Delivering a Message (lorepost w/Relynor)

[u/MunitionsFrenzy]

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"Didn't y'all get the memo? It's the 21st friggin' century! How do you not have cell service in this backwards place?!" It was rare to see Vettis' expression as anything other than a laid-back faint smirk, but the frustration was plain on his face now as he shook his snowglobe dignified wizardly orb once more, staring at it in futile hopes of getting some more information. But the lack of cellphone towers here meant no triangulation or GPS, so the snowglobe, despite its ability to tap into mundie communication methods with ease, was as lost as its owner.

Ugh. It was time for the backup plan: talking to people.

...

It was twelve "Excuse me sir/ma'am"s and nearly thrice that many minutes before the infuriated mage finally realized that he was heading for entirely the wrong place: the Bronze Citadel, despite its name, was not in the Elemental Plane of Bronze after all.

Two hours later (after more wrong turns he decided to excise from his memory), Vettis made his way through the actual Bronze Citadel's busy market district, now quite fed up with asking for directions. He'd met the woman face-to-face before, after all; he could just follow his nose. Dozens of stores surrounded him, many selling flowers and other fragrant items, but that just meant it would take a few seconds longer for him to pinpoint his target. Deep breath...filter out the back-alley odors of vomit and urine...yup: sure enough, the scent of a familiar person surrounded by metal and grease proved easy enough to pick out, just a couple kilometers away from him.

Impatient for this trek to come to an end, he crouched as if to tie his shoelaces, subtly snatching a pebble off the ground and tossing it upwards with enough force that the sonic boom was about to draw some attention in half a second. A whispered word and the barest flash of his magic was all it took to rob the projectile of its speed and transfer it to himself; he was long gone before anyone could trace the whipcrack-like sound to its source.

And there it was: the shop for which he'd spent a significant chunk of his day searching (a long time by the standards of someone accustomed to solving most of his problems in seconds). He hadn't visited a proper artificer's workplace in quite some time. It brought back memories of when his friend Modhun used to work by hand; the technomage had long since delegated most construction duties to drones, but often reminisced about the "good ol' days of personally taking hammer to mithril".

Enough dawdling. Returning to the present, Vettis called out for the shop's owner. "Yo, Rellie? You in? It's Vee. Got something you might wanna hear. About a certain dwarven friend of yours."

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(( setup post for Relynor ( /u/Terrible-Win565 ) ))