Duty Session 266: Convoy Escort Quest I

The convoy is ready. The Fall Harvest Festival may be over, but the harvest season itself is not. Carts loaded with all sorts of agricultural goods are ready to be transported from the farms to the closest city, and sure enough, Adventurers have been called on to provide their help.

Uta is here, staff at the ready, wings fluttering in excitement. "A convoy! A convoy! For once, we get to /ride/ somewhere. Instead of having to walk. That's something!"

Yeowang nods a greeting to Uta, and to the Landers. "This is where adventurers are being hired to escort a convoy?" she asks. She seems OK with walking, though, showing no inclination to hopping on the cart. "If this is the place," she says, "Then I am ready as I am." As she is does involve her long hair coiled up in a loose bun, and a lightweight coat.

For her part, Tenko has been lingering around the area after the harvest festival ended. She'd been helping clean up, assisting with rebuilding where needed, and now that there was a convoy heading out, the kitsune ronin had arrived to assist, "It is good to see you again." She says to Uta, giving a bow. She turns to Yeowang and does the same, "And you as well."

"It is, indeed, here that Advenurers are hired to escort a duty!", a mustachioed man interjects after Yeowang's question.

"Mister Bumpkin!", exclaims Uta.

"Mister Country Bumpkin. Mister Country Cornelius Bumpkin! I know you!" "Uta Furore, right?", says the man.

"So we meet again."

"I mean, I'm pretty active as a liaison between the farmers and the Hunters' Guild..."

"That would explain it."

Uta turns to Tenko, "Oh! It's you! Tenko, right? Nice to see you again! It's like a class reunion, except we never went to school together. That... we know of. Who knows. Maybe we did, and we do not recognize each other. It's a small world, after all. Exactly half the size of our original Earth, according to Jazz. Alba, I mean. The planet we're on."

"Now wait a minute, right there!", exclaims a burly Gnome with the annoying habit of violating people's personal space and jabbing his finger at them. "What is this?! We asked for a bunch of GOOD Adventurers. The fighting type. Not the cheerleaders who are supposed to spur 'em from the sidelines! I don't know what to do with this bunch of scrawny pretty faces!"

He glances sideways at Tenko's mask. "...or...maybe not even that. Can't even tell how pretty that one is."

Yeowang nods to the mustachioed man and offers Tenko a bow, and she says, "It's good to work with you. Hopefully this will go smoothly." Alas, it seems it's not to be so. When asked for her qualifications, she says somewhat tersely, "My qualification is that I am here and an adventurer. If you feel I'm not sufficiently qualified, you're welcome to proceed /without me/ and see how you fare." And then she stares down the Lander with an aristocratic scowl that doesn't actually accomplish anything other than conveying her opinion of their relative positions. She is pretty tall for a female human, and she doesn't so much as flinch under the man's skepticism.

Tenko does not move her mask when the Lander brings up that he can't see how pretty she is, "My job is not to impress you." She says to the man, arms crossing over her abdomen to rest on the knot of her belt, "My job is to keep the convoy safe. If you don't mind, we are wasting time." She motions for him to be on his way. If he doesn't like it, he's always free to stay back until the next convoy.

Uta looks confused. "We were good enough for other quests? So, I suppose we're good enough for this one as well?" She squints at the Gnome. "...Are you trying to get a discount?"

"Actually, that's an excellent idea. I demand a discount!"

After much questioning and bargaining, with possibly the Adventurers' expected remuneration getting docked a bit, the convoy sets out - and doesn't get more than half a mile down the road before running into trouble.

There're hungry monsters, waiting in ambush on a hill, seeking easy prey - and your convoy looks like it'd fit the bill. As the lead wagon round a bend, you see a goblin scout - and the monster scout sees you. There's a shout of discovery from it, and there's a shout of acknowledgement in response - an alarming amount of responses.

They're common monsters, but they've got bows and the high ground, and you have a lot of sitting duck targets. This is going to be difficult...

Yeowang looks mildly taken aback by the Lander, but proceeds along once we get underway. It's not very far out from the starting village that she finally turns on the Lander, though it's just then that we come under fire from some bandits, and her comment to him is cut short as she takes an arrow in the back. "Argh," she growls, and she'll scoot behind the wagon, pulling out her own bow and returning fire, though with the bandits holding higher ground, and her not having great visibility, she's unable to make herself particularly useful, other than as an arrow sponge.

No doubt the group may earn their pay back by the end of this, if they keep all the Landers alive and their goods safe.

The attack from the hill gets Tenko to frown. She could break out her bow, but the range is a bit father than she would like. So instead she opts for a more magical approach.

She steps out into the open so she can have a good chance to make this work, and conjures a cloud above the attacking monsters. Jagged spikes of ice begin to rain down on them, impaling some outright, and scattering others.

Uta vocalizes a virtuoso operatic aria; the handle of her staff illuminates in sync with the melody, moving with the variations in pitch. Tendrils of colored light interwine and converge towards the gem on top, and once they've been absorbed in a quantity sufficient to make it glow, a blinding discharge of light is shot towards the goblins, blinding and shattering a group of archers.

"Hold on!", exclaims Uta, and redirects her singing to a soothing melody; the staff behave in a manner similar as before, but this time the multicolor light that comes from the staff is more subdued, and shines on Yeowang, restoring some HP. "And now, to remove some of those arrows..."

A few hours pass by without incident. Miles of nature go by - giving unspoiled views one would be hard-pressed to find in the real world.

The sun sets in the distance, and camp is set up. Dinner passes without incident... but when it comes time to turn down for the night, there's a shortage of hands and supplies.

Tents need to be patched up and set up. Night watch needs to be set. Wagons need to be repaired. There's a lot of things to get done before the first day of this trip can be brought to a close.

Yeowang breathes a little more easily as Uta heals her, and the bandits eventually leave off after enough have been injured by the return fire. The rest of the day is mercifully uneventful, and it seems like it's time to make camp. But before camp, it looks like there's a few chores that need to be dealt with. Yeowang is not a chore person, and she has to resist the urge to call for her father's company. They kept experts on call for just this sort of business. But, needs must, and she will attempt some of the wagon repairs, as those seem most cricical to getting underway tomorrow. Hammer and nails and planks become patches and supports and bracing, and the one wagon, at least, is ready for another day's journey.

Tenko is a painter. She's no good with hammers and nails and needle and thread.

She certainly tries her best to sew up a hole in one of the tents, but it's not very good and she may have actually made the tent worse somehow.

There is the ruinous noise of parts of a wooden cart falling against parts of another, or possibly the same, wooden cart.

Uta stands next to this pile of boards, holding a hammer. "...whoops..."

Another night of sleep passes, with the adventurers stuck sleeping in the tent that did not end up as well patched as it should've. Luckily it didn't rain... much. Just a little.

Ok, more than just a little.

It didn't completely wash out the camp, so there's that!

When the morning arrives, Uta walks out of her tent, in her slime-pattern nightie, yawns, and stretches. She clicks her tongue twice with a dry mouth, hair sticking out in all directions, and after looking around sleepily, she materializes a bar of soap from her inventory and heads for the nearby lake, ready to menu-bathe and groom.

All would have gone well, were it not that, on the way there, she bumps into a mysterious barrier.

She squints, and tries to follow the nature of this mysterious impediment. A little examination eventually reveals it to be a burly Lander bandit followed by a bunch of other Lander bandits. "We'll make this short and sweet. Drop your stuff. Drop any attempt at resistance. Drop dead."

Yeowang is making her own way to wash up in the morning, watches the bandits accosting Uta with a skeptical eye, and when they casually threaten us all, she smirks. "Well," she says. "It's not like you were going to get out of here alive anyhow. But it's nice of you to be morally reprehensible, so we don't have to feel a bit bad about it." And having said that, she pulls out all the stops and lays out an absolute beatdown on these bandits. It is not pretty. Mostly it's hard klcks, but there's elements of boxing and Tae Kwon Do and a handful of other styles. She definitely exemplifies the 'mixed' in mixed martial arts, doing the most efficient move in any situation to beat these bandits down.

Tenko's not the type to take threats lightly. The bandits also, at least in her mind, pose little threat.

She'd rather not kill them if she doesn't have to, but that's not going to stop her from unsheathing her katana and engaging with them at close range.

She's going to strike, and then give them a chance to retreat after, if they don't persist. If they do, then they'll meet the full force of the kitsune's blade and may not survive the encounter.

Uta inhales. Simply inhales. Deep.

And intones a note. A single, pure note, which grows louder and louder and louder....

...worryingly louder...

...the air is showing /visible ripples/ around Uta worrying louder...

...culminating in a SHOCKWAVE departs from Uta louder!

If the bandits were getting beaten up badly by Yeowang and Tenko before, well, the shockwave is enough to blast them off into the distance, running for their life.

The second day of traveling draws to a close - an eventful day, and one the convoy is glad to put behind them.

Camp is set up, the sun is setting. People are injuried by the ridiculous number of bandits that was encountered in the forest that day.

"...Oh, right," comments Uta. "Maybe I should change out of my nightie and into my martial arts medical uniform...", she comments, and disappears in the distance, expression still sleepy, hair still sticking out in all directions.

Still carrying a bar of soap since the morning.

Yeowang travels the rest of the day after kicking the bandits to the metaphorical curb, and she's feeling pretty upbeat, but the end of that second day brings more problems that they could have mentioned before we're parked for the night. Medical attention? She knows a bit of sports medicine, but aches and pains and sprains and pulls are not what these Landers are suffering from. She can't do much for mysterious things like 50 percent HP loss, and some of the odd status effects they seem to have come up with. "They seem to have quite high expectations of our performance," she notes. "I see now why they thought they needed to verify our capability at the beginning. They were clearly expecting a great deal more than fighting off bandits. A shame they weren't forthcoming about -that-. I would absolutely say that any breach of contract is on /their/ part for not saying at the start what our duties would consist of."

Tenko's healing skills are...Lacking.

The kitsune none the less does her best to try to help the others, but she's no healer and it shows. She wanders away from camp, looking to find some medicinal herbs, like the kind she has seen Merek use in his shop, but never the less returns empty handed after a while. Even if she found some, she didn't really have enough skill to properly extract them.

Uta would be definitely qualified for this!

...If she were awake.

Instead, she's grabbed to tend to the wounded in her half-asleep state, and uncerimoniously barked at.

Confused and still not quite conscious, she attempts to channel one of her magical Songs of Healing through her staff, except she accidentally channels it through the wrong hand, and the conduit ends up being the bar of soap.

It is quite the show though. Geometrical lights dance on the bar, and multicolor bubbles leave towarsd the wounded.

On the plus side, they will mostly, if not completely, be healed.

As a side effect of the magic, well, seems like they'll be /very/ slippery for the next twenty-four hours...

"Oh! This is that quest for escorting the convoy, right?"

You're so close. The destination is *just* over the hill. And then these other adventurers who are out throwing fireballs at squirrels see you and come over to you. "You don't mind if we join up... right?"

Yeowang blinks as the party is accosted by some adventurers out for a stroll, trying to cut themselves in for our hard-earned reward. "I don't think so," she says to them, her tone firm. They begin some blathering fast-talk about 'ad hoc parties' that they claim entitles them to join in at the last moment, but it seems Yeowang knows a thing or two about Lander law. Or maybe about real life law that the game designers repurposed for here. Something about them not having spent enough time actually /with/ the caravan to qualify for the reward, though between that and her offering to punch them hard enough that they'll need a dentist is enough to dissuade them.

Tenko decides to let Yeowang and Uta handle it. She is, for all intents and purposes, just a bodyguard here. The others are the ones who have been negotiating with the Landers, and in this case, other adventuers.

She would vote against having folks join at the end, however. This quest was hard enough, especially with their smaller group. If they'd asked to join at the start it'd be a different story.

"Well, I suppose we could arrange something...", Uta trails off, casually, finger tapping her lips while her slightly crossed eyes stare off in the distance. "Ok, fine, you can join us. Even get a cut of the profit. But before we do that..."

She flicks her menu open, and a roll of paper shimmers into existence, along with writing implements (staff shimmering out of existence to make room for them).

"Yamato, Saturday, October 12, Year 400 After the Scrapped Princess War. The following is a LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACT between Uta Furore, (hereinafter called the "Undisputed Ruler") and ______ _____ ______ (hereinafter called the "Underlings").

In consideration of the mutual agreements herein contained, both parties agree that The Underlings will be subject to the authority of the Undisputed Ruler for the duration of the cooperation established by..."

Yeowang's successful at mollifying the newcomer and Uta's burst of surprisingly spot-on legalese adds enough uneasiness to the situation that the party runs for their life (and unindentured status).

The party eventually reaches the city, crosses the gates, and stops at the general markets where the goods are delivered.

As they are unloaded, the Gnome from earlier approaches the party.

"You were the most pathetic group of cheerleaders I've ever seen," he grumbles, tossing each adventurer a big bag of coins. "...but I guess you made /passable/ adventurers after all. Here, have what we had agreed upon."

After some thought, he adds, "...and a little extra. You kind of sucked back there, but I've seen some pretty good adventurers do worse than you. You've deserved a little bonus." And that said, a second bag of coin is tossed at them.

Yeowang smirks as the would-be add-ons are run off, and she will come in to get the caravan properly disposed of. She's quite surprised at the reward, but she's not complaining, stuffing the gold into her inventory quite quickly. "That'll buy quite a bit of real food," she agrees thoughtfully. She looks to Uta and Tenko. "I guess we did better than I thought. It was touch and go there a couple times."