Seasons of Heroes: A D&D-inspired Adventure!

[The Laurent]

Seasons of Heroes: A D&D-inspired Adventure!

The continent of Vikalean is divided: between cultures, between vastly different people, between the surviving Sepult who had once united the continent in an Empire of steel and blood, and the humans whose world was shaped by its collapse, and between humans and elves in the Islands.

It is also a continent of adventure. An ever-changing continent of heroes, where adventurers explore lost ruins and shape the course of history, of Princes, Councils, tribes and Republics.

In this age of progress and violence, this diverse age moving towards new forms of living, the story of one such adventurer resonated, changing far more than a life or three.

*****

Welcome, Questers, to another The Laurent Quest. By now these might be familiar to you, so rest assured that I'll be throwing plenty of twists and thinking plenty about history, culture and society. Indeed, I plan to have a series of posts about the world over the voting period, or perhaps before it.

So, here are your options.

As a note, all of these characters are men.

[] The Runaway Princess She didn't regret the choice, perhaps that said something about her. But when the princess faced a political marriage north, with the Island Kingdom of Olund, she balked. Not merely because it seemed a clear prelude to an invasion of Eskind or Ires and an attack on the elves and their human allies, but because she couldn't quite imagine… marrying a man, or even marrying at all. It felt wrong. She killed a man, a prince, who so far as she knew was not particularly terrible. And she fled her crime. The Princess took on men's clothing and a man's name and fled to the island of Ires. There, she survived as best she knew how. She had the skills necessary, but the past three years have had their rough patches. She still hides the truth of her sex.. Even now that those hunting her have likely given up, a part of him rebels and screams at the idea of just... just. Becoming a girl again to the world.

He is a rather posh and composed young man, given to occasionally chuckling over puns, but seemingly otherwise rather serious. Those who know him would say that he was very precise, and almost punctual, enough that some accused him of thinking he was better than them. Among this strange and foreign people, in tune with the Fae and with nature, he sticks out, but he tries not to let it bother him. He thinks of the family he left behind, but less and less each year.

[] Stranger In A Strange Land: The Orime are a proud people, strong and tough, tribes spread out over the vast northern wastelands, and into the transitional lands. They were a hardy, stock, powerful people, whose skin color varied wildly, and who valued warriors of either gender and lived in a rather egalitarian way. They usually stood against outsiders. Usually. Sometimes a tribe was betrayed. As a young man, his tribe was left isolated, and was destroyed by the Kingdom of the Kurzachs. He was driven out by the cruelty of powerful humans, and he refused to join a tribe which betrayed his people. He made his way south, over a number of years, and discovered certain facts about himself along the way. For the last year he's found himself in Edele, a land far too hot, near an unfrozen sea.

This mercenary, drifter, and adventurer is slightly above average height for his race, which was to say that he towered and loomed at far closer to seven feet than six. He is viewed as strong and often silent, though he has grown more competent in Eddelish. Despite his quiet, he can be witty, and he has a rough, even crude, sense of humor. He has Eddelish clothing, though he finds it far too revealing, but he often wears the furs and jackets of his homeland, as a sort of advertisement. Exotic and almost entirely alone, with few other Orime around, he nonetheless tries to form fast friendships.

[] The Mysterious Orphan: She doesn't remember the woman who gave birth to her, but that doesn't mean she doesn't know her parents. She was raised by two farmers at the edge of the Ailsbeg Forest. They were good, pious people, whose worship of the Gods involved helping those in need as well, and they never treated her as a burden, not even when she grew up a tomboy, proper, polite, and deferential to her elders, but given to wandering the forest and uncomfortable in long hair and skirts. She loved the forest, and she loved her parents, and she learned to protect herself as a matter of course. She grew up, and she grew straight and tall, put on muscle working in the field with her mother and father, put on wisdom puzzling out how to read and write with the local priest, though she never was all that good at it.

Finally, at eighteen, she is ready to set out in the world. She wants to have a few adventures before she figures out what she wants to do in life, and with her parents' blessing and aid, she has taken off to see what the world has to offer. She isn't very experienced, and she is quite sheltered, but she's sharper than she looks, and stronger than one would expect. Some nights, she wonders just what happened when she was a baby, but it doesn't interest her nearly as much as what lays ahead.

[] Street Rat: In the slums, and on the docks, of the Eddelian port city-state of Styrmia, one does what one has to if it means survival. She has no mother, and no father, and has grown up wild on the streets, often a day or less from starvation and death. It has made her hardy, and it has helped make her a Qile, a woman who dresses like a man, and is thought to prefer the company of women. It hasn't hurt her, any, and while she operates on the other side of the law, she hasn't stepped over any of the invisible barriers that separate the merely criminal from the outrageous.

She's quick on her feet, fast with her mouth, everywhere she's not supposed to be, and having as much fun as she's had in her impoverished life. After years of work, it feels as if she is finally finding her place, comfortable in what she's doing and how she's doing it… at least, relatively speaking. But in the slums of a city-state, dark clouds are always on the horizon.

[] Wandering Adventurer! for Hire: The Sepult are a people long since fractured into three groups, the Sepult under the hills, the traditionalist Sepult under the mountains who mine and make great artifacts, and the Sepult who travel upon the rivers, the traders and wanderers, the people who live in the world of man, the Surflug, quite literally on-the-river. He is the scion of one such trading family, which has operated the same routes for years, marrying among the same sorts of families, and doing the same sorts of things. But he was never a traditionalist, always the sort ot push the boundaries, from being a son to being the sort of Surflug who gives them their names.

With his parents' eventual reluctant blessing, he has stepped away from trading, perhaps for good. Instead he adventures, making his living by his skills, his wits, and his stellar personality. Shorter than many of his companions, in travel and otherwise, he makes up for it with vigor, energy, and the right tools for the right job. It's stood him in good stead, this last year, still a young man of thirty-five, with plenty of life ahead of him.

*****

A/N: Another The Laurent Quest. Mechanics post will come out in the next few days, but it's going to be relatively rules-light? As in, probably more rules light then you're thinking when I say that. But anyways, yeah. Probably update weekly, but maybe not? Who knows!

 

[The Laurent]

Prologue

If the woods around her home had some fancy name, she didn't know what it was. But like all the forests around, it could be dark and dangerous, especially if you were young and unprepared.

But the dark didn't have to be scary, and Lotte was not afraid. Yes, her knees were shaking, and she'd been lost for nearly an hour, but if you'd just ask her she would have told this hypothetical person that she wasn't afraid. So, there you go!

Of course, she might just ask this stranger for help getting out of the woods. Unless they were lost, then she would have sucked up any fea… any lack of fear and tried to help them. Ol' Gunther, the Forester, said that that was the duty of those who knew the wilds. He'd said it a little drunk, on another lament that none of the boys of the village wanted to learn his profession. "I'd been a real adventurer, y'know. Now all I have is a girl to teach, though yer decent, don't get me wrong. But you know what I mean, don'tya Lotte?"

Lotte felt something sharp in her chest. She wished she was a boy, just so that Gunther would be a little less sad.

But he'd still taught her plenty, and she looked around the forest, and as she did, she relaxed a little. She didn't know where she was, yes, but she knew this part of the forest in general, even if she'd never gone this deep in. She recognized the trees, the way they bent and twisted around, like ol' missus Agna. They had been alive long enough to have deep shadows and blur at the edges.

She knew what the wind felt like, knew that it wouldn't carry her scent all that far, and she knew that tangy smell in the air. It was blood. The ten year old girl didn't let herself tremble, because if it was someone hurt, she'd have to save them, no matter the cost. Her parents didn't raise someone who could just walk away from that.

Still, she proceeded cautiously forward, eyes careful for the traps she knew were sometimes found deep in these woods.

If one were some stalking beast, perched on a tree, one would see a surprisingly large scrap of a ten year old, with blonde hair done in messy braids which she fiddled with in the village, though not out here. She was dressed in old leathers and decent cloth, all of it green and brown of just the shade to blend in with the forest. She had a quiver on her back, and an odd sort of rig there, to put her bow, such that it wouldn't warp, or dig into her back when she moved. Gunther had sworn by it. She wore shoes that were little more than hunks of leather, almost raw enough to moo, and moved with a grace that would have surprised some in the village.

Of course, if one were some stalking beast, she probably would have noticed them.

The forest was a dangerous place, where a predator could look like the shadow of a log, and a bandit could look, in shades and shadows, like nothing more than a bush. It wasn't a bright place, and it wasn't a quiet place, though at the moment it was doing its best impression. That's why she had a nose, and ears, and eyes, and instincts, and if all else failed hands. You couldn't rely on one thing, it'd be like going into the forest with a single arrow.

Her bow, of about medium-length when one accounted for her age, was held in her hand, strung when she'd left for the forest some hours before. She moved forward, careful of twigs and leaves, up the slight incline, around a tree that looked like it might be a den for animals she didn't want to disturb, and on. She listened, stopping every so often, to see if anyone had been following her.

She licked her dry lips and came, at last, to a twisted, tangled sort of depression in the earth. The grass was higher than the pastures her family raised their cows and pigs on, part of the time. At one corner was some nightmare of the past. It was a twisted thing of iron, twisted around a dark, struggling, bleeding wolf that whined and growled in equal measures.

The trap looked like nothing Lotte had ever been shown. Now, she was lettered, if just barely. (Her mother had insisted, and the priest would put her in a clean enough room and glare at her if she creased a page of books which, he'd reminded her, had been hand copied by people far more intelligent than her, and couldn't stand abuse.) But you didn't need letters to guess at what this strange contraption had to be. A Sepult Trap, and if that was so, it had been there for a thousand years without rusting, which made it the kind of thing you didn't want to touch. Magic wasn't that scary: her Mom had magic from the Gods, been an adventurer for a few years. But Sepult magic? Old Sepult magic?

Even if she could trust the wolf not to lash out in fear and pain, and she wasn't sure she'd trust a person not to do so… she was almost certain she couldn't undo it, clever though her hands were. The wolf wasn't going to get out of the trap, and nobody else was going to come around with the skill to help. She imagined some Sepult jerk, grinning to themselves as they set the trap, sure it'd catch some pony-riding enemy Sepult, or… something.

Still, she didn't linger long on the hurts of the distant past. Instead she looked at the wolf. It was a beautiful enough creature, even if she'd lost a few pigs to starving wolves in the late autumn.

It would starve to death, probably, or it would bleed out, but perhaps slower than one might expect. It was going to be a painful, slow death either way, even if the end, she supposed, would be dreamier than the start.

There was only one sort of mercy she could give. She prayed to Wilfhuld, the wolf-headed God who watched after those who worked together, whether they were hunters, warriors, or people gathered to make a village festival come off.

She grabbed an arrow, notched it smoothly, with years of practice already, and loosed it.

********

The family who lived surprisingly near to the outskirts of Valwald was often thought quite lucky. Henrik's father had been a bold man, a third generation of scrambling upwards helped by his lack of sons to care for other than Henrik, and only one daughter to see settled. Henrik had inherited a decent piece of land, a chunk of the village's common-land for farming, plus some pasture and pigs, cows, but the oxen was his own purchase, and the pigs were more numerous and more carefully kept than in his father's time. He'd married a wandering adventurer, a pious woman who could heal with a prayer, yet wasn't truly a priestess. She lent her hands to help the local midwife and care for local animals, and as any smart man did, he lent out his oxen to the service of others so that they didn't have to ask his High Lordship for it. It meant that when bad times came, and bad times would always come, they wouldn't whisper so loud and wouldn't hate so much.

They was good folks, all around, and good folks to adopt some doorstep child with no known mother. Lotte, well, she was odd in some ways, of course, but she was dutiful and you could do far worse than a child who took care around the farm, and sometimes brought venison back from her forest sojurns. They said she was good in the woods, though nowhere near as good as ol' Gunther had been before he'd been taken off, last winter. Such a shame, such a shame.

If she married some nice, respectful man when she was steady of herself, they'd no doubt prosper further. Or, some added with mischief, a woman. It wasn't unknown for two men or women to marry, though many around these parts thought it odd, and in a village of hundreds there were only two such marriages. But any talk of marriage was years premature, everyone ultimately concluded. You didn't marry until you had enough to marry on, not like the nobles, leaping into bed at fourteen, dead in childbirth at sixteen, or so everyone said.

The farmland was in common, though everyone knew what parts of the field were done by Henrik. You could draw a diagram of how a field should be by his work. Now, the pasturelands, on the other hand, were marked off with raised stone, piled on top of each other, a sort of fence without a fence. It was upon one such pillar that Lotte sat that spring day, whittling out a whistle for a local kid who'd begged her for it. She'd changed, in six years, but most of all she'd grown. There was a lot of woman, lean though she was, and all of it was dressed in hunter's clothing, even when she wasn't off in the woods. Her hair had been hacked short, after an incident involving a bear, honey, and a stream where she'd done some spear fishing. She wasn't bad at it, but it had none of the simple thrill of archery.

The pigs wandered, of course they did. There was a pen right up against the house, for when they needed to be kept there, and there always had to be pigs to give birth to new generations, when it came time for the slaughter. It was a regular thing, and there was a cycle and a rhythm to life that almost made sense to her, but didn't quite fit. Her parents worked well together, and cared for each other, and sometimes she wondered if it'd be so bad to settle down--

But, no. Something in that thought twisted and turned like a snake trying to avoid a hawk.

(She'd had a dream once, one she'd forgotten over time. She'd been coming home from working in the fields, and her spouse… who was vague, in the dream, when she thought of it and remembered it, had hugged her tight. Lotte's beard had tickled their cheeks, and--

She'd woken up upon realizing the absurdity of that. Only Sepult women had beards, and she was the furthest thing from a Sepult, a tall, strapping human woman. That fact woke her up, and that fact made it easy for her to drive it out of her mind with a pitchfork, so that by a month later she'd forgotten all about it.)

It was late, and still quite early in spring, and at this stage they wanted to do everything they could to protect the pigs. In the height of summer, they could often mostly look after themselves, but this early? There were things in the forests. Lotte had seen them, fought rabid wolves, driven by some dark design, since regular animals were shy and retiring enough, or at least, were easily scared off by pain and danger. Wolves were predators, and predators didn't fight to win, not like people were supposed to do. A person would impale themselves on a spear just to have the last laugh.

Animals were, in that way, a lot more sensible. Lotte still didn't really come in for book learning, but she'd seen plenty about people, and quite a bit about animals, in her sixteen years, or something roughly like that.

So she got the pigs where the pigs already wanted to be going, and then she washed her hands in the bucket outside her home. It was a nice wooden house chimney and a rough stone floor and everything. The whole house was one large room, of course, and in the deep of the winter they brought in the animals, but she'd seen the way some in the village lived. While her family wasn't the most well off of the families--that'd be the moneylenders, the village headmen, the local lord--it was more prosperous than most.

She stepped inside and inhaled the scent of stew and bread and beer. Her mother made her own beer, didn't trust the alewife that made it. Lotte thought she sometimes was too harsh in judging the village, but then again…

Her mother was a short, slightly plump woman with sandy blonde hair bundled together haphazardly and hidden beneath a cap. Her dress was stained with the work in the field she had done, and there was much yet to do in the house. Lotte was not enough help, she knew. But she hurried forward, towards the pot and the fireplace anyways and asked, "Ma, anything I can do?"

"Just sit at the table and tell me you've seen your father?" She said it in a tone of annoyance.

"What'd he do?" Lotte asked, baffled.

"He objects to all the time you're spending around that boy. The one with his father's spear."

Lotte thought her mother knew his name. But she asked, to be sure, "Ardnt?"

"Yes," she said, as Lotte moved to get the wooden bowls and metal utensils. She laid them out on the sturdy table, one by one. They clanged, because she was paying more attention to her mother's words than putting them right.

"Careful, dear."

Lotte knew her face wasn't one of those that could hide anything. She'd met girls and boys like that, who could get away with a lot. But her face, the features a little sharp, the chin a little too strong, an ugly face, she always thought, showed her discontent.

"Lotte, what is it?"

"Not… it should wait," Lotte said, firmly. She thought about Ardnt, a sandy-haired boy with blue eyes that made him look like a dreamer. Sometimes, when she looked at him, she just couldn't look away. She was innocent, and a virgin, but she weren't fool enough to not realize she had a crush on him. But that wasn't why she wanted to do this.

No, that's not really why she was nervous.

She breathed in the familiar smells of home, of hearth, of bread from the millers (make that four families that were wealthier) and beer, watered down for her age. She could smell the pigs, still, but they were a smell you could get used to. You could get used to a lot. She glanced over at her own bed, which she'd moved into once she was too old.

(She still squeamishly contrived to be elsewhere when she knows she would hear her parents having sex. It wasn't a thing that could be done in private, not really. One wondered how it could even be attempted.)

Henrik arrived, eventually, giving a wave towards Anelie and settling down in his chair with a groan. He was a big, bearded man with a laugh that could lift the roofs off thatched houses, and eyes that gleamed with mischievous intelligence. Lotte didn't understand it, sometimes, how two such intelligent people, both literate, had a child that had to be dragged through her letters and who fell asleep reading histories the Priest had given her. She liked the religious stories, as long as someone more interesting than the people in books could tell them to her.

At the moment there was no mischief in his eyes, just wariness. They drank their beer, ate their stew, scraped the bottom of the dish, bit into their bread. "Ma, Pa, I want to go adventuring," Lotte finally… ventured.

"You do?!" Henrik asked, staring at her. "After all the stories you've heard?"

Especially after all the stories she'd heard. Her mother did sometimes tell stories about the misery and the scramble for coins, but there was also the camaraderie of the road, and she'd only met her husband because she'd traveled. "Yes," Lotte said. "I'd like to go in a week, or two. Or less."

Anelie was frowning at her. "Are you going with Arndt?"

"Well, you always said that there was safety in numbers."

"Absolutely not," Henrik said. "You're my heir, Lotte. I love you, but if you leave now, run off with a man, what am I supposed to do?"

"I'm not running off with him. I'm telling you, and I'm going with him because you're supposed to have a party to keep you safe. Isn't that what you always said, Ma? Friends on the road."

Now her Pa was looking at her Ma, eyes clearly conveying the message: this is all your fault.

"I said that, yes, but," Ma began.

"Have we done something wrong?" Henrik asked, his voice rough with the anticipation of grief. "Have we been too hard, asked too--"

"No, no, of course not," Lotte said, in a panic. Her father didn't cry, not except once or twice a year, and then when he was so deep in his cups it wasn't really him that was crying.

"Can you just tell us… why?" Ma asked, her voice careful and gentle, the voice she got when a man started swearing up and down that he was going to die. Lotte knew that tone well, knew that in the right moments she could talk a little like that. "If that's alright?"

"It's not because of Arndt." Yes, she was fond of him and fascinated by him, but sometimes he looked at her in a way that made her feel as if he was imagining her in a wedding dress of some kind. His family was another decently well off family, after all. Something about that struck Lotte as wrong, but she couldn't quite understand why. "I want to see the world, see new things, find my own place in it. I'll probably come back in a year or two, as thoroughly sick of it as you think I'll be." Lotte let the longing creep into her voice, because she could hardly stop it. "But I'll know."

"You're sixteen," Henrik said, firmly. "You're not going, and that's…"

"Dear," Ma said, her voice soft. "Why don't we work out a compromise."

"A what?" Henrik asked, tugging at his beard in frustration, which was far better than almost crying, to Lotte's mind.

"You're still young yet, and you haven't trained that much, have you?" Ma asked.

"I've tried," Lotte said, then took a breath, aware of how close her voice had come to whining. She bit her lip, and reached over to her beer, taking a swig of it in the hopes that it helped. She'd never gotten really drunk, nothing more than tipsy, and even that involved drinking so much she was more likely to need to go find a ditch before it involved getting drunk. Though Arndt had once showed her a bottle of what he swore the Orime really called "Gods' piss", a white liquid which even a sip convinced her wasn't fit for humans to drink.

"So, why don't I tell you a little about priestly magic? I don't think you have any talent for it, but learning could help. And so could training a little more…"

"Anelie," Henrik said. "How is this a compromise?"

"If, if you give it two more years," Anelie said, her voice shaking a little, but her eyes bright as if glad she'd thought of this idea. " If you still want to in two years, when the noise and clamor dies down and Arndt is long-gone, then you'll have had plenty of experience."

"I don't agree," Henrik began.

"And, in the meantime you can't let your mind wander. Help out around here, and I'm sure you'll grow to understand that sometimes it's best to stay where you are. There's a lot for you here in this village. We'll give you coin to leave with, if you want to, in two years," Anelie promised.

"I… you know what? Yes, Lotte, I will make that deal with you. I'll shake on it, even, Lottie." That's what he called her when he was in a good mood, and Lotte knew that this was the most she was going to get, unless she fled from her home, her family, and her village in the night.

They shook on it.

*******

The family who lived surprisingly near to the outskirts of Valwald was often thought to be blessed, by their neighbors. The crops had been good the last two years, and they seemed to be doing even better than that would imply. Their daughter had taken to hunting far more often, and last fall she'd been in and out of the forest more times than seemed safe, coming back dragging a sledge of deer, arms and muscles straining in a way that indeed had a few of the village girls, and a village boy or two, giggling and staring. She'd taken the Priest aside and traded small whittled idols of a God or two for the right to be locked in a room with a book on herblore, and then she'd gone out and filled baskets with useful flowers and traded them for vegetables that could be pickled.

Everyone knew that the Spring Fever, which made one tired, sick, and yellow, was caused by a lack of vegetables, which put the humours out of balance and could only be solved by the right folk tonics. She'd worked herself to the bone for her family, and because of it they survived the winter happy and healthy, even by the time spring came, though it was lean by then.

She'd changed, in the last two years, though none of the villagers knew about the deal. She was taller, about average for a man, which was to say quite tall for a woman, and she'd filled out. You did that, when you walked and ran everywhere and hauled deer and otherwise made yourself useful.

She even had suitors, of a sort, or at least people whose interest might last, and whose marriage would be heartily approved. Arndt was back, with a spear wound in his gut that might have killed him, and a few interesting stories about adventure, too. He'd been changed, but nobody was quite sure how, except that Lotte spent a good deal of time talking to him, and he still seemed sweet on her.

Then there was the headman's daughter, Hildegard, who seemed equally taken with Lotte.

Either way, all expected that Henrik and Anelie's good fortune would continue, and that they must surely know how very lucky they were, and how beloved they must be by the Gods, to have done so well for themselves, and through hard work rather than through cheating ways.

They didn't feel particularly lucky that night.

"You… what?" Henrik asked.

"I'll be leaving in two weeks, Mother, Father," Lotte said, firmly. Her hair was even shorter than before, and this time by choice, and the clothes she was dressed in were soaked with sweat. She'd worked hard all last week, harder than she'd ever worked before.

"...why?" Anelie asked.

"You said that in two years I could go. It will be two years in two weeks, and I thought to give you notice," Lotte said, looking from one to the other, remembering the hours spent pacing and choosing her words with the same care that she'd looked over the mushrooms of the forest to make sure she didn't bring poison back to her family home.

"Oh," Henrik said, putting his head in his hands. "You hadn't mentioned it in over a year, we'd thought you'd… forgotten."

Lotte shook her head. "No, of course I didn't forget it. I've learned a lot, but now I'm ready to leave, and with more than I would have left with before."

"I…" Anelie gulped, startled for reasons Lotte couldn't quite understand. She sipped her own beer while she watched them, startled by their shock. There wasn't anything that should have occasioned such reactions. "If you're… sure?"

"Mother, Father," Lotte said. "Will you be able to let me go in two weeks? I've been whittling idols to say goodbye to the forest and its Gods, and I've been talking to Arndt about what it was like…"

"You're not… attached to him?" Henrik asked.

"No," Lotte said, baffled. Though he did sometimes act as if there was some tie that bound them together. But other moments, drunken moments, he seemed to resent her for not having gone with him. He'd have been fine, if only he'd had a friend out there. In those moments, she couldn't help but both blame herself and resent his blame.

"Nor Hildegard?" Anelie asked.

"No?" Lotte said, though it was as much a question. Hildegard was shy and retiring, a beautiful young woman whose smile could sometimes do funny things to Lotte's insides, but her shyness didn't extend to keeping her from watching Lotte sometimes. She'd watch as Lotte trudged, sweat-soaked, dragging a deer or carrying a basket, her eyes finding every curve of muscle, and staring in a way that made Lotte want to hide. Lotte's body was not something she wanted to be judged for, the thought made her sick with worry she couldn't define. "I don't. I just… I need to go."

"I… very well," Ma said, glancing over at Pa.

"I expect you not to slack off, these last two weeks, and we'll see about getting you everything you need to travel," Henrik said with a grin. "And come back whenever you want, and we'll have a place for you."

Of course, Lotte knew, he expected she'd be back in a year, or less… if she came back at all. Lotte expected the same, in a way. But she had to try, had to test herself against the world and against the road, and see how she stood up.

"I will, mama," Lotte said, standing up to wrap her mother in a hug.

*******

Two weeks later, Lotte left the village on a day where the sun was shining, where the whole world seemed filled with possibilities, and with every hope that the travel would show her new ways to be.

Lotte doesn't find her first adventure… it finds her!

[] Rats!: Just two villages over down the trade route, she finds that a village is being harassed by a Rat Piper, a man whose pipe allows him to control rats… and who is making at least some of them pay for the privilege of not having rats. Those that refuse, well, they have rats in the kitchen and rats everywhere, enough rats that even cats run away at them. He, and his apprentice, are a menace, and something has to be done! The peasants who have been most bothered are those who can least afford to pay, especially so soon after winter's end, so the rewards wouldn't exactly be great… but rats all over, biting things, peeing everywhere… it was a menace!

[] Little Lost Lamb: Lotte stumbles across a shepherd boy who is looking for one of his sheep. His stepfather will kill him if he doesn't find it, and so he desperately tasks Lotte to go and see what happened to it, and save it if she can. There's been rumors of bandits and wild animals in the area, but it should be nothing an adventurer can't handle, right?!

[] Neither Rain Nor…: After almost a week of not finding much, at least not much that didn't start and end with standing in place to guard something, Lotte was handed a package by a sickly looking man and told that if she continued to the nearest town, she could deliver it to a certain address, and that she'd be paid for it. She was also implored not to open either the package or the message, because they were personal. Which made sense to Lotte!

*******

A/N: And thus is the Prologue unfurled.

 

[The Laurent]

The Book of Lotte

"Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown."

" A blood and bones and hope and arrows child. A lonely friendly happy sad joyous longing child. A girl child? A troublesome child, an obedient child."

 

[The Laurent]

1:1

Spring was certainly the season to travel, Lotte decided. She was dressed in a warm woolen cloak for the morning damp, and she could tuck it into her pack when it grew warmer. She liked the comfort of it, the thick fluffy feel. From a distance, she no doubt looked like she could be anyone at all, beneath the cloak. It was a comforting sort of thought, for all that she knew she sometimes stood out. She had the materials for a tent, but she did plan on finding somewhere to stop. But it'd be a while before she was treading new ground. She'd been as far as Wellway before, though not for long.

But there was always trading to do, and she'd accompanied her father for it. He'd been trying to get her used to the business, Lotte had realized. It probably should have been obvious, but she had been so focused on her daily tasks, her hunting, her training…

So she walked along the path, watching out for carts. It'd rained recently enough that if one came passing, it might well splash her. The roads were a muddy mess, in this part of the world, winding between forgotten fields that were fallow and overgrown. She had no idea if they had ever been different. Perhaps she'd been taught it at some point and forgotten it?

Either way, she made sure to pray to any small shrines she passed. She had very little to give, but she gave her voice. The Gods had fought together, sometimes literally, to make the world from the void of beasts and madness. She didn't know all the stories, and she certainly didn't know all of the… complicated things the priests told her about. But she figured it'd take quite a terrible person to not be grateful for that.

Her mother didn't raise an ingrate or a heretic. "Schatzi," her mother had always called her. "You are my little treasure, the one far greater than any I earned as an adventurer."

So she prayed, and she watched, and she looked up at the sky, the blue of a robin's egg, and noted that the lack of clouds meant that it wasn't going to rain, at least not anytime soon today. There was a beauty to the world that she could appreciate all the better for understanding it. She saw the trees, knew which ones were doing best, roots sunk deep in solid soil, and which ones no doubt were suffering from some local conditions, or the competition of trees.

Trees had a life, she remembered learning. Roots snaked into the ground, and drank deep of secret sources of waters. She'd learned it one day, while practicing digging for water. A priest had commented on some far pilgrimage, and the lack of water, and she'd--

Well, she'd been bored and willing to spend some time trying to imagine how she'd survive so far away from the trees she knew. At the end of it she had learned very little, in all honesty. But it'd passed the time.

The birds were all out for spring, here to mate no doubt, but also hunting, foraging. She noted one, and then the other, making a game of it as she walked. She counted the crows, swifts, and when she got closer to a stream, the different sorts of plover. There were names for every sort of bird and beast, many names in fact, but Lotte's mother had helped teach her these, long ago.

If all else failed, there were certain kinds of birds that mostly lived in marshes, or near sources of water, and you could learn a lot about a place by what lived there. In fact, it was when nothing lived in a place that you knew there was trouble. When the bear had cleared out, and the wolves howled and left, then that's where there were monsters.

That's, at least, what her mother's stories said. There were monsters in the wild, and old castles, and beast-people, who nobody she'd ever met had a good word for. Though, in all fairness, she'd never seen one of them. So perhaps they were wrong. She couldn't say for sure.

Either way, she traveled along, and stepped out of the way once or twice, with a polite doffing of her hat, when someone passed by. It was a simple enough hat, though it was her father's, and she'd decided she needed something like it to cover her head.

There weren't many people passing through. Wilfhuld, her mother had told her, was at the long end of a chain, with villages, then towns, larger towns, and at some point a city as its links. It dangled at the end, supported and provided for, but only after the merchants had sold everything else. They were surrounded on three sides by forest, though it was a large enough clearing otherwise, large enough to live in. There were paths through the forest, but they were twisted, unsteady paths not suited for a soft merchant. Few people had reason to go to and from her village, and so she had remained nestled for most of her life. The trip to Welsburg was just a few miles, so even slowing down to savor it, she soon reached the village.

She'd been before, it was a slightly larger village in a depression that couldn't quite be called a valley. It was only bounded by trees on two sides, with the other two entirely open. Lotte looked down at it, taking in the farms, which seemed far larger than she was used to. Welsburg had more room to grow, and Lotte looked over it. It was a nice enough looking village, of course. There were rich homes and poor homes, and it was run by the same lord of the area, who could be found if she followed the road into town, and then north.

She took it all in, and took in how familiar and normal it was. You weren't going to find a new adventure or distant shores several miles from home!

So she turned towards the less used path that looped around the edge of the village. It was sloppy dirty indeed, but she made decent time. She wasn't going to stop for at least two more villages, and she hoped to pass by even more. It was still morning, and she wanted to sleep somewhere she'd never seen before.

So on she went. Except, at the outskirts, she saw a house. That wasn't a surprise, though what was a surprise was the moment of pained homesickness. It was absurd considering she'd just left, and just as easily pushed aside.

It was easier still because it was like no home of hers. It was as tall and about as wide, but it was made of wooden frames, wattle, and daub. So, of course, were most houses. But it looked halfway to collapse, the frame leaning inward and almost ready to buckle, and the two people standing in front didn't look much better.

One was an older man, about the age of her father, whose skin was like leather, and who held a small knife. His hair was startling to fall out, and he looked like a wounded animal, snarling with rage. Lotte was too far away to hear him, but she could imagine it, and indeed his wife, a thin woman who looked as if she would be hardier if she were in better health. Her hair was long but tangled and brittle looking, grey from age and yellowing. She was dressed, as with the man, in worn looking woolen clothing, same as most people were around here, if a little more gray and fraying.

Standing about two-dozen paces away from them was a finely dressed man. He wore a flowing red tunic, and had new looking hose, and shoes that seemed as if they'd been made by quite the cobbler. The overall picture was one of glowing red health, only slightly marred by how milky his face was. He was healthy, strong looking, and perhaps in his thirties, at the age when men like him sometimes began to grow stout, if they were a hard-working wealthy farmer. He had dark hair, swept over his face in an almost dramatic way, and he held a flute in his hand. At his belt was a knife scabbard and a squirming bag of… something.

Behind him was the first beast-woman Lotte had ever seen. She didn't really look like a ravenous, heartless monster. No, the girl, who seemed part rat, merely looked anxious. She had the ears of a rat, a little higher than ears were supposed to be, and a long, thin pink tail, flicking back and forth, faster and faster as she watched. Her nose was a little off too, snuffling as she fidgeted with her hands. Lotte was too far away to tell the color of her eyes, but they were some sort of dark color, she guessed, along with her dark hair. She was dressed in a woolen dress, not so much nicer than the woman's faded clothing, and couldn't have been much older than Lotte.

Lotte walked closer, though she still couldn't hear the conversation.

The farmer shook his hand, and the Rat Piper, for that's what he had to be, theatrically shook his hand and dumped the squirming bag at his feet and then began to play. Out came big, hungry looking rats. As the Piper began to play, they leapt at the farmer.

The farmer stumbled back, and none of them got to him, or even tried to bite him. Instead he danced around, trying to slash at them as they leapt, but in no shape to catch them, until at last, dizzy, he fell over.

All the while the Piper kept up the music. Lotte was growing closer, and could hear the faint sound of screams from the woman. But the farmer wasn't being hurt, merely terrified. But there was no reason for it, no sense to it.

Then the Piper turned and left, the faint sound of his music drawing the rats after him. That was a Rat Piper? He'd always heard of it as a bold and kind profession that dealt with pests. Though rats were kind of cute when they weren't being a nuisance.

The girl trailing the Piper looked back for one moment, seeming to hesitate. Before the farmer yelled, "Go on, git!"

She hurried after the Piper.

Lotte continued on her way, now determined to get to the bottom of this. The farmer saw her approaching and stood up, trying to affect dignity that had long since fled, like a deer before a sudden noise.

"So, you saw," the farmer said.

"I did, sir. What… what was that?" Lotte asked, aware she was being blunt.

"What's it to you?" he asked, his voice harsh.

"I'm an adventurer," Lotte explained.

"Ah, well." The man spat on the ground. "Freidrich, if it pleases you. And this is my wife."

Lotte nodded. "Who was that?" She repeated a very similar question.

'His wife' said, "That was Aldrich the Piper of… Gaffburg. He came a few days ago, asking for money in exchange for getting rid of the rats. Whether in coin or kind. I said we should--"

"Quiet, woman. We barely have enough, and when we gave him his coin, who is to say he wouldn't have demanded more?" Freidrich asked. "No, I don't like bullies, but now rats are nibbling everything in the house and scaring us awake. He's gone mad for revenge, jus' cause I didn't pay his racket."

Lotte stared for a moment. "I'll help you."

"You'll…" 'his wife' said, eyes wide. "We don't have… much."

"How much'll it be?" Freidrich asked, his eyes showing that he'd probably be willing to pay more than his wife thought wise, if it meant getting back at a man who had humiliated him and made him miserable.

What IS Lotte charging?

[] Nothing except perhaps a square meal and room while and immediately after dealing with this. Bullies are despicable, and stopping them is the right thing to do.
[] Some token amount of coin on top of that. Not much, but something to jangle around in her hands. Proof that she had completed her first adventure.
[] Besides food and board, perhaps… some cloth? Not much, but they make clothes like everyone else, and Lotte had this image of having more than three sets of clothes. What she wore was practical, but there were other practical things she could do.
[] Write-in, subject to veto.

What does Lotte do?

[] Confront him directly. He's being a bully, and surely he doesn't understand just how bad he's being. And, if he does, perhaps a direct solution would be more useful.
[] Try to find a way to steal the pipe. No pipe, no controlling of the rats, right? Now, if Lotte were he, they would be very careful not to set it aside, but it's possible. Lotte knows the man has to sleep, and they're pretty sneaky when they want to be.
[] Find out where the Piper is staying--the couple says it's not in the village--and harass them. Give them a taste of their own medicine. It's… yes, a little mean, and Lotte doesn't like being mean, but they started it, and bullies don't like it when they have to face their own tactics. That's Lotte's experience, at least.
[] The rat girl is apparently his apprentice, at least according to Freidrich and 'His Wife'. But she seemed a little startled and apologetic for what he did. What if Lotte talked to her while he wasn't around, tried to get her on Lotte's side. She might know important things about what's causing all of this.

******

A/N: So there we go, the first adventure has begun! It's comparatively straightforward, as you might have guessed.

 

[The Laurent]

1:2

The forest that she plunged into was different than the one she knew. The differences were small, and yet she couldn't help but notice every single one of them. The shortcut past the hive of bees she'd taken didn't exist, early on in the woods, and neither did the nettles along her most usual path.

The air felt as clean, the animals as lively, they certainly didn't note any differences in living from the area around one village and another. Why should they? The lines people drew weren't always real.

That was about as philosophical as Lotte had ever gotten about anything, perhaps in her entire life. Lotte, however, didn't know the word philosophical, and so she decided that her 'ponderings' were a result of leaving home, and discarded them as quite unimportant in the face of tracking to be done.

If it were a hard task, it'd be more interesting. Few people went deep into the woods, and even Lotte had only occasionally gone towards the dark heart of the forest around her home, where there were hints, mere hints, of strange monsters and stranger people. No, the Rat Piper left a clear trail through the parts of the woods that had been, at places, cut back by fire and axe.

Lotte could see the places where the cutting stopped, could even see where some enthusiastic fool had left a grove of stumps. It was hard, pulling up stumps, and easier to let them rot, if you were lazy.

It couldn't have been that long ago, if the stumps were still there. Not compared to the age of the forest.

Either way, the Rat Piper left footprints in the damper ground, and he moved, it was clear, with the grace and subtlety of a novice. It was a winding trail, enough so that Lotte understood why nobody had followed him before. He doubled back, which was a good move to hide your tracks, actually, except he left such clear indications that he might as well not have bothered.

Lotte was enjoying the sun on her face when she walked in clearings, and she almost didn't want to reach the Rat Piper and his apprentice, since talking to her would no doubt be difficult, and even dangerous. Lotte had no idea how she was supposed to fight a swarm of rats, if it came down to that. She was a good enough shot that she could probably hit them, but if there was a swarm, than the only proper tactic would be retreat.She knew that some rats could climb trees, and others couldn't, or at least not well.

The other proper tactic, of course, was stopping the music by any means necessary, but the thought of killing a human being was disturbing. It would be killing, in that she had no way to control how bodies reacted to her shots. She had to assume that anyone she shot with a well-placed arrow might die, so that she'd feel lucky if they didn't.

It was something Lotte would have to get over. But she still thought that killing the Piper, Aldrich, would be a bad idea.

Of course, not everyone agreed.

"If'n you can kill him," Freidrich said as he let Lotte step into the house. "I'll pay double whatever you're charging."

Lotte looked around. It was shabby, of course, but his wife, whose name Lotte still hadn't learned, clearly had put labor and effort in trying to make it the best shabbiness she could. She'd swept up, though the straw on the floor meant that it'd catch some of the refuse. His wife also had food cooking already, and she offered a chipped, half-broken bowl of stew for Lotte, and gestured towards the seat. She sat down, saying, "What he's done is cruel, but I don't know if I can kill him for it unless I have no choice." She began eating the stew, never one to pass up a meal. She was eighteen, and her father had joked with watery eyes that now that she was gone, there'd actually be food that lasted for more than an afternoon before it was all eaten up.

It was thin and watery, but there was a slight flavor of certain plants that some people used to add a sort of spice to the dish. Not real spice, which was expensive and only for the merchants and nobles, but enough to help its taste.

"We don't need womanish doubts about violence. You're an adventurer!" Freidrich pointed out, bellowing loud enough that it was followed by a coughing fit.

"Dear, as long as she deals with the problem that's enough, right?"

"I… suppose," he said, after he'd finished coughing so hard his whole body had shaken with each cough, as if he were about to collapse.

"What's your name?" Lotte asked 'his wife.'

"Hilda," the woman said. It was a common name, and Lotte knew three Hildas and a Hildegard.

"Do you have somewhere I can stay? If I don't drive him off today."

"Of course! Just as long as you don't take too long. What's your price?"

"A single black Pfin," Lotte said, without even a moment's hesitation. She wasn't sure she liked the man, but it would be cruel to ask an actual price.

"What can you buy with that? Not even a white Pfin?" Freidrich asked.

"I'm not planning on buying anything with it. It's a token," Lotte said.

There were black Pfin, made with whatever metal was lying around, and there were White Pfin, like the ones she had in some quantity in her coin purse. They were not all silver, or else they would have been far beyond most people, but they had silver in them. This gave them a steady value, whereas the black Pfin were what you traded for apples, or a dog's breakfast, or the right to bed down in someone's filthy hay.

She thought she might whittle a religious charm and find some string, and make a medallion of sorts of it.

It'd be nice to have something to remind her of her first mission.

They were camped in a small clearing, with two tents set up, and a fire in-between them. There were rats swarming around the main path, closed in by what looked to be a circle of blood. Lotte knew far too little about Rat Piping, but she knew that it was more than just controlling rats with an instrument. It was hard, though, to tell the stories from the reality.

Lotte snuck up carefully. She watched out for twigs, she tried to step where she wouldn't leave tracks in the dirt, and she kept towards the dark edges of the trees as she moved closer, until at last she was only a dozen feet from the camp.

Alddrich and his Beast-person apprentice were standing there, talking.

"I'm going to go back to town, go around the long way. We need more food, and I need time to think about how we're going to deal with the farmer, Lisbeth."

"Deal with? He's… just a farmer," the rat-girl, Lisbeth, argued. "He doesn't have anything to really steal, and if we hurt him too bad we'll turn the village against us."

"You're right, girl." Aldrich shrugged, though he was hunching up a little as if he were an animal about to spring. "But you can't have people thinkin' that a Rat Piper does anything for free. The rest of the village, and the Headman, agreed to pay me, but--"

"I understand, sir. But didn't the headman pay for him?" Lisbeth asked. "Hardship, or somethin'?" The Rat-Girl spoke with a faint accent that Lotte couldn't quite place.

"That old bastard is just too cheap. Well, we'll show him. I just have to figure out how." He paced around a little and then said. "Watch things while I'm gone. Practice your notes, girl." His face grew darker for a moment and he reached a hand out to grab her shoulder. "Careful that mouth of yours. Don't question, and don't be soft. If anyone crosses you, you hurt them twice as bad back. That farmer hasn't tried to kill me, or I'd do it right back."

Lotte decided that he should never learn of what Freidrich had asked about.

Lisbeth was staring at him. "Do you understand?" he asked, in a voice low enough that Lotte barely heard it.

"Y-yes sir," she said, sounding shaken, and her whiskers were stiffening in an odd way Lotte couldn't place.

"Good girl," he said. "Mind this place. Perhaps I'll see if there is fire oil for sale. Burn out any food they have stored. Let them go begging for it."

Lotte thought that this was not so different from murdering them, even with the most generous sort of village. Besides which, Freidrich had pride as heavy and hard to shift as a tree blocking any such path of retreat.

Lisbeth nodded, though uncertainly.

"Remind me to talk to you about killing later," he said, giving her a glare that told her he meant it.

"Yes, sir," Lisbeth said.

She stood stock still, her tail stiff, her ears raised, until he was long gone. Then Lisbeth slumped down, shaking her head a little sadly.

Lotte chose that moment to step out, with her hands raised. Lisbeth didn't have any weapons, or else Lotte would have been even more careful.

Lisbeth turned, staring at Lotte as she approached. Her face was blank, as if she was somewhere far away, but her tail was swishing back and forth rapidly.

"You," Lisbeth said, quietly. "You're that adventurer I saw approach the hut as we were leaving."

"I am."

"Then I suppose you've been listening in?" Lisbeth asked.

"I have been. I wished to talk to you," Lotte said.

"I'm Lisbeth, but you know that too, right?" Lisbeth asked, taking a step back. "If you were planning on attacking me, I can scream loud enough to call him back."

"I don't want to do that," Lotte said. "All I want is to do is help someone. You don't gain anything from hurting them, do you?"

"No, but my Master said we should do it." Her body seemed to twitch a little as she said the next bit. "I owe him a lot. If you try to hurt him, I'll stop you, no matter what it took." Lisbeth's voice was low, but filled with the sort of threat that seemed like the shifting of the air right before an animal attacked. It wasn't helped by the way her features were just a little different than Lotte expected, up close.

Lotte smiled, raising her hands up a little farther, trying to think about what she could say. "You owe him a lot?"

"Yes. The specifics are none of your business, but if you want to know how unlikely it is I'll betray him: he saved me when he could have killed me. And he's training me." Lisbeth's ears were curled forward oddly, and Lotte couldn't be sure what that meant.

"How long have you been his apprentice?" Lotte asked. "I've never met a Rat Piper."

"Eight years. Now, you should go," Lisbeth said. "If he finds you…"

Lotte noted the worry on the girl's face, the concern. "Why are you so worried? You shouldn't be afraid of him."

She hadn't been afraid of her parents, had been a good child in that respect.

"Maybe I shouldn't, but I just… owe him so much." She got a far off look for a moment, before shaking her head.

"How old are you?"

"Eighteen summers," Lisbeth said, her cool smile wobbling. "Not sure how long that is."

"Can… can I ask something of you?" Lotte asked.

"No, you should--"

"If he is planning on burning the field or their house or hurting someone, could you tell me? I know we just met, but." Lotte gave her best smile. "They should at least know to be able to flee, or… or to find a way to convince him to stop."

Lotte would have offered her own money as a portion, except she'd heard what the piper had said. The debt had already been paid, he was just vengeful. Besides, Lotte feared it would just encourage him to do it again.

"Only if you tell me if you plan on attacking him."

Lotte shouldn't promise that. She'd tell him, and then…

But she nodded. "Agreed." She held out her hand, and they shook on it.

There was very little to say, then. But Lotte decided to say it. "I haven't told you my name."

Lisbeth looked startled. "You… huh, that is some smile. Then what is it?"

"I am Lotte, of the next village over. I'm a hunter."

"Ah, hunting!" Lisbeth said, her ears perking up a bit. "I've done a bit of trapping, lean days. Though just for spice. You never starve as a rat piper, not if you're desperate enough."

Lotte considered all of the layers of meaning behind these words and nodded. She wasn't sentimental about survival, and she wasn't proud, not in ways that would prevent her from surviving. But she couldn't imagine the taste of rat. "Seems practical."

"That's Aldrich for you," Lisbeth said, the fondness like a brush of dew on grass, making her face entirely transformed. "He's the sort who always has an answer, always knows what to do. Not like me." Lisbeth shrugged. "I guess I must be lonely, to talk to some enemy who came out of the forest." She shook her head, her tail twitching in what Lotte guessed was worry.

"I've never met a beast-woman before," Lotte said.

"Well, here I am. And there you are." Lisbeth sighed and pointed in a random direction. "There's time before he gets back, but I don't want to risk it." Lisbeth curled in on herself, in a way that made her wonder what Aldrich was to her, that he could inspire such fondness and yet also such fear. Lotte turned to leave. "Oh, and, nice hat."

Lotte, feeling more pleased by that compliment than the comparative trust she'd been given so far, grinned from ear to ear, and felt cheerful enough to try something. She had her equipment with her, so it shouldn't be so hard to…

*******

Freidrich stomped into the house, exhausted after a long day of work. Spring days were backbreaking work, as hard as winters were sickly. The broths were thin this early in Spring, but lively, and he hoped his wife had done her best to make it tasteful. The woman was a good cook, and kept house well, though he had to wonder about her sometimes. Did she regret not having children? Everyone said that a woman needed a child or two, and regular sex, or they burned up inside as with a fever.

Freidrich never forewent the duty he owed to her, nor her to him. But there was something wrong with him, something that made him curl up at the thought of more than what was needed. In his drunk moments he wondered what sort of man he was, that he couldn't have children and didn't feel the spark of lust that others did. All he'd have to show for this life when he died was the work of his hands, the crops he'd planted.

What little coin he'd saved up, since with the way he was declining, she would be his widow as well as his wife. If that time came, he was not going to have anyone saying he was a failure of a man.

His wife wouldn't understand that, the pride a man had, or perhaps she would, in some odd way. She took pride in her housework, so…

He smelled something unexpected when he trudged in, hands still damp from washing away all the mud and grime of the day's work. It smelled like meat.

Inside, near the fireplace, there was a second pot, the stew already scooped out to eat, and inside it came the smell of… birds?

"I had time, so I caught three birds," Lotte said. She was sitting at the kitchen, still with that mannish hat on. She was an odd girl, but she was an adventurer, and what could you do about that?

Hopefully she'd save them all a lot of time and trouble.

"Three?" he asked. "We can't eat three. And woman, you can't pluck birds well." It was the simple truth. She had no practice.

"So we took them over to Goodwife Hulda, and she plucked them--"

"You accepted charity from that--"

"We plucked them," Lotte continued, speaking quite out of turn. "With her help, in exchange for one of the birds. Two was enough."

"Lotte convinced her to eat the Maiden's Scream," Hilda said, her voice oddly gleeful.

"The… what?"

"Bird you find out here. It has a scream like a woman dying," Lotte said. "Or what they say that sounds like. It's not supernatural, or at least it's as easy to kill as any bird, but they say eating it's bad luck."

"Ah, and Hulda, that witch, doesn't believe in luck," Freidrich said, realizing it was quite true. For someone who knew a little of the old magic from down south, perhaps bad luck meant nothing.

"Maybe not," Hilda said. "Sit down, dinner will be ready soon, and some meat to go after it."

He didn't have a seat. Instead he walked over to smell the birds. He glanced over at Lotte: she was a good hunter if nothing else, and a single black Pfin and a place to stay was no real cost at all. Certainly not enough of a cost to ask hard questions, just yet.

Still, it had been so long since there'd been much meat.

The cauldron smelled a little something like hope.

What does Lotte do next?

[] Go to the village headman, whom she has seen before, though never spoken to. Surely he might have some power to talk to the Rat Piper and warn him off of anything too drastic. At the very least, it'll be a help for later.
[] Aldrich is a proud man too. He wants revenge. So deny him it. Hunt food for the family so they eat better than they did before he started cursing them. Trade some of it with others for things for the family. Make him mad, and make it seem pointless.
[] Confront him non-violently if and when he comes back to talk to Freidrich and Hilda. There are those that might view him as someone who can't be challenged, can't be questioned. Being able to do so and get away with it would perhaps show them otherwise.

*******

A/N: So it goes.

 

[The Laurent]

1:3

Lotte woke to pain and confusion. She kicked out, grunting, feeling teeth at her ankles. Argh, where was…

She blinked into alertness, sitting up and grabbing her knife.

She could feel the rats on her, nibbling and squeaking, driven by some song she couldn't hear. Lotte slashed out at one of them, which went flying from the force of the blow, but the others kept on going as she crawled over towards the ladder down. She was glad she hadn't taken off her clothes last night, because now she had no time to get dressed.

Hilda had lit the fire, and was trying to use a broom to sweep them into it. Luckily it wasn't winter, or they wouldn't have the wood for it, but even so it didn't seem to be working. The darkness was inky and complete, and it was just before midnight. The first sleep was just about over.

Lotte had planned to pray and leave what offerings she had to the night in the sacred hour around midnight between the two sleeps. She'd also thought about talking to the couple, but they might be busy, though she'd prefer if they were not busy in certain ways.

Aldrich, on the other hand, had clearly decided to use the time for different purposes.

"Lotte!" Hulda called, her voice hoarse. "We need to…"

"I know, I know," Lotte said. "Do you have a log?"

"I… yes."

Lotte ran over towards her, seeing that her husband had begun to get up too, writhing in pain. She picked up a medium-sized chunk of wood in one hand and brought it down on a rat scurrying past. It squished quite admirably, leaving a smear of gore on the floor as she brought it down a second, and a third time.

Lotte had a keen eye, and she hadn't missed once in all three times, though she missed the fourth swing. She climbed up the ladder one-handed, and began swinging somewhat wildly at where her bed was, making sure to avoid the bow. When she was sure the rats had all run, she grabbed her bow and began to string it, glaring down. "Keep sweeping. Don't let it get on fire."

"Argh!" Freidrich said, dancing about, still trying to dodge the rats.

Lotte carefully worked to restring her bow. If you kept a bow strung all the time, it'd go bad, and so she ignored the few rats that tried to bite at her, only occasionally swiping them aside.

"Keep them off balance. They're still animals."

"They can hear what we're saying!" Freidrich claimed.

Lotte had no idea whether or not that was true, but she also understood that it didn't matter. If you panicked then you were lost. The advantage hunters had over animals was that they could think, they could wait as patiently as an ambush predator, and yet also use tools, and their own ingenuity.

Animals, on the other hand, were given to panic and fear. So were people, sometimes.

So Lotte kept calm, and strung her bow as fast as she could, without making mistakes. Then she climbed down, stretching a little as she threw open the door and stepped out into the cool darkness of the night.

The moon was high overhead, and in the forest there was light that reminded her of Nachtmater. But it was, in truth, a lantern held by Lisbeth, who was standing next to her Master, who was playing a tune that even out here, Lotte couldn't hear. Perhaps it was made only for the ears of rats to hear?

Either way, Lotte had grabbed an arrow, and she drew her bow and took aim… at a tree a dozen feet to the right of Aldrich. A rat tried to bite at her heels, but her keen eyes and steady hand didn't let her register pain as she loosed the arrow.

It soared through the air before hitting the tree. Lotte then looked right at Aldrich, clearly aiming her bow now in his direction. She didn't get ready to loose. It should be one smooth motion, not something held at pain. But she could put an arrow through him, at this distance. She could miss, but there was a decent enough chance she wouldn't miss. He had to know the threat she meant.

Lotte wasn't sure whether it was a true threat or not.

She hoped she didn't have to try to put an arrow in a human. Not that she thought it'd be any easier to do it in a Sepult.

But it seemed like she might not have to decide. The rats swarmed her, but Aldrich looked like he was backing up. Casually, Lotte stomped on one of the rats as it tried to crawl up her leg. Her bare feet crunched the rat, and its death squirms were bizarre beneath her heel, but she kept on walking forward, into the mud of a field at midnight, still staring out into the forest. Lotte glanced at Lisbeth, saw a stiffness of her movements, and wondered how she could approve of it.

Finally, though, they turned away.

But oddly, the rats didn't stop trying to bite and attack, even though rats weren't like that. She'd dealt with rats before, there were traps you could make, though for the most part they were, if not harmless, than not exactly terrifying. They could even be cute, when they weren't getting into larders.

These rats weren't cute, and it was another hour before they finally seemed to remember they were animals and fled, desperate and afraid, breaking in one wave, most of them already dead.

Lotte tried to wipe her feet on the ground inside the cottage, glancing over at Freidrich. "This… is how it usually goes?"

"Worse," Hulga admitted. "They stop about now, but usually there's so many they can't escape and we can't sleep."

Lotte grit her teeth, still wiping her feet on the ground. "How does it continue after he's gone?"

"I'm not sure." Freidrich sighed. "We might as well get to sleep, I guess. You're going to kill him tomorrow, aren't--"

"No," Lotte said. "First, I need to pray. Second, I'm going to go to the Headman."

"I don't take no help from--"

"Dear, you've already hired help. If she wants to…"

"I am going to pray," Lotte said, glancing out towards the night, lips already beginning to form the words. "You can make your decision."

The fire was doused, and she stood in the darkness.

She prayed to a half-dozen Gods, her voice low and careful. There wasn't anything in particular she wanted, not even that Aldrich be waylaid, and yet the act of whispering the words, of sending them up in the air towards where the Gods were, felt as if it soothed something in her. Lotte smiled once she was done, dragged herself up to sleep.

******

Rolf was the village Headman, a red-bearded man whose distant ancestors might have come from up north, for how large he was, and how impressive his beard was. He had a huge nose, and small, beady little eyes, but his lips were wrenched into a smile when he saw Lotte approach.

Lotte knew that he was well-off enough that he had tenant farmers for the chunk of common and uncommon land he held, and thus he didn't have to work himself to the bone every day. Still, he was out there amid the dung and the crops, examining everything with a careful eye. He was available for anyone who wanted to come up to him, and indeed a village woman was consulting him as Lotte approached.

"I don't know what to do. He's made his pledge, and yet will he keep it?"

"If he does not, he disgraces himself in the eyes of all the women and men of the village. You can tell him I said that, Nette." His voice was a rumbling boom, like a falling tree. Whenever one fell in the forest, everyone knew, whether in the moment or afterwards. So too did his words have similar weight.

"Thank you, Rolf." The young woman gave a slight bow and hurried off, no doubt to her own duties.

"Ah, Lotte! I knew this day would come." He turned to face her, the smile on his face wide and eager.

Lotte's impressed admiration for the man only grew, to have known so much. "I'm surprised, but… it's good that you knew. There's a lot to discuss."

"Yes, of course. For one… is it my son, or my daughter? I have both, I'm sure you know." Rolf leaned in. "I always told your Pa that you were the wandering type, not the sort to want to press a claim in the same village you'd always been born in."

Lotte flushed, "N-no. Not that your children aren't perfectly good. I think." She hadn't met either of them, or if she had, only in passing without even a word spoken. "No, it's about the Rat Piper!"

"I think he already has an apprentice, that awful beast-woman," Rolf said, with a shake of his head, as if he were a priest informing someone of their coming demise. "But if you want for a profession, I am sure there are people in this village who could use with an apprentice--"

"I don't," Lotte said, thoroughly flustered by now, wishing she could start this conversation all over again. "I've become an adventurer, and Freidrich and Hulda hired me to help them with their Aldrich the Piper situation."

"Help with?" Rolf looked suspicious.

"I don't intend to hurt him, but he's tormenting them. He went out at midnight to have rats attack them in their sleep to keep them awake when they could be praying or preparing for second sleep." As Lotte spoke, her voice firmed up, hardening as it did. It wasn't right, what had been done to them, and not merely because Lotte had suffered through it too. "Even though you paid for them, he's still attacking them, and humiliating Freidrich."

"Gods know all the man has is pride, and not enough to cover himself in winter," Rolf said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. "But… this is disturbing. He's dealt with the rat problem caused by… well, perhaps by a spell gone awry." Rolf twisted his lips thoughtfully. "The Witch says that of course rats would gather, they always do with the right… but either way." He perked up. "What do you want me to do?"

"Tell him to stop it. He has to rely on the village to eat, at least if he stays there and doesn't want to eat rats. I doubt he's much of a hunter of anything else," Lotte said.

"I don't know if I can do that." Rolf admitted. He frowned deeper, though it was obscured by his bushy beard.

"If you talk to him, you'll see it. His own pride is strong enough that he'd rather make someone suffer or even die than take even a small insult. Could Freidrich have paid the price?"

"Probably. But barely. It wasn't a hard price, but he's never been a lucky man. He's no worse a farmer than anyone else, but if you told me he'd been cursed by the Gods for some unknown ill to have his seeds die, his body ache, for rain to hit especially hard on his poorer lands…"

Lotte winced. The life of a farmer was hard, the work of taking from the ground what you could. Lotte knew she had very little skill at it, but she also knew that skill was less important than luck. When the starving times came, everyone suffered. "Oh."

"Yes. But if you want me to talk to Aldrich, I have… thoughts about how I could keep him from getting into too much trouble or causing too much of it either." Rolf gave a laugh. "If you'd be willing to stick around. He knows you're involved, right?"

"He does now," Lotte admitted. She could still feel the pain from the few bites she'd taken. Lotte had bandaged them, but no doubt if she ran too much or worked too hard, they might bleed through and open up.

Lotte stuck around. She helped haul a few things around when asked, and kept an eye out for trouble, but it was as boring as working on the farm had been before. Still, it was just after suppertime, the sun high in the sky, when Aldrich came into the village.

Lotte had had breakfast, as only those who worked and those who were young or sick did. But she was looking forward to a large supper, and hopefully she'd have some sort of answer before dinner.

Either way, Aldrich seemed in a surprisingly good mood, right up until he saw Lotte.

At his back was Lisbeth, who was crouched behind him, her ears drooping and her whiskers surprisingly straight.

"What is she…" Aldrich begun, then coughed. "And what are you doing calling me here? I was merely going to purchase a few things and be gone."

"It's just that, Aldrich. Why don't you go back to my house," Rolf said, his voice soft and even wheedling. He leaned in. "It's a private talk, very confidential. But important."

"I… understand," Aldrich said, nerves showing in the way he looked at Lotte.

'Did you do this?' is what his gazed asked.

Lotte didn't reply, simply breathed in the air and the smell of dung and mud and grass, glancing over at Lisbeth.

"Girl. Go to the blacksmiths, you know what to ask for. I'll meet you there," Aldrich said. "Got it?"

He loomed over her, until at last Lisbeth nodded. "Yes, Master," she said, quietly.

Lotte, for her part, waited until Aldrich was out of sight before turning to Lisbeth. "May I walk you? I doubt there are dangers, but--"

"To a human, perhaps not," Lisbeth said. Her voice was carefully controlled, but Lotte had to guess she was alarmed. But even though Lotte had heard people speak against beast-people, surely it wasn't that dangerous to walk through a village, harming nobody.

"Either way, may I come along?"

"I suppose you may," Lisbeth said, and she began to walk, her tail's posture loosening a bit as she did. She wore a long, old looking dress, with a hole in it for the tail. It was different than what she'd worn before, but only slightly nicer.

They walked along the path into the village, moving rather slowly, all things considered.

"I saw you, holding the lantern," Lotte said, quietly.

"I didn't know," Lisbeth insisted. "I really didn't know that he was going to do that. He just told me to get a lantern and follow him." She was animated, her ears curling back but still flinching a little sometimes and her tail curling and swishing with a similar rapid pace.

Lotte watched it all, wishing that she knew more to be able to understand just the emotions being offset. "I believe you," Lotte said.

"Thank you."

"But I have to ask, why did the rats keep on going even after the piping stopped?"

"If you're skilled you can give orders that last hours. I've heard there's more you can do, and the more skilled you are, the more precise the orders can be." Lisbeth shook her head. "I'm only good enough to control rats while I'm playing. You'd think, being a rat-person, I'd have some special gift for it? But it feels mean, to make them do things. If you're good enough and know the right songs, you can get scared, miserable rats to fight to the death." She shuddered at the thought of that, her voice going lower. "It just seems a little… but I like piping, anyways. Sometimes."

Lotte wasn't sure she understood liking and hating something at the same time, but she didn't know what to say. "So, is there any way to block the rats ears?"

"If you block them, they can't hear. Supposedly. But rats have very good hearing."

Lotte opened her mouth to ask if Lisbeth had good hearing as well, but she realized that perhaps that was a little bit rude.

Lisbeth seemed to relax, as if she'd seen the question coming. "But what about you? You keep on asking about me."

"Well, my name is Lotte, did I already say that? And I'm a hunter. I like animals, and hunting, and I'm pretty good at tracking. I'm from the next village over and, uh… I like whittling." She gave a smile, feeling startlingly nervous.

Lisbeth laughed softly, for just a moment, her poise and reserve disappearing as her ears made a happy looking motion that was oddly… cute. "Well, what do you whittle?"

"I could give you an icon. For the Waldherz. There is probably one in that woods too," Lotte said.

"Oh, right. You know, that'd be pretty sweet of you, considering we're sort of enemies."

Lotte waved her hands, "Not really. I don't think you want to hurt anyone, and neither do I, not unless I have to. Even then, I've never done that before. Hurt someone. Animals, yes, but even then… never just for fun."

Once or twice, when she'd not been too desperate for another kill and yet more meat, she'd refrained from wounding shots because of what she imagined. She imagined the arrow entering their leg, and the slow, limping death that followed.

Only, Lotte didn't have that great of an imagination. It was hard for her to imagine things she hadn't seen, except by taking bits of what she had and just dressing them up like a straw doll. She'd done it before, and sometimes it was the only shot you could get. Sometimes you needed the animal.

"I understand." Lisbeth shrugged. "You don't have to justify yourself. Aldrich… sometimes he makes the rats dance for him. It's cute. But sometimes he gets really drunk, and he keeps on making them dance, not just for a few minutes, or an opening of their mind, or… but instead just on and on until they collapse."

Lotte shuddered. "That's…"

"It's what his Master always did, and his Master's Master," Lisbeth said. "He follows tradition. It keeps him steady."

"I suppose…"

Lisbeth stood up straight, a confident pose, but her whiskers were raised too in a way that reminded Lotte of hackles on a wolf. "You can't suppose. You can't know. You can't just show up and, what. Try to say he's bad." She lowered her voice yet further. "You're working against him."

"Yes," Lotte admitted openly.

Lisbeth blinked, slowly.

"I am working. It is against him. But I don't want to hurt him, and I don't want to hurt you. If he just leaves now, then nobody gets hurt, nothing bad happens."

"I couldn't stop him if I wanted to," Lisbeth protested.

From the smell of urine, they were awfully close either to the village pits or to the blacksmith. "Do you want to?"

Lisbeth took a long, long time to answer. In fact, she was about to step into the hut when she said, "...Yes." Then she turned, tail swaying, and was gone.

******

"Three days after today, Lotte," Rolf told her, as soon as she'd checked back in with him. "If he's not gone from this village by then, we start to call in the lords, we take up the pitchforks, we don't serve him or his vile apprentice anything. How about that? We drive 'em out, then, and you just keep him from doing anything too much to the farmer."

"Thank you," Lotte said.

It was more than she'd feared he'd be able to do.

What next?

[] Talk to some of the villagers, try to convince them to refuse Aldrich service early, try to carefully and politely convince them that something had to be done. Now, not in three days.
[] Try to find a way to get Lisbeth alone again. She seemed as if she was being talked around, though her power to stop Aldrich seemed low. But… she was in distress, and Lotte didn't want to leave her in that state.
[] Stalk Aldrich. Follow him just out of his sight. Be sneaky, be cunning, figure out what he has planned, and perhaps do something to let him know he's not welcome.

*******

A/N: Lotte is a dork.

 

[The Laurent]

1:4

Lotte loved to walk in the woods, and loved to hunt as well. This surprised few people about her. There was something about being in the woods, doing a physical task. It was as if she wasn't Lotte, daughter of two parents, with all sorts of duties, all sorts of fears, all sorts of expectations. She could be anyone, anyone at all, she didn't have to be Lotte, she could just be some hunter out of some story. When she was younger, when she wandered the forest with rather less purpose, she'd always liked to play pretend, thinking she was one of those folk religious heroes her mother told her about with breathless enthusiasm.

She'd pretend to be Maurice of the North, a priest who had warned of a coming invasion and saved thousands centuries ago, or Tancred the Tall, a brave warrior who had been as pious as he was--in her mother's rather gleeful tales--skilled in violence, or--

Lotte blinked, realizing that another hero she'd pretended to be, especially when she was younger, was Aldrich the Ant, noted for being a dwarf and yet stronger than any man. He'd wrestled other men to the ground and gained their submission by his strength, and since she'd been a child, she'd liked to imagine that she had some sort of kinship with him. Which was silly, because he was a warrior, and a man, and she'd been some scrap of a girl.

Still, she wished that this Aldrich was anything as honorable and amusing as that Aldrich.

She wandered a little, noting the sound of birdsong, mapping out where they were if she wanted to hunt them. She didn't think she'd have time, not after last night had gone so well. She'd been able to pray, and she'd carved out a whistle, just in case Lisbeth wanted it. It was a small one, more something you'd blow to alert someone of trouble, but she'd tested it out, gone south of the village instead of north, and given it a blow.

It had sounded...fine. Lotte liked music well enough, but she wasn't going to pretend to know much about it.

She smiled and almost whistled, though she wasn't going to. Not when she was getting so close to Aldrich's camp. She wanted another chance to talk to Lisbeth, and not just because she hoped to convince her to stop Aldrich from hurting anyone if need be. No, she thought that she and Lisbeth could be friends, and she even felt faint stirrings of…

She knew it was attraction. But just because she hunted and knew the birds and beasts didn't mean she had to act like one. She barely knew the other girl, and it was rude besides, as rude as if Lotte had been trying to get Lisbeth to hurt Aldrich. Rude and selfish.

Lotte wasn't rude, or selfish… or at least, she tried not to be! She was supposed to be a good girl, and even if she'd fallen down in so many areas, tripped and stumbled on all the deep-rooted requirements in the human forest…

She could do that much, at least.

As she got closer to the camp, she ground to a stop, wondering if Aldrich would have found a way to guard the camp, now that he knew there were people working against him. So she thought about rats, wandering the area, ready to run and squeak the moment they saw, or even more importantly, smelled, anything.

She frowned and rolled around in the grass and dirt for a moment.

Lotte had stared in naked envy when a merchant had come by with a bottle of scent-blocker, specially enchanted for hunters. But the cost had been egregious, and she'd been far too skilled to need it, at least against the regular animals Lotte had set herself against. It'd been enough to make sure she wasn't blowing her scent on the wind to the deer, and to watch their patterns and learn how they thought and acted.

After a moment, she decided to go from tree to tree, and climbed up one, moving from one middle branch to another, glad that the forest, even this short in, was thick enough for it. She suspected the rats would all be on the ground, after all.

She occasionally had to walk, but for the most part she kept as safe as she could. It wasn't too windy today, so the tree wouldn't sway enough to hurt her accuracy, if it came down to that.

When she reached the camp, she saw that Aldrich was up and about. So was Lisbeth. Both of them were going about their routines, Aldrich yawning and stretching every so often.

Which would make sense, since it was barely half an hour past daybreak.

Aldrich looked a little less impressive in the morning, a bit less like a hero, and Lotte thought she could see the signs of age slowly gathering in his face, like the forest in the late fall, where every day brought a little more of winter's chill.

It happened to everyone, but Lotte had to admit she was not feeling particularly charitable towards Aldrich.

They had a light breakfast, bread and some cheese and little else, and then Aldrich announced, "Lisbeth, make sure there's not an attack. I have a matter to look into, and will be back for dinner at noon."

"Yes, Master," Lisbeth said.

"In the meantime, practice your scales, I suppose," Aldrich said, already distracted by whatever he had planned. There was an odd sort of look on his face, closed up and yet triumphant.

He left in quite a hurry, and Lotte almost went after him. But what if he had better defenses than expected, or some way of telling where Lotte was. Certainly, whatever he was doing would have to be as secretive as possible.

As soon as she was sure he was gone, she dropped down. Lisbeth's head snapped over, and with wide eyes she backed up a few steps, glancing over at the tree Lotte had jumped from as if it had betrayed her. Lotte resolved not to hide in that same tree again, in case Lisbeth was on guard for that.

For the moment, it was enough to hold up her hands as she walked forward. "Lisbeth, I wanted to talk to you."

-She was stiff, and that was reflected in her ears and tail, both of which seemed far too still for their own good. Lisbeth finally nodded, "What is it?"

"I just wanted to… talk. And give you this." She pulled out the tiny little whistle and handed it over. It was rough, she knew, but it worked, for all that.

Lisbeth looked down at it, tail starting to move again. "Thank you. So, what do you want to talk about?"

Lotte's mind was startlingly blank as she tried to figure out what. "Oh, well. Did you have any questions for me?"

"I suppose I want to know if you were behind the headman's declaration… but of course you were," Lisbeth said. "Aldrich was hopping mad."

"He… hops?" Lotte asked.

"No, he doesn't," Lisbeth said. Her face was blank, but her ears were oddly pink, like a blush, and her whiskers were twitching.

"Oh. It's a figure of speech," Lotte realized, feeling silly. But then, she wasn't sure how she was talking, because her brain wasn't quite engaging right at all. Instead, she wanted to… impress Lisbeth somehow. "Well, so, your Master…"

"I hope nobody gets hurt," Lisbeth admitted. "But I don't know anymore. I haven't seen him this angry in a long time. He wasn't that angry even when I stole his pipe to try to practice."

"You stole his pipe?" Lotte asked.

"Just to practice. He had it made just for him," Lisbeth said. "It can play notes that humans can't hear."

Lotte's eyes widened, well aware of just how valuable that would be. It'd make it possible to stealthily control rats, as long as nobody could see you. "And…"

"I dropped it. It was fine, but he was so angry he whupped me so hard I couldn't sit for a week," Lisbeth said. Her whiskers flared up, like hackles. "But it taught me a lesson."

"It still seems cruel. I'm sorry I made him angry, and I hope it doesn't… doesn't hurt you as well."

"Do you? Why?" Lisbeth asked, eyes narrowing suspiciously.

"Because I think you're a good person," Lotte insisted. "I don't want you hurt. But… even bad people, it's hard to imagine wanting to hurt them."

"You're something," Lisbeth said, thoughtfully. "How did you get to be such a good shot, and so sneaky?"

"I spent much of my childhood and teenage years in the forest," Lotte said. "It's familiar to me. Comfortable." Lotte bit her lip, deciding against talking about how it was the only place she felt entirely comfortable, as if people weren't expecting too much from her. She didn't know whether it'd make her sound odd.

She adjusted her hat, not sure what to do about the instinct that told her that it wasn't something she should talk about. It wasn't unusual, but that's just… how she felt.

"I suppose I get that," Lisbeth said, with the barest hint of a smile. "There's not a place like that for me. There are moments I feel comfortable, but I travel around a lot."

"Then you carry your heart with you," Lotte said, repeating what her mother had said. "There is nothing wrong with that, either."

"Maybe. Aldrich says Rat Pipers are outcasts, but they can make good coin."

"Do you want to be a Rat Piper?" Lotte asked.

"What do you mean, do I want to be a Rat Piper?" Lisbeth asked. Her tail was swishing back and forth, and her ears curling back against her hair dangerously.

"You said that Aldrich hurts the rats he controls, sometimes? If his Master did that, what if that's just what… Rat Pipers do."

"Then I'll be a Rat Piper who doesn't," Lisbeth said, cooly, looking at Lotte with suspicion. "I can do that, you know?"

Lotte nodded. "I'm… I'm glad. And I'm sorry that you're caught in the middle of all of this. Aldrich, and the farmer…"

"Both so stubborn," Lisbeth groused, face scrunching up.

"Yes. But one of them… one of them's doing more," Lotte said. "Aldrich's gotten his coin, anyways. He could just take it as a little annoyance in life, like being shorted a little on occasion by a traveling merchant."

"Did you get many, if you're around here?" Lisbeth asked, relaxing. "This place is in the middle of nowhere."

"No, not many. And some had the oddest things. Witch offerings. Potions. My father bought one that was supposed to help thicken his hair, and it didn't work. He didn't lose anything he wasn't willing to throw away on a guess, but--"

Lisbeth giggled. "Are you sure it just didn't work on guys?"

"Mom tried it in her hair, and I dabbed some on my face," Lotte said, feeling the grin steal across her, though also an uncertainty. "Just to see what it did. I don't even know if Witches can do something like that--"

"I think they can? Aldrich had some for a while. Has some, actually," Lisbeth said. "If it's the sort of tonic you're talking about. But then, he lives well."

Lotte looked around the rather normal looking campsite skeptically.

"He just ties it up in small things, and favors," Lisbeth explained. "He's known for that. He always keeps his word. He knows what he's owed."

Lotte tried not to say anything, or let it show on her face, but Lisbeth looked at her skeptically. "That's a good thing, in a mixed-up world. So many are cruel. They'd have hurt me if it wasn't for Aldrich. I'm a rat-girl, after all."

Lotte nodded, though she wasn't sure. She knew there was cruelty, but surely nobody could want to hurt someone like Lisbeth, who hadn't been doing them any harm at all? "I'm sorry."

"You haven't done anything to hurt me. Not yet," Lisbeth added, as if that were important to say.

"I hope I don't," Lotte admitted. "And... "

"What?" Lisbeth tilted her head, just slightly, her ears twitching forward a little as if straining to hear.

"Is there anything else I can do?" Lotte asked. "While I'm here."

"Well, I have to practice music," Lisbeth said. "Or I should, at least. You could listen, I suppose. But you have to leave here before he gets back."

Lotte nodded, eager to hear her voice. She had little doubt it was beautiful. It was hard to imagine it being otherwise. So she found somewhere to sit down on the grass, somewhere already pushed down by footsteps, so that there wouldn't be any sign of her presence.

She had to look up at Lisbeth, which was a different perspective, to say the least. Her nose looked different, at once more prominent and… cuter. Especially with the whiskers surrounding it, like the delicate movements of the priests' quill, writing things she could barely understand. They were like call...i… grafy. Or whatever it was. Lotte was well aware that her thoughts weren't entirely coherent, but she'd managed to string words together so far.

So that'd have to be enough.

Lisbeth sung at first, and then played the whistle, as inadequate as it was. In neither case were there words, just humming and noises, some higher and some lower. Lisbeth's voice was clear and rather pretty. It wasn't as beautiful as some of the best birdsong Lotte had ever heard, but then again, what singing could be? It was enjoyable, and Lotte allowed herself to relax through a half-dozen songs, before just as suddenly Lisbeth stopped.

"It… doesn't always help me, but the more complex the song, the more complex the magic you can do with it. I want to learn to do magic that lets me be a Rat Piper without… hurting them."

Lotte nodded, pulling herself up. She realized that she had to leave soon, even though she didn't want to at all. She was just sorry that she had far less to show off than Lisbeth. She worked with her hands, she hunted, she didn't exactly… even the whittling wasn't nearly as impressive as singing. But Lotte didn't say that. That'd be rude, it'd be whining of the exact sort her parents would have been ashamed to hear from her. So instead she stretched for a moment. "I should be going. But your voice was nice."

"Nice?" Lisbeth asked, her face a little flushed.

"Very good," Lotte corrected, embarrassed.

"I… I'll try to trust that you mean it. Do you want to… meet again?"

Lisbeth hesitated with each word, but Lotte didn't at all. "How about tonight, after he's asleep?"

Lisbeth thought about it for almost a full minute, her tail and ears twitching every so often. She reached up to scratch one of them for a moment, and then nodded. "Yes. I don't think he's going to be doing much tonight."

"Should I come four hours after nightfall?"

"Three," Lisbeth said. "If that is okay with you?"

"I should be able to do that," Lotte said, stepping carefully so as to leave as few signs as possible of her arrival.

On the way back, her mood was good, and she whistled and left a small stick offering to the local Waldherz.

********

"Thank you for helping out," Hilda said.

Lotte looked at the stream, the same stream that kept on going all the way to her village. That itself was frustrating in a way, that she was still doing some of the same chores she'd done before. It hadn't changed yet, and these weren't the kinds of adventures that people liked telling stories about.

But Hilda had laundry to do, and she was afraid of being attacked. So Lotte had come, in full gear… but then decided that the real odds of attack were pretty low. So instead she was helping to hold the wooden board flat, or doing the work of washing and scrubbing it with the flat, stick-like washing bat. It was all hard work, but she'd done it plenty of times before. Life was hard work, and she didn't shy away from it. There was less than there might have been with a larger family, and once she got into it, she looked over at Hilda, who was half-distracted glancing at her.

"You're not like most young girls I see," Hilda added, biting her lip. She didn't have soap, not even the rough kind that Lotte was used to, and so they were just hoping that the cool water would do enough. "You're rougher. But nicer."

"Nicer?" Lotte asked.

"I… I was a young girl, not that long ago." Hilda looked older than ever, hunched over her work, though she was clearly in better health than her husband. "My father was… can you promise not to judge me?"

"I promise," Lotte said. "We're in this together, a Wilfhuld's pack trying to keep this from falling to pieces."

She believed it. She wanted Aldrich to leave, without hurting anyone, including Lisbeth. Even if it meant never seeing Lisbeth again, it was better than imagining Aldrich killing someone, and then the village trying to hunt him down. He could do it. You had to have keen eyes, when you hunted. Lotte was sure she could see the signs that he'd kill if he thought he had the right reasons, all over him. The dismissive way he acted, the violence he'd already inflicted. Maybe he wasn't all bad. Surely he wasn't some monster who hurt others because he liked causing misery. But his pride was going to get someone killed, and it probably wasn't going to be him.

Or not him first.

"Well, my father was the village drunk. He wasn't anyone worth knowing, and I had nothing worth having. But Freidrich married me. He didn't have much, but he had more than I did. And he's hard sometimes, but he's more the man to sulk or yell than to beat his wife bloody," Hilda said, in a quiet voice. "It's more than I have any right to ask."

Lotte wondered at it.

Lisbeth felt about the same.

Lotte… never had, not quite? But then maybe if her parents were crueler she'd have to make excuses for them. "Oh," Lotte said.

"Those eyes, though. They're familiar." Hilda kept on working, and it was almost a minute before she said. "But everything you're doing, I'm thankful for it."

"You're welcome," Lotte said. "I've been trying to… figure out what to do. I'll protect the house, but Aldrich has only two more days after this before he's expected to be gone. He's going to do something soon, and when he does I don't know how I'll keep everyone safe."

"Oh, dear. You see, it's, you know… nobody's ever safe." It was as if Hilda had been trying to chew and swallow the words, but like a bad piece of meat, finally had to spit it out.

Lotte nodded. "I know."

Life wasn't safe. People died every year, and it was remarkable how an oxen could step on a foot, or a person could stumble drunk into a ditch one winter night…

And she hadn't seen the worst of it in her eighteen summers.

"You're good, though. Or at least, polite, to listen to an old woman blather."

Lotte smiled. "Not that old."

"Maybe." Hilda sighed, and got back to work.

There was always plenty to do.

*******

You had to go slow through the woods at night. There was no way to rush it, and rushing would just get you killed. So instead, you walked, and enjoyed the night.

Lotte certainly did. Sometimes she'd wonder at where the line was, between boldness and stupidity. The forest at night was no place to go, as deep as she'd gone before.

Now, though?

It wasn't much. She crept up and around, careful to make sure not to be easy to find, and eventually came upon the camp. Aldrich was nowhere to be seen, but his tent was pinned up, so no doubt he was inside.

Lisbeth, on the other hand, was waiting where the fire had been, her foot poking at the ashes from the fire.

There was a break in the tree cover, and the half-full moon spread down its silvery rays on her, highlighting her tense ears, her stiff body, but also her dark, powerful looking eyes and the control she held herself with.

Lotte's heart raced to look at her, even though they'd known each other for… no time at all. Perhaps Lotte fell too easily, as the moon falls upon all who are within its gaze, no matter who they were.

The tail was at once strange and yet… something. Lotte blinked, shook her head, tried not to wax too poetic, considering there was nothing of poetry in her soul any more than she could stand to read for more than a few minutes at a time.

Lotte slipped down, hands out again, repeating the same actions she'd done before, but from another direction. That was to say: hands up, out of the way, waiting.

Lisbeth nodded, the gesture stiff, and moved. This time they were going to go off a little.

Lotte should have noticed that something was wrong. It was all about instincts: sometimes she just knew when a hunt was going to go badly. There was that same feeling about Lisbeth, but Lotte didn't even really notice it, not until after the fact.

Once they were far enough away, Lisbeth asked, "What do you want?"

"What? You said to meet," Lotte said, tilting her head.

"I mean, what's all this for, pretending to be nice to me. You want something. I already know some of it, warning of my Master's plans. My Master, who has raised me for eight years, but what else?"

Her voice was calm, but her ears were flat, her tail flicking like a whip, threateningly.

Lotte bit her lip, "I… I don't know. I didn't really have anything much planned, just trying to get your help to stop this from falling apart."

"You were hired by that farmer who hates me," Lisbeth said. "That's surely not all he wants. How can I trust anything you've been saying?"

"I haven't…" Lotte began, though she understood where this was coming from, almost. "Were you… how…"

"I thought about it. Then thought about it some more." Lisbeth had this tendency to spread out her emotions, to show them in ears and tail and whiskers as much as in face, and never in voice.But in that moment her voice grew cold and raised, an angry, killing wind. It was enough to let Lotte know that somehow she'd really messed up. "He plays for me sometimes, you know. I can hear the pitches only rats can hear. I helped him practice, but then sometimes he'd just play for me and I'd almost fall asleep, the music was so nice. He's not… what do you think about Aldrich. Tell me?"

She wasn't yelling. Not quite. But her voice had raised up a bit, and Lotte took a breath. "I think he's proud, and his pride lets him be cruel and justify it. Cruel, if not to you, than to Freidrich and Hilda." Lotte gulped, aware that this wasn't going to be a popular answer. "He's not necessarily a bad person, but if he lets his anger and hurt drive him like that… someone's going to suffer, and it might be you. Or the family, or myself. And it probably will be him as well. If he just left, with you, moved onto the next place, none of this would be necessary. I don't want it to come down to violence, or heartache."

"You… you're lying," Lisbeth said. "Or… you're aiming for something else. I'll keep on trusting you and you'll tell me to steal his Pipe." She wasn't listening, didn't seem ready to, and Lotte didn't know what to do about it.

It hurt her, that Lisbeth didn't trust her, but why should she?

Lotte had been kind so far, but…

"Lisbeth, I know it doesn't mean anything right now, but I don't want to hurt you, and I don't want to turn you against Aldrich."

"Don't you?" Lisbeth asked, pointedly.

The truth was, she had a point, Lotte thought, leaning against the tree. She hadn't intended for Lisbeth to betray Aldrich, but she had wanted Lisbeth to realize that Aldrich's goals were going to hurt everyone and that he needed to back off. But she'd seemed to agree before, and Lotte wondered at the 'thinking' she'd done.

It reminded her of Arndt, the way he'd sometimes seem to build up a head of steam in his own head, until at last it exploded outwards in drunken rants. It hadn't been his fault, she had… she hadn't gone with him, and if she had maybe he'd be uninjured. There was truth to his anger, just like there was to Lisbeth's. But there was that same isolation, that same lack of feedback that allowed the hurt to build and build and build--

It was like a sprain, some debilitating pain, to realize that there was nothing she could do. She had no idea how to help Arndt, and she couldn't help Lisbeth with this. They shouldn't feel the same, after all she'd known Arndt for years, not days. But there was that same inability to…

And of course, Lisbeth couldn't read her mind, saw the pain and assumed that it must be guilt. "That's what I thought."

"No," Lotte said. "That's not why I--"

"You should leave," Lisbeth said, quietly, making up her mind.

"I will," Lotte said. "But it's not because you're right about this. It's because your fears aren't anything I can... "

She trailed off, and Lisbeth opened her mouth to speak, but Lotte, her heart torn in two, spoke first. "I can't make you not afraid, I can't stop you from distrusting my intentions, even when I know they're not what you think they are. That's why I… flinched."

Lisbeth nodded, though as if she'd merely written down her words somewhere, as if she were some scribe in court, ready to read them back to prove Lotte's guilt.

Lotte should have gone back.

It'd be the right thing to do.

But Lotte… was an Adventurer, and had a mission. So instead she looped around and snuck into somewhere at least a little close to the camp.

Lisbeth was there, pacing, her tail swishing as she did. She glanced over at the tree Lisbeth had been at before, and then in the direction she'd come from, and then she knocked on the tent.

Aldrich came out groaning. "What is it, 'beth?" he asked, blinking. Then he seemed to see her guilt, or something, because his eyes narrowed. "What. Is. It?"

"The adventurer came to talk to me."

"She… came to," Aldrich said, but then saw something on her face. "Not for the first time. And you talked back?!"

"I… a little," Lisbeth said.

In a sudden fury, Aldrich wrapped a hand tight around Lisbeth's throat. Lotte moved to grab an arrow and… and do something, but Aldrich stopped himself, and let her go.

She was breathing heavily, though a second of constriction couldn't have left her breathless. But she had to be shocked.

"I'm sorry, 'Beth. You just made me so angry. I thought you'd betrayed me, but you could never do that, right?" He asked it in a voice as sweet as sap, stroking her hair as he did.

"No, Master," Lisbeth said, her voice trembling.

"So what did she talk about, this adventurer? What lies did she tell you?"

"That… she said that your pride would get someone hurt, that there had to be some way to stop anything from dying, or… she was worried, but she was also lying," Lisbeth said. "I know she was lying. You'd never hurt them for something like that!"

"Of course I wouldn't," Aldrich said, though his face was a mask, and his voice so sweet that Lotte thought it sounded fake.

Yet Lisbeth relaxed, seemed to take some comfort from the words, from proof in her mind that she was right to distrust Lotte, to trust Aldrich.

"I thought so, Master," Lisbeth said.

"Yet you doubted me."

"I'm sorry Master."

"There will be a punishment waiting for you, later," Aldrich growled. "But I'm just glad I didn't lose you."

This time his voice didn't sound as fake to Lotte's ears. She even heard some of the same tone she heard in her father's voice, there. Was she imagining that?

"You couldn't," Lisbeth said.

"You should go talk to this girl again, tomorrow morning," Aldrich said.

"What?"

"Lie to her. Tell her about an attack that's not going to happen, find a way to distract her. Perhaps set her up for some sort of ambush, so I can get her out of the way." Aldrich said it with glee, but Lisbeth was clearly nervous and clearly failing to hide it. "I think you can do that. I won't kill her. I just need to not have to deal with some crazed hunter for a while. She threatened me, you saw it. So, just go to her tomorrow morning. I'll have lies for you to tell, and we can… deal with her. Together. Master and Apprentice."

Lisbeth nodded, clearly trying to push through her doubts.

"Now," Aldrich finished. "You should probably get to sleep. I've got to set up better guards if she's found out where we are."

As soon as her back was turned, Aldrich's face slipped into something darker and more frustrated as he looked at Lisbeth. Then he sighed, shook his head, and went back to his business.

Lotte…

Lotte didn't know what to do.


What does she do about Lisbeth?

[] At the meeting tomorrow morning, confront her about having overheard it. Perhaps it won't make her like Lotte. After all, Lotte would have to admit she spied on Lisbeth. But, she had to do something, couldn't let Lisbeth do this to her. And herself.
[] Don't confront Lisbeth. Instead, pretend to be fooled, try to get information out of her, knowing all of it was going to be false. Perhaps it could make Aldrich think that she was fooled, that she wouldn't be a threat.
[] Tell someone about Lisbeth's plans. It'd be… betraying her, in a way, but perhaps backup could help Lotte captured her, or… something. Find a way to get people involved, and aware of the attack that would no doubt come soon.

*******

A/N: Well, this was pretty long by the standards of this Quest. Hopefully not too long.

 

[The Laurent]

1:5

Lotte looked at the rising sun and had no poetry for it, nothing special to say about it. She hadn't slept well last night, had been trying to imagine what to say. But no matter how one toiled all the night long, the sun came.

Lotte's mind had gone over and over the betrayal. But the more she looked at it, in the light of the moon and in the facts she knew, the less it seemed like betrayal. Not really. Lisbeth hadn't promised not to tell Aldrich, even if that'd been implied, and she'd known him for eight years, and Lotte for a matter of days. She pushed down her doubt, her fears, and thought about what Lisbeth had done so far, and what Aldrich had done.

Lotte was sure that Lisbeth had made a mistake, but mistakes happened all the time without feeling personally betrayed. She couldn't help the way she felt, but she could help reacting badly to it.

Lisbeth was a good person, and so what she needed to do was remind her of that.

But she could dream of that all night long with her eyes open, and still she didn't know how she was going to confront Lisbeth.

She prayed to the Gods, not just the ones she most often did, but to others still, even when all she had were names.

Adalet was some goddess of wisdom. The priest who'd tried to taught her had told her, once, that she was a God far from the south. He invoked her often, especially when begging her to give him the strength not to be angry at Lotte's stupidity and lack of ability when it came to reading. Whether she answered or not, Lotte didn't know, but he'd kept on teaching her despite his frustration, so maybe.

Perhaps Adalet, whatever she looked like and whatever she was like, would have pity on her.

So Lotte prayed to her too. "Give me the strength to do what's just, and not what's selfish. To do the right thing."

She didn't know what it was.

"I don't know what I could give you, in payment. I don't know a lot of things. I'm too stupid to ask you for anything," Lotte admitted. It was true enough. She took to book-learning as a fish did to a bush. Which should be an odd comparison, but one time Arndt had been fishing in a stream deep in the woods, and a fish had flopped around and wound up in a bush, no doubt slowly dying, as a fish did, staring balefully up at them in general and the cruel world in particular.

Or perhaps Adalet liked the laws, which were… vague, or so she knew, when it came to the forest. It was at once property and not-property, and she'd heard that what in one area was poaching was in another perfectly acceptable. Luckily enough her village was one of the latter, for the clouds were high and the Lord was far away.

"But still. Still I ask. Better to ask than not ask."

That was her prayer, and there wasn't much of it, but then there wasn't much of her wisdom.

By dawn, she felt terrible, her heart as ragged as a wounded animal. Her chest flopped around when she got up, annoyingly in the way of everything. It didn't make her a worse archer, but she knew that ol' Gunther had never had to deal with anything like them in the way, and it felt like her heart was buried under a bunch of fat that was, supposedly, a sign of… something.

That morning it felt as if nothing was quite right, and nothing she could do was right. But she ate what she could, and then said, "I'll be going to patrol around, see if there's anything else."

"Of course, Lotte," Hilda said. "There's not long now."

She wished that it was true, but she didn't know how long this would take, let alone how long it would last.

As she wandered outside, she waited for a sign.

Lotte got it when a rat hurried up to her and then stopped, looking up. It was a cute rat, all things considered, fat and well fed, and cleaner than she'd expected. Someone had taken some time to care for it, and somehow that's what told her that it was Lisbeth's. If she didn't feel so terrible, she'd almost be touched by the care.

As it was, she followed the mouse, wary for an ambush. Would Lisbeth… no, Lotte couldn't believe it.

Lisbeth was just beyond the start of the treeline, leaning against one of them. Her posture was stiff, her body still.

"Hey, Lotte," Lisbeth said.

"Hello, Lisbeth," Lotte said, and decided to lean against the same tree. "Should we sit. To talk? We… didn't part on the best terms. I'm sorry."

"You're sorry?" Lisbeth asked.

"You must love him a lot. I think I'm right, but could I... "

Arndt. Would Arndt have tried to choke her in rage? No, surely not. He was angry, he was bitter, but it was words. Talk talk talk, that's how it felt sometimes, and yet her heart ached to see him hurt, and she'd never believe the worst about him. Who could, when he'd lost so much because of… because of many people, her included.

"You could?" Lisbeth asked, suspiciously.

She shouldn't have to do this. When an animal was wounded, it didn't spread itself wide to take another arrow. Hurt once, it didn't beg to be hurt again, it didn't offer to trust someone with its life, with its secrets.

There was piety and then there was senseless martyrdom.

It was exhausting, thinking of telling her something so personal.

But it was the only way she could see forward. To trust, and hope to be trusted in return.

Lotte let herself sink down against the tree, and watched Lisbeth do the same. Then she closed her eyes, and heard the sound of wind through the trees, and birds in the distance. "I was friends for a long time with a boy named Arndt. I might have been… I might have had some interest in him. Either way, when I was sixteen, I wanted to run away and be adventurers with him. My parents convinced me to wait two more years before doing it, he went out, and returned, bitter and tired and angry and drunk half the time, and when he was drunk he'd yell at me, for ruining him. I hadn't been there for him, after all. Maybe he was right."

"He, he sounds like… like he was terrible," Lisbeth. "Blaming you not for being there."

"But, I wasn't there," Lotte said. "I could have kept him company, and maybe he wouldn't have been so badly wounded. Maybe he would have been better. But even so, he hurt me, even though I cared about him. Even though he was far from all bad. There were moments when he was… sweet."

It was true.

If Ardnt had only been angry, Lotte would have… would have not know the truth, which was that he had reason to be angry and that she'd hurt him.

But he'd hurt her back, and on purpose.

"So, what. Are you saying that Aldrich's like that?"

Lotte kept her eyes closed. It was easier to feel like a soul that just happened to have a bodily prison when she could see nothing. She could smell dirt, and not far from there some animal had gone. She could track them by spoor, if not by scent, which would be rather more impossible.

"He could be. I feel like he might be, but I could be wrong," Lotte confessed. "I'm not very good at these things, but I'm not lying. I'm even worse at that."

"Are you?" Lisbeth asked.

Lotte opened her eyes to glance at the rat-girl. "Yes, I'm terrible at lying, so I try to tell the truth. There's less chance of getting tripped up. My brain isn't built for curves. Or much thinking at all." She tapped at her head, as if it was a joke, seeing the look on Lisbeth's face.

"Well… I… I figured out Aldrich's plan." Her ears were flat, and her voice was toneless. If Lotte was a terrible liar, Lisbeth was even worse.

Lying. To her.

A part of her wanted to lash out. She hated it, hated how she felt today, betrayed in too many ways, some of which she couldn't quite name.

"He's going to be attacking the Headman, since it's the Headman who is backing up his enemy. Just rough him up a little and leave, and he knows just how to do it. It's hard to… hard to… notice rats until they swarm on you." Lisbeth was stroking the fur of the rat she'd used to bring Lotte over, but that was the only soft, gentle thing about her at the moment. By the end of the words, she was all but mumbling.

"It's strange," Lotte said, feeling the chill in her voice. But beneath it, she churned. She wasn't betrayed but she was angry. She was furious. Blood, as it left the body, was usually warm.

That's how it felt.

"What?"

"I'm furious at you. Yet I don't, I really don't, feel any desire to strangle you for it. Nor would I act on such an impulse," Lotte said, quietly.

"You…" Lisbeth began.

"Followed you back, out of instinct. Saw all of it. Saw him hurt you, saw him furious, saw him sweet too, and kind. Saw him lie to you, tell you he meant to do nothing, but if he truly did, then has he told you what his real plan is?" Lotte spoke fast, not standing up because she didn't want to loom over Lisbeth, but also aware that she had only so long to speak. "I don't think he's evil, but he can be cruel, and he knows you wouldn't approve. But if he hurts the farmer family, afterwards, would you abandon him, or would you reluctantly accept that… that what's done is done?"

Lisbeth's mouth was gaping, and she blinked. "I… he hasn't told me. You knew that I was going to lie to you?"

"I hoped you wouldn't. And I wanted to talk to you," Lotte said, aware of how desperate that sounded. "I wanted to confront you with it, talk to you, be honest instead of…"

"Lotte, I only did what I…" Lisbeth began, but Lotte could see that she was teetering at the edge of breaking.

"What you thought was right," Lotte said. "So am I. That's what I'm asking you to do. Consider whether or not there might be a right thing to do that isn't this. If you want to leave, want to go back to him and tell him I wasn't fooled, you can." Lotte spread her arms wide. "I'll do what I can to protect them, and you will do what you think is right. But we could stop this."

"Stop this? How?" Lisbeth said.

"I'm… working on that. But if we can just take his pipe and everything else, he can go on. Maybe he'd want to get revenge, but more likely he'd have other things to do," Lotte said. "Nobody has to get hurt if we can get those pipes, and even if it comes down to a fight, there are ways to… ways for there to be less risk."

"Not… not take him for the Lords' peace?" Lisbeth asked.

"If he's truly planning something terrible, yes," Lotte admitted. "He should be. But I don't want… I don't want to hurt you any more than I have."

Lisbeth stared at Lotte, and Lotte had no idea what she intended to do until she said. "I… won't stop you."

"You won't?"

"I… don't know if I can come. I could… I can try," Lisbeth insists. "But only if you don't kill him. I'll never forgive you if you kill him. I don't think… he'll hate me forever. One way or another, this is the end of my apprenticeship, the end of everything. But I couldn't sleep, I couldn't sleep and this time I thought about all the truths you've told me, and how much you cared. And how could he get revenge without hurting them? What more could he want?" Lisbeth said it slowly, staring at Lotte as if she were anything special.

Lotte felt like a mass of ugly flesh and doubts, exposed and vulnerable. She wondered if her flux was going to come soon: she always felt worse just before and after it. Perhaps her mood was a sign?

She couldn't tell. But she knew that there was hope, and that somehow that was what was shining along with tears in Lisbeth's eyes.

This could end. Today.

Nobody had to die, nobody even needed to get hurt, though they might.

Today was a bad day, but it'd have to be the right day for all of this.

What's the plan?

I'm going to try to see how write-in votes go. A few things. First, any vote that has killing him as something intentionally part of the plan is automatically vetoed. Lotte won't do it unless as the absolute last resort. Second, know your character. Lotte will do some things but not others, so just, y'know, ask.

Third, bringing Lisbeth or not is probably the biggest and first decision anyone making a plan should consider. Not bringing her along keeps her out of it and might keep her safe. However, just as an obvious one, Lisbeth could theoretically serve to lure him out, distract him, or even help Lotte be the distraction while doing something else. Plus, with her whistle, the one Lotte got her, she could in theory serve as a counter-force to rat control, get the rats a little confused.

Finally: no plan has to be detailed. It doesn't need contingencies. Things might well go dramatically wrong in the first few minutes of any of the plans. Hell, they might go wrong even if the plan is good, because that's tactics for you.

*******

A/N: So, yeah. Lisbeth was already wavering.

 

[The Laurent]

1:6

Lotte tried to gather herself, to focus. She has the ghost of a thought… or not a ghost, more like a bird, flitting through the forest, and she chased it, tried to imagine what she was supposed to do with that thought.

It was a simple one: Aldrich was prey. That thought felt discordant, but it didn't have to be cruel, it didn't have to be anything but a way to look at things.

Lotte coughed. "I have… questions," she said, aware that she was in no position to ask anything of Lisbeth, that she was unworthy of even the trust Lisbeth had placed in her. She was some pathetic, miserable (what reason did she have to be sad?) woman who was probably going to hurt Lisbeth's Master at least a little.

"You can ask them, then," Lisbeth said, and she at least seemed to be under control, her tone of voice again cool and formal, but not as bad as it might be.

Lotte licked her lips, trying to figure out how to ask it. The thought of hunting Aldrich did remind her that this was her job. It wasn't pleasant, but… but the truth was, as as much as pigs were thoughtful animals and far smarter than some humans, she'd rather be here, even as miserable as she was, than back home and trapped.

"Where did Aldrich want you to lead me? What did he expected from me? What did he say, in general, about what was going to happen?"

"Oh," Lisbeth said. "I… he had this grove he said would be a good ambush spot. Plenty of places for rats to hide." She stroked the rat in her hands, so softly and gently that Lotte wondered how she could love a Master who used them so callously.

How, for that matter, she could trust someone who had hunted animals for a living.

"There was a place. I could show you, but… I was supposed to go and tell him, first. I was going to suggest it as a meeting place to plan… strategy to stop Aldrich's attack on the mayor," Lisbeth said. "Aldrich had this whistle he'd played while in the area. I don't know what it did, but the grass all dried out around there."

Lotte didn't stiffen, even though he had already begun to have certain suspicions. "When?"

"Sometime after noon. The idea being, you'd be out of the way for a night attack," Lisbeth said. "Which I assume would be on the farmer couple."

"What does he think about me?"

"Not much. He thinks you're… sweet on me, and he thinks you'll trust me no matter what I say. He thinks you're foolish."

"I do trust you" Lotte said, and despite how terrible she felt, the ghost of a smile on Lisbeth's face was a warm fire on a cold, dark night.

"...I'm surprised. I haven't done anything to deserve it," Lisbeth admitted.

"I want to think I have an instinct. But. Maybe not." Lotte flushed a little. "Can you show me where it is? He won't expect you back yet, right?"

"No. He thought I'd take a while buttering you up," Lisbeth said.

"Then, let's go. If you would," Lotte said.

***

"Fire," Lotte muttered, staring incredulously. All of the grass was dry and half-dead, the exact sort of grass that always lit up when lightning strikes, and the area itself was a slight depression, with trees on all sides making useful hiding spaces for both a man and any rats he might bring in.

"Fire, what do you mean?"

"Look," Lotte said, trying to think about it the way she would any other trap. "There's only one way out that's not through the dried out grass, a single route of escape." She pointed at it, leading up. "If you set an army of rats there to trip someone up, maybe made the path narrower, than the only choices I'd have would be to burn to death or surrender."

"He wouldn't--" Lisbeth began, and then looked down at the grass. "He would, wouldn't he?"

Lotte's heart was racing, because she knew it was more than 'wouldn't lay a trap.' No, would Aldrich think it served her right if she died? If she stubbornly let herself burn rather than surrendering?

He'd blame her for her own death, because he wasn't the sort of person who casually, happily killed others. If he was, he'd have long ago done so. No, instead he was someone whose pride and arrogance could take him to places so dark that they made the forest at night look like the fields at noon.

"Yes," Lotte whispered. "I… I have an idea. But it might be a little difficult."

"Difficult?"

"Yes. That's… a word for it."

Painful. Dangerous. Bold. Foolish. Those were words for it as well. But she had a feeling that this just might work.

She'd need time, she'd need luck, and she'd need an odd reserve of ruthlessness. It wasn't a plan to kill Aldrich, but it was a plan to fight as unfair as she possibly could, to take no ransom, to win at whatever the cost.

To trap Aldrich as he'd intended to trap her, and have him surrender.

****

"So, she bought it?" Aldrich asked, pleased that Lisbeth had done right this time. That girl could be so frustrating. It'd been his pious duty, to take in the daughter of a friend, but she had been such a bother at times. Like most children, she was in need of correction, and like most children, himself included, she started to learn her lesson after a few beatings.

Sometimes he didn't know how his old Master had stood him long enough to beat the weakness out of him. His Master had made a real Rat Piper out of f Aldrich of Nowhere, Orphan and Tramp. Rat Pipers had to be clever, vicious, powerful if they wanted to be anything more than second rate employees of the powerful.

"Yes, she wanted to believe me," Lisbeth said, as she stepped along, a little bit behind him.

"She's a fool, though her archery was quite dangerous," Aldrich admitted. "But she let her infatuation with you control her."

"Infatuation?" Lisbeth asked.

"I was surprised as well, but… you can't tell me you don't see it," Aldrich said, almost smiling. He hadn't bothered with such feelings since the man who almost became his husband. It was a distraction, anyways.

"She's infatuated with me?" Lisbeth asked, then she coughed. "Oh. I didn't know that. But she's so strange."

"Is she? Or are you just not used to such normal, boring people," Aldrich said, a smirk on his face. He'd had her figured out from the start: a blonde do-gooder, just good enough to not allow herself to hate a beastfolk without knowing them. A thousand stories had women like that as heroes, but he knew that it'd be best for her if she was hurt right now.

He couldn't tell Lisbeth this, but his plan was to catch her and burn her. Not all of her flesh, not anything that would keep her from living her life, but enough of an injury that she'd slink like a dog back to her village.

That arrogant child, threatening him, thwarting him, almost seducing Lisbeth! He couldn't let that go unchallenged!

"She's… I guess she is boring," Lisbeth said, uncertainly. Aldrich could imagine her biting her lip, doubting herself…

She needed more confidence and she needed more brutality if she was going to become a good Rat Piper.

"What's that smell, Master?" Lisbeth asked.

Rats, whether of the normal variety or rat people, indeed had good senses of smell. Of course, it didn't take that strong of a nose to smell the flammable oils he'd soaked so many rats in.

"It's how I'll defeat her. I've soaked certain rats so that they'll ignite like a bonfire when even a little flame touches them." He grinned. "Don't worry, Lisbeth, it's a few rats, and the results of this little trick will be the defeat of the farmer, of Lotte, and the completion of our just revenge. Then we shall go south."

"South?" Lisbeth asked.

"To get you your own Pipes, and enter the final stages of your training. Another year or two, if you can merely listen to what I say, and not let your feelings and compassion get in the way of doing what has to be done to maintain your pride. It's a harsh world out there," Aldrich said, overcome by passion as he walked through the forest.

If she didn't understand this, she'd die, and she'd be… she'd be no good to him, or to herself. "People are going to hate you because of what you are. They always will. They will hurt you, unless you are on guard, unless you repay every insult tenfold. Being nice will get you killed, and that's it." He let out a breath, paying no attention to the trail by this point. "A person stabs you, you kill them back. A person tries to kill you, you make them suffer. You have the skills to do it, and if you don't do it, someone else will first, you understand that Lisbeth?"

"R-right," Lisbeth said.

He turned, confused by just now nervous she sounded, as if she were terrified that he'd hurt her.

He was paying even less attention than before when he tripped over something and tumbled into mud. It wasn't mud that should have been there. It was a dry-as-bones day, even without the effort he'd put into preparing the ground!
***

Lotte had watered the area well, and helped cut the sticks so that they'd roll perfectly. She'd brought the lit candles she now sheltered as a way to perhaps trap Aldrich in his own scheme. Now, from a perch, she looked at the huge mass of rats and down at Aldrich, scrambling for his expensive looking pipe.

An arrow hit just inches past his hand, and he stopped, withdrawing it and calling out in song. But it seemed as if the rats were following it, up until Lisbeth took out her whistle and blew it once, twice, three shrill notes that sent many of the rats scurrying away.

"Surrender," Lotte said, as loud as she could manage without yelling. "Surrender and you won't be hurt."

"How dare you! How dare you turn my Lisbeth against me! If she's… if she's truly weak, then… La lah, lah…" he began humming, and Lisbeth's eyes seemed to lose something, her jaw growing slack as she leapt between Aldrich and Lotte. Lotte let her second loosed arrow hit the ground, unwilling to hurt her.

"You see… lalah de la… I trained this in her. It wasn't easy, but she's a rat-person, it affects her a little, and build it up, year by year, and I can control her if I...need. Run away now and I might not catch up to you, but you can't hit me without going through her first! She's… she's clearly been corrupted and tainted. I need to save myself. I'll just… let her take the fall. I… I won't like what you've forced me to do, Lotte!"

His voice grew stronger and weaker, as if even he wasn't sure of what he was doing. "You tore… you tore the girl that was like a daughter to me away from me." He picked up the pipe and began to stand up. "You hurt her. You made me unable to love her anymore. How. How dare you."

Lotte was a little like the grass beneath her. His words set her heart aflame. "How dare I? How dare you choke her, how dare you try to teach her to hate, how…"

But words weren't enough. She was seized with sudden, wild passion. She had to save Lisbeth from this, this… this vile man. So she did something that was probably stupid.

She leapt down onto the ground, discarding her bow and charging forward at top speed, eating up the ground as she shoved Lisbeth aside. "Lisbeth, wake up!"

Lisbeth hit the ground as Aldrich began to draw his sword, his pipes dropping once more.

Lotte wouldn't win a swordfight, even if she'd had more than a knife. So, she just tackled him, bearing him down to the ground and grabbing his arms to keep him from getting up. She wasn't that much smaller than him, and while he looked strong, she was strong as well, and they wrestled for supremacy in the mud.

"What's going…" Lisbeth said, sounding as if she'd woken up from a dream.

"Lisbeth, please!" Lotte called. "Grab the… ropes. Over by the tree."

"Lisbeth, she's lying to you!"

Lotte was winning, though her arms ached with the effort of holding him down in the mud, and there was no doubt going to be mud everywhere. She'd come prepared, and now it was paying off. It was a terrible feeling, struggling and scrambling in the dirt. But…

Lisbeth moved, to get the ropes.

"Thank you," Lotte said, as Lisbeth handed them over. It'd almost gone entirely wrong, and even now she was well aware that there was a lot of luck involved. But. She had him.

She began to tie him up, slowly and carefully, making sure the knots were neither too tight or too loose.

He was shouting, and cursing, and Lotte covered his mouth, holding it closed. "Please, a… I think I brought a cloth? If he can sing, he can control you again."

"Control me?" Lisbeth asked, sounding horrified. "I just thought I… drifted off. I do that sometimes. It's nice. But… but he was controlling me?"

"Yes. You… you reacted to the music as if you were a… a…"

"A rat," Lisbeth said, sounding miserable to have to say it. She looked down, as if suddenly terrified of Lotte, and her ears were perked up, her whiskers bristling in obvious anxiety. "So, what are we going to… what are you going to do?"

That was certainly a question (Choose 1)

[] Take his pipes, and all the goods he has, but then release him after that. On the one hand, even without all of that, he's still a Rat Piper and might come to get revenge, but it'd hurt him the least… and perhaps Lisbeth the least. Emotionally, that is.
[] Take him to the village with the accusations, to be tried (eventually) in a lords' court. But Lisbeth doesn't need to be involved. Part ways with her… and say goodbye, give her what she wants of the camp, and refuse to bring her up. On the one hand, that'd protect her and hopefully punish Aldrich, but if she does get brought up… there will perhaps be suspicions and aspersions cast her way. Then again… is she going to be back around here anytime soon?
[] Do the above… but take Lisbeth with you. She can testify as to his plans, yes, but just as importantly Lotte could emphasize that she's innocent of everything. At the same time… it'd put her at risk, in that drawing attention isn't a good thing, even if there's a good chance of it ending in some sort of vindication.

**

A/N: So, originally some of the problems that came up were going to be worse, but you chose not only the objectively best vote option of the ones proposed but one honestly rather better than anything I would have thought up if I were a voter?

 

[The Laurent]

Note: You May Have Missed 1:6 because of an error on SV. So if you're like, "What's going on" go back and read 1:6.


1:7

Lotte couldn't say for sure whether she was really that moral a person. Yes, she tried to follow the will of the Gods, and she tried not to cheat others, and she tried to provide for her family, but 'good' people in the stories did grand things that lit up the world around them. She knew she didn't do that, and she only sometimes felt bad for that fact. It was what it was. She tried her best, and her best wasn't particularly special: it wasn't hard to be honest, to be polite when she could, to do her duty as she saw fit. These were less matters of good or evil than… than just learning not to do something so terribly wrong that only a fool could…

All of this meant that she didn't deserve a choice, and the fact that she was tempted at all to make a choice, as if… as if. It was like being under the shade of a dead tree, that feeling in her guts. She'd won, she'd done all of that, but it didn't give her any special authority, didn't make her better than average, certainly didn't give her the right… didn't.

"No," Lotte said, trying to ignore the struggling man near her, muffled and tied up but still dangerous. "I will take him to the village so that they can charge him in the courts." She let out a long, slow breath. A sigh. She only realized in that moment how tense she was, how much the stress had been eating at her the whole time she'd prepared the ambush. "I will do that because it's the right thing to do, and I'm… I know the basic duties that… that everyone has to the world."

The Gods had duties to the world, and so did men, women, children. Everyone owed much. Everyday, ordinary decency was something that, just maybe, Lotte could manage, even feeling as she did now, like a bruise that would never heal, like a rotting carcass drawing flies.

Lisbeth was staring at her, but Lotte didn't let herself see whatever was in her eyes, in the set of her face, in her ears. She didn't want it.

"I… but I will not tell you what to do. I am not your Master or Liege, and even if I was, I wouldn't have any right to command you. I'm an eighteen year old peasant girl, nothing like an authority over right and wrong. You can do," Lotte said, reaching a hand out, almost touching Lisbeth's hands, which were trembling, "Whatever you want. You can come with me, to testify against him, or even to defend him, to accuse me of lying about it. You can flee, you could go into the village and see what they'd do, you could… I'll help you do whatever you want to do, other than freeing him. Even then, you could try to do that if you wanted." Lotte took a breath. "Please, don't do that. But it'd be me stopping you, not me forbidding you."

Lisbeth looked at her, and Lotte looked up to meet her eyes. Then she flinched away from the awe she saw there. Why? How? It wasn't deserved, either way.

"Oh," Lisbeth said, as soft as a prayer. Speaking of, Lotte would have a lot of prayers and offerings to give after this. "Then I want…"

They, all three of them, seemed to be waiting to hear it. Even Lisbeth seemed uncertain about what she truly wanted, but at last she spoke. "I want to leave. If… I'll take anything from the camp that you see fit to give me, but I want the pipes. I can't stand to go with him, to condemn him, save him, or neither. I can't face it, can't understand it, can't justify it." She looked back at the rats, what few of whom hadn't scattered in shock. They clearly had woken up themselves. She looked at them with soft, fond eyes that seemed to tell Lotte--indirectly--that everything was going to be okay.

Lotte hoped it was going to be.

*******

"You can keep all of them," Lotte said. "I don't need coin. That's not why I did this."

Lisbeth frowned, looking down at the pile of coins. They were in his campsite, and he was tied to a tree, unable to shout out, and blindfolded too. Even so, there was a feeling in the air, the knowledge that he was nearby.

It made Lotte feel like she was a bandit trying to split loot, more than anything else.

"Take one. Just one," Lisbeth said, holding up a silver coin. "To remember."

Lotte nodded, not quite willing to fight. She could use the coin, and it could be the brother of the first one, another memorial.

"Is there anything else you could want? Be honest," Lisbeth said.

"The cloth for the tent, but… you need it more," Lotte said. "Another knife, if he has one, just to make sure I have… spares." Lotte bit her lip. "That's it."

"What about his clothes?" Lisbeth asked.

Lotte suddenly felt as if she were trapped, as if her leg must have fallen into some sort of snare. She didn't even know why she felt like that, just that there was a chill down her spine. "What about them?"

"I was just thinking, you probably won't be as reminded of him, and they are nice clothes. You could have them done in for cloth, and make something nice to wear."

Lotte relaxed, though she again didn't know why she'd tensed up at all. She glanced through the clothes, while Lisbeth looked at the notes Aldrich had brought along, and the little trinkets, and then at the bottom of the pack, a few small gems that looked remarkably valuable.

"Oh, Aldrich," Lotte said. "Security?"

Security against what? Famine, perhaps, or a long run of bad luck. He hadn't needed the money here at all, not really.

Lotte didn't know how to process it, the way that a person could be so many things to one person, and yet also so terrible. The clothes were nice, and out of curiosity, Lotte slipped one of his shirts on, shifted so that her chest was less visible, squared her shoulders, and stood there for a moment.

"You know, it doesn't quite fit you, but you're a very big person," Lisbeth said.

Lotte had the presence of mind to smile, and even asked, "Or are you small?"

Lisbeth snorted, and went about her business. Lotte helped Lisbeth pack up, and Lisbeth gave a small bag to hold the clothes in, so that she could take them with her when she was bringing Aldrich to justice.

Finally, she stepped up in front of Lotte. "You know, yeah, the shirt… huh. It's easy to forget whose shirt it is, when you're in it."

"What?" Lotte asked.

Lisbeth stepped a little closer and whispered. "Master Aldrich said you were sweet on me. Are you?"

"He's not your Master anymore. You've… you've become a journeywoman," Lotte said, hoping to distract her. Hoping, even, to get into some sort of strange argument. She was standing there with clothes, a coin, and a knife in a bag. She'd done a lot and risked a lot, and at the moment that payment seemed far more than enough.

It even seemed generous, by the wounds of the Gods.

"Lotte, could you please answer?" Lisbeth asked. Her eyes were wide, her whiskers twitching. "It isn't easy for me to ask, you must know that."

"...perhaps a little bit, yes," Lotte admitted, quietly. The words had to force themselves out of her throat.

"It might be awhile before I see you again," Lisbeth admitted, looking up at Lotte, stepping even closer. But she moved slowly, as if Lotte were an animal that would spook easily.

Lotte frowned, looking at Lisbeth, head tilted downward.

"It will be, but I plan on seeing you again, someday. It can't be now, I need to go on the road, I need to prove that I can be a Rat Piper, even without Aldrich around to… to help me." Lisbeth whispered it. "And he really did help me, whatever else he also did."

"I'm not going to argue with you," Lotte said. She wasn't sure she agreed, but she also knew she didn't know enough about him.

"Good. Very good. I'm not going to see you for a while, but I will see you again, and I will miss you, I think. I can't know for sure," Lisbeth admitted, her ears carefully unmoving. As if she were fighting emotions. "But I can't imagine not missing you, and I can't imagine not being grateful to you, and all you've done. You could have easily hated me, easily fought Aldrich to the death. You did neither. You're the best person I know."

"I'm not," Lotte said, feeling her heart race as Lisbeth leaned up a little.

"You are, and I'd like to kiss you, just once. Before we part ways."

"I--"

Lotte looked down at her lips. They were soft and thin, pursed now into the ghost of a smile. But it wasn't hard to read Lisbeth, not really. Not now.

"Yes," Lotte confessed, feeling the tension go out of them as Lisbeth reached up and grabbed onto her shirt… Aldrich's shirt, that is. She tugged on it, her tail wrapping without thinking around Lotte's ankle as she leaped up.

They met in the middle, and it was… probably not the best first kiss on all of recorded history. No, Lotte couldn't get the angle quite right at first, and it was a little awkward, having the whiskers tickling at her chin. But then she leaned into it, a little more, and Lisbeth wrapped her other hand around Lotte's shoulder. The kiss continued, and they broke for a moment, panting.

Lotte felt fire roaring through her veins, higher and higher, her arousal almost stunning her. She usually wasn't this… it was hard, she didn't, she was--

Her thoughts were a chaotic muddle of pleasant feelings (her arm feels so nice, her fingers feel nice tugging at her shirt, I feel so warm, I feel okay), strange feelings (should be kissing her harder, why am I not, what am I), and even a few unpleasant (why am I not feeling wrong, shouldn't there be a moment, where…).

They made no sense, even to herself, but she lost herself in the second, and then the third kiss. But she pulled away before the fourth. She wasn't the best kisser, but… from the look on Lisbeth's face, she'd appreciate it too. Lisbeth looked flushed, her face red, her eyes blown wide, and Lotte had to keep from leaning in.

The fire in her belly had spread, and if she didn't stop, she had a feeling they'd do more than kiss. She didn't want that. There was no holy law (at least in the Gods Lotte knew), but it was custom to… try to keep such things to a minimum before marriage. Though that had far more to do with children than anything else.

But there was a growing sour feeling in her belly, to fight the… the lust. "No," Lotte said. "Aldrich is… he's listening."

Lisbeth paled. "Oh."

That wasn't the reason, not really, but now that she was thinking of it, that was weird, even if he might not be able to hear that much.

"Yes," Lotte said.

"I liked kissing you."

"I did too," Lotte admitted, with a flush. She wanted to do more than that, and not in the way they'd about to do. When she thought of it, she thought of romance, of going to harvest festivals together, of working close together, of paying a visit to her house… but then again, Lotte was an adventurer and Lisbeth was a wanderer.

How would that even work?

"I should go. But you should take some of the notes. I found the ones on fire rats. I won't be using it. And there's other bits of evidence of his fire plan."

"I will," Lotte said.

"Good luck, and may the Gods be with you," Lisbeth said. "I am glad I got to meet you."

"I'm… not that special… but I'm glad I got to meet you, too."

She was glad, too, that she'd learned something. How long would she have gone making wrong assumptions about Beastfolk?

Lisbeth smiled.

"Hey, may I ask: what do you plan on doing?"

"I'm going to be a real Rat Piper. I'll keep my prices as low as the fellowship will allow, and see if I can do it on my own."

"There's a fellowship?" Lotte asked. "Not a guild?"

"Rat Pipers are too independent. It'd be like an adventurers' guild," Lisbeth said.

Lotte nodded.

Today seemed to be a day for learning all sorts of new things, good and bad.

*******

They talked about it for months afterwards, and then stopped for a time, before restarting with even greater fervency. The way, in late afternoon, a girl some of them had seen around stepped out of the forest, Aldrich the Piper tied up and well in hand, wearing two shirts, one of them surprisingly nice. Her shoulders were straight, and even those who had seen her before had never noted just how tall she was. It was as if she were on parade, as if something had stiffened her spine. Every so often she'd stop, brushing down her overshirt with rather more care than expected.

This archer, this tall woman, looked so strange, moving with confidence. Aldrich tried to escape twice, but was caught instantly, tugged back.

It was only her hair, and her features, that even told her as much of a girl, obscured as she was by the second shirt, and the air of martial grandeur.

Afterwards they told stories of how she must have fought against impossible odds to triumph unharmed, but at the time they just noted how unmarked either of them were, other than a few tiny bruises, and a good deal of mud and dirt.

Stories, later, took out the mud and dirt, and changed many other details. It was first told accurately, though, by people in taverns, and then by men to their wives. Sure, a few details weren't correct, but did that matter? They caught the essence of it.

They caught the new Adventurer Lotte as she walked into the town center. They gathered, curious, those that could--which were few enough--abandoning their work to see what was happening.

(In retellings, the entire village was of course there, and perhaps people the next village over as well.)

She straightened up and announced, to all assembled. "I have captured Aldrich the Rat Piper in the act of ambushing me, and of plotting arson upon Friedrich and Hilda. As a freeholder under the Lord of these lands, I make this arrest, and ask all to hear the evidence I have, and ask aid that he be held and the Lord contacted."

The Lord, of course, would have dungeons for holding those accused of serious crimes, the kinds of outsiders that couldn't be kept on threat of village disapproval and little else.

She looked around as the headman came forward, gaping, but--or so the stories said--very impressed.

"He also comittted trespass by magic," Lotte said, after a quiet pause that they all interpreted as wise years later, and awkward days later.

"Of course, honorable Lotte, right this way…"

End of Chapter 1

******

Adventure XP!

Successfully Completing an Adventure: 2 XP
Completion with Style: 1 XP
Fight with Aldrich: 1 XP
As a Hunter, did you bring the wild's bounty back to your people? Did you protect someone or do the right thing?: Yes. Yes he did: 2XP
=
6/10 XP to Level 2

******

A/N: And thus ends the first adventure. Flip your holy books to Chapter 2, Verse 1 of the Book of Lotte next week!