Very well, overwhelming victory for option E
E) Tell Kalz and do what he says to do. We are on this mission for a purpose. Since we are the only one in the group who can read, we are irreplaceable, so it wouldn't do for us to run off and get ourselves in trouble.
Let's see how that turns out.
34 – A last minute quarrel
You decide to tell Kalz about this development, and to defer to his judgement on this. It's your first task, you don't want to botch it up or to get in trouble. So, after returning to your quarters for the night you stop a second, invite him inside your room and tell him about this message. He's very surprised, but once again he has no reason not to believe you. He thinks a bit about what should be done about this.
"I don't like this at all. I think it's better if you don't go, it could be a trap of the carpenter and let's face it, you're not good at combat my friend. No, it's too high a risk, taking such a blind bet. Let's do this. Tomorrow, once you see the man with the red cloth, pretend you're not interested, as if you did not want to meet this mysterious person. But do look at him carefully and write down a description. In about a week we will leave for Nokos, and we will be alone once again. Once we are on the road you can write a letter and I can send one of my men to take it to Jacob. That way, nobody here knows of the letter, and Jacob can send someone good at investigating these kind of things. Spies, if you want to call them that. You can also write in that letter to keep an eye on the carpenters, just in case."
His plan seems to make sense, and so you agree to it. The next morning you wait for the man with the red cloth. However, you see none. For the entire day you keep an eye out, but nothing happens. You wonder why. Something happened to him? Or maybe to the mysterious person who wants to talk to you? Or maybe they somehow overheard you and cancelled the whole thing? Nah, impossible, you were in the lord's house....
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Excerpt 4: Etiquette – The ancient customs of Avarlos about entering houses.
.......
Not much has survived of the famed, complex etiquette in use in the ancient city of Avarlos so many centuries ago. We do know that their ways were considered exquisite in the entire known world, but they have been mostly lost in time.
One thing however has survived, and is still in use nowadays in every nation that occupies the territory that Avarlos once ruled. And that is the way to enter houses. In ancient Avarlos, it was extremely important to choose carefully which foot to use first when entering someone else's house.
If you were entering the house of a noble, a priest, or someone of higher standing than yourself, you had to use the left foot first. This was considered recognising that your standing was lower than that of the host. Only if you were entering the house of someone less important than you the right foot would be used first. It was a very important symbol of standing, and many duels to the death originated by entering a house with the wrong foot.
Right now though only part of those customs survived. It is considered extremely impolite to enter with the right foot first the house of someone of higher standing. But the meaning behind all this has been lost to most, and only scholar remembers why
.....
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Another week passes by, busy but uneventful. You work, study, train and have some fun with the soldiers. You never see anyone wearing a red cloth...
The preparation of the caravan proceed at a steady, brisk pace. But just the day before the departure one last problem rises its ugly head. In the late afternoon, when almost everything is ready, one soldier comes running for you and Kalz. He tells you that merchants and carpenters are quarreling in a very bad way. You run to the location they are and appraise the situation while the soldier explains what happened. He was certainly not joking around, this is very bad.
The caravan is assembling in the main plaza of the village. It seems that while loading a cart, one of the merchant's apprentices stumbled and let an important tool fall. The tool is unfortunately broken beyond repair. The owner, a carpenter, was enraged by this and hit the apprentice repeatedly with a stick. He kept hitting the apprentice until he ended up with a broken arm, and maybe a leg too. Now, this is clearly going overboard, and normally the soldiers would have seized the carpenter and thrown him in a cell. However your.. "enemy", the carpenter guild's head came running and started to threaten loudly the merchants, saying that not one cart would leave unless they apologized profusely and made adequate compensations. The merchants are not taking this well at all, and as more and more people arrive the two groups are looking at each other in an increasingly hostile way. The merchant guild's head is nowhere to be seen. There's already maybe fifty people here, and they all seem ready to fight. With the corner of your eye you see some people taking up some sticks...
You are here with Kalz and three other soldiers, decidedly too few to stop fifty people!
What are you going to do? Open choice since there's too many possible things you can do. Make proposals and put letters on it to help me count.
