Myndariel's Middle Earth : Special Event: Treasure Hunt, 19-23 June 2014

After first discovering the treasure hunting grounds while exploring Ered Luin, I have been looking forward to the treasure hunt. My little hobbit scholar Robinya (who spends most of her time at the library except during special events) eagerly took her pickaxe and started digging.

At first she didn't find much; a few tokens, an abandoned pickaxe, a moldy treasure hunter's pack. She took a meal break then went and spoke to Halthor Goldeneye about getting some more pickaxes. One of the other treasure hunters had a trained cave-claw who was hungry so she gathered some berries for it and they gave her some more tools for her own excavations.

She worked like this all night - hunt for a good dig-site, test it with a cave-claw or a dowsing gem if she had any, dig and hope, then when she ran out of tools she'd have a bite to eat and help the other treasure-hunters to get more tools.

Just before dawn, it finally happened. She hit a huge dig-site. She was on her last pickaxe and was about to start going "eeny-meeny-miney-mo" to pick a site, when she spotted an out-of-the-way dig-site and had A Feeling. You know, like you're holding the winning lottery ticket. Well, she dug and she dug, and she dug some more and finally reached the bottom and she found .... a pile of tokens, a rusty mining pick, and a treasure-laden pony.

The pony was very nice. She had been hoping to get the 1000 tokens to buy the special Harvest-brew Goat, but at the rate of 4 pickaxes per 15 minutes and 1-10 tokens per dig-site, it would have taken a long time. So she decided the pony was the jackpot and she'd done enough. She could go back to her books now.

But as she sat on her new mount and watched the sun rise over the chilly mountains, then turned and saw the dig-sites sparkling in the light, she had a crazy thought to get a couple more pickaxes and just dig randomly - who knows when she'd get another opportunity to be a treasure hunter?

On her second dig, she hit another huge dig-site. She couldn't believe it. She stood staring at the hole she had dug and almost couldn't dare to look in and see what she had found. It turned out to be rather disappointing - just a pile of tokens. She rubbed them together between her fingers and decided treasure-hunting wasn't a good investment so she'd spend what tokens she had and take the pony back to civilisation. She just needed something to show for her efforts, something she could write about in one of her books and maybe one day in a few hundred years or so, some elf might read about her adventures and think she was a hero.

One of the vendors at the base camp looked at her bag of tokens and listened to her request for a souvenir that would look like she'd been a great treasure hunter. The dwarf's eyes crinkled as he gave a deep belly-laugh and pulled an old battered box off the back of his wagon and started filling it with shiny rubbish left lying around after the hordes of hopeful treasure-hunters camped all over the hillside. He presented it to her with a wink and told her no-one would know the difference. She shrugged and strapped it on the back of her pony and headed back to her homestead near Bree.