Blue's Quests (Day 3)(4/8)

Penny stared up at the massive wagon laying sideways across the street. “And you’ve got a plan for that?” Given that the siren’s outfit amounted to a tight-fitting cocktail dress, her reticence towards physical labor made a lot of sense—not only was her body obviously not accustomed to the hours of effort that unloading the boxes would require, her outfit would likely be ruined in the process.

“For the wagon itself, probably not, but I think I can manage to unload the boxes with a gadget.” The artificer class was the one that Elsie felt most comfortable with. She hadn’t yet had an opportunity to actually use her diviner or erudite active abilities—or rather, she had stored an ability with sensate, but hadn’t yet had a reason to use it—but the tiny magical gadgets she crafted felt intuitive and natural.

If Lily hadn’t made a point of calling out her brownie heritage, she probably wouldn’t have made the connection, but Elsie assumed that part of how the succubus had done whatever she’d done when she imbued her with magic was enhancing the abilities that were already there. If her knack for fixing things like computers was actually a result of her Fae heritage, then the useful tools she cobbled together were an extension of that same heritage.

She had spent 20 GP buying some miscellaneous crafting supplies from a merchant a couple streets down from Tailor’s Way, and was in the process of assembling some of them on the cobblestones of the narrow street while Penny watched and waited.

“Can I do anything to help?”

Despite her offer, the blonde bard didn’t appear overly anxious to get her hands dirty. Still, there was something that needed to be done, and since Elsie was likely to be occupied for the next few minutes, she accepted. “Yeah—figure out which shop these were supposed to go to. The quest description just says ‘to their intended recipient’ but I’m not even sure if it’s on this street.”

Penny glanced at the cart. It was obvious that it was intended to be pulled by some kind of animals, but the yoke had snapped when it turned on its side and there was no trace of the beasts of burden now. Tailor’s Way was only about fifteen feet wide and she had no idea what could have happened to cause the cart to tip in its narrow confined, but it was now blocking traffic almost completely. There were tiny gaps on both sides where individuals could squeeze through one at a time, but she’d watched another cart back out when the driver realized the way was impassible.

“Got it. Let me see what I can find.”

Five minutes later, she was triumphantly holding up a slip of paper she’d managed to retrieve from a small pouch attached to the side of the driver’s seat of the wagon.

“Found this bill of lading. That’s weird, right? This is supposed to be a fantasy universe.”

Elsie didn’t look away from the metal framework she was assembling. She was nearly complete, with only a few rounded metal rods to finish attaching before it was ready, and she didn’t want to mess it up this close to the end. Her tone was distracted as she explained, “Bills of Lading in our world date back thousands of years. Stheno probably dealt with them.”

“Really? Huh, I had no idea.” Penny lifted the document to read through it, then sighed. Her translation effect had worn off at some point on the walk over, and while she had no trouble understanding the English girl, the words on the paper she held were indecipherable. Rather than give up, though, she kept searching until she noticed a logo of some kind, then scanned the street looking for a matching sign.

She found it at about the same time that Elsie put the finishing touches on her newest item.

Box of Helpers

Contains a small number of helpful constructs who will perform physical tasks for their creator.

She had already used her once a day ability to make a permanent item—in this case, Kevin’s watch—so they would only last an hour before breaking down, but as a dozen small mechanical constructs that looked like clockwork fairies marched out of the wooden box on the ground, a grin lit up Elsie’s face. It was exactly the kind of thing she had always wished she had access to growing up—a tiny army of helpers, ready to take on the physical task in front of her.

Penny pointed down the street. “Want to pop in and make sure they’re ready?”

Elsie nodded, and the two women turned to walk towards the shop. A squad of tiny humanoid mechanical creatures followed after them, following after the brownie like ducklings trailing their mother as they approached the building.

The sign on the front was polished wood, with letters that were not only burned in but still appeared to be actively smoldering. Faint wisps of smoke floated up from jagged letters in a script Elsie didn’t recognize, but the icon next to them—a surprisingly elegant drawing of a bra and panties—gave her a clue about what kind of apparel the store offered.

The fact that there was an entire wagonload of boxes slated for delivery there spoke volumes about how Lily intended the rest of their adventures to progress. Elsie and Penny exchanged glances for a moment, then the siren turned and marched in with the smaller brunette and her miniature mechanical army following close behind.

What greeted them when they marched through the door of the shop was an upscale boutique that was obviously badly in need of stock. While the wooden dummies that lined the walls and grand display window were shockingly lifelike—and disturbingly anatomically correct—the majority of them were bare.

“Are you with the harpy adventurer?” The woman who called out from behind the counter was taller than either Penny or Elsie, and sturdily built. It was only because the interior of the store was well lit with glowing magical crystals set into the ceiling that the two women were able to tell that the proprietor’s skin was a deep, almost mahogany red rather than black, though the twin horns that curved gently up from her forehead would have suggested a non-human origin even without any other clues.

“That’s us. You need the crates brought in from the street?” Elsie’s slightly eager tone brought a gentle smile to Penny’s lips, as she watched the younger woman do her best to play the role of adventurer.

The woman nodded, and Elsie turned to begin directing her small army of mechanical helpers back onto the street. While she did so, Penny turned to the vaguely-demonic looking woman and asked, “Blue didn’t mention any kind of reward for the task—did she offer to do it out of the goodness of her heart, or…?”

The shopkeeper laughed. “I told her that I could get her a better outfit than the one she was wearing. Offer stands, too—I can’t run the shop without my wares, if you two will bring them in, I’ll happily upgrade your kit.” She extended a hand across the counter. “Mik. Or, I guess, if your party member is anything to go by, you should call me Red?”

Penny shook the woman’s head and laughed. “Whatever floats your boat, Red.”

A moment later, one of the boxes from the overturned cart appeared to float its way through the doorway. Only when Penny leaned to the side was she able to make out the four small automatons walking beneath it, courtesy of Elsie. The brownie herself followed behind a moment later and asked, “Where do you want them?”

“In the back. Just stack them anywhere, I’ll get them unpacked and unloaded over the next few days.” Mik nodded over to a door leading deeper into the shop, and the crate slowly headed in that direction, at Elsie’s command.

The first problem that Hazel and Tess needed to solve to arrange the required delivery of fresh milk for Overflowing Cups was finding it. The expanded quest description included only the names of the two establishments—one expecting a delivery of milk, one which was supposed to have it to be delivered.

Neither name was one that Kevin recognized, which meant they were likely both Lily specials, a fact that caused Tess some measure of trepidation when she and the nymph set out from The Long Rest with a vague set of directions provided by Blue.

The one thing the harpy did clearly remember about Overflowing Cups was the magical logo that adorned the front window. Staring at the illusory outline of an abundantly busty humanoid cow-woman holding up a pair of mugs filled with milk in front of her breasts, Tess could see why. It wasn’t overtly pornographic, but looked like it belonged in front of a sleazy strip club instead of a building that looked like it had been plucked out of 1950s small-town America and dropped in the middle of a medieval fantasy city.

When Tess and Hazel stepped inside, they were greeted by the slightly incongruous sight of what appeared to be an old-fashioned soda bar. Behind the counter, a tall muscular woman was in the middle of pouring a pitcher of milk into a couple of glasses for what looked like a couple of teens on dates. The fact that the customers were two dwarves, a literally flame-haired girl with onyx-black skin, and a nervous looking young man who might have just been a vaguely fish-like human, while the woman behind the counter had the piebald black-on-white skin of a classic dairy cow was the only sign that the door hadn’t led to another time and place altogether.

“C’mon in, take a seat—wait, hold on, you aren’t adventurers, are you?” The cow-woman slid the glasses of milk across the counter to the dwarves and walked closer to the door as she addressed the two new arrivals, and it required Tess to seize control of her reflexes to avoid gawking as she realized that the breasts the other woman sported were almost cartoonishly large. Even Hazel’s seemed reasonable by comparison, as the nymph was merely extremely busty, while the cow-woman sported a pair of orbs each much larger than her own head, held up only by a leather vest that struggled to contain them.

“Overflowing cups indeed.” Tess muttered the comment under her breath, which brought a giggle to Hazel’s lips before the vine-clad woman turned to respond to the woman’s question.

“We are! I think one of our friends came in here yesterday, she mentioned that you were looking for help retrieving a delivery?” Hazel seemed to have no trouble taking either the odd appearance of the establishment, or the bartender, in stride. She offered a sunny smile, and was greeted by a toothy grin as the muscular cow-woman nodded.

“The blue one, right? She came in here, sampled a glass of milk—free for adventurers, of course, unless you want one of the special vintages we have—and I mentioned that the regular shipment from the dairymaid ranch is running behind. If I don’t get it by tomorrow, I’ll have to close the place down while I go investigate myself.”

Even as the woman spoke, she pulled out two large glasses from under the counter, grabbed the pitcher of milk, and poured. She slid them across the counter towards Tess and Hazel, then added, “You look thirsty—please, drink up. I’m Maybelle.”

The moment Tess neared the glass, it was as though her senses lit up all over again. After a day spent mostly inside as she learned to adjust to the heightened awareness her familiar bond provided, the white-haired young woman’s eyes went wide. “That smells incredible!”

She eagerly reached out and picked up the offered glass from the counter, lifted it to her lips, and started to chug. Sweet, cool, delicious milk filled her mouth and it was all Tess could do not to drain the glass in its entirety right then and there.

Hazel was a little more restrained in her approach, taking a small sip as her fellow party-member let out a sensual moan of delight, then commenting, “This is fantastic, thank you Maybelle! We’d love to help you out, but unfortunately Blue didn’t happen to catch where the ranch is. Could you point us in that direction?”

Tess lowered the glass only to breathe, then lifted it to her lips. As Maybelle gave both of them another toothy smile and started to give directions to an establishment outside of the north gates of the city, the selkie tipped the glass back to catch the last few drops it contained, then let out a throaty moan.

“I’m not even—I don’t normally like milk, but that was–”

“It’s how we stay in business, dear one. Best milk around, accept no substitutes!”

Hazel took another drink from her own glass, and then another, before sliding the now half-empty thing over to Tess. The other woman accepted it without hesitation, lifted it to her lips, and let sweet, creamy liquid flood her newly sensitive tongue.

Only when that, too, was empty did the selkie seem to realize what she was doing, and her extremely fair skin suddenly turned faintly pink as she blushed. “I’m sorry, it’s just… that was really good.”

Both Hazel and Maybelle let out warm laughs at that. The former reached over and patted Tess’ arm softly. “I don’t think she minds, dear. I’m sure there’s more available for you if we get that shipment, though?”

She glanced over towards the cow-woman for confirmation, and received a nod. “Of course—you get me that shipment here before the end of the day, and I’ll give you 50 GP each. Do it before dinner and I’ll throw in a free glass of any of our specials. If you think our regular milk is good, just wait until you get some of the good stuff inside you.”

Cutter’s Alley was one of the locations that Kevin was able to give directions to easily—it was his standard ‘the PCs need to meet up with someone shady’ starting point, and had featured in nearly all of the campaigns he’d run in Adventuria. Unfortunately, while Hwa and Blue were provided with good directions to the alley itself, it was on the far southern edge of the city in the more run-down and seedy part of town.

By the time the pair managed to navigate their way there, Blue was going slightly stir-crazy from the need to remain close to the flightless kumiho, while Hwa’s teeth were on edge from the constant need to remind the easily distracted harpy not to dart off and investigate every shiny object or unusual person that caught her attention.

“Pay attention. That is the inn the directions mentioned, the ‘Rooster’s Mocking’.”

Lily, it turned out, was not the only one capable of giving establishments suggestive names—Kevin just usually tried to keep his more subtle.

Hwa gestured at the sharp turn into the narrow alley just past the run-down brothel masquerading as a place of respite. “We have already needed to band together to save you from the consequences of your magpie instincts.”

Despite the fox spirit’s sharp tone, Blue wore an excited smile. The pair were already attracting no small amount of attention as extremely attractive women wearing clothing that would only have looked out of place in the brothel by being too high quality.

The fact that Hwa looked ready to kill and eat anyone who accosted them was providing the pair with a measure of protection, but the harpy’s easy smile and obvious curiosity at her surroundings drew the attention of a tall, thin man with a pencil mustache in dirty leather armor, who was doing his best to surreptitiously beckon the harpy over away from her more obviously hostile party member.

When Blue began to meander in that direction, Hwa’s hand shot out and wrapped around the monk’s wrist with surprising speed. The harpy might have been the one put into a physically-oriented class, but the kumiho demonstrated that her natural talents were not exclusively oriented in sorcery and potion-craft.

She hissed quietly through her teeth at Blue, then reminded her, “I am doing this so that you will agree to forgive me. Please do not make it more difficult than it will already be.”

By now, Hwa had only a single stack of the accursed humbling poison remaining, as the rest of the party had been willing to simply accept her apology as soon as it was given. Only the harpy had held out for anything in exchange, a fact which the kumiho was unlikely to forget anytime soon. However, while the cost of the poison remaining active was no longer potentially lethal—since the single stack would cost only a single HP per day—the fact that she was already the only member of the party whose HP had dropped below its starting point made her leery of antagonizing the bird while the leverage still held.

When it was done, however, and the poison was gone–

“I think that’s him.” Blue lifted a feathered arm and pointed directly at a man standing a short distance down the alley. He was wearing an oversized trench coat and had a rickety cart next to him, and his eyes widened as he noticed the obvious adventurer pointing his way.

Hwa turned and began to march towards him, muttering loudly as she did, “Have you never heard of subtlety? Now he knows that we came here looking for him. I had planned to approach him without calling out that we sought him in particular.”

“If you didn’t want me to point at him, you should have said something.” Blue seemed unoffended by Hwa’s implications, and added earnestly, “I can’t read your mind. If you want something, tell me.”

The words Hwa muttered were translated by the tongues spell, but Blue wasn’t exactly sure what ‘baby dog’ ‘seizure’ and ‘bugs’ had to do with each other. Before she could ask, though, the woman had stepped in front of the trench coat-wearing man and demanded, “I would have words with you.”

He looked her up and down, glanced over to Blue, then suddenly turned and sprinted down the alleyway, leaving his cart behind him.