At this meeting the player of Fergus, the paladin, was absent, but we had been watching how he had been behaving as of late. So when the bar brawl started (thanks to the thief!) it was not too far out of his character to stop the charging "bar thug" who was also "evil" with deadly but not fatal force.
Hence the meat skewer to the chest.
That was one.
Number two was when the thief snuck down during combat and stuck the royally appointed deputy in the back with a poisoned dart because he thought he was using deadly force in town against the populace. He was wrong, and the deputy saved - but a tone was set this night in our dealings with the townsfolk.
Write-up follows:
Concerned that Marshal Centurion Ippsalis Westwinter and his four deputies would now make our life even more difficult given that we snubbed his offer to become deputized (and therefore in some way under his control/authority) the party discussed possible options. Were there a list of laws that we could peruse to see what we might be casually bending/breaking? How about possibly having a barrister working for us on retainer to cover any lapses in lawfulness that we might be party to?
We went off to see the Magistrate and he promised to send aviary to Argosility for us to try and find any uncourted barristers who might want to make the journey here to talk to us about options and possibilities. From there we had a variety of other small errands we needed to finish resolving , most of them personal in nature.
Some of the party went to whatever work they had in town to do, while others of us needed to find some sort of gainful employment. Bildad went to the Pixie Down Inn where he convinced Maris the proprietor to give him a shot a cook. Marcus went to Magistrate where we took on a scribing duty, impressing the magistate with his skill and speed. And finally Fist’al…well, Fist’al didn’t have any “job” to do so went with Flimflam to Pelis the Rugmerchant to see about buying some protection…I mean a rug. Yes, a rug for the Hall of Heroes.
There was some back and forth for a while with Pelis and Flimflam, there was also another…salesman/thief there who listened to Flimflam’s concern over the cost and what we could do to alleviate the price in the future. Eventually we walked out feeling fair while Fist’al remained behind to set up some need for 4 very low level helpers of the guild to report to both inns tonight and to “follow his lead”.
Bildad’s cooking did not wow anyone at the Pixie Down, but his pies were delicious, and his singing did bring in a small amount of coin as well as solidified his possibility as a singer in the future should he want it. However his 15 minutes of fame were upended as a bar brawl and rush for the exit occurred when charges of “Thief” and “I’ve been robbed” filled the inn. Apparently Fist’al’s attempt of 2ndarily extorting the proprietor of the Pixie Down did not go well and Maris was not totaling understanding the situation so had the bouncers block the doors to prevent anyone from leaving.
When the crowd of 80 tried to rush the front doors, the burly-boys called out in frustrations that the back door was currently unguarded. Fergus offered to help and charged the back door, bowling some unsavory personages aside who tried to reverse direction and escape. In some of this mess was a thief or two, with the stolen money bags in question. So the paladin did a ‘detect evil’ and saw 15 or saw evil people milling about and charging around the Pixie Down.
One of them was thundering towards the back door where the lone unarmed and unarmored paladin was warding it. He snagged the bouncer’s stool as an impromptu shield and picked up a 2’ long fireplace meat skewer to defend himself just in time as the suspected thief/frantic farmer/evil person made a break for the door. And Fergus stabbed him.
He went down screaming, blood flowing, a meat skewer in his chest.
It was organized chaos after that as the militia was called and Maris defused the situation and let the bouncers let people go. The 2 who had their money bags taken were given them back by Fist’al and Maris did NOT want the elf to provide protection for him and was pretty fucking pissed about the entire mess, totaling up the lost revenue from tonight he was paid off by the contrite elf and the group left (after Flimflam did a quick berry-healing to the stabbed farmer).
Lo and behold, not too much later the Marshall and Caladis showed up and wanted to talk to the group about the stabbing in the inn and Fergus did the right thing and came forward, announcing his guilt and admitting his wrongdoing. He was taken into custody and the group was both understanding and not happy. Also, to this point, we STILL did not know exactly that Fist’al was the origin of tonight’s bar brawl and did not know of his part of it.
It was early the next morning, roughly 1 AM, that we heard banging on the main door. Opening it up we spied the cleaning man for the Four Rings Brothel was here, looking for our help at the behest of Madame Ivy, due to some fight between “7 or 8 of the angriest customers we’ve ever had and 2 of the new deputies”.
We grabbed our armor and a fast weapon or two and then raced out the 4 or 5 buildings to the next block to see what was going on. Bil arrived first followed by Flimflam, Fist’al and then Marcus. The situation was dire with 8 young men (between 16 and 20ish), homesteaders from their clothes we guessed, armed with cobbles and bricks and stick, shoving and pushing deputies Caladis and Sterkus. Some of the girls from the Four Rings were here, two of them with bruises and fat lips.
Dreyl, the loudest of the bunch, was arguing almost incoherently about bitches and whores and they deserve it, and get out of our way or you’ll pay too. They kept massing forward and the deputies were trying to calm the situation down without resorting to weaponplay.
Fist’al took a spot on the roof of Sutor’s Forge, bow at the ready. Flimflam and Marcus tried adding their voices and weight to the press in order to keep them back but it did not seem to go over well and then one of them shouted that Caladis was a “brass plated bitch” and hurled a cobble at her head, striking her and causing her to stumble.
Sterkus whipped two arrows out and fired at the drunk youth while the party shouted out, “No killing!”, but both of his arrows missed! Caladis was struggling with one of the youths and Marcus began reciting magical words. Flimflam, Whosea, and Sanford held off a few of the locals as they stormed forward and knocked Bil down and kicked the poor Halfling in the head, knocking him out.
Just before it overwhelmed us, Marcus’ sleep spell went off and 4 of the youths slumped over unconscious. Sterkus fired again, and again two more of his arrows missed! Caladis was forced to whip her axe out as the youth she was fighting did NOT stay down from her punishing kicks and gouges, but she did use it with flat side leading, still interested in knock out rather than kill.
Whosea was able to grapple one of the youths into submission while Flimflam laid about with cudgel whipping. Sterkus was smashed in the head by a cobble, 12 points of damage, and went down with the side of his head turned to hamburger and his bell rung. Not wanting to fire into the crowd but wanting to take out Sterkus, Fist’al snuck down off the roof of Sutor’s forge, drew out the dart covered with the “agony poison” he had been carrying for awhile, and stabbed Sterkus in the back over his kidney with it. He then climbed back up Sutor’s Forge and looked down, dismayed to see that Sterkus was not affected by the toxin.
With more than half of the youths asleep, we were able to take down the rest of them but we all noted it took MUCH longer than expected and most of them didn’t seem fazed by our attacks. It reminded Flimflam of Goblinwater, especially also because of the way they were acting and the dilated pupils, but there was no sudden healing and no smell of rosewater coming off of them.
Caladis thanked us profusely for our help and Sterkus for his healing (thanks to Flimflam’s berries) – both of them acknowledging that if we were not here, it could have been much worse. We were confided in the fact that Marshall Westwinter was going to the Magistrate tomorrow to have Fergus placed in the stocks for 4 days as punishment for his assault with the meat skewer yesterday. We thanked them both and went back to the Hall of Heroes after helping out the Four Rings a few minutes longer and crawled back to bed for a good night’s rest.
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