The survivors and the farmers all looked at Karl like he was insane. "You met, as in stopped and spoke with, the Orc Tribes, and you didn't get attacked?" Karl nodded. "Yeah. We traded fish with the Yellow Tusk Orcs, and then greeted the ones south of here as they passed by the highway. Neither one of those tribes was just randomly violent."
"Once, I can see. But twice in a week, and you're still here to tell us about it? Are you part Orc or something?" The troll asked, sniffing the air to try to determine what Karl was.
"They just admire his brand of insanity. He threatened to punch Chieftain World Smasher in the face if the Orc didn't like his gift." Tessa joked.
The farmers blinked slowly as they stared at Karl. "You should have been the one telling the evening stories, it sounds like yours are far more wild than ours. How did you even find out his name in the first place?"
Karl shrugged. "The scout told us. Then we had a chat, and I explained that I had trade goods. It was all quite normal as far as trades with nomadic tribes goes."
The farmers shook their heads in dismay. "These few are what most villages look like when the nomadic tribes pass by. But then, most of them don't have a good relationship with the Trolls or the Demon Tribes.
I just hope that nothing comes back this way tomorrow so that we can get our supplies to the city and go back home."
The commotion had roused the closest few groups from their beds, despite the early hour, and some of them were preparing to start on breakfast, so they could eat a hot meal and still be among the first on the road when the sun was up enough for the oxen to see.
"Do we have a big pot? I think that our two clerics might be able to help you out with some Dragon Cleric oatmeal for breakfast." Karl offered.
"There is one in town for the poor. I will go get it. You don't mind, do you, Priestess?" One of the farmers asked.
"Not at all. Feeding travellers is always good for the church, even if it's not the faithful."
The troll chuckled. "Well, we might not be the most faithful, but we're not Giants to call the World Dragon and his Pantheon of allies our enemy."
That made a number of the farmers laugh, and even the Demons among the farmers smiled at his response. The Lizard folk were somewhat torn between factions, as they weren't quite dragon descended, but they also didn't consider themselves to be evolved from common beasts. Their history was somewhat murky, so they normally only followed the shamanistic gods. Either the Shaman God of the Titans and Beasts, or the Green Dragon, who wasn't actually a Shaman God, but was in tune with the elements.
It only took a few minutes before a troll was coming back with a pot nearly a metre round, as well as a number of friends carrying firewood.
Corded muscles under blue Trollish skin clashed with ivory tusks and silver accessories in the morning twilight as the trolls got to work setting up the breakfast pot.
Cara had chased Lotus out of bed so that she could help Tessa with breakfast, and the little cleric was already hard at work rolling dough to make fresh flatbread to go with the oatmeal.
The Trolls had a wide variety of toppings for bread, apparently, as that was their usual morning travel ration on the road. So, fresh baked, instead of dried and then soaked in tea or oatmeal to make them edible would be more like home.
Tessa casually filled the pot with oats and hot water, as it had legs on the bottom, so the fire could be built under it to bring everything to a boil.
The bread was the hard part, but both Lotus and the farmers knew a great trick for breakfast. If you greased and heated a cast iron pan first, you could leave it sitting by the fire, on the ring of fire pit rocks, and just toss the flattened dough on it to let it cook much faster than a regular loaf in an oven. With this many groups, they had a dozen suitable pans all around the pot by the time that Karl set fire to the first batch of wood and got the heat started.
While they were happy to stack the firewood, everyone had been reluctant to actually light the fire, an instinctive aversion to the potential of a wound they couldn't properly regenerate. So, Karl had taken care of it with [Flaming Body] and the wood was crackling under the pot before an aging troll in a leather apron could even get in place to begin stirring the oatmeal.
Karl was a bit concerned with what it would end up tasting like, as each farmer came by to add a small handful of berries or crushed nuts to the mix. There was no method to it other than they each added a bit of what they had.
Then, Lotus added ground cinnamon and nutmeg to the pot to give breakfast an inviting scent that drew all the remaining farmers and merchants out of bed to see who was torturing them so early in the morning.
"There is enough to go around, and we've got flatbread cooking as well." Tessa informed the farmers, who were giving the pot curious glances.
From what Dana and the others could discern, this was their grand plan for making it safely out of the Monster controlled territories. They were going to pretend to be merchants, and make friends across the country, if possible. There would be no reason to hide if nobody was after them.
There was a rapidly growing stack of flatbread on a small table by the pot, but with the magical assistance, and the water already hot when Tessa created it, the oatmeal wasn't going to take long even in a cauldron that large.
They were already developing a lineup, and Tessa was becoming concerned that they might not have a big enough pot for everyone, but they would have to make due with what they had, or boil another pot once this one ran low.
They didn't have to hurry out this morning, they were going the opposite direction to everyone else. But if they did have to come back this way, a little goodwill would go a long way in ensuring that they could pass without trouble.
If they were lucky, it might even start to build them a positive reputation if they did happen to come here again.
They were still young and fast-growing Elites, so there was a chance that more official missions might send them outside the Golden Dragon Nation, with the possibility that they might end up somewhere here in the Newbon Empire again.
Karl was thinking that it might eventually be an official thing, as they did have good luck with foreign trips. But the others had a very different opinion on this particular side effect of hanging out with the man who had gathered too much attention from the Gods.
As a few of the Monsters had mentioned, it was not only the World Dragon that might have taken an interest in current events.
There had been far too many strange coincidences, and the Archbishop himself had said that the System Stones they had encountered early in their travels might have been linked to the Laughing God, and not the World Dragon.
That ancient Deity was a curious one. Nobody really knew what he was supposed to be the God of, but every ancient legend mentioned him as a trickster, a deity that granted your wildest desires in a way that you could never have anticipated.
He was neither good nor evil. Unlike the World Dragon, whose very existence brought stability and magic, the Laughing God simply existed for his own amusement. That alone was enough to make his attention a dangerous thing.
Even worse, there were rumours that the Laughing God was not one of the Dragon Gods at all, but an ancient god lingering from the time of creation, even after the memory of most other primordial gods had faded. Something like the God of Magic that Karl had been named after.