The not-immortal Blacksmith

Isle of Golstran

47th of Kusha, the month of Harvest.

2290 Years since the New gods came.

Maxwell’s Journal

Mr. Aaron Fish has brought an interesting bit to my attention. He was asked by the local temple to the goddess of Wisdom to look into a monetary issue for them. You would think that Wisdom would have better accountants.

I believe it will be an interesting way to test his mettle, and told him to dig deep, and damn the consequences. I hope the old bat goddess likes the kick to her teeth. I did tell Aaron to keep a written record of what he found. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said something along the lines of “Well Duh!”. I wonder if he is…whatever.

From the Journal of Aaron Fish…

47th of Kusha, 2290.

Lord Smithson must be used to dealing with idiots. Telling me, a forensic accountant, to keep a journal! Ha. I have a meeting today with the head Deacon of the temple of Wisdom; some of the records I have looked at also call the goddess “The goddess of Knowledge”.

-I have questions as to why “god/goddess” isn’t capitalized, but the sphere of influence is. It is an oddity. -

The meeting is at ten in the morning, so I will need to hurry.

-

The meeting went long, but the jist of it was that the person in charge of finances, one Deacon Gregory (her last name), has disappeared and the financial records for the temple are…not correct. Credit and Debit statements in the ledger do not follow any sort of book keeping I am familiar with. In fact, they aren’t even dated. They have two columns, one listed as “Income” and the other as “Outcome”. It makes my head hurt.

The Outcome column is written in small letters, and Income is written in large ones; but not so that you would notice on first glance, only upon detailed inspection. For every ten Income, there are between eleven and thirteen Outcomes.

This only goes back for four months of records; I know this because I have the last two years of records. I will be going over the numbers for the next few days and adding them all together.

49th of Kusha,

The tally is in. The average income for each month comes to three hundred forty-three silvers (S.343) and twelve coppers (C.12). That is a compilation from the last two years of records and has shown not to vary much from month to month, except as the season changes. This is a combination of tithes, support monies from the head temple, and payments from the public to use the temple for reading and research.

Until the last four months, the outgoing monies were three hundred seventeen silvers (S.317) and eight coppers (C.8) on average. This is a combination of pay to the employees, fuel, food and other sundries.

This leaves an average profit of twenty-six silvers (S.26) and four coppers (C.4) per month; for a projected total of five hundred twenty silver (S.520) and eighty copper (C.80) in the last two years.

The last four months show an average of twenty-four additional “sundries” purchased per month. While each of these purchases is small (averaged to one silver (S.1) and thirteen coppers (C.13) each), the total amount per month is twenty-seven silvers (S.27) and twelve coppers (C.12). This is obviously more than the temples average profit.

I shall show my findings to the Head Deacon in the morning.