Althea Valara

Right, so I need to find out how to get copper ingots. Since it was a goldsmith who asked me, I figured I'd head to the jewelry shop to see if I could buy some. Seems obvious, right?

No such luck--copper ingots aren't for sale. But I noticed a side room off from the shop, and me being the inquisitive girl that I am, couldn't help checking it out.

A woman looked up as I entered. "Are you here to join the Goldsmithing Guild?" she asked. I said, "Uh, yes?" I mean, I'm still not entirely sure what all this adventuring stuff entails, so maybe I need to learn how to smith...

She signed me up and told me a bunch of stuff that I can't remember about how the Guild works (my mind tends to wander when it comes to bureaucratic stuff like that), but then she started talking about synthesizing things. Which is TOTALLY COOL. Basically you take a crystal and a bunch of stuff and do some hocus-pocus on it and end up with something entirely new.

And then she gave me my first synthesis recipe and GUESS WHAT? Yup, it's for a copper ingot! I need the following: 1 Fire Crystal, 1 chunk of copper ore, and 6 copper nuggets.

I know you can get fire crystals from killing monsters; when I was down in the mines attempting to beat up some bats, I saw others finding crystals on monsters they whoop-assed. But... I don't know where to get the rest. Because of course the store doesn't sell those items.

Which means it's back to the drawing board on that copper ingot. *sighs*

Meanwhile, I've been trying to finish the stamp hunt. I thought I had found all the stamps, but when I tried to give the sheet back to Arawn he just waved it away and kept talking about the badge that Alib-Mufalib had given me to help recruit some Sentinels. And by that he means mercenaries.

...I just don't know what to think about that. It's not like Alib-Mufalib gave me much choice; he badgered me into agreeing to help him before I even realised I'd been asked to do something. I suppose I could just ignore the thing, but it seems like people's eyes are drawn to the badge even when I'm not trying to bring it to their attention.

I'm the kind of girl who has never really held strong opinions about anything, because my world was so tiny there wasn't anything to have an opinion about. But since I've started adventuring the world's gotten much bigger and suddenly I'm surrounded by opinions. I don't know anything about Aht Urghan other than it's on the Aradjiah continent and that's a long, long way from here. Others seem to know a lot, though, because they sure do have strong opinions--so much that some of them are thinking about becoming mercenaries and joining the Sentinels.

And now I can't help wondering why I'm doing this adventuring thing anyway. I knew it involved questing and fighting monsters and magic-casting. Questing is fun, and I'm not opposed to fighting monsters because they're all over the place and something needs to be done about them. But mercenaries? That's not killing monsters, that's killing people. Which is something I'm not sure I'd want to do.

Too many frustrations. Too many things to think about.