May Day

OOC: Moving everyone towards the farms

The halflings made some compelling arguments, even the elves had to admit that and after an hour of negotiating they acquiesced. It was that far anyway and they could collect their reward from the village, so everybody would win. The sun was at its highest point when the party exited the forest. It was a nice day and everybody loosened their coats after a while now that the permanent shade of the leaves was gone. After just half an hour they came upon the two farms that Otar had told them about. From the outside nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. White smoke coming from the two chimneys indicated that at least someone was home, but who?

Despite his prodigious height for his people, Durin-Daine did not let pride envelope him as he listened to the halflings chatter among themselves. Of course the elves are selfish, greedy blighters...nigh-immortality and inherent haughtiness have ever combined to make them insufferable. His father Thoradin Silverspike, thrice-curse those who had slain him, had little love for the elves, and Durin-Daine had seen little in his own travels to make him think differently. He frowned as he walked back towards the village at the thought however: he'd seen plenty of vileness in men and dwarf alike, and he did not doubt the halflings were capable of evil as well. The whole world is filled with folk, good and bad. I suppose some knife-ears with kind hearts and strong spines must exist as well.

As they approached the seemingly normal home stead Duskhammer slipped his sword free and casually laid the flat of his blade on his shoulder.

Bryn loved the forest, although he'd been born and raised in the city he always felt more at home with the trees.  He was tense as he walked through the woods, thinking about what had transpired on their previous outing, but the smell of the loam and moss put him more at ease.  

When they came out into the farmyard clearing he looked around at what appeared to be a perfectly normal setting.

"Seems pretty quiet for having been raided by the Barbarian hoard."

As he speaks he opens his pack and pulls a small rat from it. He gently sets the creature on the ground and watches as it runs toward the house. when the creature gets close Bryn closes his eyes and focuses to see what his tiny friend is sensing.

OOC: Sending familiar in to scout, hopefully he can get through a crack in the wall to see whats inside.

OOC: I'M BACK BITCHES! Let's get rolling!

Lath drew his weapon and nodded to Bryn, knowing full well the power of his mage brother and how he could commune with the rat. "Let us look for who is inside, perhaps we will find the answers we seek."

The party carefully approached the two farms and settled behind a three feet high hedge in order to get a closer look. Bryn releashed his rat and the trusty creature skittered forward. The cobblestone wall and small steel-framed gate looked enormous through the rat's eyes. Without effort it scurried below a steel bar and sniffed the dusty courtyard. Here the first, subtle signs of a struggle appeared as it moved across the handle of a broken broom, broken hatchet just left of it. It was close to the door as it flung open and two burly men exited. Two regular humans, albeit with great beards and long, greasy hair, clothed in simple woolen garments and scalemail. Two battle axes swungs from their hips.
The language of the eastern men of Valess had bits and pieces in common with the Austerian language, but it was far more harsh and gutteral. The sounds, combined with the excellent hearing of the rat, distressed the familiar a bit and it sought a safe spot in the wall before focussing the on the conversation.
The men mostly carried art objects and toys, which they threw just behind the shed. There already a large pile of furniture lay from what were probably the previous owners.
"...useless. The tencho said we should fortity the dende. Everything that doesn't help to perdan the djengo should be thrown out. We must be ready for when the djengo comes here. Not like last time..."
The door slammed shut again and the familiar shrieked. So much noise!

Lath looked around and whispered to the assembled party. "What is a tencho? Is that their leader? Perhaps we should kill this lot, and set an ambush for the leader of this rabble."

"Perhaps we should inquire about this djengo that is coming before you indulge in your violent tendencies?" Bõ said while he rubbed his bald head.

"Perhaps it is time for some planning?" He continued. "I wouldn't mind going into the house and distracting them while the rest of you cover the doorways. We can capture them and ask them nicely what they were talking about."

Bryn was still focused on the rat, speaking the words that he heard so that his companions could share in what he learned.  Unfortunately he could not see or hear his own surroundings while he concentrated on those of the rat.

Once the two were out of the way he attempted to guide the rat inside of the building to see if there were more men to deal with of if it were just the two.

After telling his companions what the men were talking about Bryn coaxed his best friend through the wall into the house. Inside the rat immediately noticed five men, four walking around, stripping planks from the furniture except for a large table and chairs where the remaining man sat. He was even bigger than the others with a face hewn from stone. Thin, black hair that fell on his shoulders combined with his pale complexion betrayed that his lineage traced back to the north-eastern mountains. He wore thick hides on his shoulders, two panther heads as his shoulder pads. The two staring predators unnerved the familiar. You realise that this man was no stranger to the woods in the south, because these panthers only lived in the south-east of the continent.
He clearly was the man in charge, barking order continuously.
"Nurlan, I want you to board up all the viterek. Ashkat! See if we can reinforce the door with ferro. Soon the rest of the tribe will be here and then will need to move on to other farms."
He looked around and growled: "Nadya!"
A woman in studded leather hurried into the room, her long, wavy brown hair flowing behind her as she went. A big, dark-green tattoo of some kind of tree marks the entire left side of her face.
"Tencho, please don't do that. I will come as requested without all that yelling."
The big man just ignored her and kept his volume although she was less than a feet away.
"Medicine man, we have dragged your entire assortment of casjpa to this place for you to create something for the djengo. Are you done already?"
"Soon, tencho, the rituals take some time. Time that must be spent meditating. Hope you understand."
The man only huffed and dismissed her with a snap of his fingers and pointing back to the adjacent room.

Bryn repeated what the leader had said and the count of men inside the building then waited a moment for the lady to walk back into her room. He then guided the familiar quietly into the room behind her to see if there were more and perhaps glean what type of ritual she was performing.

"Once we have an idea of everyone inside, we can plan their capture, or death. Either way."

Lath said as he eyed the building, watching around it for any sign of more enemies.

The rat felt little to go further into the house to peek in the next room. Only the mental bribe of a humongous piece of cheese convinced it to try. It skittered along the wall until its eyes were just around the corner. This room was obviously the bedroom, two large beds took almost all the space in the room with wooden shelves covering the outer wall. All the personal memorabilia had been thrown in a corner near the closest bed and were replaced by sundry containers. Wax candles stood everywhere and the whole room reeked of holly. Nadya chanted slow, deliberate words, but you couldn't make any sense of it. You might vaguely remember it a sounded a bit like the seer in your home town, but it definitely wasn't arcane. Her chants became whispers and with each word the shadows on the walls danced. She swayed and swayed. THUD! The sound of a broom smashing into the floor just an inch from the familiar startled the both of you. The rat fled with all its might as it heard Nadya cursing the man that tried to kill your familiar for breaking her ritual. It flitted through the wall and ran straight towards the hedge where the party was. Safety!

"I say we slay them, keep the witch alive and figure out what she is working on." Lath said and drew his weapon.

"Let's draw them outside, and ambush them in the woods. We make some racket that causes just a couple to come out and see what is happening, like animal noises." Lath said quietly to the assembled group.

"We kill those that come out and then we can enter the house to finish the job."

"Yer a bunch of bloody bastards, aren't you?" he muttered to the group, "Before ye charge in head-long, looking to die, perhaps ye might allow me to go down there and palaver with the fine barbarian folk? I spent decades in the Valess..." he paused, considering the blood that he'd split in the dusty Eastern territories..."I'm known to many of the tribes, on good terms mostly. Ye can stay here and plot to rain death upon them should this go poorly."

He knelt without waiting for a response from the group, opening his pack and removing several long leather bundles, all rolled tightly. He opened several of them, revealing clothing akin to that of the Valess tribals, as well as an odd assortment of knick-knacks and what appeared to be cosmetics. Without regard for those around him Durin-Daine striped to his small clothes, rolling the obviously Austerian garments into an empty bundle, and then redressed himself in worn tan leather boots (which he rubbed with a bit of sandy grit), brown leather trousers patched with red cloth in various places, his waist and stomach wrapped with off-white rags that he secured with a beaten bronze clasp, and over it all he donned a long grey vest, sown of some sort of scaled hide. He placed an armband embedded with various fangs on his left arm, girded himself with a belt of obsidian discs over the wrappings covering his lower torso, and finally tied bands of small bones around the tops of each of his boots. He replaced all but one of his bundles, which contained several small jars of various colored dusts, putties, and grit. He poured some of his water into a small bowl, into which he mixed a red chalky power. Using too fingers he stirred it until it became a kind of paste, which the dwarf applied to his the shaven sides of his head: two red lines on either side. He also traced several glyph along his right forearm. After cleaning his hands he took more of the sandy grit he'd applied to his boots and dusted his hands, vest, and pants.

Transformation complete he closed his pack and turned to the group, "If there is any need for mingling between ye and the Valess, assuming this doesn't all end in a bloodbath, don't call me Durin-Daine or Duskhammer." He looked away for a moment, considering what to tell these people he'd fallen in with. "To protect my family while working the Valess, I go by Khazadim Shattershield. Austerian dwarven clans and the mining clans don't have a friendly history." It was a lie, but none of the group seemed like experts on dwarven relations.

With that, Khazadim Shattershield stepped through the hedge blocking them from the twin farms, sword on his back and his two handaxes hanging from their leather sling at his waist. His pack and javelins left behind, he strode toward the gate.

With an air of eastern confidence Durin... eh... Khazadim rappelled his knuckles on the door. When the door opened, one of the men the party saw earlier outside opened the door. Up close it was clear that his nose had been broken a few times, which had not made him look more handsome... or smarter to judge by the dim light in his eyes.
"Who is it, Ashkat?" demanded a commanding voice from across the room.
Ashkat's accent was thick, but clearly from just few miles out of the Austerian border. Khazadim should be able to decipher most of the dialect.
"Just a dwarf from one of the mining clans tencho!"
"Why in the name of Uthgar's piss did he end up knocking on our door? We don't need no dwarf! If he doesn't have a good reason, just send him away."
Ashkat turned to Khazadim.
"Yeah, what'd ya want? No need for dwarves here!"

Bryn didn't really care too much if Durin-dain wanted to risk his own skin by talking to the barbarians, it could prove even more fruitful than his own scouting had. He watched the dwarf transform himself into a barbarian in his own right and gave a nod at the impressive look that very nearly matched what he'd seen on the men in the cottage. The plan seemed somewhat foolhardy to him but the dwarf was his own man.

"Good luck, Dwarf. I'm sure we'll hear your screams if you need us."

"Someone might even like him enough to do something about his screams...." Lath added with a grin.

Khazadim eyed Ashkat for a moment, considering his approach. Mining dwarf? Clearly an ignorant lot. "I am Khazadim Shattershield, and unless ye want to eat yer own teeth, never call me a miner. I don't break rocks for any longbeard. I need to speak with your tencho."

The conversation at the door was clearly taking too long to the tencho's liking.
"Why is that casjput not gone yet?" he boomed.
Suddenly Ashkat was shoved aside and the tencho towered more than a feet above the dwarf. Up close Khazadim could see that man had many scars that might be from the many battles the tribes fought or just from their bloody competitions they held for amusement.
"You have my attention now, dwarf Shattershield," the man spat out his name. "Now tell me why I shouldn't shatter your bones."

Behind the hedge, the monk seemed in a trance. Legs crossed and staff resting on his shoulder with both hand lightly wrapped around it. Eyes closed and head bowed forward. There seemed to be nothing that could disturb the bald man from what he was doing.

Bõ stayed in this meditative state listening to the conversations around him, taking in what he didn't know and trying to understand it. The strange words, the dwarf's transformation, the barbarian's motives, the portentive ritual. Like a ball of string, all was one string but one could not see the whole until it was unravelled, and so the monk sat there, unravelling.

Until the time would come that action was required.

Though tall for his kind, Khazadim didn't come up very high to the Valess chief. However height did little to intimate him - it was all that much easier to hack off the man's legs, if it came to it ."Ye'd regret the attempt, this I can assure ye. 'Sides, why strike the one who comes bearing warnin' to ye and yers? I caught yer trail after encountering unnatural things in the woods," he waved his arm, "There's a...force, an evil, unnatural thin' moving through the woods, destroyin' the woodland folk, comin' this way. Not a few hours before I fled it's path I cut behind an Austerian irregular force head'd this way to investigate the disturbances." He spat to the side and looked the man in the face, "Somethin' terribly wrong here, and I'd rather face it besides Valess folk, than with the soft farmers."

Actions:
Deception +2

The tencho's expression changed when Khazadim mentioned 'unnatural things' in the woods. Some discomfort, perhaps even fear? Within a second his was face stone again, but his tone softer.
"You know about the djengo dwarf? That changes things, but I can't know if you're dependable enough to fight with us. If we let everyone who sets foot on our soil fight with us we would be no better than those 'soft farmers'."
He scratched his side burns for a second before speaking again.
"All right, if you last three rounds against me you're in. In the tradition of our tribe you'll have to prove yourself in battle. Pick any one weapon."
He grinned. "I won't blame you if you choose to wear mail, but I of course won't wear more than this hide."