Things she could almost certainly have predicted: this.

Alas. 

What if she says please very nicely she is going to have to hit it over the head with a hammer probably. 

Probably!

And she might also have to hit over the head with a hammer the additional two kobolds the commotion has attracted. Assuming they don't hit her over the head with a mining pick first.

Ack, a counter-ambush. 

Well, she did practice this! Seal of Command, swing hammer, sidestep and carry same motion into new swing on next kobold, keep spinning between targets to keep them all at comfortable two-handed melee range until appropriate time, Judgment, rinse and repeat. It's in some ways remarkably like fighting teenagers pretending to be goblins, only with, somehow, more shrieking. 

Very angry teenagers.

Dealing with living creatures who sincerely want to kill her is harder than fighting target dummies or practice spars. She begins to find herself overwhelmed.

Theriel is regretting her overconfidence immensely now, which is not an unfamiliar feeling but it is usually from a vantage point of "haha whoops time to respawn," not so much "wait shit this is real life." 

Aaaaaaa where are her defensive cooldowns and healing spells, paladins are supposed to have those, survivability is the whole dang - 

- yeah, she's running away. 

A wise decision.

Fortunately, she can run faster than a kobold. They eventually lose track of her in the dark.

Hoooooraaaay. (Ow.) 

Okay, that was not a super successful adventure.

She will eat, sleep, and in the morning try something slightly more responsible, such as applying her fledgling Mining skill to the task of obtaining shiny rocks from the ground which can be turned via capitalism into a quest log. Then maybe she will feel prepared to go deliver her letter to Marshal Dughan and find out if it inspires him to give her another Quest. Diane had the right idea, she thinks, what with the using tailoring to be better prepared for things.

... where does she sleep, she should know this one, she lives here. 

Her parents' house is over there. Their characteristic affable uninterested absent-mindedness means she wouldn't have to answer any questions. Or she could get a bed at the inn. She's an adult, after all.

Ah yes that's right she has bonus parents. 

She wants to save up her meager handful of coins and has no exciting parent-related trauma, so home to their house it is. 

What with all the exercise and the total absence of a cell phone screen, she's out like a light shortly after the adrenaline rush dies down and back up bright and early. 

Everyone else is up pretty much with the sun as well. Artificial or magical lights exist at all, but not so much outside of the capitals, even in relatively prosperous settlements like Goldshire.

Lovely. 

Time to attempt mining for copper ore! Badly, probably, but practice makes adequate and not having any money is fairly inconvenient when you need to eat and sleep. 

Once she finds a deposit, the mining isn't all that bad. She's has plenty of upper body strength. More problematic is dealing with the wolves and aggressive boars, who consider her to be a snack of opportunity and an obstacle to be battered down, respectively.

She is torn between "whyyyyy, I just wanted shiny rocks" and "well, at least wild animals are a fairly morally unambiguous source of live-fire practice." 

She learned her lesson from the previous day, though; she does her best to keep an eye out for hazards in advance of getting anywhere near them and fight them one at a time. Presumably they do not actually behave like video game creatures with an aggro radius but she can probably still avoid being swarmed if she's very careful? 

Curiously, the wild animals tend to roam singularly, rather than in packs. As long as she doesn't go heedlessly charging through the woods, she can keep it to one opponent at a time.

How strangely convenient of them. Maybe there's interesting evolutionary reasons!

She will definitely not go heedlessly charging through the woods, tempting though it is. If she spends all day instead being nice and sedate and careful - this somewhat strains her capacity for patience, but she does not want to die today - does anything else disturb her plan to gather up as much copper ore as she can and go sell it to Andrew Krighton the armorsmith? 

No, she has successfully identified and dealt with the dangers.

She'll be able to get more money if she wants to spend additional time smelting the ore into bars.

She was half-expecting that thing where ore is worth more money because smelting is worth skill points, but of course in the absence of a player economy this is not so. She's all for it; she'll smelt her copper ore into copper bars, indulge in a few minutes of delightedly petting the smooth shiny results once they've cooled, and then sell them. 

Then she can get enough money to buy her quest journal, and perhaps a few small items besides.

Hooray! 

She would like ... any amount of armor, ideally. Can she afford a mail shirt or does she need to settle for gloves? 

She can afford a mail shirt! Just barely, though.

She'll take it. Holding out for loot drops is for people who don't die in real life if they get unlucky, and also it seems perhaps unlikely that she'll randomly get armor off a bear or something, that doesn't actually make sense. Okay, to-do list: 

1. Kobold candles for Pestle. (Consider learning some alchemy: is two-prof limit real?)

2. Talk to Dughan/deliver commendation letter 

3. Get a less terrible hammer

4. Go to Stormwind (how to talk to Varian?)(is BC soon??) 

5. how do: blessings??? 

Writing things down helps, and so does the comforting weight of armor (distributed appropriately away from just her shoulders by that nice belt she got from the Abbey, of course; she has met the back pain that comes from wearing chainmail wrong). Time to go see the Goldshire Marshal and deliver him the letter from his compatriot in Northshire. 

Quite impressive.

If she's looking for more work, he's received reports that other mines in the area could also be infested with kobolds. He'd like her to scout through and report back. And she might bring that other girl who had a similar letter-

"Hi Theri!" Diane waves.

"Hi Diane!" says Theri brightly, crossing out item #2 in her to-do list and writing in 6. Scout other mine(s). 

"Are you gonna go look for kobolds?"