"Why don't you go up to the surface and look for them?"
I ignored Ket and instead opened my Augmentary map.
Among the glowing golden lines—lines which designated the various passages and levels of my Sphere of Influence—were different colored dots. Some of these were moving, while others were still. Apart from a very small cluster of blue dots gathered around my shrine, signifying active worshipers, all of the dots were green in color. I felt a certain smug satisfaction to see it. It wasn't all that long ago when the majority of them were gray and non-faithful.
With a few mental swipes I was able to rotate the map, zooming out so that the dots grew smaller and I could see more of my Sphere at once. After some careful searching I finally spotted them: two green dots had just entered my Sphere from the north-east. They were moving slowly. Had something happened to them? Were they injured?
I recalled the red symbol I'd seen beside Longshank after the mole-rat encounter, and reassured myself that something similar would be showing here if that were the case. Furthermore, the scouts' support of Shanky had shown that they would not have left their comrades behind if they were wounded.
Unless they've been up to their swindling antics out there as well...
When they did finally show their faces in the Grotto, the reason for the delay in their return was obvious.
"What... is that?" Ket sounded like she was going to throw up.
"I believe it's a severed head," I told her. Formerly belonging to a sheep, I presume.
The head barely fit through the entrance, and it took Swift and Cheer an excessive amount of tugging on the ropes they'd tied around its ears before it finally came clear. It landed on the ground with a heavy thud and immediately began to roll away.
"Oh gods... its eyeball is hanging loose," Ket moaned. "Look at its eyeball! And the congealed blood... and the way its tongue is flopping out of its mouth... hnnghhh..."
Completely unfazed, Swift and Cheer attempted to take their prize in hand, hauling on the ropes and making "Woah!" noises as though it were a runaway horse rather than a decomposing cranium. A group of children playing nearby caught sight of the monstrosity rolling toward them and fled, screaming.
"Yep, Swift and Cheer are definitely back," I said with a sigh.
The pair had always been... different from the rest of the tribe. At first, it was the extent of their apparent incompetence that made them stand out. Then it became clear that their ineptness was not the sign of a lack of skill but of willful disobedience. They ignored everyone and everything, including the drill sergeants and Gneil.
Not even assigning them a vocation had changed this; I'd made them both warriors weeks ago, yet still they'd abandoned their posts in the barracks and joined the militia instead, the better to be around their beloved Granny.
There were only two things I’d ever seen them heed: direct orders from an overseer, and compulsion abilities like Scout. Both lasted for a limited time only.
As they reined the skull to a halt, patting it approvingly, I toyed again with assigning them the scout vocation.
I'd learned through trial and error that there was a limit to how many vocations I could assign each of my denizens. Back when we'd been focused on strengthening our defenses, I'd been forced by circumstance to reassign most of my builders and other construction-related professions to military roles.
Now that things were safe, I'd found I could re-assign those warriors as builders and such once more, but not any other vocation. Most of my gnomes, it seemed, only had the capacity to learn a maximum of two professions.
As a militia fighter-turned-scout-turned-hunter, Longshank was an exception to this rule. The only reason for it I could see was that the Augmentary described hunter as an 'advanced' vocation, which perhaps meant it counted as an extension of the scout vocation rather than its own separate thing. I wished there was someone I could ask about it, but Ket didn't know either.
"I can't watch them anymore. What are you doing?" she asked me now.
"Nothing exciting."
"I don't care. Just please, please distract me from the sight of those two little monsters pulling maggots from a sheep's brain and feeding them to the badgers."
"That's the sort of image you can't unsee," I agreed. "I was just thinking again about the vocation stuff. D'you think I should... huh."
"Huh?"
"Look."
Straight away she spotted what I was referring to. "Huh. She unlocked a new vocation?"
"They both did. I must have missed the notification." That was annoying. It seemed if I didn't catch the initial ding from the Augmentary, as obnoxious as it was, then I remained unaware of whatever new development had just taken place.
Adding it to my ever-growing list of things to look into improving, I focused now on the new vocation option for Swift and Cheer.
Scavenger
Vocation type: gathering
A scavenger is skilled at finding objects and materials which have been discarded by others. They are also competent at repurposing items which might otherwise be overlooked as useless.
"Scavenger. Seems more than appropriate," said Ket.
I nodded, watching them toss the sheep’s now-detached eyeball into the air for Clyde the badger to snap up. I could sense the sprite had meant it in a negative way, but the scavenger description really did fit. Recently I'd seen more and more evidence of what Ket had called gnomish innovation amongst the tribe—and from these two individuals more than any other.
Swift and Cheer had designed the weighted nets now carried
