Joli let out a shriek and flailed her lit punk about as the bats rushed her.  Thankfully however none caught in her hair, as she'd heard that they could do.  She wasn't overly scared of such beasts, but truth be told, neither was she overly fond of them.  She clutched the dead man's journal and then quickly dashed back out to the other room, feeling it to be safer from vermin.  Only once she felt safe, did she store her flask and drop the punk to the stone floor to gutter out.  Then by light of her magic torch would she crack the journal carefully and read what she could.<br/><br/>"Hmmmm" she said as she re-read the passages for a third time.  "Secret tunnels masked with clay, orcish hidden tunnels, and apparently iron ore quite valuable."  Joli bit the corner of her lip.  She didn't know much about metalurgy, what the dwarves called metal crafting.  But she thought that iron was fairly common.  Maybe the iron in this mine was special somehow?  She leaned back against a wall and pondered it, one finger running across the top of one ear.  It was a childish gesture, one she had held from childhood, one that often reminded her she wasn't an elf.  But sometimes when deep in thought it surfaced without her realizing it.  The fact that her ears were one of her erogenous zones did nothing to deter the self stimulating behavior of course.<br/><br/>"The problem is," she said quietly to the empty air, "that the corpse in there is at least a half a decade old.  It's quite likely that it's even more than that, but I don't know enough about bodies to tell.  But a lot can change in five years, especially when it comes to goblins.  They are so short lived that they make humans seem like elves."  Joli was partially right of course, goblins did have very short generations.  But that was due more to their high mortality rate and very high fecundity.  Goblin women could birth a liter of pups twice a year if they needed to revitalize their numbers.  As for a goblin's natural lifespan, it was actually fairly close to a humans, it was just rare for the average one to live that long.  *<br/><br/>"So what do I know?" she asked herself, bringing her hand away from her ear as she realized what she was doing.  "There's a cavern complex below the mines, and that something tunneled up into it.  The main shaft is watched over by the goblins, so that's definitely going to be dangerous.  Then there's the mine storage, which is where 'something' tunneled up?"  She sighed, her breasts straining against the moonsilk that barely covered them.  She looked down and realized her nipples were just slightly hard, probably from playing with her ear.  She decided to ignore it, she'd just jilled off by the river, she was no animal.<br/><br/>She decided that she needed a better understanding of the space she was in, and was going to be very careful in examining the area around her, looking for anything she might have missed.  She wanted to know exactly what her options were here.  She wasn't going to try to climb down the shaft, not yet at least.  So she needed to make sure that it was down to that or heading back up the way she'd come.  There might be a hidden passage or door she'd missed after all.  **<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">ooc</div><div class="spoiler_body"><br/>* = intentionally 'failed' knowledge check.  I assume you don't need me to roll to have a bad check?<br/><br/>** =  I'm not 100% clear on the layout of the room / rooms she's in.   The way I understand it, she came from a tunnel into this room.  This room had one door that led to a dead end, and then it also had a mine shaft that went down.  Is there anything else that I'm missing?</div></div>