With a few belongings and a selection of tools Flory arrived in the village of Brockenboring. She had heard tales from the other Tooks of Tuckborough about the Hobbits of Brockenboring, mainly that they spent most of their time looking after their sheep and that they were only marginally more intelligent than those same Sheep.
Brockenboring was smaller than Flory had imagined, a small cluster of burrows sandwiched between the wooded hillsides and the vast expanse of the Greenfields. She passed a few of the locals trying to persuade a sheep into a pen and she grinned when the animal sidestepped one Hobbit and took off in the opposite direction. The only lodgings in the village were at The Plough and Stars, a small Inn overlooking the village. Inside was warm and relatively clean but the customers smelt more strongly of sheep than the sheep themselves.
After tidying herself up a bit Flory decided to go and take a look around. Walking through Brockenboring Flory got the impression that the locals did not see many Hobbits from outside the Northfarthing; several farmers stared as she passed and whilst walking across the Greenfields she caught sight of some nosey Hobbit trying to sneak along. Once across the Greenfields Flory quickly noticed the unmistakable signs of Goblins.
The Goblin camps were to be her main focus on this trip. It was rumored that many of the Goblins carried bits of old relic and other shiny Mathoms that they had dug up out of the ground or scavenged from the ruins that once populated the Shire. The Shire still had some ruins but most of them had been pulled down long ago by the Hobbits, keen to use the stone to make walls and pig pens or just move them out of the way of the ploughing.
With the Goblins located Flory returned to the Inn, she would plan another trip to the camps at a later date and see if she could recover some of the lost relics. The nosey Hobbit was still hanging around the Inn asking questions when she returned. Flory politely refused to answer the questions, the last thing she needed was some silly local girl following her around. Flory took her key and something to eat and went to her room to unpack her books and maps.
The tools of the Scholar
