Since I seem to be only attracting scammers, I thought I'd sweeten the pot a bit. I advertised the series as being humorous but the first few chapters don't really showcase that aspect while setting up the story. So here's a quick, slice-of-life scene to hopefully whet some appetites. This doesn't feature anywhere in the story, so we'll call it a canon side story taking place in book 3. Without further pomp, please enjoy.
Of Labels and Other Objects
The Prancing Peony was, as roadside taverns go, a perfectly acceptable way station for weary travelers and wanderers of all stripes. It had all of the expected amenities—ale of questionable purity, food of dubious origin, a bar displaying hypothetical cleanliness, and rooms that were
technically sanitary so long as one refrained from touching too many surfaces.
Tucked into a corner at a round table and close enough to the hearth to ward off the autumn chill, five travelers consumed their first hot meal in days. The 'stew', which leaned more heavily on root vegetables and barley than the meat which had been advertised, was just nourishing enough to keep their grumbling to a minimum as they ate. Their travel packs had been left against the wall with weapons readily available, though this was more out of habit than any specific threat.
The group's resident lock picker, thief, and general stirrer-of-shit sat with her back to the nearest wall and ripped a piece of dark bread off the communal loaf. Her icy blue eyes continued to scan the room long after the others had focused on their dinners. The generic averageness of their accommodations was gnawing at her.
"I swear we've been to this dump before. Didn't we stay here on our way to the Saltwright job?"
The imposing aasimar warrior to her right shook his head. Cofounder of their ragtag group and consistent killjoy of her self-described cleverness, Kael wiped his mouth on the rag that served as his napkin and cleared his throat. His yellow-gold eyes crinkled at the corners as he dredged up the memory of that job so many months ago—the adventure that had introduced them to their newest member.
"We didn't come from this direction Liriel, that was closer to Hearthdell. Smaller place...also it wasn't the
Peony." The half-elf rogue nodded thoughtfully and their wizard Theron cleared his throat from her left.
"Worse clientele too. Remember tha' one dodgy character sittin' by his lonesome?" The dwarf took a drink and grimaced at the stale taste. "Fella smelled like owlbear scat." He shook his head and straightened his plum-and-forest green robes. "Wanted to conjure some water over his head jus' to keep my food down."
"He just came in from the forest," their ranger and tracker spoke up. Her voice carried the calm authority that never failed to mediate group disputes. She tossed her long, brown braid over her shoulder to keep it out of her stew. "None of us smell great while we're on the road." Elara resumed eating without further comment, the finality in her tone had shut down more than one nascent argument in the past.
"Which is why," Liriel deftly redirected the conversation, "I am getting my own room tonight. I've had enough of listening to
that one snore in her bedroll." She gestured at the last and most recent addition to their insane little family. Across the table, the diminutive redhead looked up from her own meal.
"I do
not snore." She defended herself firmly, an encouraging development over the last few months. Eya's ability to push back against Liriel's needling had come roaring back in a way that told her friends that this was her natural personality reasserting itself. The half-elf simply rolled her eyes.
"Bitch, you snore." She complained dismissively.
Eya pointed her spoon across the table and huffed. "I do not snore and I know that for a fact." Around her, the others perked up from their exhaustion. This exchange already had all of the hallmarks of inbound entertainment. Liriel put her own utensil down, sat back in her seat, and folded her arms.
"I need to hear this," she gestured to their cleric. "Go for it."
Eya drew herself up in her seat and raised her chin. The human was barely two inches taller than Theron but did her level best to appear authoritative and imposing. The result was...mixed. "If you snore in your sleep, Devils will find you and kill you and since I haven't been killed, I do not snore. QED."
She was met with silence at the table. The crackling of the hearth at her back and the low murmur of conversation around the room only served to amplify the discomfort. She had a habit of doing exactly this—offering unhinged observations in such a matter-of-fact tone that it managed to temporarily derail her friends' thoughts. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat and tried to qualify the statement.
"Admittedly, that makes more sense when you're bivouacked two miles ahead of an active battlefront...but I stand by my premise." Eya resolutely returned to her meal without acknowledging the others further.
The first sound to emerge from any of the remaining four was Liriel's choked scoff. "How the fuck do you keep doing that? Also, who just uses 'bivouac' or 'QED' in a sentence?"
Kael cleared his throat and rose to her defense. "I do. Bivouac: temporary shelter without cover. We usually bivouac when we're on the road." Before Liriel could retort, Theron interrupted.
"QED is an acronym in draconic for 'I feckin' told ya'. True story." He nodded knowingly and stabbed a chunk of roasted meat with his fork. Liriel just sneered and gestured at Eya's defenders.
"Case in point. Nerds of a feather." She took a large spoonful of stew and talked through the food. "Speaking of which, why are we walking all this way? Why can't you just teleport us?"
Theron rolled his eyes. "Ya want me to fold space and time jus' to save ya from putting a few more miles on yer dainty tootsies? Do I look like a rented mule?" Liriel smirked at the obvious opening.
"Well, now that you mention it, you do remind me of a jackass I rented in Marquet."
"Go boil yer head, ya horse's ass." Theron resumed eating without further ceremony. The rogue decided to press her point.
"It's not just me, look at poor 'Lara! She's obviously hurting, aren't you Stickers?" The ranger looked up from her meal and shifted uncomfortably.
"I'm fine, it just takes a little while to get used to being back in all this," she gestured at her leather armor, "after so much downtime." She unconsciously tugged at the binder under her clothes which kept her figure from interfering with her bow draw.
Liriel smirked in the telling way that informed her friend that she was about to take the conversation in an instigating new direction. "Want me to carry those for you?" She jutted her chin at her friend with a trademark grin. "You know, a little support?" Kael's long-suffering sigh followed the sound of his spoon hitting his wooden bowl from her right.
"Oh good, I thought you'd been replaced by a helpful doppelgänger for a second there, pervert." Before he could resume eating, a sharp smack to the back of his head interrupted his thoughts.
Liriel pointed her finger at his face and looked uncharacteristically stern. "No. Bad." He rubbed the short, iridescent white hair at the nape of his neck.
"Ow! What was that for?"
Liriel gestured at Elara and Eya. "Those two can call me a pervert." She then hooked her thumbs at Kael and Theron. "You two can't." The aasimar shook his head as if to clear a confusing thought.
"What? Why?"
"Because," she retorted, "you're only calling me a pervert for having the same libido as either of you."
Kael gestured across the table at the ranger, who watched them both with interest. He sputtered at first, but found his footing. "You were just talking about groping her. Again. It's objectifying."
Liriel abandoned her meal and turned to face him fully with a withering expression of genuine offense. "I do
not objectify 'Lara. She is a smart, capable, fearsome woman who knows what she wants and has made her preferences completely clear to me."
Elara nodded with satisfaction. "Thank you."
Liriel continued, unabated. "I objectify the two big
objects she has to lug around because I want to bury my face in them until I suffocate and they are, as I mentioned, objects."
Elara's eyebrow raised tellingly and her spoon hovered over her dish, frozen there. "Thank...you?"
The rogue nodded at her. "Anytime, gorgeous." She turned back to Kael, "and so what? Everyone looks her in the cans when we're at Greenhome." A new silence descended on the table, this time markedly less entertained. Elara looked around at her companions. Kael managed to keep his composure under her scrutiny, but his ears betrayed him with their rapidly increasing redness. She looked to Theron next and he began hurriedly gesticulating with academic precision.
"Ya see...what ya have to understand is, at my height tha's basically eye contact." The ranger narrowed her eyes and looked at her half-elf friend next. Liriel just grinned and nodded, completely unashamed of herself. Elara rolled her eyes, silently chastising herself at expecting anything less from the rogue. She turned to face Eya, who had gone very still and was intently focused on the center of the table.
"Eya? Look at me."
"Nuh uh." The cleric firmly declined and absently stirred her stew. Elara goggled at the, supposedly, most innocent member of their group.
"Really? You too?"
Eya shrugged without taking her eyes from whatever had captured her attention between all of them. "They're hard to miss."
Elara narrowed her eyes at her friend and her penetrating gaze made the cleric's neck feel warm but she refused to look over. When the ranger finally spoke, it was low and deliberate but not scolding. "It's like I'm looking at a puppy that ate my trail ration and
knows that I know she did it." Snickering from her other companions drew her eyes back around the table. "Oh, you're all just as damaged." She finally brought the spoonful of dinner to her mouth, ate it, and pointed it at Liriel. "And I called you a pervert because you loudly implied that I would take two blacksmith
twin brothers to bed at the same time right in front of said brothers."
To her credit, Liriel managed to appear genuinely flabbergasted. "Are you really going to get mad at me for trying to get you laid-laid?" The ranger dismissed her by lifting her mug with a head shake and no further comment.
In the silence, Theron spoke with reassurance. "I'd never call ya a pervert, Daggers. I know lots of fine, upstanding perverts who wouldnae be caught dead with the likes of ya." He drank again and ignored her withering glare. "I'd call ya a 'harpy', probably. Or 'Demon'. Or 'Witch', 'Gangly'—"
"I know where you sleep." She curtly interrupted his monologue.
"Ya
think ya know where I sleep." He said, thoroughly satisfied with himself. Across from them, Eya took a large gulp of ale and wiped her lips on her sleeve.
She fixed the rogue with her own glare that could generously be described as 'petulant'. "I called you a pervert because you called
me 'slut' after I said that thing you keep making me say," reminding them of the affirmation she'd been forced to repeat when Liriel had gotten sick of her constant self-deprecation. The rogue just snorted into her own beer.
"Yeah you did," she chuckled at the memories of Eya's compliance with her intervention.
"
And," the offended cleric pointed at her and scrunched up her nose, "I did it again when you tried to scare me out of my bath by talking about snakes."
Liriel rolled her eyes at the accusation. "There
are snakes around that pond. Someone back me up here." She was met by raised eyebrows and silence while Eya gestured dismissively.
"And I still don't care." The redhead picked up her fork and knife and began cutting a chunk of meat in her stew. "I'd threaten you for it but," she gestured at the half-elf with her fork, "it would just make you...moist."
Liriel leaned on the table, completely unaffected by the insult. She gesticulated openly, still bewildered by her own reactions sometimes. "Seriously, it's like an instant swamp. I don't even fully understand it myself." She resumed eating her meal before offhandedly adding her own provocation. "As far as foreplay goes, it's going to make our sex life
really confusing." She received her intended reaction in the form of Eya dropping her utensils into her bowl and shouting at her.
"WE DO
NOT HAVE A SEX LIFE!" Her eyes shot open at her own volume, which attracted attention from around the room. The cleric slapped her hands over her mouth and mumbled through her fingers. "...I hate you so much."
Liriel smirked at her. Their newest member was, by far, the most fun to screw with among all of them. "No you don't," she confidently retorted. The cleric picked up her utensils again.
"No," she sighed, "I don't."
Never one to let a knife go untwisted, the rogue smiled into her mug. "That's right, slut." She managed to dodge the fork that came flying at her head, but still splashed some stale beer in the process. "Hey!" she shouted with indignation, "Lead your target, Red. I'm disappointed."
Eya scrunched up her nose in a way that she assumed looked threatening and not at all like an angry child. The others just watched the drama unfold. "If I wanted to hit you, you'd have a fork in your eyeball. You'd have a...a forkball."
"Ya wouldnae really fork her, Sundown." Theron's soothing burr reached the fuming cleric, but she turned to him with fire in her eyes.
"Oh, I would
definitely fork her! I'd fork her right in th—" Her eyes went wide again. "
Muffin!" Her fond nickname for him being used in such an accusatory tone broke most of them instantly, eliciting snickering from around the table.
Liriel extended a fist in Theron's direction with a chuckle. "Good one." He silently accepted the fist bump.
Eya deflated slightly and picked up her beer. "Bugger."
EDIT: Some embarrassing typos.
