Rule 57: Always try to make friends with local librarians, archaeologists, and hunters. They know more about the area than you do, and if anyone is going to be able to tell you about the weird and deadly quirks of the local monsters or the twisty story behind that ruin you’re about to explore, it’s them.

- “1001 Rules for Adventuring,” standard issue to all new Adventurer’s Guild initiates.

Archivist al-Badr’s office, FExCorps headquarters, Bridgetown

I’d thought that the major was a collector, and found it unusual for a high-ranking military officer to have so many artifacts on display in her office. She was nothing compared to her archivist, although given his profession I didn’t find that quite so surprising.

Racks of stone, wood, pottery, and bone objects lined the walls. A long table covered with parchments and two arcane contraptions I couldn’t identify in varying states of disassembly dominated the center of the “office,” which in reality was more like a large storage room filled with a museum’s cast-offs.

The place smelled of dust and clay, with a faint undertone of wet and rotting wood, and I immediately shot a warning look at Cherubix, sitting on Faraday’s shoulder, muttering out of the side of my mouth, “No cleaning without permission, got it?”

Judging by the way she’d been sniffing the air and looking around, she’d been thinking along the same lines I was. Though she pouted a bit under my glare, she nodded and put her hands back in her lap. We’d been over this before, after the incident with the dust mage and the mop.

I’d just begun looking for the archivist when a high-pitched, reedy voice piped up from behind one of the far shelves. “I told Hollins no visitors today! And, naturally, that lout just lets you in. Well, you can turn right on around and leave, I’m busy!”

I peered towards the shadows around the shelving, trying to find the source of the voice. “Ah, Mr. al-Badr, yes? We’re adventurers, new in town, and Major Tor-Harrek told us to ask you about…” I looked back over my shoulder at Faraday for confirmation. “... the ‘peculiarities of this planet,’ I think were her words.” Faraday shrugged and nodded, and I turned back to the table, in time to see a short form emerge from behind the rack and walk towards us.

Starlit heavens, I thought. A ratfolk. Today’s just full of surprises, isn’t it?

You didn’t see many of them outside of their underground hive-cities, and it was apparently a fifty/fifty chance that they were either civilized and interested in trading or murderous and interested in eating you, depending on which world you were visiting. I’d never laid eyes on one, myself, though the Guild’s curriculum had included a lecture on their social mores to ensure nobody committed any political faux-pas. Now I was wishing I’d paid more attention in that class.

Short as a dwarf, but skinny where dwarves were stout, he stood about four feet tall and might have weighed seventy pounds. The robe he wore hung loose on his frame, but his brown fur was lustrous and his beady black eyes were focused on us. His face was, as the common name for his species implied, that of a giant rat, with long black whiskers and round pink ears. A pink tail covered in brown fuzz flicked from side to side behind him as he stalked towards us on digitigrade legs, his claws making faint ticking noises against the stone floor with every step.

“Hmph. So you are. Fine, fine, better to brief you so you know what you’re in for.” He pointed a clawed hand at us. “But no stupid questions, I want to get back to my work as fast as possible, are we clear?”

Yep, those were definitely rat fangs showing when he talked. This was just so odd - I was used to dealing with rats in either a “kill them and I’ll give you some coppers for every tail you bring back” or an “I don’t care what you do just get them out of my granary!” kind of way. Having a giant bipedal rat talking to me, with a considerable amount of contempt no less, was putting me on my back foot a bit. Ko seemed to be having similar issues, judging by the unease I was sensing from him.

I didn’t let the smile falter, though. Doesn’t matter if it’s a crotchety ratfolk or blustery and self-important merchants, a smile makes people think you’re willing to work with them, gives them reason to hear you out. I did, however, clamp my lips together so as not to show teeth. Ratfolk interpreted a wide grin as a threat display. That much of the lecture I could remember.

“Anything you can share would, of course, be appreciated, sir,” I said. “Is there somewhere we could sit and -”

“Here’s fine,” was the abrupt response, though his demeanor did seem to have become slightly less hostile. “We won’t be talking long. I assume you’re as ignorant as every other bunch of delvers who’ve come through?”

Ugh, so it was going to be like that. Fine, I’ll play dumb, just tell us what we need to know, please. “Likely, yes, though we each have our own specialties. Please, educate us.” Glancing at Faraday, I saw his mouth quirk up at the phrasing. Normally I wasn’t so tolerant of this kind of abrasive attitude, but we were still new here, and were planning on staying for long enough that I wasn’t willing to throw away goodwill unnecessarily.

“Bah, at least you’re cognizant of it.” He glanced between the three of us, narrowing his eyes slightly at Cherubix, before stepping back and hopping up to sit on the edge of the table. “All right, the main thing, and the bit I’m sure the major wanted me to tell you, is that for some reason the people who used to live on this world left behind a collection of relics - we call them wardstones. How and why they were made, we don’t know, but their effects have caused us headaches ever since FExCorps first crossed the Bridge over here.

“Each wardstone creates a region-wide jamming field, significantly impeding any kind of teleportation, message, or scrying spell for dozens of miles around it. Worse yet, they all interact with and amplify each others’ fields, and the net effect is to completely shut down any of those magics at a range of more than a hundred feet or so.”

He glared at us, as if he blamed us personally for the affront. “I shouldn’t have to tell you how annoying and difficult life gets when you can’t even send a Message spell that a goblin raiding force has been spotted; and you can forget sending relief forces via teleport circle, too. Most of our operational handbook had to be rewritten in order to deal with this place, and the high command isn’t willing to risk people very far beyond the walls when we aren’t able to support them.”

My eyes had gotten very wide as he’d explained, realization after realization slamming into me. Sundered Hells, it’s no wonder the Major’s looking to pay people to give her warning about dangers. It’s like they’re stuck in a low-grade warzone - they can’t see anything that might be coming their way. Can’t send men out without leaving them on their own and unable to report back reliably. Starlight and Sunrise, no wonder the rumors in the Guild are that this place is cursed.

A few months after we’d signed on with the Guild and finished our training, Ko and I spent two weeks clearing out a plague locust infestation in the middle of an actual warzone, a continent-wide slave revolt that the Federation had refused to take a side in. Lots of silver flowing around for freelancers like us, but a nasty bit of business in general. Both sides had kept up jamming fields to hamper the other’s ability to communicate, spy, and attack - there was nothing like somebody hot-dropping a dragonborn heavy assault team on top of your commander’s tent to make the survivors say “nobody’s teleporting anywhere.” Ko’s ability to fly messages back and forth had been a godsend, during that whole mess, and I’d never been more scared of losing him. Hopefully this place wasn’t as full of crossbow-happy soldiers looking to shoot anything that moved.

On the other hand, these wardstones offered us an opportunity; if we could go out, do our thing, and return with both loot and valuable information… My smile was no longer forced. This world had “profit potential” written all over it in silver - no, in gold letters!

Well. Provided we didn’t die, of course. Gotta live through it if you want to spend your loot.

al-Badr was watching us as we thought that over. Faraday was looking as stunned as I was. What little information the Guild had on this world had not included these details, and someone was going to catch at least one Hell’s worth of trouble for that failure if I had anything to say about it. Cherubix, sweet bewildered fae that she was, didn’t seem to get the implications at first, but then I saw the glowbulb go off in her head and she said “Ooooh, so, like, that’s why you need us! Right?” She grinned, pleased with her deduction.

The ratfolk’s eyes narrowed into slits at her. “Impertinent, but correct,” he growled. “My own efforts to map the surrounding area and pinpoint any sources of trouble have been… less than effective, even after seven years of trying.” He jabbed a clawed finger at us. “I will have you know that I am one of the pre-eminent diviners in the sector! But...”

At that he sighed, and his ears and whiskers drooped a little, and I felt a little flutter inside at how cute he suddenly looked. Not that I would ever tell him that, of course. “But there’s damn-all I can do when none of my spells can get clear resolution beyond a mile or two outside the walls,” he said. "Even with the materials I purchased off of some of the past adventurers after they came back from expeditions, I can only create a small amount of magical sympathy, enough to get a vague sense of direction and a general feel for the elemental balance of the area.”

He glanced over his shoulder at one of the shelves, then hopped off the table and padded over to it, his claws making that tick-ing noise. Reaching up, he snagged what looked like an intricately-carved stone egg the size of my head, and then from another shelf a long rolled-up piece of parchment.

Setting both on the table in front of us and unrolling the parchment, he turned back to us. “This is what I have for a map of the area. For what it’s worth, I’ll be happy to make you all a copy of it.” Looking down at the map, I was… frankly not very impressed, and could see why he was so defensive about his abilities. While the town, the three villages, and their immediate surroundings were clearly marked, along with some mountains far to the east and west and a large blob labeled “Dwarfstone” to the south, there was precious little actually present on it.

“This,” he said, gesturing at the egg, “is a wardstone. Note the exquisitely-shaped runes and the interlocking latticework of its structure. It wasn’t carved, it was grown into this shape, and its enchantment emits from the very structure of the stone, rather than a spell laid into it after it was formed. If the louts who brought it back hadn’t damaged the lower portion of it when they extracted it,” and at that he tilted it up so that we could see the chisel marks and cracks that covered the bottom of the oval object, “I might even have been able to hook it up to a mana crystal and gotten it running again to figure out how it works.”

He glared at the thing, as if it offended him on a personal level. “Even damaged and inoperable, it’s still a marvel of magical engineering, and I’ve sent the other one they recovered to Central for further analysis.” He snorted at that, and muttered under his breath, “For all the good that’s done.”

He shook his head, returning to the lecture. “At any rate, we’ve placed a bounty on these things. Any you bring back, intact or in pieces, will get you five hundred gold denarii.”

“Five hund-!” I broke off, shocked to my core at that, and exchanged glances with the rest of my party, who looked equally stunned. That was enough for a family of four to live off of in comfort for five years, maybe ten if they were on one of the more distant worlds and thrifty. For adventurers, that was a bounty that you only saw on seriously dangerous threats, like a wyvern nest or a trollish warchief. Whooo, yeah, this place definitely had opportunities.

al-Badr was just scowling at me, though. “Indeed. There’s a reason for that high a bounty, unfortunately - previous bands have only located three of them, and while their removal or destruction seemed to alleviate some of the jamming temporarily, there were enough of the stones in the lands beyond those three that the cumulative effect still prevented effective scrying or communication.” The scowl grew into a snarl, and he hissed out the rest, “Those idiots didn’t even tell us where they found them, either! I had to piece together from rumors and eyewitnesses to a drunken diatribe that the one they found in the forest to the north was hidden inside a black stone pyramid. Beyond that we have no clue where you should start looking.”

He visibly spent a second to calm down, then continued, “The laws governing Guild and Corps interactions mean I can’t force you to give up any information on what you find out there, unless I have credible evidence that it directly threatens civilian lives. However,” the glare he sent our way was full of pent-up fury, “if you lot intend to keep your findings secret the way they did, you will have to go about your business without my help, or that of any other FExCorps personnel if I can do anything about it. Are we clear on that?!”

I just stared at him blankly. Why would they not have shared what they found…? Cooperating with the local authorities, unless they were blatantly corrupt or trying to use an adventuring party for their own political purposes, was standard Guild procedure.

It also made a lot of sense, from a practical standpoint - the adventurers get information, money, and a willingness to put up with heavily-armed and dangerous strangers in town, and the local sheriff or mayor or whatever gets some of their thornier problems solved. Talking with the person in charge, telling them what you found in the haunted mansion on the hill and asking them what they know about the Ring of Spookiness that the ghoul inside was wearing, was Adventuring 101. Otherwise you had to go to an enchanter and pay them to figure out whether the thing was safe to wear, or cursed and likely to kill you, and never learned that there was a relative of the ghoul who would pay good money for the ring, cursed or not.

Then again, this town’s only been here for a bit less than two decades. Maybe they just didn’t see the point, if the locals didn’t have centuries of historical knowledge to draw on? That still didn’t explain it, though; regardless of any local knowledge they might or might not gain, they should have wanted to build up good will. What could have made them so unwilling to share information?

I shook my head, breaking off that line of thought. Doesn’t matter, we still need to be on FExCorps’ good side. Speaking out loud, I reassured al-Badr, “Crystal clear, Master Archivist. I cannot speak for other parties, but for ours at least,” and here I glanced at Faraday and Cherubix, making sure we were on the same page, “we see no reason to hold any information back, and would be delighted to assist in your efforts to learn more about the town’s environs. For the right price, of course.” The last was said with as polite of a “business is business” smile as I could manage.

The ratfolk’s whiskers twitched, and much of the tension went out of him. He really hadn’t liked being kept out of the loop by those other groups. “Yes, yes, of course, if you’ll actually help, then I can get clearance for a budget to reward you. Would you be opposed to taking soil and flora samples? Having a catalogue of such would improve my ability to properly map the areas you move through.”

Smile firmly fixed on my face, I got down to haggling. Yeah, this place definitely had potential.