1x01 Beginnings and Bar Guests

Gather in, listen carefully, for every tale must start somewhere, and this one starts with rain. That sort of rain that seems to set in around mid morning and you just know that it isn’t going anywhere today. Now, at a cross roads in the kingdom of Sacken, there is a town called Ettmoss, and in that town a tavern by the name of the Giant's Heads. It is kept by a good woman called Amity Kama. It was there, on an afternoon that was suitable only for ducks, that fate, that fickle mistress, did what fate does best: it wove the paths of strangers so that they found themselves all sat a the same table. 

The first of these strangers was Horton, young and blond and never more than an arm's length from his axe. The second was Missenbar, a halfling with hair the blue of a summer sky, who swore up and down he was some sort of monk. And lastly there was an elderly teller of tales plying his trade from town to town. I feel dear listener, I should point out that I was that storyteller. And that what I now recount to you is a true and honest retelling of the events that I myself witnessed. 

We had scarcely taken our seats when the door blew open and a battered band of adventurers staggered in, carrying one of their own (a tiefling, out cold). Sent to clear a cave of goblins, so they told it, they had been ambushed by a sort of blue skinned goblin wolf hybrid. Barely had they caught their breath and sat down when the door banged again, and in strode a blue dragonborn with two guards at his back, all bluster and pointing fingers. He wanted the noblewoman, with the crest of some minor house stitched on her clothing, travelling with the battered band of adventurers (a warlock, we would learn later, named Ast Ata Keseau).

Well. You know how it is when faced with such rudeness. Especially in a room full of strangers who've had just enough to drink. My companions of chance moved as one. Missenbar slipped in to draw the brute's eye as Horton put both hands to his chest and shoved. I did my small part from the back, an unseen hand I conjured to knot the guards' bootlaces together, so that the two of them went down in a heap the moment they tried to charge. The blue dragonborn, meanwhile, was learning hard lessons from Missenbar's fists, and when at last he turned to flee, he found he'd left it too late; down he went, beaten senseless by the little monk! Horton dragged the great lizard out by the collar and dumped him in the street, the better, he said, to tidy the place up.

As the dust settled, we did what any sensible folk do after a fight: we sat down together over food and drink. Ata told us she'd run from her home, and begged us to carry a small ornate box out of Ettmoss. Inside it lay a platinum figurine she believed her own family were using to hunt her across the land. “Take it to a town called Oitti,” she said, and hand it to a man named Pollitt. This she hoped would lead her pursuers astray. Horton being the upstanding young chap that he is agreed straight away and as he did in walked two of the Royal Assurance (the king's law, for those unfamiliar). They promptly offered to forget the small matter of the dragonborn in the street, if only we fate-touched strangers would look into a small matter of a murder. We were to bring them the guilty party. We naturally agreed and so the night ended: Horton to bed with an axe beneath his pillow, myself in my favoured chair by the fire with a cup of tea, and Missenbar shown up to his room, the three of us saddled with two jobs apiece before we'd so much as finished our first drink together.