'accidentally fallen through a regio' was not, in fact, on the list of things she thought was going to happen on patrol, but here she is and it looks like - Summer? Scenic woodlands, check, goblins, check, some kind of pitched battle about to happen...

Bethany is a somewhat unhealthily pallid figure, about the size of a human, with an enormous straw hat, straw dollies tied to her limbs, a satchel bag and a waistcoat with many pockets, and a big stout wooden stick.

It's likely this battle is none of her business, but she doesn't fancy getting caught in the middle of it, so she puts on her best Beater voice:

"It looks like y'all are squaring up for a fight? But none of ya seem to want it, much. Might'cha put the rocks down, and have a chat instead?"

She's not totally stupid, so she has her staff readied and is keeping a wary eye out, ready to bounce the first person who decides it's a good idea to attack her.

Nobody will try to start shit while the person capable of teleporting is telling them not to; they have a self-preservation instinct, after all. Nobody puts down thier weapons, but they do lower them. 

After a moment, one of the dwarves will make her case. "Those bastards, they stole Bob's pig!"

"And half my good hammers!" Chimes in another. 

"And the years entire crop of mask-of-death!" 

Bethany turns to address the cowering goblins. "Is this true? Did you have a reason to?"

This could go several ways, but it looks like it's either 'blind prejudice club' or 'clumsy allegory for the Feni'.

She doesn't exactly want to just let theives get away with it, she's killed enough Feni in her time, but this seems pretty Summer and so there's probably a story-book outcome where she teaches someone the error of their ways...

"Not like the bastard haven't sent three lots of bandits through our home in the last year!" Shouts one goblin

"The last ones through killed sarnatz! Its only fair that we get back at them" adds another. 

Aha, it's option c), someone stole someone's cow a few centuries ago and now everyone has a grudge for good reasons... 

"Right, so you've all been at this for a while. Is trying to kill each other here going to sort any of it?

What would even look like a good end - you," she indicates the goblins, "want them to stop coming through and raiding you, and you," she indicates the non goblins, "want the pilfering to stop?"

"Well, I'd also like to be a great hero and - " starts one of the goblins before he gets elbowed in the ribs by one of the others. 

The remaining goblins, dwarves and humans make grumbling affirmative noises. 

"Are you capable of calling off the raids and the pilfering, or do I have to come and speak to someone else about it?"

This feels like a setup for a nice Foot the Ball game to relieve the existing tensions and then maybe going on a Quest with the wannabe hero.

Possibly she should instead be looking for the return portal, but it's probably at the end of the Quest and also she's having more fun than she has in months, not that she's going to let this show in her Appropriately Stern Expression.

"Of course they're not" says one of the goblins. "They'd never go adventuring themselves and even if they said they won't put up bounties, they'll buy the stolen goods themselves" 

"The king hasn't sent a force this way in any of our lifetimes. We've got to protect ourselves." Says one of the humans. 

"Damn your thrice damned king and his piss-filled locks" says one of the goblins. None of the humans seems to disagree, though one of the dwarves winces. 

"Not like we can tell adventurers what to do, they're all buddied up with the city folk and their guilds" adds another of the dwarves defensively. 

"So, these folk ain't even the ones who did it to you, 'cept maybe indirectly, and y'all still went out to steal from them?" she asks the goblins. "And you, were you 'protecting yourselves' by getting other folk to make off with the stuff of folks who just weren't much like you?" she asks the human.

She's beginning to formulate a plan, but she'll see what they say to that, first.

"They're the ones getting fat off it."

"These hills are full of monsters." Meaningful glance at the goblins. "Goblins are hardly the worst of it." 

"There's a reason the king doesn't bother with us lowlanders anymore. To expensive to clear the land, so they stay in thier tunnels" 

"That," she says to the goblins, "smells like self-justificatin' - these folk are nearby and weak enough to pick on, so you picked on them. And," she continues, rounding on the humans, "ain't nothing a monster that can stand round and talk about it all nice-like.

Sounds like, you folk," to the non-goblins, "need to tally up your losses, retrieve what's for retrieving, and set a fair tally of what's to be repaid - then mind your own business and keep yourselves to yourself; defendin' yourselves ain't the same as going out on the attack, or gettin' folk to do it for you. And you," she turns to the goblins, especially the one who wants to be a hero, "sound like y'all need to pick on a bigger target, which I'm fixin' to help you with, if you're up for it."

Everyone is unhappy with this deal, as is the mark of a good compromise, but nobody wants to argue with the lost apparently-teleporting mid-level adventurer. The farmers will reluctantly go home to search the woods for their ironmongery, and the goblins will look dubiously at, apparently, having been pressganged as cannon fodder. Still, they'll hear out the pitch.  

"Right. Now that lot have gone - what's really up, here? Is there some folk we can actually hassle about your troubles, or should I be digging out the old palisade-building skills, and getting the compost bins ready to harvest your way out of your problem?"

"Our palisades are perfectly good thank you very much! I'd like to see you do better than the direct descendants of Guillemette of the High Tower herself."

The most diplomatic of the goblins:

"Perhaps if one of the great adventurer's guilds were to swear protection for us, we would be safe, but why would they do such a thing? It would inevitably drive them into conflicts they could otherwise avoid. What could the likes of us do to make it worth thier while?"

"Well, that's a good question there, right? What can you do - or anyone, even if it's not you - that might make it worth their while?"

"Certainly we cannot do anything to bribe them, with what little wealth we have. A peer might pay them with riches. For us and many others, lack of chances to safely grow is a problem, but those guilds are on top of the tower-delve, so they have as much of that as they can swallow. Presumably they have - specific agendas -, that they would like to progress, but I don't know what they are. Alliance with strong adventurers who can credibly promise mutual defence - which, again we're not, because there's not that much space for safe hunting in our territory before you get into the deep hills and things are too dangerous and you don't want us raiding. A smaller town might just be happy if we solved more problems than we represented, but a big city has big problems." 

"Hunting?" There was a lot she didn't understand in that explanation, but, "The land not good enough for farming to feed y'all, or at least not and leave folk over to watch against bandits?"

"Food is never an issue, we have plenty of food, the problem is *danger*. From monsters and from adventurers. We can never accumulate enough resources to be safe." The goblins also seems to be getting increasingly confused

"I thought you just told me that you were experts at palisade building?

I'm not much of a drill-master but I remember a few things from my Bounder days - what have you got for weapons and armour, and how do you usually fight?"

"It doesn't matter if our walls let each fighter fend off three times his strength if the attackers are each worth eight of our men and we lack veteran marshals to lead and healers to heal." 

"The problem isn't *training*. We have plenty of people who know how to fight. The problem is experience! Without experience, training is nothing." 

"If there's plenty dangerous animals and so on, or - what d'ya mean by monsters, what sort have you got? - then we can pick y'all up some real experience by finding the right things to pick a fight with?"

"Monsters are - everything which isn't a person and will try to kill you?" "A *civilized* person, dragons and the like are people."

"Around here we get wild boar, and ankhegs, and sometimes giant spiders or centipedes, elementals and the occasional unquiet dead or nymph or other spirit. The variety is half the problem; prepare to fight a boar and get ambushed by an ankheg and you're in for a pretty bad time."