<div class="floatleft">(http://a2irongods.net/wiki/images/thumb/b/bd/Painting_of_Torch.jpg/600px-Painting_of_Torch.jpg)</div>After several weeks of river travel and two days of hiking along the dusty prairie roads of southern Numeria, you've finally arrived at your destination; Torch! It's been your group's intent to make this town the first stop - maybe even a base of operations - on your explorations of Numeria and its marvelous ruins, alien wildlife, and strange technologies.<br/><br/>The actual town maybe falls a little shy of whatever expectations you had. As you make your way along the dusty road towards Torch, you pass numerous small farms. They barely look like they grow enough for themselves, much less sustain a whole Town. The town itself is situated on a rise of rough black stone. A thin waterfall splashes off the south edge of this rise, feeding into a stream that winds off towards the west. As you come up the road, climbing around the edge of the stone rise, you see that most of the buildings are small, wooden, and well-made. And of course, framed against the sullen grey early-afternoon sky, is the tall hill of black stone and earth where the town's eponymous livelihood burns, the brilliant jet of violet flame you've heard so much about, hot enough to even forge adamantite with! The very wonder that you've come here to see.<br/><br/>Except... you<em>don't</em>see it. The cap of the Black Hill is dark. There's no smoke coming from the smelters that dot it here and there, even. The edifice seems dead!<br/><br/>As you enter the town itself, you pass a pair of guards; both are stout men with short-cropped black beards, dressed in brass-studded leather armor and carrying spears with red-stained wooden hafts. One of them looks the lot of you up and down with practiced suspicion. The other has doffed his cap and is massaging the space just below his eyebrows with a scowl, and doesn't seem to notice you.