"Why choose this life?" Beedah asked herself, in response to Sarah's similar question, "I figured it had to be more rewarding than following in my Mum's footsteps."<br/><br/>Sarah's expression seemed to say to the young goblin woman that the human didn't quite understand.<i>'Oh, well,' </i>thought Beedah,<i>'I hate telling my life story, but I think Sarah could use a little knowing of what the world is really like.'</i><br/><br/>"'Camp followers' follow armies around and do menial work," Beedah told Sarah, as they continued to walk eastwards.  "Most soldiers don't get paid much more than what they need to keep their uniforms clean, unless they win prize money in a war.  Camp followers depend on what little money the soldiers can afford to spend on the extra goods and services, like cleaning clothes, little bits better food than what the army supplies and, uh, some entertainments.  My Mum's pimp, a peg-legged veteran, wasn't a bad sort.  He had connections with ranked serving officers and it wasn't often at all that his girls would get roughed up.  I don't know why, but he'd sometimes tell the 'accidental' kids stories of adventurers.  One night I said that I wanted to go on adventures and he decided to become my mentor."<br/><br/>Beedah continued, "When I left everyone, he advised me to go about adventuring in a 'quiet way'.  I didn't have the benefit of training with sword masters, or priests or magicians, but there were people that trained me about moving quietly, booby-traps and locks.  If I became a leader, there would be a lot of bigoted people in the world that would want to take a goblin girl down a peg or two and 'put her in her place''."<br/><br/>Beedah smiled and said, "And that's the story of my humble life."  Beedah might have asked Sarah to share the story of the human girl's life, but she was having fun collecting what little bits of information that Sarah was accidentally sharing and trying to see if she could guess more about the young woman that she was traveling with.