Chapter 14

After profusely thanking Wazard Bolton, I walked home while I flew the drone at about 150 feet relative altitude. I kept the picture coming from the drone down to a segment of my vision of about 25% of my total scope of vision so that I could keep track of where I was going and what I might run into. I had some trouble at first with this variation of double vision, but I got hold of the situation before I ran into anything or otherwise fell on my face.

Yes, I was having fun seeing things from two different angles, but I focused my attention on getting home without having a silly accident. Bill and Ed were sitting on the front stoop waiting for me, and I showed off by having them watch the drone as I put it through its paces. I wasn’t as smooth with my control as I really needed to be for working around demons and monsters, but I was learning fast. Hopefully, I could do some good when we reached our assigned search area in level #6 tomorrow. My plan was to ask Pete to let us go outside of the town and look for signs of a mine where those odd gems had been found.

Ed and Bill were suitably impressed with what I could do with the drone already, and all three of us could hardly wait to put the device to work in the field hunting the mine and looking out for demons and monsters. It turned out that they had found a safe that would do what we needed for a while, at least. They also picked up a scale that we could use to weigh the coins we had instead of counting them. The coins were uniform enough so that they could be valued by their weight as a concession to merchants. Bill and Ed figured if merchants were happy being paid that way, we should be too, and I agreed with them. It took a lot of time to count the coins, and it was basically a boring job, so I was in favor of anything that would make life easier for us.

While they were about it, they had made a list of the rings, etc. that we had found. That would make it easier when we went to sell the stuff to John, the jeweler. About that time, Ellet stuck her head out the door to announce that supper was ready. During supper, I told her and Alon that I had a flying machine that I would demonstrate after supper. That got Alon’s interest right away, and he was ready to start eating immediately. I did warn him that the drone was not a toy, and he should stay away from it because it was going to help keep me alive.

After supper, I put on the flying demonstration for Ellet and Alon, and that gave me about half an hour more practice time. By then, it was getting dark enough as the sun set for me to have a problem seeing the drone, and that was crucial when it came to safely flying it.

The next morning, I flew the drone as we walked to work, and I had Ed fetch Pete for a short demonstration of what the drone could do. Pete was suitably impressed, but he did ask me, “How much did that gadget set you back. Such a fancy gadget from two old-time Wizards could not have been cheap.”

Pete was flabergasted when I told him, “The drone and the camera were gifts. The two Wizards were so pleased that someone was actually interested in what they had been doing with their hobbies that they gave the drone and the camera to me.” Furthermore, I wanted to take the drone out of town today to try to find the mine and see if it was in use by the demons.

He agreed and was looking forward to a report from me on how well the drone did as a scout for Heroes. We teleported to the town platform, and I launched the drone. I figured that I might as well test it in an urban environment since we had to walk through part of the town to get to the cleared plain. I would search the forest if we had time.

I had my vision adjusted to see the image from the drone in my left eye and where I was walking in the right eye. I was going to have to adjust how well this worked as I used the drone to search for the gem mine.

The drone made it possible for me to spot demons and monsters without them tumbling to the fact that I was looking down on them from up in the open air. At first, it was a bit confusing to try to see what was going on with either eye while the other eye was also visible. I finally went to a split image for both eyes with the drone’s view on the top half of my vision and the local world on the bottom half of my vision.

Yes, even that was confusing at first, but I got used to it and my brain was able to sort out the important information from the dross very quickly. Those two Wizards had done a great job in programming my brain to control the drone and to see the camera output. Currently, I could not think of a better arrangement.

Once we were out of town where I felt it was safe enough from demons, I asked Ed and Bill to keep an eye out for potential attackers while I searched for a mine shaft, or even a pit. I had no real idea of exactly what I should be looking for, but I hoped that I would recognize it when I saw it. Well, I had no trouble realizing that I was too low on experience to whiz over the landscape and immediately spot what I was looking for. Instead, I covered the ground fairly slowly so that I could grasp what I was seeing and would not miss something important because I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at,

Fortunately, it only took about half an hour for me to find a hole in the ground with a lot of dirt piled not far from that hole, so I figured that must be the mine we were looking for. There was no doubt that it was a dug hole that I was looking at, and the amount of dirt in the pile suggested that the mine might not be deep, but it sure must be long. Of course, I had no idea whether this was a single long hole, or if it was a shorter hole with branching tunnels leading from the main tunnel. The only way to get the answer to that was to go down into the tunnel and see for ourselves what was there.

In order to make sure that we walked directly to the mine and did not spend a lot of time wandering around, I sent the drone high enough so that I could see both our current location and the location of the mine. I shifted my vision enough so that I could see both the sketch map I was making and the area we had to travel over, and drew my map from that perspective. My map could hardly be used to get the scale of anything, but it was adequate to guide our journey to the mine opening. At least, I hoped so!

Naturally, I kept the drone operational as we made our way toward the mine entrance. I wanted to be sure that we would not be surprised by demons or monsters as we concentrated on our trek through unfamiliar territory. We did run into one bunch of goat men as we walked toward the mine opening. They were surprised by us, for a change.

The goat men were clustered around what I guessed to be a shaman who was giving some sort of instructions to his listeners. We never found out what those instructions were because my amulet struck as soon as we got in range. The goat men were all gathered so closely together that they gave the amulet what amounted to a single target. As nearly as I could tell, the amulet fired off only one lightning bolt that split when it got to the goat men and killed all of them in that one shot. That included the shaman. We figured that those were to be the guards at the mouth of the mine because we saw no others when we finally reached the mine.

The hole in the ground must have been associated with the town because we found a road that ran from the mine back toward the town. I had not spotted the road simply because of my inexperience with the display of what the drone could see. Later, when we exited the mine, I sent up the drone, and this time I had no trouble finding the road, but, of course, I knew that it was there and I knew what to look for. Oh, well, nothing was lost by my mistake except for a bit of sweat and some tired feet and legs.

We were a bit tired when we reached what looked like a man-made tunnel even to our inexperienced eye. Just inside the huge mouth of the tunnel, we found the tracks of wagons and oxen that were obviously being used as draft animals. There were ramps and platforms of the correct height to match the wagon beds, and there was enough room to turn around the wagons all inside the tunnel mouth. In fact, we found a wagon that was partially loaded, but we saw no sign of the associate draft ox. Why was that”

We went inside the tunnel opening, and I shut down the drone operation. The roof of the tunnel was just not high enough to allow me to operate the drone to any advantage. I slung the drone into its carrier on my back and resumed being pretty much just another foot soldier. I was still the leader of our trio out of common consent, but I rarely had to give any orders. The other guys knew as much as I did about fighting demons and monsters, but I was the one with the powerful amulet.

There were four openings to tunnels running off from the entrance chamber, but the tracks running to and from one of the side tunnels suggested that it was the one most recently in use. Therefore, we took that tunnel as the one to investigate first. We took personal lanterns from a rack near the tunnel entrance, lit them, and started walking through the tunnel that we had chosen for our first investigation.

We walked about 200 yards down a twisting tunnel that looked like it was following an outcropping of whatever was being mined here. When we had reached 200 yards, our personal lanterns were no longer necessary. There were light sources hanging from the ceiling that were on and operating. They were up out of convenient reach, so we assumed that they were magically treated to operate all of the time. We extinguished our lanterns and set them aside for use later as we left this tunnel.

There were several small carts that a single man could handle scattered along the tunnel as far as we could see. The carts were much like wheelbarrows, so we were not sure that a demon could handle one very easily. Possibly a goat man could manage to use one of the carts, but he could not carry a weapon in his hands at the same time. We didn’t know whether or not that was going to make any difference to us.

There were a few nodules in some of the carts as if the men working there had dropped what they were doing and run away suddenly. Well, if a bunch of demons had shown up on me suddenly when all I had to fight with was a pick or a shovel, I am sure that I would have tried to run away.