04/08/2020 Snippet, TRADE NEGOTIATIONS.

I wonder what I should title this story, now.

She tapped the map again. “It looks like this was the closest garrison to where you were — no, wait, there have to be troops at Gladstone. Why didn’t the elemental go there?”

“That’s a damned good question,” said Jimmie. He brought out the pieces of the charm from the fire elemental; they were still a little magically ‘hot,’ but that’s what the silk wrappings were for. Pine pushed them around a little with a stick.

“Okay,” she finally said. “It’s a local made charm from the Peoria Sefirot arsenal. Not from the core Dominion lands.”

“Those your dwarven senses tingling?” asked Jimmie.

“Yeah,” she said, which meant among other things that Jimmie had pegged which Dwarvenwood faction she was from. “That and the armory markings. It’s definitely from Peoria.”

“I suppose we haven’t found all of the Dominion’s secret military caches.” Leo did not really couch that as a question, and Major Pine didn’t take it as one.

“Depends on who you ask,” she said. “We got most of them, sure. Probably. Fifty/fifty odds, at least. But we didn’t get all of them. We overran this Sefirot too fast for the Dominion to expend their stocks, you see. And they were real paranoid about who knew about what, so none of our prisoners knows where everything is. So there’s probably enough out leftover military magic there to start something. The question is, what?”