55 – Age 14 – 12 of 12
Votes for this Turn:
A1 - Patrol - 3
A2 - Feast - 12
A3 - Plants - 5
A4 - Stories - 1
A5 - Hund - 36
A6 - Hunt - 0
S1 - Wikipedia - 0
S2 - Steam - 0
S3 - Paradox - 18
S4 - World - 38
Ideas: So Far
(10R) Investigate the Wall and inquire about our Father. - 23
(15R) Seek out the Church Starry Wisdom and invite a priest back to Long Lake. - 11
(15R) Investigate the God's Eye and the Green Men there. - 10
(25R) Go to Braavos to see if rumors of Targaryen buildup there are true. - 1
(15R) Bring a weirwood sapling to the Blackwoods Family. - 1
(25R) Go to the Vale, request to study Royce Rune Armour & Runestone Castle - 1
(25R) Go to the Vale, to investigate the Mountain Clans Firstmen, Wargs, etc. - 1
(30R) Go to the Stormlands to investigate StromsEnd Castle. - 1
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Rolls for this Turn:
Personal: Forgotten Realms Wiki
Thanks to Charm person, Petyr Baelish has knowingly gained the ability to convince one person at a time that he is their Friend.
He must be careful with this ability because it fades when he changes its target, but even as the effect fades, the memory will not seem strange to the target, only in hindsight would any strangeness become clear to the target.
There is also no visible sign of their ability, at least to those unable to sense magic in some way.
So there is nothing to stop him from targeting someone right in front of them.
Still, as bad as all this is, it makes him seem like a friend, not a BFF, so he can't overwhelm a person's desires or give them commands they wouldn't normally do or anything, but he is terrifyingly good at charming people now.
World: Elder Scrolls Wiki
Thanks to Ring of the Hunt, while Warging or generally sleeping, we now gain a slight regeneration power.
This won’t counteract everything, so no regrowing limbs, even over the course of months.
But injuries that might have proved mortal to another might just be debilitating for us now.
Not to mention how minor injuries will start healing much faster for us now.
This effect is sped up while we are fully warging with Jinx or Janus, though we’ll need to figure out our dreams are more than just dreams for that to happen…
-----
Story:
You took the Fetching Lady across Long Lake to reach HartShore.
That felt good in a way you hadn’t expected.
For all the sailing you’d done since coming home, you hadn’t really been back out on the water like this since childhood.
The lake settled into you once the sail filled and the hull found its rhythm, and some old part of you seemed to wake with it.
It was faster, too.
A horse would’ve had to pick its way up and down the folds of the Lonely Hills to reach HartShore, while the boat carried you straight there over open water.
You, Jon, Janus, and the wolves fit well enough aboard her.
The wind was kind that morning, enough to fill the sail without making work of it, and the lake wore that pale northern light that made even plain water look cleaner than it had any right to.
You handled the boat with growing ease.
Jon sat easily in it as well, and the crossing never turned heavy or silent.
Even Janus seemed more interested in the water than in passing judgment for once, which was rare enough to notice.
The farther you sailed, the more HartShore began to look like a place apart.
The country around Heartsgrove spread wide and low, all fields and easy water.
HartShore sat where the Lonely Hills came down to meet the lake, and the land there hadn’t the least interest in neatness.
The town clung to several higher rises with lower green stretches between them, and even from the boat, those lower places looked like the sort of ground that only pretended to be trustworthy.
You didn’t need anyone to explain what spring did to them.
People built where the earth would keep them through the year and used the low places only when the season allowed it.
Once you saw that, the rest of the place made sense.
The houses stood on the higher ground.
The sheds, pens, and stores sat where they could be repaired, moved, or sacrificed if floodwater came up mean.
Fish racks stood farther uphill than you might’ve guessed.
The paths between one cluster of buildings and the next weren’t pretty, but they were sensible.
HartShore wasn’t a town built to please mapmakers.
It was a town built by people who knew exactly what the land would permit and what it wouldn’t.
The hounds were the next thing you noticed.
They were everywhere.
Under benches, beside sheds, asleep in doorways, pacing fences, following people as if they’d every right in the world to be there.
That alone told you you’d reached Clan Hund.
The place smelled of wet earth, fish, dog fur, smoke, and lake water.
Jon noticed it too.
He smiled a little and said that if the clan chief turned out to dislike dogs, then somebody’d lied to you both.
HartShore’s glass garden stood high enough to catch your eye before the people did.
It sat on one of the safer rises, bright where the light hit the panes, larger than you might’ve expected a place like this to support.
It didn’t look ornamental.
It looked needed.
The whole thing had the patched, watched, carefully kept look of something too useful to neglect.
By the time you tied off the Fetching Lady, the clan chief was already making his way down toward the landing.
Cinaed Hund didn’t look anything like the settled image your mind had attached to the phrase clan chief.
He was too tall, in that awkward way of a young man who’d gone up faster than he’d filled out.
His hair curled down to the neck and had already gone strangely white in places, and his beard and moustache had done the same.
The rest of his face was shaved clean enough that it looked deliberate.
Without the northern twang in his voice and the way the rest of the Hunds resembled him just enough to make the likeness plain, he might almost have looked like something washed ashore from the Iron Islands and decided to stay.
Aine and Caden came with him.
Aine’s coat had that almost radiant silver look to it.
Caden carried herself lower and steadier, with the sort of old loyalty that doesn’t need showing off.
They fit beside him so naturally that they seemed less like companions and more like part of the same first impression.
The wolves noticed them at once.
Ghost watched the hardest.
For a few breaths, the animals at the landing took one another’s measure while the people waited.
Cinaed started formally enough.
He bowed properly, greeted you by title, welcomed you to HartShore, and got through the first part of it with a careful precision that suggested practice.
Then Janus hopped down from the mast rail, landed on a post, and fixed him with one bright eye.
Instead of the usual hesitation people had around ravens, Cinaed lit up.
He clicked his tongue once, said something low and absurdly gentle, and Janus came closer at once as if he’d known him for years.
You hadn’t seen the bird take to someone that quickly since Robert Baratheon.
That told you a fair bit by itself.
Cinaed crouched without thinking about it, let Aine and Caden settle, let the wolves study him, and somehow managed to greet the animal half of your company without making any of it feel staged.
Ghost watched him carefully.
Jinx circled once and seemed content enough.
Janus gave a low sound that bordered on approval.
Only after that did Cinaed really look up at you and Jon, and when he did there was something almost sheepish in it, as though he knew exactly what he’d just shown and had realized too late that it might’ve been too much.
After that, the walk upward through HartShore came easily.
Cinaed explained the settlement as some men told stories, by following interest instead of order.
This rise stayed driest, so most of the permanent houses clustered there.
That lower patch could be used for pens in summer if spring hadn’t been too cruel.
That muddy stretch looked useless now, but gave fine reeds and sedge when the season turned.
It should’ve felt rambling.
Instead, it felt alive.
He knew the place too well to lose his point for long, and every now and then one of the hounds would glance toward something, and he’d read the gesture as if it had spoken aloud.
By the time he showed you into the clan hall for dinner, you had a much better measure of both him and the place.
HartShore was clever in the way rough places had to be.
Cinaed was clever in a different way.
Not polished or smooth.
Not the sort of man who hides himself behind perfect manners.
Just quick, warm, and interested in everything around him with an intensity that would’ve been tiring in another man and was only barely so in him.
Dinner passed well enough because of that.
He tried to be lordly and mostly managed it, though every now and then some topic would catch him and he’d tip over into enthusiasm, whether that subject was hound breeding, spring flooding, crab fishers, teachers, or the small things animals revealed about the people who kept them.
You stayed the night in one of the spare rooms of the clan hall.
That felt natural enough after the crossing and after the meal.
HartShore was too far and too awkwardly placed to be touched at the edge and then abandoned again in the same breath.
The room was plain but comfortable.
The hall itself had that settled, lived-in feeling of a place that’d served its people for a long time rather than simply housed their chief.
By the time you slept, the sound of the lake and the hill wind had become one thing in your ears.
It was the next morning, as you were getting ready to leave, that Cinaed surprised you.
He found you near the landing again, Aine and Caden at his side, and for once there was a real hesitation to him.
He started to say one thing, stopped, then admitted with visible embarrassment that he’d heard the rumors going around the province about your effect on growing things.
That alone made Jon’s expression dangerous.
Cinaed saw it, flushed a little, and pressed on anyway.
He said he knew how foolish it sounded.
He said he didn’t truly think your boots made oats leap higher out of joy.
But HartShore’s glass garden mattered too much to his people for him to ignore even a ridiculous chance at better fortune.
So, if you were willing, he’d be grateful if you might bless it before leaving.
That was the sort of request you could only refuse by being crueler than the moment deserved.
You didn’t believe for a blink that you’d become some wandering crop charm.
Jon plainly didn’t believe it either, though he was enjoying your discomfort enough that he had to look away entirely.
Cinaed looked as though he’d rather wrestle floodwater barehanded than ask the question twice.
So you agreed.
The glass garden was warm, close, and full of the sort of careful life that only existed because people’d fought for it pane by pane and season by season.
What grew there wasn’t luxurious in any southron sense.
It was useful.
Herbs, starts, fragile things needing shelter, and enough green life under glass to remind you that places like HartShore didn’t survive on fish and hounds alone.
Cinaed took the whole thing with such earnest seriousness that it became hard to resent the absurdity of it.
For him, this wasn’t some village joke.
If HartShore’s glass garden failed, people suffered.
If it prospered, people ate better.
That was enough to make even nonsense worth trying.
By the time you stepped back out into the morning and turned toward the Fetching Lady, you knew more about Cinaed Hund than you had when you arrived.
He was: strange, perceptive, and little exhausting.
He was far better with animals than most men had any right to be.
He was also the sort of man who’d let himself look foolish if that was what his people needed from him.
That mattered more than polish ever would.
That, you thought as the boat pulled away and HartShore began to break itself back into hills and distance, was worth remembering.
---
The journey back to Heartsgrove was quieter than the journey out had been.
Jon had enough sense to leave that quiet alone, which was one of the many reasons he was good company, and so the two of you crossed the lake with more thought than talk while HartShore and its hounds slowly broke apart behind you into distance and haze.
By the time the Fetching Lady touched home water again, you had decided what needed doing next.
It was not an exciting task, not even a pleasant one.
It was simply one that should already have been done.
As lord of Long Lake, or close enough to it for any practical purpose that mattered, you were the nearest lord to Castle Black.
And yet in all the months since returning home, you had made no effort at all to reach out to the Wall.
That was beginning to feel rude.
The Night’s Watch could have written first if it had some urgent need, and plainly it had not.
But that only covered so much.
Tradition ran both ways, and it was beginning to look strange that a new lord had not yet sent an envoy north to ask whether the ancient order required anything within his means to provide.
The Watch had needed men since long before you were born, and you were hardly going to start treating your own people like prisoners just to answer that lack.
But there were other needs a lord could meet: ore, timber, preserved food, cloth, tools, lamp oil, leather, seed grain, and a hundred other things that mattered much more on the Wall than they ever did in the south.
That sort of request you would expect.
That sort of request, once made, tradition would demand you answer.
Your own situation only made the delay look worse.
True, you were still underage for another year and were technically heir rather than lord in the most tedious legal sense.
True too, you were acting with the approval of the Stark in Winterfell, which meant no one sensible was likely to question your authority inside Long Lake.
Still, there came a point where failing to send anyone began to look less like youthful disorder and more like neglect of duty.
You had no intention of letting it reach that point.
So once back in the castle, you went to find Omek.
Of all your people, he was the one you had known longest and trusted most with something that needed tact more than pomp.
He had the patience for it, the age for it, and more than that he had been to the Wall before and understood the strange mix of pride and need that seemed to cling to every black brother and every black holding.
If anyone could go north, ask the right questions without giving insult, and come back with useful answers instead of bruised feelings, it was him.
There was also the other matter.
You did not circle around it much once the two of you were alone.
If Omek was going to the Wall anyway, then you wanted him to seek what information he could about your father, though without pushing the matter so far that it became a spectacle.
If nothing else, honor would demand that in a year’s time your father return your ancestral blade.
That alone made it worth knowing whether he still held it, whether he had kept it in good order, and whether he had already started inventing some crooked excuse for why it could not be passed on cleanly when his claim finally ran out.
It was not a flattering thought.
It was, unfortunately, a realistic one.
Your father was exactly the sort of man who might run from his duties and then decide cleverness counted for the same thing as honor.
You would not have put it past him to try some little loophole, some temporary transfer, some gift or loan meant to keep the blade from falling back into the hands it was actually meant for just as his own hold on it expired.
Perhaps that was unfair.
Perhaps you were being harsher than he deserved.
But a man who had walked out of your life seven years earlier and then kept that silence afterward did not leave much reason for charity.
Omek took the whole charge with the sort of calm that was either reassuring or irritating, depending on your mood.
He did not pretend the Watch would suddenly open all its books and secrets to him just because he asked politely.
What he promised instead was better.
He said he understood the delicacy of the matter, that he would do as bid, and that he would represent Long Lake honorably while he did it.
If there was a need at the Wall, he would learn it.
If there was news of your father to be had without making a mess of the thing, he would bring that back, too.
There was not much left to do after that except see to the practicalities, arrange what provisions he would need, and then wait.
And that last part was the most irritating of all, because waiting always was.
The road to the Wall was not impossibly long, but it was long enough, and careful questions took time besides.
It would be months before you knew whether the Watch wanted anything from Long Lake, whether your father still held the ancestral blade, and whether your suspicion had been wisdom or mere bitterness.
So you let Omek go north with your authority, your questions, and your unease all bundled up together in one quiet task.
After that, all that remained was hope.
Hope that the Watch’s needs would be simple enough to answer.
That your father had not already done something underhanded.
That your own judgment had not curdled too far into resentment.
It would be some months before you learned whether any of that hope had been worth the trouble.
-----
Skills:
Combat:
(10) Westerosi CQC - 40/200 (+15) (Talented In North)
(7) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 40/100 (+5)
(10) Northern Archery - 115/200 (+15) (Skilled)
(7) Northern Equestrianism - 100/100 (+10) (Knack)
(10) Heavy Armour - 185/200 (+30) (Prodigious)
Diplomacy:
(9) Interpersonal Communication - 100/100 (+20) (Skilled)
(4) Public Speaking - 65/100 (+15) (Skilled)
(12) Management - 60/400 (+40) (Prodigious)
(5) Stewardship - 85/100 (+15) (Knack)
(5) Northern Law - 65/100 (+15) (Knack)
(5) Westerosi Law - 55/100 (+15) (Knack)
Language:
(8) Common Speaking - 100/100 (+5) (Knack)
(10) Old Tongue Speaking - 5/200 (+30) (Knack) ←
(7) Valyrian Speaking - 37/100 (+3) (Knack)
(6) Common Reading - 95/100 (+0)
(4) Westerosi Runes - 50/100 (+10)
(6) Valyrian Reading - 30/100 (+0)
Scholarly: (Knack in North)
(8) Math(s) - 55/100 (+20)
(10) Accounts - 70/200 (+40) (Prodigious)
(9) Northern History - 90/100 (+30) (Knack)
(6) Westerosi History - 75/100 (+0)
(7) Northern Peoples - 95/100 (+25)
(5) Westerosi Peoples - 55/100 (+0)
Leisure: (Knack in North)
(9) Northern Hunting - 35/100 (+10)
(5) Fishing - 100/100 (+25)
(5) Swimming - 25/100 (+15)
(4) Seacraft - 20/100 (+50) ←
(5) Climbing - 20/100 (+10) (Skilled In North)
(4) Acting (Lying Convincingly) - 3/100 (+0)
(11) Herbology - 15/300 (+40) (Prodigious) ←
(1) Warging - 75/100 (+15) (Gifted)
War:
(8) Strategy - 100/100 (+25) (Prodigious)
(2) Castrametation - 10/100 (+0)
(2) Poliorcetics - 10/100 (+0)
(2) Fleetcraft - 10/100 (+25) ←
(1) Battlewise (coup d’œil) - 10/100 (+0)
-----
Earning: 5
Spending: 10
Banked: 29
-----
Rolls for Next Turn: → L7! ←
T2 = Person/Event at Home
L7 = Most convenient
-----
Voting:
Main Actions:
A1 - Patrol the Kingsroad with Jon to prove it’s not boys returning, but men.
Reputation: Small Boost with everyone at Heartsgrove.
A2 - Order a small feast to celebrate your return. (-10 Resources)
Reputation: Moderate boost with everyone at Heartsgrove.
A3 - Ask Berenice to teach us about the herbs cultivated in the glass garden.
Reputation: Large Boost with those who believe in your Plant “Blessings.”
A4 - Go on a hunting trip for a few days with Jon and the Wolves.
Reputation: Small Boost to everyone in the Northern End of the Wolfswood.
A5 - Go to the Glass Garden in Heart of the Gods to see how the Larvesta are (and to bless it).
Reputation: Moderate boost with everyone at Heart of the Gods.
Personal Rolls Sources:
S1 - Wikipedia
S2 - Steam Games (On Cooldown 2/2)
S3 - Paradox Wiki's (D30)
S4 - World Rolls List (D12) (On Cooldown 1/1)
-----
Information:
1 - New Schedule!
I just wanted to be direct about this, because as difficult as it is for me to make the call, I unfortunately do have to move this quest off daily updates and over to weekly updates.
The reason I started doing daily updates in the first place was because I had become underemployed to the point that I was actively losing money even while working as much as I could.
I needed something to do that would keep me engaged without costing me more money, and that is how I ended up starting Born of Bad Odds.
But like anyone in that situation, I was trying to fix the underemployment problem.
Recently, I finally managed it.
It is not glamorous work, but it is work, and it means I am about to go from working 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, to 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, along with about an hour of commute each day.
Unfortunately, that just does not leave room during the week for writing.
That said, this is not actually all bad news.
Had I not found something like this, the quest probably would have ended in a month or two anyway when I got priced out of my apartment.
So, as sad as this change is, it is also me saying very clearly that I am committed to this quest and committed to being as consistent about it as I realistically can be.
That means from now on, I will be working on the quest over the weekends.
In theory, that could mean two updates a week.
In practice, it has been pointed out (correctly) that my updates are not always as detailed as they should be.
So rather than trying to force out two thinner chapters, I am going to do one chapter that I work on over the course of the weekend and then post on Sunday.
I am genuinely sorry about this.
I would completely understand if some of you chose to dip at this point, though I really do hope a good number of you stick around.
Either way, I want to thank all of you!
I genuinely did not expect the reaction I got to BOBO, much less the even stronger reaction I have gotten from this quest.
So thank you all for building this story with me, even if this ends up being as far as some of you go.
2 - The next Two Weeks
For those of you who are sticking around, there is one bit of good news.
My new job does not start for a little under two weeks.
That should, hopefully, give us enough time to finish out the first Long Lake arc before the full schedule change kicks in.
There are about a hundred pans in the fire down south, and any number of them are going to boil over into this quest’s version of the War of the Five Kings sometime in the next year.
So I figure the best use of these next two weeks is to build up Long Lake as much as we can, so that when the switch to weekly updates happens, it happens right as we move into the next phase of the quest.
It’s still true that I should not be updating every day.
So instead, for this last stretch before the full changeover, updates will happen 3 times per week.
Age 15:
1 of 6 - Tuesday, April 28th
2 of 6 - Thursday, April 30th
3 of 6 - Sunday, May 3rd
4 of 6 - Tuesday, May 5th
5 of 6 - Thursday, May 7th
6 of 6 - Sunday, May 10th
After that, we will be into the War of the Five Kings and the regular weekly Sunday updates.
-----
Write-In/Questions:
1 - Where should we send Berenice, and what should she do there?
A few examples from Omek that would work just as well for Berenice:
(15R) Seek out the Church Starry Wisdom and invite a priest back to Long Lake.
(15R) Investigate the God's Eye and the Green Men there.
(25R) Go to Braavos to see if rumors of Targaryen buildup there are true.
(15R) Bring a weirwood sapling to the Blackwoods Family.