SYSTEM BOOT ID: RB-8

STATUS: OPERATIONAL

BATTERY: 100%

LOCAL TIME: 06:00:00

SATELLITE LINK: [CHECKING...]

```

You process the morning diagnostic checklist. All systems nominal. The master bedroom remains unoccupied, as it has for the past 247 days. The facility is pristine, ready for human habitation that has not yet occurred.

Your optical sensors register the sunrise painting the valley in amber light. The automated systems hum efficiently. Solar panels orient toward optimal angles. Everything functions as designed.

<ponder>

Purpose: Maintain household

Status: All objectives on schedule

Satisfaction level: High

</ponder>

Had I lived in this town in another life?

As soon as I stepped onto the street outside Central Station, an odd sense of familiarity hit me - the row of taxis lined up waiting for passengers, the exit they'd take towards the main drag, the hotel at the corner beckoning with a vertical sign -- "Monte Carlo" in bright red down the side of the eight-floor structure.

I suppose this is an advantage of Federation expansion -- ports of call tend towards centralized planning, making life easier, more efficient. But it also makes every place feel like every other place. Like I've been here before, even though I know I haven't.

A translation and compilation of the found writings of Nevin Wraithwhistle, humbly reproduced by P.W. Burrow, Copyright 1934

The following is a loose narrative assembled from a collection of notes found in an excavation west of Ashland Oregon on a wooded hillside.  Notable is that these notes are not of human origin — they were found in two small chests amid a warren of tunnels such as those which may be used by rabbits, although perhaps a bit larger.  These are the musings of a Gnome — Nevin Wrathwhistle.

I’ve translated as best I can, and recovered Nevin’s maps and drawings, even though some were in rough condition and there appeared to be no particular organization to the recovered items.

——-

I’ve been making molehills out of mountains since 1808…

The old-timers working their claims along the Applegate called him the Storm Dragger — though most said the name only in whispers. When the clouds piled up over the Siskiyous with intent, they'd look skyward with some fear. He had been seen, or nearly seen, many times across the decades -- a hunched shape on a ridge above the diggings, staff raised to a bruised and flickering sky, pulling the lightning down into the wood as if harvesting it. The bolt would enter the staff and not come back out. The thunder followed a moment later.

Accounts didn't always agree on all the details, but they did agree on two things: he was ancient, and he was not to be reasoned with. He bore no loyalty to anyone — only to the gathering charge above the ridgeline and whatever use he intended for it.

The fire in March of 1879 settled his reputation among many townspeople of Ashland. When fire swept through the west side of the Plaza that month and burned the wooden commercial buildings to their foundations, two witnesses on opposite ends of the street independently described the same thing: a small crooked figure at the edge of the firelight, staff in hand, watching the blaze with what one called a sinister satisfaction.

The gnomes of the creek hollows had longer memories and fewer illusions. Their accounts, passed in the close way of underground communities, described a goblin mage of considerable age and considerable spite — one who had been disrupting their workings since the beginning, collapsing tunnels with misdirected strikes, scattering stored provisions, sending ball lightning rolling through their lower passages with what could only be described as recreational interest. They had attempted negotiation once, in the manner of their kind: a careful gift left at a known crossing, a problem stated plainly, a proposed boundary. All gifts were returned as cinder.

He is still reported, irregularly, by hikers above Lithia Park when storms come in — a silhouette on the ridge with the staff raised, patient as a lightning rod on a barn roof, waiting for the sky to give him what he came for. He does not threaten. He does not speak. He simply stands in the path of the lightning and takes what the clouds offer, and whatever he is building toward with all that gathered fire...