As I ate my breakfast in my little inn room this morning I started thinking about all the things I have learned so far in Eldran. The Ministry certainly do seem to think they are working in the best interests of Valenor. I don’t know if they have made the link the migration patterns and the skein anomalies though. Come to think of it I still don’t know if there is a link, but the patterns do seem so similar.

I decided today’s activity would be information gathering on a more personal level. I want to get out into the streets of Eldran and find out if any of this is having an effect on people’s day to day lives

The first people I talked to were the river merchants along the waterfront, I was interested to see if they knew why we were seeing more traffic along the river in Bern.

They were interesting people to talk to and we covered quite a lot of ground, did you know the most common duck on the river in Eldran is the Mandarin, which is a very fancy duck! I wonder if the school children in the area have been seeing a lot of those on their daily duck updates. I have to admit, I think a daily duck update is something schools should be giving children, even when the Skein glitches are sorted out!

They also said that they have been getting quite a lot of new directives from something called the Department of Pathway Compliance which mandate the river routes that are allowed to be used. They are quite concerned about this as in the past they tended to vary the routes they took to minimise the ecological impact of river traffic. It also allowed them to manage the order of shipments according to urgency and add extra stops if they needed to.

I have not heard of the Department of Pathway compliance, I will have to speak to some roadwards to see if they have been getting any similar memos.

Further along the riverside I found a wonderful little market, set up along the edges of the roads, you could get everything you could possibly think of. There were flowers and herbs sitting companionably next to skein relay repair kit, beautiful boots and hand made resonance bands. I spent a long time just looking. And I have to admit I purchased a bit more than I probably should have done but the resonance forearm bands were so well made, and I absolutely needed some of the lovely smelling herbal ointments to stave off blisters and fatigue!

As I wandered I picked up quite a few interesting pieces of information, the skein tech artificers were quite keen to point out that the skein bands were made with traditional methods and resonance fibres. When I asked them more, they believe that the new synthetic standardised ones are harder to work with and resistant to being woven in the bands. Apparently the traditional tools sometimes skitter and scratch when trying to meld the fibres into leather mesh. None of them mentioned a prickly feeling though so I kept that to myself.

The herbalist I spoke to was having difficulty getting the ingredients she was expecting, apparently her wares are crafted seasonally due to availability of plants and in recent times the harvests are varying more and more.

As I strolled around and chatted, I got the feeling people were slightly less trusting than they used to be, they outwardly said that the standardisation was likely to help, but I couldn’t help noticing that they avoided using the newly patched skein tech which had been augmented with the new fibres. I also noticed that the market was almost exclusively human. The one or two Aethri I saw passed by to hushed conversations and slightly suspicious looks. This is not something I have experienced before anywhere I have been. I couldn’t tell exactly what was behind the looks, it is something I will look out for in the next few days.

The last thing I discovered was that there is a quarterly town meeting tomorrow in Caereth Hall which I think it might be worthwhile me attending.