Hello there, I´m coming out of lurking for a moment to revive this lovely threat. For I have done a scouting-mission in Helsinki! And it may not be a location the comic is set in ever, but it was the first time I ever was in Finland and I´m very excited about it.
Area: Helsinki, Finland
Date: June 16 - June 19 2023 (I know it´s been a while, but you know, as a ranger I have a lot on my plate ^^')
Scout: Mirasol, assisted by parents
Trolls detected: no
Troll activity detected: no
Troll activity indicated: no
Ghost activity detected: no
Threat level assessment: low / high if you mess with the seagulls
It´s also the first time I´ve been on a plane since I can remember, so that was exciting.
This is Germany from above though.
To get into actual pictures from Helsinki. Since it was the week before midsummer it only really started to get dark at 11pm (this is the tower of the central station). Not that I ever go to bed anywhere near earlier than that (which might be part of the problem xD), but it was just basically the middle of the day at 10 at night. Which will be obvious to people like Jitter, but it was new to me. And caused my whole scouting team (mostly cronic nightowls like me) to lose all sense of passing time repeatedly.
(It does get dark later in summer than in winter in Germany, but by 11 it´s usually completely dark, at least where I live.)
We were very lucky with the weather, 30°C and not a cloud in sight, despite my mom´s weather app insisting the opposite every single day. So the ideal weather for scouting without running into trolls.
These pictures were taken from the fortress-island(s) Suomenlinna. While it hasn´t been used as a fortress for a long time (it´s a world cultural habitat now), and is mostly a nice location for picknicks today, I´d say it´d still do well as a survivor-colony. Mainly because it´s in a good distance from the shore but not too far out in the sea to be in great danger of (big) seabeasts. Also it absolutely has enough restaurants it would be able to feed people until they can figure out a proper foodsupply.
There were lot of baby barnacle geese around. Very cute, and their parents weren´t nearly as aggressive as I´m used to from other kinds of geese. Which was a good thing because they were walking their kids on footpaths everywhere, especially on Suomenlinna. So as long as you left them alone, they´d leave you alone, you could peacefully walk past each other.
The seagulls on the other hand... If the seagulls of Kauppatori defend their home with the same viciousness and level of organization as they use to steal icecream from unsuspecting tourists (luckily didn´t happen to us, but we saw it happening several times), I´d say that place is a lehto for sure (I´d say a survivor-colony, but unless they get a sentinel mage here I doubt they´ll get the seagulls to cooperate with the humans). I suddenly see the phrase "the power of a thousand wings" through completely different eyes...
(I know seagulls have no hesitation when it comes to stealing food, wherever they live. Lost some fries to them on various occasions throughout my life. But the ones here... They´d act like they hate each other, yet have lookout posts on every relevant food-stand on the market square. As soon as someone buys icecream and holds it a little bit too far away from their body, one of the lookouts will hit it out of their hands and all the other seagulls will descend upon it.)
And I got to use my broken Finnish plenty here! Mainly to try and translate every street-sign and food-menu we came across (which my parents at some point simply resigned themselves to listening to because I was so excited I understood words I wouldn´t stop... ^^' Though the fact everything was written there in Swedish too spoilt the fun a little. Written Swedish is pretty easy to understand as a German...). I couldn´t really gather up the courage to speak it to the locals though. A few times I mentally prepared for ordering food in Finnish, but once I´d come up with a proper sentence one of my parents would have already ordered in English before I could open my mouth.
The cinnamon rolls here were still delicious.
Other than that, we scouted by doing typical touristy things, like visiting the cathedral, doing a boat-tour around the little islands that are part of the city (not really including Suomenlinna, you can simply take the public-transport-ferry to go there), and going to national library (I don´t know if that last thing is a typical tourist-attraction, but the man we sat next to on the plane, who was a local from Helsinki who works in Germany, highly recommended it to us, and it did not disappoint! Plenty of books of course, in all kinds of languages, but also 3D-Printers, sewing machines, even a recording studio including instruments you can borrow or use with a library card. And the view from the roof was pretty great.)
Lastly, could a native Finnish-speaker please help me with this, but in a food menu I think read the word "karhu-vadelma" as meaning "blackberry". The dictionary I had with me, and that I looked into to double-check, has a slightly different translation for it though, "karhunvattuka". I really like the idea of blackberries being named "bear-rasberries", but now I´m not sure if I misread it.
All in all I´d put the general threat-level here as
low. Plenty of birds to defend everything. I didn´t come across any blessed felines, but the seagulls more than made up for it in terms of security. though I wouldn´t count on them caring about anyone´s safety but their own...
I´ll be happy to continue my scouting later this summer in Bornholm, back with my full party again instead of just my parents. To for once do some scouting in a place that´s actually relevant for the comic.
I know I´m using this threat as just an excuse to post vaction-photos at this point, I´m sorry...
