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In spite of the funeral, the general mood amongst the Fire Pilgrims over the ensuing days was mostly upbeat, aside from the dead man's immediate family. Victory in battle, especially with such light losses, was a heady thing, and I wasn't immune myself. I suspect that part of why it affected them so strongly related to how the Duke had treated them; stripping them of arms and driving them from their homes.
The day after our battle with the Goblins, we reached the last outpost of civilization for one heading inland from the coast, a small, fairly grotty outpost/village that existed off the trade of trappers, and the occasional prospector, though none had found anything of consequence yet. There wasn't much to it, a couple of inns, maybe a dozen houses, a watchtower, and a whorehouse. One thing I shared with the Fire Pilgrims, was a desire to leave the place behind quickly; it stank of ill flavor, even if it wasn't actually hostile, and the trappers were more than smart enough to pay me respect.
I set up shop in one of the inns for a little while, offering a few coun for word of the terrain farther inland, specifically including rivers and potential metal deposits. The coin I paid with, by the way, was the equivalent of pennies; a fairly cheap gold/tin mixture; in case I haven't made it clear yet, silver is worth more than gold here, because it's a useful metal. I also distributed some appropriate Druidly advice: don't trap or hunt a species to extinction in an area. Not only will it hurt your trade in the long run, you'll get Druids gunning for your ass for wrecking the local ecosystem.
After a single night at the outpost, which didn't even merit a name beyond 'The Outpost' yet, we pressed on further inland. Some of the trappers said a prospector had found a Tin deposit about sixty miles upriver; it just wasn't worth a mining company's time when it was more than a hundred miles from civilization, but it would be an incredibly useful resource for the Pilgrims in establishing their own settlement. Unfortunately for the caravan as a whole, the outpost was also the end of the road, and our pace dropped from roughly twenty miles in a day, to something more like five.
Lyn spent the next week deliberately socializing me, working on a family by family basis. Her mode of operation was fairly simple, she struck through Chuckles. Chuckles, like any canine with a companionship relationship with humans, was a sucker for treats, and Lyn fed him several hunks of seasoned meat at dinner every day after the caravan stopped. Extending this into a standing dinner invitation, with Chuckles already attending, effectively made my attendance mandatory. After that, she simply invited another family to join us every night, starting with those I'd already met.
The first was Vagyr and his family; seeing the burly huntsman with his wife was jarring, not only was she more than a foot shorter than him, but she also had an exceptionally youthful face; she could have passed as his daughter, if he'd been a father at sixteen (not an entirely implausible thing in this culture). They only had two children thus far, a three year old son, and an infant daughter; the boy, Chalt, spent most of the meal climbing all over Chuckles, while Millie spent the entire time being held by one of the other three adults around Lyn's small fire. He was a competent hunter, she was a pioneer housewife; he made his own arrows, she wanted a small group of sheep of her own to feed her near-obsessive knitting habit. There wasn't really much else to them; it doesn't make them less as people, just so far removed from who and what I am, that it would take active effort for me to forge a meaningful connection with them. I know how to do such things, but unless I decide to stay with their settlement, I doubt I will have the time.
The second family was one of the glassblowers, Grigor and Lilaya, with their two sons and four daughters. I never got all their names; mostly, that meal reminded me of helping my mother run the nursery at church back when I lived in the Middle East. Which is a rather jarring thing to be reminded of when you're literally in a different dimension, but I suppose it just goes to show that people are people, wherever you are.
After that, Lyn brought in less rambunctious families for me to meet, and by the time we reached the tin deposit two weeks later, I'd met more than half of the Fire Pilgrims at least once.
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AN: Apparently, I didn't do enough research. Expect to see more non-tin stuff showing up in story; I knew Tin was a crappy substitute, but I didn't realize it was that crappy. Also, not very common. So basically, it's probably going to be 'there was a lot of Tin around Tarsus, which is why it was in common use there.'
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Apparently, 'Tin deposit' also means 'Granite deposit,' and the Fire Pilgrims were a lot more excited about the Granite, than the Tin. Not much of a surprise once I saw what they started doing with it, and even more so once I started to help out.
Between helping the Pilgrims build their new town, mostly by working to erect walls around it with the aid of my own and Chuckles substantial physical strength, and spending as much time as I reasonably could with the smith, I was very busy. Helping him work necessary tools, and rework them after they failed through use, was a lot of work, keeping the construction efforts reasonably supplied.
Then Winter came, and most of my time was diverted to managing the Fire Pilgrim's hunting. They were a transplanted farming community, and had spent the year travelling, rather than farming, and thus their provisions were critically low. Hunting was the only real source of food they had available, and it was more or less up to me to make sure that they neither starved, nor hunted any of the wildlife into localized extinction. It was this activity, that made me my first real enemy amongst the Fire Pilgrims; I suppose it wasn't surprising considering that I was restricting the food supply of hungry men, women, and children, but that made it no less unpleasant.
His name was Henry, and his argument was basically that, as an 'outsider and heathen,' I had been sent to weaken and corrupt the 'true believers.' To me, he sounded like a bad cliché, but to a few of the families, he made a dangerous amount of sense. The most aggressive he got was suggesting that rather than eating about as much as four men, Chuckles would be better suited to serve the role of 'food' himself. Neb shut that talk up right quick, but the discontent remained.
When Spring arrived, and I started helping them clear land for farming, Henry pretty much shut up; early berries, nuts, and fruits, very quickly filled out the empty parts of the Pilgrim's diet, and my Druid spells let me down about as many trees in a day, as the rest of them combined. Stone and tin-sheathed wooden tools aren't the best for felling trees. I could tell he still had it in for me by the way he, or one of those who listened to him, kept an eye on me at all times while Chuckles and I were in the partially-built town. A hunter amongst his followers tried to track me into the woods a few times, but, like I said, Druid.
Things settled down as the year progressed, and I settled into a fairly regular schedule; two days a week with the smith, two working on the village walls (something that I was pretty much the only person working on, aside from a few curious children now and then, or some of the adolescents who were sent to hard labor with me as a disciplinary measure), one communing with nature, and the last two experimenting with Psionics.
So, first off, it turns out yes, Psionics is exactly what I'd gotten my metaphysical 'hands' on, and unsurprisingly, it was going to change everything. Specifically, because I've created white astral goop, which I've at this point, confirmed is Ectoplasm, and successfully created my first Astral Construct, which I'm pretty sure makes me a Shaper. Shapers get the Psionic version of Fabricate as a level four power, rather than Wizards and company getting the spell version at five. Plus, Ectoplasm in general has a great number of potential uses, the Astral Construct being the most notorious of them.
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I've spent more than a year with the Fire Pilgrims at this point, and I finished the wall about halfway through this second Winter. It's only about twelve feet tall, and three thick, but it's made from granite blocks, and wraps around the entire village, with two large gates. There's not much more I can really pick up from the smith, and I've learned the basics from the Carpenter as well; as things currently stand, I plan to leave in the Spring. I've also built a beehive to the specifications you lot gave a while back, unfortunately, no bees have been recovered yet; I haven't really had the time to travel that far afield from the village.
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AN: Oh hey look, I just ran out of momentum all over again! Goody. Oh well, hopefully I'll manage something more substantial next week...