"Huh," Sev said, glancing through his messages. He glanced at Misa — they were having breakfast together in the room, having decided that the suddenly crowded tavern downstairs was not for them.

Well. More accurately, Sev had decided that the crowded tavern wasn't for him, and Misa had opted to eat with him so he didn't have breakfast alone. Which was a gesture he appreciated, really.

"Looks like we'll be splitting the party?" Misa asked, glancing through her own messages, and Sev nodded.

Vex had sent him an update through the system, informing him both about what had happened downstairs and who they'd talked to, as well as the various suspicious circumstances they'd come across. The fact that only one mage could see the mana behaving oddly in town was strange enough.

Then there were the other things. The mention of a dungeon, albeit a low-level one. Vex shared his concerns about the behavior of mana and whether or not it was potentially related to dungeons, or to a dungeon formation.

He added on that no one had technically actually answered the question of where they'd come from overnight — even Noram, when asked, seemed to frown a little bit and then said he couldn't remember. Everyone else deflected from the topic. Then there was the matter of food, and how Noram had said he hadn't actually felt full from eating until he'd had porridge with them.

That part in particular, Vex had noted, was strange — but it was a minor sort of strangeness, and he didn't know what it could point to. He mentioned it anyway for the sake of completeness. Sev wasn't quite sure what to make of it; he certainly hadn't noticed anything odd with their food, though he made sure to cast a quick [Purify Food and Water], just in case.

"Any ideas what's going on?" Sev asked, raising a brow at Misa, and she shrugged and shook her head.

"Not a fuckin' clue," she said. "But I'm thinking my mom might. I sent out a couple messages so she can get a few people ready to help me scout out these goblin raiders."

"Meanwhile I have to get ready for a day of socializing," Sev grumbled, and Misa grinned at him.

"Consider it training," she teased.

"I'm already the leader of the party!" Sev complained. "I don't need diplomacy training!"

"Funny, you're whining like you do."

"Misa," Sev huffed, and Misa laughed.

"You'll be fine," she said, giving him a more genuine smile. "You always get worried about talking to people. We picked you as the party lead for a reason. I get too aggressive, Vex is too nervous, and Derivan doesn't like using a lot of words and doesn't really follow most customs."

"So you admit you're too aggressive," Sev said. Misa narrowed her eyes playfully at him.

"Don't push it."

Breakfast was a simple affair — Sev had cooked up some pancakes with the ingredients in the pantry, and after their meal the two of them went about their days. Vex and Derivan, they were sure, would be fine; the two were headed out to a low-level dungeon with company. Sev told them to call on him if there was any trouble and healing was needed, though, and he made plans to head over once he'd finished questioning people about the goblin raids. That wouldn't take too long, he figured.

How very, very wrong he was.

The problem with a task like "go and ask people questions" was that "people" turned out to be a pretty large variable. The first person he'd decided to ask about the raids had been Anyati — and he still hadn't managed to extract himself from the conversation.

"And they broke all my good pans!" the woman complained. "Can you believe that? Came into the inn and smashed them right up. Didn't even take anything. What's the point of that!"

She was bustling about the kitchen while she was talking, cooking meals for the surprisingly many hungry customers outside — not all of them even looked like they were from Fendal. There was a table of water elementals sitting in the corner, their thin, wavering forms splashing harmlessly against the wood. It didn't seem to actually soak into the wood, either. Elementals were a rarer sort, so Sev was surprised to see a number of them apparently traveling.

And the rest of the tavern's visitors... well, there were plenty of the more common species he'd come to expect — lizardkin, orcs, humans. But there were some of the rarer species, too. Some of them he'd never seen or heard of before, even.

There was a table where a lone crystal floated above a seat, very occasionally making a ting, which appeared to translate into a request for a drink — Sev wasn't sure how they were drinking, exactly, except that alcohol seemed to vanish within a certain vicinity of them.

There was a table where a man that appeared to be made entirely out of plants and vines was sitting. He was devouring, perhaps a little frighteningly, a plate that was stacked high with steak — the vines and petals on his head opened up to reveal razor-sharp teeth and an interior maw that seemed like it led straight into a void, and the steak disappeared into it, with the plant-man barely chewing. Not for the first time, Sev wondered about the food shortage, and how bad it really was.

There was yet another table where three kobolds were chatting animatedly between one another, which wasn't particularly unusual except for the fact that kobolds were generally considered a 'monster' by the system. No one was giving them a second glance, though, and Sev mostly wanted to meet them, because good god, they were small and cute. He was glad he'd never faced off a kobold — he was pretty sure he'd refuse to fight them on principle.

"And!" Anyati said, and Sev blinked; he'd forgotten she was still talking. "One time they raided the town just to scream really loudly in the center of the town! They were ranting about... eh, I don't know. But it was very disruptive," she said, huffing.

"That doesn't seem... bad, though," Sev said, phrasing his words carefully.

"It's terrible!" Anyati complained. "How am I supposed to get business done with goblins yelling outside my inn!"

Sev decided that he wasn't going to get anything that was actually useful out of her, and moved on. She hadn't seemed explicitly angry about the goblins, at least; frustrated with the raids, certainly, but she'd never mentioned any great harm that they'd done and didn't really seem to care about them beyond wishing that they'd be less disruptive when they raided.

But that didn't really match up with what they'd been told. Gensen had mentioned the goblins stealing from the mana crystal stores; Anyati had mentioned nothing of the sort, only that they'd been loud and disruptive.

And that trend was consistent, he would come to find. Or rather, it was consistently inconsistent.

He asked a man at a flower shop what he thought of the goblin raids, and the man had immediately launched into a full-on rant, just like Anyati. He was another one of the plant-people that Sev had never seen before, and his complaint was that the goblins would always raid in the middle of the night; they were the stealthiest creatures he'd ever seen in his life. He'd wake up in the morning to find his flowers half-chewed on.

"I can just grow them back," the man, whose name was apparently Seed-Planter — Sev didn't comment on the name — said. "But it's a waste of mana! And I shouldn't have to do it in the first place."

"We're going to try to figure it out," Sev said, trying to project reassurance into his voice. "Have you heard anything about them stealing from the mana crystal stores? Or being loud and disruptive?"

"What?" Seed-Planter frowned at him. "No, I didn't hear anything about that. I didn't even know we had mana crystal stores."

"So they just... sneak around at night? And chew on your flowers?" Sev asked a little helplessly. Surely that wasn't the only thing Seed-Planter knew they did.

"Yes," the plant-man said, apparently still very convinced that that was, in fact, the primary goal of the goblins.

"We'll figure out what's going on," Sev said with a sigh. "You take care, alright?"

"Are you sure you don't want to buy some flowers?" Seed-Planter said, leaning forward. He brandished a single flower that looked a little bit like a rose, though the center of it twisted off into several smaller roses. They were a pale blue, matching the color of his robes remarkably well. "These ones would look great on you. They match your eyes."

"My eyes are black," Sev pointed out, amused.

"They're a very dark brown," Seed-Planter said, acting affronted, but he seemed to grin in his own strange way — the petals and vines on his head spread open wide, revealing the same razor-sharp teeth that he'd seen back in the tavern. "And I happen to think pale blue matches very well with dark brown."

"Or it happens to match my robes and you're just trying to sell me flowers," Sev commented with a laugh. "But I'll take it."

And he did. Seed-Planter was kind enough to pin the flower on his robe for him, too, a small burst of magic causing two thin thorns to grow out of the flower and stick to the fabric of his robe; it wouldn't actually damage the fabric, he was assured, although Sev was a little doubtful of that claim. It didn't really matter, though; Sev wasn't particularly attached to the integrity of his robes.

The florist-merchant waved him goodbye after extracting a promise from him that he'd return, and Sev began to search for the next person to question.

The pattern remained the same. Everyone knew about goblin raids; none of them seemed to agree on what the goblins did. They all agreed on the time, but never on what the goblins did or where they were. On top of that, they all seemed to have very specific, personal grievances when it came to the goblins; it was never that it disrupted the town, it was that it disrupted some aspect of their personal lives, or their personal business, or else just something they cared about.

Which was... certainly a pattern. Sev wasn't sure what to make of it. He was almost concerned it was all just some sort of very elaborate prank, but he couldn't imagine the sort of skills that would be needed to fool nearly everyone in a town.

The next step, then, was to speak to someone with a skill that could pierce illusions. Intuition-type skills, like Misa's mother, or various forms of observation and mildly precognitive skills often given to people with classes centered around protection.

Sev went to look for the town's guard captain. Hopefully, whoever they were, they'd be all business, and he could get the interview over with quickly so he could join Vex and Derivan and whoever it was they'd brought with them to the dungeon—

"Oh, I'll tell you about the goblin raids, alright," the guard captain told him when he finally found the man. He was an older man covered in heavy plate armor, in sharp contrast with the lighter leathers that his men wore. Sev couldn't even see his face. "Let me tell you, back in my day—"

Sev sighed.