Threewells Exploration

Threewells Exploration is Broccoli Bunch’s first sustained investigation of the abandoned settlement and the decisive foundation of her early journey. What begins as an improvised search through a deserted town becomes a chain of discoveries: the town’s buildings and records, the entrance to a young dungeon, the danger of the Evil Root, and evidence that Threewells belongs within a larger network of mana disturbances, military anxieties, and contested frontier spaces.

Entry into an Abandoned Town

Threewells first appears to Broccoli as a place that has been left behind but not emptied of meaning. She explores most of the town, moving through its structures and examining what remains rather than treating the settlement as merely scenery. The exploration gives her practical knowledge of the layout and eventually allows her to describe individual buildings, offices, a barracks, and the main tower from which she entered.

The town’s physical condition places it between habitation and ruin. Later views of the surrounding region connect Threewells to the Darkwoods, eastern marshes, northern mountains, and a distant lake, establishing the settlement as part of a broad and difficult frontier landscape rather than an isolated curiosity. The ruined buildings and the surrounding wilderness also make the town valuable precisely because its abandonment has preserved information that active settlements might have overwritten.

Records, Maps, and Bargaining Power

Broccoli’s exploration produces material evidence as well as memories. In the offices on the first floor of the main tower, she finds papers and places them in a chest in the barracks. She also removes two binders filled with reports, including the guard captain’s ledger and the reports leading up to the town’s fall. These documents are heavy enough to burden her during travel, but their weight later becomes economic and political leverage.

When Broccoli meets Leonard Chand’nuit and the others, she retrieves her Threewells Map and offers it in exchange for food or another form of assistance. Leonard Chand’nuit recognizes the map as a representation of Threewells and is visibly surprised by it. Broccoli explains that she explored most of the town, with pride in an achievement that had seemed ordinary only while she was carrying it out. Emeric responds by calling her full of surprises and suggesting that the group keep her, showing that the exploration changes how the expedition evaluates her.

The records receive an equally concrete valuation. Broccoli reveals that she placed the town’s papers in a chest and then produces the two binders for Leonard Chand’nuit to inspect. He offers six lesser gold and continues questioning her about the settlement. The exchange turns exploration into a form of intelligence trade: Broccoli gains provisions and relief from the binders’ physical burden, while the expedition gains access to documents from a fallen city and the possible commercial value of its history.

The Dungeon and the Evil Root

The most consequential discovery in Threewells is the so-called evil hole, which Leonard Chand’nuit identifies as an apparent entrance to a young dungeon. Broccoli’s account therefore links her personal exploration to a larger supernatural infrastructure. The town is not simply abandoned; it is connected to a dungeon whose mana can shift violently enough to alarm local authorities.

An earlier report by Overseer Hardy records large mana shifts, concern that someone may have damaged the dungeon core, and a decision to double the guards while sending a scout toward Dunwich Dungeon. Broccoli encounters this information as evidence that the region’s disturbances are being watched and interpreted through military and dungeon-centered categories. Arianne confirms that the expedition felt a mana surge, while Leonard Chand’nuit notes that someone might have destroyed the dungeon after Broccoli left and that such an act would not be easy. Her exploration thus becomes part of an unresolved chronology involving the dungeon, its core, and the changes observed after her departure.

The exploration also leads Broccoli toward the Evil Root. When ordinary effort fails to damage it, she strikes it with the edge of her spade, but the object does not even leave a mark. A quest update then identifies the Evil Root and states that Broccoli is too weak to destroy it directly; instead, she must break the core and let the root starve. The instruction converts geographical discovery into a lethal objective. Finding the root is not the same as possessing the power to remove it, and the gap between knowledge and strength drives the next stage of her adventure.

Exploration as Survival and Progression

Threewells Exploration is inseparable from Broccoli’s developing system of skills and quests. When she performs a Special Action aligned with her Class, she unlocks Cleaning. The reward is comically modest beside the dangers around her, but it establishes the principle that useful labor in the physical world can become measurable progression. Cleaning reaches Rank F at ninety percent, and the system defines it as an ability whose effectiveness improves as the skill rises.

The same system later records Broccoli’s success against three level-one Sentinel Ghosts of Threewells. Their defeat grants bonus experience because the enemies were above her level, and her Cinnamon Bun class reaches level one, increasing Stamina by five. The exploration therefore produces a pattern of advancement through practical action, combat, and persistence rather than through a single formal initiation. Even the quest involving the Evil Root culminates in a system declaration of completion and the message that the world thanks her for her sacrifice, an absurdly grand response that Broccoli meets with exhausted, adrenaline-fueled laughter.

Her social progress also grows out of the Threewells episode. After parting from the group that has heard her account and benefited from her information, she unlocks the general skill Friendmaking for repeating a Special Action a sufficient number of times. The reward suggests that exploration has expanded more than her map: it has begun turning solitary survival into exchange, negotiation, and affiliation.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

Threewells Exploration establishes Broccoli as an accidental but unusually capable witness to a ruined region. She can navigate a fallen town, recover its documentary past, identify its important structures, survive its ghosts, locate the Evil Root, and communicate knowledge valuable enough to purchase food and attract the attention of an expedition. Yet the episode repeatedly contrasts her curiosity and resourcefulness with her limited power. She can find the root but not destroy it; she can possess the map but must bargain with it; she can gather records but must carry their burden until someone else recognizes their worth.

The action also reframes the abandoned town as contested evidence. Local reports interpret mana shifts through the possible damage to a dungeon core and the suspected presence of Imperials, while later frontier discussions describe the United Republic of the Trenten Flats as expansionist and troublesome, including its failed invasion of Deepmarsh. Threewells exists within this political and ecological world of military patrols, borders, marshes, ruins, and nonhuman communities. Its exploration therefore supplies not only adventure but a view of how abandoned places become legible to guards, guilds, travelers, and prospective buyers.

By the time Broccoli leaves the settlement and its aftermath behind, Threewells has supplied the pattern that will govern her continuing journey: enter an unfamiliar place, clean or investigate what others have neglected, uncover a danger larger than expected, turn found knowledge into practical aid, and depart with more connections and obligations than she possessed on arrival. The exploration is consequently both a local episode and the prototype for Broccoli’s life as an adventurer.