As no one wants to post on this thread except Roger and I over in S&I I'll move it over here, as per Roger's suggestion, And see if any one posts. The game to date reads. This will require a bit of setup so BWM ok? , I'm going to post the setup for a story... I'll establish the three characters for us. Once I have started the 'story' anyone that wishes to contribute... (up to a... page?) to the story. Let's see what it ends up looking like. Tellin’ folks we didn't fit in would be about as obvious as a codpiece on a pair of ridden britches. A hot lookin’ gray-elf, a catkin, and me, in a city full of humans? The first time I met M’Ress and Danny was in the Human city of Cassomor at the southern end of the Sellen River. The temple is sort of famous for “encouraging” quests and spreadin’ the faith after all. I just never felt that anyone you convert at the point of a sword would be all that faithful. And serving in a peacetime army ain’t as exciten as watchin’ a tinker putting” a new edge on your sword. So I’d made it all the way to Cassomor and got me a bunk and a meal for the night before the wages from my stint in the peace time army of Alams started running low, and I had to start looking for work, That’s when I met Silias Gribb. Gribb was a merchant headin’ north, up river to make a delivery to someone named Hinclay in Belhaim. I’d never heard of either, back then, But guardin' a wagon for five days for fifteen gold diblunes is really easy money/ I was just about to close the deal when this woman walks over; pulls back the hood of her cloak, and dam near queers the whole thing. Dam I was so pissed at her, until I saw what she looked like under that cloak… Dam. Who needs a codpiece when you got a woman that can make leather armor look like that? You can call me Danni. My real name is not the sort of thing most humans can pronounce, (The Elvin tongue tends to do that from-time-to-time) and “Danni” is close enough that I’ll turn around and look to see who’s calling. To say Durgo and M’Ress didn't quite fit in would be more than just a bit redundant. But there was a lot to admire about both of them. Durgo may have been a male, and therefore a bit of a letch, (He was also tall enough to look strait down between your cleavage and just ignore your eyes.) but the church had raised that mountain right. He fully believed in the Paladin’s code. He was a gentleman about it, just as the code demanded. As apposed to ninety-nine percent of the full blood Orcs you meat. And to this day he was one of the most powerful swordsmen I have ever met. M’Ress on the other hand was a tiny thing. (Even in ridding boots, I don’t think she stood two-and-a-half deenears at the shoulders.) with her face, and presumably most of the rest of her, covered in thick tawny gold fur, and a dark brown-black main of hair that would put a lion to shame. Lugging this longbow almost as tall as herself. The first time I met the two was in a pub in Cassomor, on the north-east end of the Inner Sea. I had only just turned 150, 3 months earlier. So I hadn’t been on my own for any real length of time. Do not get me wrong here. Being the daughter of two bards, and raised in that life style leaves little room for naiveté. I more or less knew my way around the kingdoms of the northern half of the Inner Sea. But if you really want to be able to afford more than a hand full of arrows and a new set of strings for your mandolin, sooner-or-latter you have to find work beyond just singing for your supper. That’s when someone told me about a man named Silias Gribb, who was over at the Dancing Goblin Public House, recruiting guards for his trip inland. Durgo was already in one of the back booths, talking to Gribb when I got to the pub. It was obvious that Durgo was both a half-Orc, and a paladin sworn to the church, (The purl the church sets at the thought of each set of armor makes it hard to miss.) As it turned out Gribb was willing to offer us both five day work, and would we be interested for 15 gold peaces? Oh yes. What the heck will we be guarding? The machine of Lum the mad? And that was when the catkin stepped in the door, with a bow in her hand and a sword on her belt... To say the three of us were misfits in town would be to state the obvious. In a city peopled by mostly humans, Durgo and I both had as much chance of fitting in as a dragon at a bridal shower… actually even less than that. A lot of dragons can shape shift and walk through a village looking just as human as the next drunk. And even though Danni could have kept her cloak pulled up and had some small chance of going unnoticed… Danny’s a bard, (And a pretty good one by the way.) And… well it’s just not in the nature of a bard to keep a low profile. Bards tend to be all about; “Come listen to me, as I play this ancient elfin balled. And as I play, put a few copper pence in this cup so I can afford a room in this armpit of a village for the night” Then of course there’s the fact that being a part of the vagabond lifestyle of village to town to village,,, most bards parity quickly become accomplished in bow or blade, or both. And walking into a village with your face hidden, a quiver of arrows hanging from your belt, and speaking in a thick eleven accent… your just not going to go uncontested for that long. So none of the three of us were low profile that morning we first met our new boss Silias Gribb, and each other for the first time. My quest to locate and rescue my family had brought me from the High-Eleven city of Kann’sora at the southern end of the Worlds Edge Mountains, west to the mouth of the Sellen River and the city of Cassomor… and to the end of the little silver I’d had when I first began, Now being the only Catfolk in a city full of humans is not really as big a deal as you’may expect at first. We Catkin tend to get along well with a lot of peoples, and to just sort of fit in wherever we find ourselves. But finding yourself running low of funds in a major port city like Cassomor? Well that is something else entirely. Fortunately in a port town like Cassomor, with all the comings and goings of merchandises and trading goods, both out to sea and up river and inland, there is always a need for them who can nock an arrow and actually hit the brown-bulls-eye of a goblin trying to flee with some merchants gold. And even if I do have to say it myself… I took out a fleeing goblin just last week, and the sheriff had to let me go. Because he couldn’t find the arrow wound. The only problem I had was cleaning the smell off my favorite arrow when I was dun. So it really didn’t take that much work to find some work. The first bar wench I ask just told me where to go… but the second… pointed out a human in one of the back booths, a merchant by the name of Silias Gribb, talking to an elf, and a truly massive mountain of mussels in chain mail with a claymore great sword slung over one shoulder. His right shoulder surprisingly. In all honesty? I don’t believe I’d ever met a southpaw half-Orc before I met Durgo. Brother. Talk about a face even a mother can’t love.” I really really HATE Orcs. In my opinion the only thing worse than… You know? I don’t think there is anything nastier than… Waite. Yes. The only thing worse than an Orc, is a drunken Orc. When Orcs gets drunk, they get horny. Never turn your back on a horny drunken Orc. Which explains why there are so many half-Orcs being raised in the local temples. Which in turn explains why so many half-Orcs end up pledging as paladins to the local church. So as soon as Durgo turned to address me, the peril was clearly visible in his armor. Marking him as a knight of the faith. I hate Orcs. But paladins are the sort of people you can trust to cover your back. Then there sat Danni at the table. Who at first glance LOOKS for all the world like a Dark-Elf. Dark-elves may not be as bad as Orcs, but as a general rule of thumb you should only trust a dark elf about as fair as you can toss an Orc while coming down from a catnip buzz, But I just happen to know a thing or twelve about elves. When you LOOK at Danni, a trained eye can spot the differences. Danni’s a Gray-elf, and both of the gray -elves I’ve known were good people. Silias Gribb on the other hand is a human, and of course there really is nothing you can say about humans. Other than no two are the same. Case in point, Silias is a merchant. Now you’d expect a merchant to be a bit of a braggart, telling you all about what he has to sell and what a bargain it is for such a fibulas item… but not Gribb. Silias was surprisingly quiet and reserved. As it turned out Grib was only taking one wagon up river this time. Heading to a river village named Belhaim… Back then the only thing I knew about Belhaim was that it was home to a pretty powerful wizard by the name of Hinclay. I’d heard he made a lot of cool stuff with his magic. But the truth is the village doesn’t even appear on most maps. Three good blades to guard a single wagon? I think we all probably wondered what was in it… Gold? But for three gold diblunes each, per day, plus anything we might glean from anyone that attempted to waylay us? Oh hell yes. I just wish we’d known then what we learned when we got to Belhaim… Roger A. [Durgo]: Well, Silias wanted to leave at dawn. He said the faster we got the cargo to its destination the faster we got paid. It was hard to argue with logic like that, so I got up even earlier than normal to finish my morning devotional and try to purge a few impure thoughts about Danni from my mind. No real luck on the second part of that. As we got ready to leave we all exchanged a few minor pleasantries, and I tried my best not to stare at Danni. M'Ress being as small as she was informed us she would be taking the lookout position on top of the wagon. I couldn't argue with that being a sound tactical decision, but when I nodded and turned around she decided to run up my back like I was her own personal ladder. I was...shall we say...less than pleased with the action? I am a professional though, and a Knight of the Church, so violence over such a minor thing wouldn't have been an appropriate reaction. Instead I explained, oh so politely, to M'Ress that to step on a Knight of the Church is disrespectful of the Church itself, and if she needed help getting up to the top of the wagon, she could have just asked. If she did something like that again, I might have to take offense on the behalf of the Church. Her apology seemed a little less sincere than I would have liked, but we still had a job to do, and as I said earlier, I am a professional. Danni, for her part just watched, and I like to think she tried not to laugh, but if she tried she didn't try very hard.A couple hours in to the trip, I heard the TWANG of M'Ress' bow and she shouted "Incomming! Straight up!" I pulled out my sword, getting ready for an attack, and what do I see when I look up? A goose falling directly toward me. Stunned by this unexpected development, I of course fail to catch the goose, but I do manage to cut off its head mid fall, even though it is already clearly dead. Danni and M'Ress shared a laugh at my expense. Silias just smiled and said "At least we know you can swing the sword now, and we know the catkin can shoot her bow." Apparently M'Ress gave Danni an Silias some signal and they knew exactly what was happening. At least the apology this time came in the form of first choice for what part of the bird I wanted for dinner later. But it wasn't even lunch time yet. Dinner was hours away. This was going to be a long 5 days. Ms Kitty Well. As no one else has posted… [Danni]: M’Ress and I met up again at the Dancing Goblin the next morning, for some breakfast, before making our way down to the docks to find Gribb. We found Gibb and his buckboard already on the dock, along with TWO large draft horses… along side the Black Pegasus. I’ve seen The Black Pegasus before in port over in Alams. She’s one of the fancy little, fast, three masted, ‘pocket clippers’ out of the yard of Westertown, designed for getting really valuable, perishables to market as quickly as possible. The crew had rigged a block-and-tackle to the ship’s yardarm and Silias was screaming bloody hell at her crew as a crate cleared the cargo hold hatchway. As the crate was lowered into the bed of the wagon, I watched the leaf spring give. Whatever was in the crate was really heavy… heavy enough to need the two horses. This one crate took up almost all of the wagon bed. If someone had removed the legs from a harpsichord to crate it… the size might have been about right. But it wouldn’t have weighed nearly half of what this did. What ever it was. [M’Ress]: Whatever it was we were going to be guarding for the next five days was inside a single big crate. If you’d boxed up a pair of coffins, side-by-side, it might have been about the right size… but the box didn’t smell like dead bodies, as we helped cover it with a big oiltarp. When the wagon was finally ready, Gibb climbed up, settled in to the bench, and took up the rains. The sound the dock made as the wagon worked it’s way back to dry land and the street sort of reminded me of an orc, with a belly full of five day old fish. Normally I would have ridden Temper, and stayed out in front of the wagon. Normally. But the question of what was in that box was driving me nuts. So as soon as the thing was back in the mud. I tied my pony off to the back of the buckboard and ‘volunteered’ to guard the thing by sitting on it. Durgo just wasn’t all that happy with the idea of my using the hem of his chain mail to boost myself up to the top of the box. He razed such a stink, carrying on about me disrespecting the church. Holly crap. You’d have thought people were watching the brown-eyed-Cyclops backpedaling out of town, the stinkeye we got from a couple of them. [Danni]: We were only about two, two-and-a-half, hours into the trip when I saw the cat, twitch her ears, and I heard the honking of a flight of geese. M’Ress tapped Gibb on the shoulder, and point into the air, as she drew an arrow from her quiver… and grinning, In all my century and a half, that was the first time I have ever seen anyone bring down a goose from that high up with an arrow… and I’ve never seen, before or since, anyone behead a bird as it drops from the sky. Come on. SOMEONE add another page. [M'Ress]; "Hay give that back... That's mu favorite arrow. Dam. It still stinks of goblin." [Danni]: Now who gets to pluck the duck?" Roger A. [Durgo]: After lunch the first day was the first time I started to get the impression someone was watching us. Not following us, but watching us. It was difficult to describe. If it had been someone following us, we could have spotted them, and confronted them. If there were too many of them, we could make a run for it, or maybe set a trap. But no matter how carefully I looked, I couldn't see anyone around. Still the feeling of being watched persisted. After an hour, I was beginning to doubt my sanity. M'Ress didn't seem to have noticed anything out of the ordinary, and Gribb certainly didn't have any clue. It wasn't until I saw Danni looking uneasy that I realized I wasn't imagining it. Or at least if I was, I wasn't the only one. I made my way over to Danni and was about to say something when she said " Have you ever SEEN such a beautiful day? It's almost like MAGIC." She kept the emphasis slight, but even as slow as I can be sometimes, I got the hint. Someone was watching with magic, and might be listening too. 'I guess it's a nice enough day, but there seems to be a little bit of a chill in the air." It was actually pleasantly warm, so I knew she would get my meaning. The feeling of being watched was sending chills down my spine. "We will need a good fire, to keep warm tonight, and that means someone will have to tend the fire through the night." Of course I meant we would need the light to keep watch by. Danni replied "No, I don't think it will get cold enough to need a fire tonight, but maybe tomorrow night". Was she trying to say that the watcher was far enough away we would be safe tonight? How could she know something like that? I would have to ask her later what she knew about magic.....
