So the moonstone thing disappears from the game and I'll never craft the dr's lenses again? What is the point of having the recipe learned?
Clearly this is an effort to stimulate gripping RP:
Olga sat back in her rocking chair and shook her withered, liver-spotted fist at the bright-eyed young gargoyle crafter before her.
"You kids these days don't know a thing about crafting! Why, back in my day, I stood at the Minoc bank--in Felucca, mind you!--for days on end, making scales and throwing them on the ground. Days! I made so many scales, meticulously, one at a time, that I permanently damaged my wrists! I made mountains of platemail chests before we figured out how to smelt them back down--oh, the waste! I threw so many oilcloths in the Cove bay it's a wonder a ship can sail there to this day!"
Her face softened. "But there were good times, too. I used to know right where to go for valorite, before dark magics shifted the veins around so that only mindless golems have a chance to find anything good. And..."
She paused, then broke into a dreamy smile.
"There was this ore, too. A special ore. Black moonstone. We couldn't mine it--no sir! We sent our mage friends down into the Kotlan holodeck for it. Don't look at me like that, it's true! They'd turn those holograms on and shake the ruins until artifacts fell out of the ceiling. It's a wonder the dungeon is still there. They'd take the artifacts up to the researcher outside the entrance. I guess he had a secret mine somewhere, because there was no other source of this material. And what an amazing material it was!"
She leaned forward in her rocking chair and looked straight into the young gargoyle's eyes.
"With this material, I could turn a hat into glasses! Fabric into glass!"
She leaned back and sighed.
"But now... the holodeck is dark once more. They shook all the artifacts out of it they could, and the researcher sold his mine to the Mining Cooperative. The
Mining Cooperative! Those fools who can't even get
Minoc to work a deal with them! So now here we are again, making mountains of scales and platemail chests and oilcloths... but now we have to do it on request, and fill up these orders that take up all our house space, and trade them for the ore!"
She shook her head.
"At least Vela's still selling those transmutation things. I guess I can send a warrior friend out to the Void Pool. Virtues know
I can't do a damn thing there."
She slowly rose from her rocking chair and heaved her shovel up from nearby.
"It's a thankless life, that of an honest miner. Maybe even a pointless one. But it's the one I chose."
She limped away toward the nearby mountain range. The gargoyle crafter watched her go, an expression of confusion on his face. He waited until she was out of sight, then summoned his messenger pigeon, wrote a quick cash offer to his favorite golem keeper for a hundred moonstone ore, and returned to the inn to sleep another few weeks.
