John built the coop for the tidewalkers after studying the design of the meat farmer’s for a few days. He took all the measurements, made the adjustments he figured the tidewalkers would need for size, space, and function, and the built the coop. Transferring the dozen John had now captured from the traps to the coop was easy because of the airlock system he had built.
He was surprised at how quickly they took to their new environment as long as they were provided with salt fish and fresh water. He had built brood boxes, not knowing if they’d be needed or used, but to his surprise they were. After spending a few weeks feeding and watering the tidewalkers and getting them used to his presence, he began trying to train them. John decided he needed to tag them and make them easily recoverable should they escape. He asked the jeweler for advice on making tags for them after explaining what he was doing. “Have I got a deal for you, John” said Petros, the jeweler. “I bought these minerals from a travelling merchant for quite the price” the rocks were pinkish and red, with whites, grays, and yellows. “They’re fantastic gems that capture the sunlight!” and he took John outside into the street and held a handful of the rocks up in the direct sunlight. To John’s surprise, they began to glow bright pink and orange. “What are these?!” asked John in wonder. “Some kind of mineral the merchant said they dug up from a mine up north. They cost me a lot of money, and sadly, nobody can afford to pay my prices for them, so I’m just sitting on them.”
“So what’s your deal then?” asked John. “Simply this” said Petros, “I believe in your brains and ambition and what you’re trying to do. I think coming up with a way to move information across the continent so fast is well worth doing. I will make for you simple metal rings with gems of this material inlaid in them. That way should any of your birds escape, they should be pretty easy to track back to their nest, especially as the sun goes down. I will do this for free.” John was thrilled. “However,” Petros continued “should you lose any of them, I expect to be compensated full market value, my time included.” “deal” John said, shaking Petros’ hand. “Pick them up tomorrow morning”. And John did just that.
The next day, John carefully attached the glowing rings to the feet of every tidewalker. Then the training began. John began getting them used to being out in the yard on leashes one at a time, walking them around, gently restraining them when they tried to fly. Using salted fish to lure them back and forth with the help of the meat farmer who was also intrigued by what John was attempting. The rings did make it easy to track the couple who escaped back to their nest, and they were docile about being recaptured. After a month, the first generation of domestic tidewalkers was born in John’s coop. He tagged them too, right away and began their training, which was even easier. As time went on, they became more obedient and likely to do what they were trained to do. Flying to different markers, farther and farther away, until finally it was the day. John headed out with Nathan’s caravan again to Port Saltmarsh. He had agreed to synchronize times with his apprentices to let the 3 best trained tidewalkers out, each with a message a day after he and Nathan were supposed to arrive in the city. They should have let them out that morning, and that afternoon John was getting excited.
Then he saw a flock of tidewalkers on the horizon.
He ran to the docks where the flocks always landed to find their food and waited. And sure enough, there in the water, were his 3 birds. Each with a glowing bracelet and a small vial tied to their leg. John whooped for joy! “T’shaw t’shaw!” he hollered, looking like a madman and making the sound he tried to mimic from the birds. His 3 birds saw him standing with his salt fish and immediately rushed him. Nathan finally came to find him and found him with a bird on his head, one on his shoulder and one in his lap. Laughing and reading the notes from his apprentices. It had worked!
A little while later it was getting to be time for the tidewalkers to fly back, and John had to see if it worked. He put reply messages into the vials and left his birds on the ground where they took off with the flocks. “So what now?” Nathan asked “we wait. If they come back again tomorrow afternoon with more messages, it means it works and we head to the bank to talk to that clerk.”
It was the next evening near closing when John and Nathan ran into the bank, apparently babbling in excited hysterics. It took the clerk a full 2 minutes to calm them down. “Okay now WHAT happened?” “THE TIDEWALKERS!” John said “I trained them to carry messages between here and Greenhill during their feeding cycles! AND IT WORKED!” he said showing the messages to the banker. It took the banker a second before his eyes became wide as dinner plates. “You’re telling me, you trained TIDEWALKERS to fly messages back and forth between Port Saltmarsh and GREENHILL?!” “YES!” Nathan yelled. “Impossible, how?!” and John walked him through his last few months. The banker was suddenly VERY interested. “John,” he said “If you can prove this to me, and then repeat it. This is going to change everything and make you a very rich man”. John laughed “I just wanted a bank and bookkeeper in my town!” “Oh you’ll get that, and much more I assure you”.
The next afternoon John’s 3 main birds landed again with messages from his apprentices, but this time the banker was with him. He had the clerk write his own messages to prove what was happening with instructions to send the messages back with petals from the mystic blue iris, which only grew around Greenhill. The birds left with the rest of the flocks and the next afternoon John, Nathan and the banker were outside waiting for the afternoon tidewalker feeding rush. And sure enough, there were John’s birds amongst them.
John called his birds and fed them their treats, then he opened the vials and spilled out the flow petals. The clerk fainted.
It took a couple minutes to revive the clerk, but revive he did.
20 minutes later the three of them were running hysterically into he bank branch rambling like mad men. “FATHER!” yelled the clerk. “Gods, Ryan, what is it?!” came an answer from the loft in the bank. The old bank manager was bald, and stopped over, and small, but he had a wit far larger than anyone for a long way John estimated. After an urgent and sudden meeting, everyone had calmed down enough to discuss John’s achievement.
“Assuming this is all true” said the old man “It IS true Father!” said Ryan, the clerk. “ASSUMING it is true” his father continued “how much do you want for it?” the old man asked John. John looked at him puzzled “What do you mean?”. The old man said “You invented a new method of doing something incredibly grandiose and convenient. One that has the potential to make everyone on the planet much richer and their lives more convenient. You’re the only one who knows how to do it, or do it effectively, and other people know you’re the creator and know this. We believe you should be compensated.” John smiled. “One million gold, and a tenth of one percent of the profit from every transaction made using my method. To be payable to me, and then my heirs or people they appoint in whatever percentage I or they deem fit from now until the end of time. In exchange, I will help your scribes compile all my extensive notes into a training manual and give you the manual and said notes. I will teach any ten people you choose, not only my method, but how to teach other people my method of training. I will teach how to hunt and trap the tidewalkers, how to breed them, how to build their coops, I will personally train a thousand birds, and I will design and supervise the construction of a grand coop here in the city, as I imagine, you want your bank to be some type of communications hub for this method going forward.” The old man used his un-louped eye to look John up and down, then said “Done. You’ll stay in my house tonight, and tomorrow we’ll have the contracts drawn up and you’ll get to work.”
The next day John read through the contracts with help from Nathan and Ryan and an advocate counsel they insisted he hire. Once everything was properly negotiated and signed, John got to work.
He spent the next year fulfilling his end of the contract and living at Ryan’s house. The grand coop was huge and built to house birds trained to fly to every major city on the continent. Stopovers and relays at smaller villages were established along the way and soon the skies were filled with tidewalkers carrying messages and conducting business all over. John was now a very rich man.
He sat in his room, reminiscing about how far he’d come in the last 2 years. An amnesiac beggar, turned wood cutter, turned carpenter-woodworker, turned father of a new style of communication that changed the entire history of the continent.
——
John was a wealthy man now, his woodshop had grown thanks to the tidewalker communication system and creation of a bank branch in Greenhill. Heck the whole town had grown, everyone there lived better lives, though about a quarter of the people weren’t thrilled with its sudden growth and changes. The lord of the town was especially happy with what John had done as, through taxation, he’d become even richer off of John’s work, and off all his subjects. John resolved to fix that.
He had a meeting one day with Ryan, now official bank liaison to the Tidewalker Communication Guild. “How can I help you today, Guildmaster?” Ryan asked. “Don’t call me that, I’m not the guildmaster, I don’t even work there.” John said. “Fine fine, how can I help you, JOHN?”
“I’d like a full audit done of Lord Quezzel, all his accounts and his books with the kings finance ministers. I know you guys handle all of that.”
“I’m happy to do it,” Ryan said, “But why?”
“He’s too rich. Greenhill was a largely self-sustaining little hamlet, no crime, and they handled everything you’d expect a government to do themselves and out of their own pockets. The people there lead hard, poor lives, while Quezzel lived in a mansion with his guards. They were supposedly town guards, but they were never in the town for anything other than collecting taxes, or free booze.”
“I see. I’ll get right on it.” Ryan said. “Why are you doing this?”
John smiled “they took care of me when I had nothing, not even any memory or clothes on my back. It’s the least I can do.” Ryan nodded and John thanked him again and left.
——
As John walked away from Ryan’s office he thought to himself. “Where do I go from here? What do I do now? I’m wealthy, I don’t need to work, and I helped all the townsfolk who saved me. I guess I finally have the real means now to find answers.” He headed back to the workshop he’d set up in Ryan’s father’s mansion to prepare for his journey.
When he got to the mansion he realized that if his journey would be long, he’d need to travel light. He’d been working with a Port Saltmarsh blacksmith for a few months on small and collapsible multi-tools. John had a number of them now, mostly for woodworking and carpentry, but he knew he’d need others for a journey, camping tools, survival tools, and he knew he’d need a way to defend himself. John sat down at his drafting table and got to work. He had envisioned a staff, or walking stick, full of multi-tools of different types. Some on winders, and belts, others that popped right in and out of the shaft.
He knew he’d need to be able to start fires for cooking and purifying water, and included magnifying lenses from an old loupe, as well as a flint and steel in his design. Next, he incorporated 2 small collapsible spits and a thin, small, roll-up square piece of scale armor to use as a cooking surface. He had his camp stove.
In a pinch when he needed water and couldn’t boil it, he came up with the idea of using a reed tube packed with cloth, sand, and charcoal that he could use to suck up dirty water for safe(r) drinking. He added that straw and a small hose of catgut and a hand squeeze pump to his staff design to help siphon the water through the filter for cooking or movement, knowing the hose and pump might be useful for other things.
John added compartments for topical disinfectants and analgesic oils, sterile bandages, some collapsible splints, along with poppy gum for emergency pain killing and energy. He added some spools of fine horsehair thread and some stitching needles, along with glue, because you never know. He also tucked in a catgut tourniquet.
——
The next day while John was out collecting supplies for testing and tinkering with his travelling staff designs, he saw wagons moving the entire town apiary. “What in the heck is going on?” he asked one of the apiary workers following on foot. The worker replied “We’re having to move our whole operation across the city, there’s a new machine they built at the shipyard for planing the wood in the ships and it makes some kind of vibration that disturbs the bees and drives them away. We tried going to the council, explaining how important our honey and mead are to the economy, but they said they already sank too much money into the shipyard and gave us new land to move to away from the sound.” John was surprised, but it gave him an idea.
As the weather got warmer every year, there were many kinds of insects in this part of the continent that were bothersome, venomous, or carried diseases. People used netting and various types of smelling oils to keep them at bay. While John liked the netting, he wasn’t fond of the smelling oils, as some were expensive, irritating to the skin, or could run out at inopportune times. John headed down to the wharf to begin talking to fishermen.