A Stranger from a Strange Land

     Andel gazed at a rather off-looking human woman, thoughts running through his mind as he examined the odd woman. At a casual glance the only things that seemed odd about her would be her immense height at roughly six feet one inch and the shocking red hair, which was kept in a braid with the sides of her head shaven. A closer look however showed many other things that raised questions about her.

     Her skin was pale, and what initially appeared to be faint black and green tattoos spread from her neck over her cheeks and across her forehead. However, those tattoos (if that is indeed what they were) followed the veins and arteries. He had seen humans with her hair color before, all from a far off land over the eastern ocean, but none of those humans had her markings. While it is possible that she was part of an organization that marked their members as such, he could not think of any possible reason for doing so that would not be better served with an actual design.

     Her clothes were fairly simple, a basic shirt and trousers with the most extravagant article being the pelt of an animal that he did not recognize for a cloak. Curiously, her feet were bare and some sort of cloth was wrapped around her hands and knuckles.

     Andel’s thoughts took a different turn as she stopped by a bread merchant and tore a small piece of bread off of a loaf out in front. The merchant’s face began to redden in anger as she ate the piece she took. Mulling over the piece of bread she stole, she then pulled out a small pouch and placed some coins in front of the merchant before taking the loaf and walking off.

     Andel blinked a few times in confusion as he tried to understand what he was just witnessed. Never before had he heard of someone sampling a loaf of bread before buying it. It just wasn’t done! Walking over to the grumbling merchant, Andel pulled out the badge that signified his position as a member of the guard.

     “Greetings. I was wondering,” Andel requested politely, “if I may look at the coinage with which the strange human woman paid for the bread?” Even as a member of the guard, Andel knew that a little bit of politeness went a long way with elven merchants. If he were an elf then Andel would be more blunt but his being a gnome required that he dance around the bush if he didn’t want to suffer these unintelligent fools any longer than strictly necessary.

     Still grumbling about crude, lowborne, arrogant humans, the bread merchant handed the off-duty guard a silver coin. Looking at both faces, Andel raised an eyebrow at the surprisingly intricate craftsmanship. One face held tiny writing along the edge surrounding a building on a mountaintop. The other had a pouncing wolf, with stag antlers. Pulling out a piece of parchment and piece of charcoal, Andel took rubbings of both sides before returning the coin to the merchant.

     As Andel made his way to the city’s library, his mind began to piece together the few clues he had. The woman was undoubtedly a foreigner; the hair, her behavior regarding the loaf of bread, and the designs used for the coin faces precluded any other reasonable explanation. He may be on vacation but something about this human woman peaked Andel’s curiosity.

     It wasn’t just the lack of basic social niceties, everything about her seemed…off. Her body did not move as smoothly as one would expect, yet contained a feline grace. Her markings were too…organic. On top of all of that, something about her arm wrappings left him with a sense of déjà vu. Andel felt like he had seen that kind of wrapping before, but for the life of him he could not place where. That left him two things to focus on at the city library: her coinage and the arm wrappings. Hopefully the librarian Getisse would be able to help him narrow his search.

     As it turned out, Getisse was able to do more than narrow Andel’s search. The old man was able to tell Andel where the woman was from: a region across the eastern sea that the locals called Braenlo. Apparently that is the same land that Glastig traded with for their explosive black powder. The old librarian had traveled there for a time in his youth, barely avoiding a terrible plague that was called Black Blood.

     The region was named for the northern of the two large mountain ranges in the area, which apparently encompassed more than twice the amount of land that the Green Coast did, while the other mountain range formed the southern border. Elves did not live there, the closest being tiny fey that placed curses on various items (such as a wood-splitting ax that always turned so that the back of the ax-head hit). Orcs ruled the largest kingdoms by land area, organized into ten kingdoms called clans. The sea gnomes that came to the Green Coast for trade with increasing frequency were thought to be a type of dwarf, while actual dwarves spoke a flowing, suave, and at times nasal language that sounded more similar to the primary gnomish language than any Green Coast dwarf dialect.

     Most importantly, Getisse was able to translate the words that Andel took from the coin. In the human language from the Braenlo region it roughly said: ‘As wolves guard pups and bears guard cubs, so shall we guard those that respect the wilds.’

     So whoever made the coin represented some sort of naturally inclined organization, but not the city-dwellers that perceived an idealized natural world that excluded the possibility of civilization. Indeed, so long as respect was there it seemed to imply protecting civilization. How interesting.

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