A Merry Ruckus on Avechna’s Peak

Newton Caverns can be so dark. So dreary. So harsh. So boring!

There’s a whole wide world outside of the caves, beyond Smoke Mountain, outside the war for survival with the gnomes, and some of us are tired of pretending there isn’t. We began to sneak outside, and we discovered so much. There’s a huge library, and caverns with floating seals, and shops filled with wonderful things. We tried loads of different foods and drinks we’d never even dreamed about before.

Most of us wanted to bring these treasures back home, but not Merri. I think she was worried the gnomes might take the things we found from her, or that maybe they’d be repurposed for the war, so she found a little hole in Avechna’s Peak instead. A place she could call her home away from home, a stash for her treasures, a spot just beyond the reach of Mother Mucka and the gnomes.

We held a lot of parties there with her, but eating or drinking for the sake of it gets boring, too. So we started contriving games of wit to test against one another – and, hilariously, that frustrates Merri. She threw such a fit the last time that she rambled over to the Aetherplex and demanded some strangers help her! We watched some people whose names we recognized help her out, like Tikki, who smelled like sugar, and like Rhalkyr, who smelled like the shadowy forest. It was even funnier that she made them run all over the mountain for her while she drank with Khnemu and their big, pretty wyvern friend Sedjet. She kept talking really loudly about all of them being her new friends.

Maybe she was trying to make us jealous? I think I’d like to taste some of that cocoa she keeps talking about trying later.

Anyway, it was so much fun to watch everyone that now, whenever we hop out of Newton Caverns to enjoy the sun above, we make a point of setting up a scavenger hunt for her to struggle through. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if she makes other people solve more riddles for her again, and we’ll be there, hiding and watching, when she does!

-Found within the musty diary of a dirty fink.