Kre stopped at a couple of the other tables to exchange short pleasantries with other friends and their families. Most of the families in the town treated Kre like a foster son. His parents were stationed on the Northern Shore as part of the Jayde Line, the northernmost point that the humans were able to successfully colonize in their desire to expand their territories. There were a few other youths in town that were in a similar situation, but Kre was the youngest of them.
While he was old enough to tend to his family’s land and care for himself, the town generally felt that as his parents were serving on the Northern Shore, they could return that service by ensuring Kre felt the constant love of family.
Back outside the Lodge, in the cool evening air, Kre took a moment to stretch his arms and legs. The rest of the town around him was mostly empty with near everyone sitting in the Lodge behind him.
There was, however, at least one townsman that wasn’t at tonight’s dinner. In fact, he rarely came to any of the dinners. Terry Cootsman, also known as Cooter by the general populace (though never to his face) was an older man that lived alone on the farmstead closest to the one owned by Kre’s family. It wasn’t that Cooter wasn’t a nice, pleasant person or that he demanded to be left alone, but, as he explained it, he just got too anxious around large crowds.
When Kre’s parents got their orders and shipped out to the Jade Line, Cooter arrived the next day and started helping out without saying a word. When Kre offered to pay him a standard hand’s wage, Cooter simply asked that Kre do the market shopping for him and visit a couple of times a week to play a game called Tehynji.
Tehynji was an odd sort of game that no one else in Mintas played and only a few of the more grizzled soldiers had ever heard of. Cooter said that he picked it up when he was a deckhand on a merchant ship sailing along the Wyrth region to the south. It involved a leather-cloth “board” set with variously shaped and marked pieces, and a deck of small square cards. Kre was still trying to grasp the basics of the game and Cooter was a mostly patient teacher. He eased Kre into the mechanics by starting with the most basic gameplay and then introducing a new rule every few times they played. So far, Kre counted at least forty rules about what shapes can move where, and which cards could be played for each piece. It was enough to give him a headache just thinking about the different rules. If the game grew any more complex, Kre might have to stop playing altogether.
Still, Cooter enjoyed the game and he seemed to really enjoy teaching Kre how to play. Though Kre never won a game against Cooter, it was never because the old man suddenly declared a never before heard of rule but rather because he was simply better at the big picture tactics of the game. Most of recent games ended up with Kre managing to eke out a successful mid to late game push, on the verge of victory, only to see Cooter pull off a masterful set of moves that Kre hadn’t planned for. It was almost always like the older man spent much of the early game setting dozens of traps for Kre with the younger man falling for every single one of them one after the other right at the end game.
Taking the dirt path leading out of town to the farmsteads, Kre marveled again at how quiet the countryside was. It was a good half hour walk to get to the crossroads that led to either the Nevynar farm or to Cooter’s place. Pausing at the junction, Kre looked for and spotted the light that Cooter kept lit when he was expecting Kre’s visit. There were a couple of times when a different window had a light shining from it, but Cooter didn’t answer when Kre asked him if it was intended for someone else’s visit. He simply set the board up in silence as if the question had never been asked.