“I have found the location of something called The Fate Dial in one of these old notebooks.”
Agatha Grunt held up a slim, battered book, waved it at the assembled group, and threw it backwards onto the cluttered desk against which she leant.
“It doesn’t have much to go on, little more than a rough area and a brief description. But it is clear that if we find the Dial and stand on it just so, we’ll be rewarded with clear knowledge of the future. Or at least what it describes as “the most likely potential” future. Which would obviously be incredibly useful and why every time I said ‘we’ I meant ‘I’. Got it?”
She looked at the halflings before her, most of whom were still listening. Her apprentice, Belinda, seemed to be concentrating on replacing "we" with "I", mouth working silently as she mentally worked back through what Agatha had just said. The effort seemed almost audible. Arthur was hopping from foot to foot with excitement and Edna was nodding slowly as she lovingly rubbed oil into her rolling pin. Percy, with a faraway look in his eyes, was staring at Edna from across the room, his hands absently playing over a stained leather pouch at his belt. Agatha frowned, momentarily distracted.
“Er, right” she said, trying to refocus and not think about Percy’s rumoured collection. “When we get there I’m heading straight for where I think the Dial is. Edna, Rupert, you’ll be with me making sure nothing comes too close. We don't need a ghoul or something learning its future. Stanley, find somewhere high to watch over us. Ephraim, see that the rest of this lot find something valuable to bring home. Oh, and my scrying suggests we can expect to run into that idiot dwarf Merthyn again, so you’ll need to take care of that for me too.”
Ephraim positively bristled at the word dwarf.
“Bloody midget dwarves” he spat, upper class affectations slipping for a second. “Filthy creatures. Can’t trust the little buggers any further than you could throw ‘em.”
“Okay” Agatha said slowly. She shared neither Sir Ephraim’s lack of introspection when it came to racial stature or his venom for dwarven-kind: Agatha shared her contempt equally amongst all she did not consider her intellectual equal irrespective of size, and Ephraim was fast dropping out of that category.
“Just deal with him please, Ephraim, and make sure he stays away from-”
She was interrupted by Belinda Twiglet snorting loudly, and turned to see her apprentice wiping snot up the back of her robed sleeve.
“That’s vile, Twiglet, absolutely fucking foul” Agatha grimaced. “I’d ask if there was something wrong with you if I didn't already know the answer. Look, you’ll not be much use around the Dial and I already know your future and it’s not bright. So your job is to… just… oh, I don’t know. Just steer clear of me and try to stay out of trouble, will you? You can take Percy with you.”
Belinda looked on impassively. If she was offended by Agatha’s words she chose not to show it.
“We’re leaving in half an hour” Agatha finished. “Get your stuff together and meet downstairs.”
A vision of the future would be invaluable to her as she explored the Ruined City. She was not getting any younger and she badly needed one of these expeditions needed to make her rich enough to retire. Her mind drifted once again to its recurring vision of a honey-coloured stone cottage somewhere out West, well away from the mud of the Eastmarch, with a hot stove in a well-stocked kitchen, and which she shared with an extraordinarily well muscled blacksmith…
Agatha was snapped out of her reverie by Belinda snorting again, and she sighed.
One day, she thought. One day in the hopefully not too-distant future.
She did not need the Fate Dial to know that her most likely future, for far longer than she would like, involved all together too much of Belinda Twiglet, Percy Fucking Tosskettle and Merthyn’s bearded rabble.
