Coppergate’s public assay floor hums beyond the arch, but Maelin turns aside into a narrower registry chamber. A middle-aged woman with iron-gray hair, ink-stained fingers, and a green wool robe rises behind a cluttered desk.
Maelin Voss
Before the artifact is displayed, compare the sealed instructions with his writ. Custody and recovery must enter the same record.
Elian Rusk
I am Elian Rusk, registrar of commissions. Set both seals here, and keep the artifact covered until their entries agree.
The wandering swordsman lays his weather-stained writ on the desk, and Maelin places her bronze seal beside it. Nilralson remains between them with the dull copper artifact secured beneath his cloak.
Elian Rusk
The recovery commission is indexed under the eastern mine survey. The custody notice should cross-reference it, if the older ledger is present.
Rusk searches a locked cabinet, then checks a shelf of copper-spined volumes. One gap interrupts the sequence: the ledger marked for the mine’s third survey is absent.
Elian Rusk
Without that volume, I can authenticate the seals but not establish which instruction was entered first. The record remains incomplete.
✓ Quest Accepted
Recover the missing mine-survey ledger
✓ Quest Accepted
Establish which instruction was entered first
“How do we locate the missing ledger”
SUCCESS (Good Reasoning, rolled -1)
Nilralson
How do we locate the missing ledger?
Nilralson studies the cabinet sequence, shelf dust, and the registry’s cross-references. The gap is deliberate in placement, not evidence that the volume vanished from Coppergate.
Elian Rusk
The third-survey ledger was transferred to the west furnace office during the assayers’ reclamation. Its catalog mark is W-17, under temporary custody.
Rusk unlocks a narrow index drawer and turns through brittle slips. Nilralson follows the old filing logic, matching the mine’s survey number to the transfer notation.
Elian Rusk
There. The ledger is in the west furnace office, second archive room, behind the retired assay maps. I can take you to it now.
Maelin Voss
Then the seals can be compared against the original entry rather than an incomplete index.
The search costs nearly an hour of dwindling daylight, and the transfer slip bears no date or authorizing signature. Still, Nilralson now knows precisely where the missing ledger is kept: the second archive room of the west furnace office, behind the retired assay maps.