone to the thigh, but didn’t slow or drop the box.

Eventually the kobolds broke off their pursuit when the Varr Barak guards made their presence known. They were more concerned with chasing Kobolds then with checking boxes, so Job managed to lead the whole group back to the Iron Harp without further incident. Everyone trooped back up to the hallway outside the two rooms before two things became apparent. One: the party had brought back quite a volume of scrolls, the parchment largely unrolled from a compressed drum inside Index’s chest, that now required a rather large area to be stored in. And two, the urds would need some space of their own.

Baar’miin was the spokes-urd for the four of them, and proved able to speak common with only a minor accent.

“Urds stick with egg-mother and egg-box. Is warm box. We not need whole room. Can sleep with two others.”

Index had already pulled her calligraphy kit back out, “and I need to make some clean copies of the few stone tablets I managed to fit into my pack. Plus I should like to begin attempting a translation of the dwarven runes. So I will room with the scrolls.”

Job rubbed his head, feeling a headache coming on. With Index and the scrolls in the same room there was space for only one other person in that room. And that person would likely not sleep well if Index was up all night working...