Pepsi's Tale, Session Two

OK. Where was I?

Right. Wolves. Then thieves. Then, in a foolish exhibit of mercantilism, we loaded the corpses of the bandits and their bloody weapons onto the hay, thus soaking hay worth a considerable amount of gold with blood. Not to worry, though, I’m pretty sure I can spin it as high in iron. And we can sell the cart. I wiil make a profit out of this journey.

The next day we stumbled into a trap by a river. Brigands were hiding in the trees, apparently waiting for us. They came with dogs, and it would’ve gone badly for us, except for a lucky coincidence: a few of them, apparently bored of waiting, had waylaid a hobbit trying to cross the river with her pig.

Anyway! It was another success. We rescued her, saved her pig (Ronaldo, apparently), and continued on to the castle.

Honestly, by this point I was relieved to arrive at the destination. Despite all that time together, and three battles to bond over, I still had not learned any of their names, aside from the halfling’s pig friend, Ronaldo. It was getting unnerving.

The castle was, honestly, a dump. A small keep, some stables. They had beds outside for some surely idiotic reason. Both sides of me, thief and shopkeeper, adjusted expectations of any sort of profit out of this town down a couple orders of magnitude. It was with a bit of resignation that I cleaned the weapons we’d looted in the only water I could find, a trough for the horses.

“Yer gettin’ the water bloody!” yelled a guard.

“Good sir, I’m merely trying to make these weapons respectable,” I said, but he clearly wasn’t going to let anything affect his conviction that I was in the wrong. He was ready to throw me into jail, an outcome I’d rather avoid, when one of my companions, a wizened yet sprightly wizard, came to my aid. He said we were travelling performers, and between his cantrips and my acrobatic prowess, we got a gold piece out of the fools!

While all this was happening, the warlock delivered whatever he was meant to inside the keep, and we sold the hay. By this time it was getting too late to leave. With the exception of the dwarven cleric, who rested in the middle of the courtyard, and the warlock, who meditated, we bunkered down in the cots against the wall and fell asleep.

Big mistake.