[u][b]Siwon, Ettamri, Katya - Setting Up Camp[/b][/u]

With the main source of contention sent away before sparks could truly fly, all that was left was for them all to start on whatever tasks necessary to set up temporary reprieve from the cold weather. It wasn’t snowing, thankfully, and though the cold was bitter, it was bitter only when one stopped moving for too long, which none did. Ettamri, her assertions unchallenged by Muu, was free to set up a windbreak out of the tarp, the fireplace set up simply by shifting a couple of riverbank rocks around. Katya, of course, was just walking around the general vicinity. There were fish swimming in the stream, a fact made clear by the little priest’s exclamations of [color=6ecff6]“Hey, look, there’s fish! We can eat them, right, Ettamri? Geez, Siwon, hurry up and get the fire started already!”[/color]

And then she began slinging rocks at those little swimming meals, to little real effect, the splashing water occasionally hitting her own coat and causing Katya to jump back. It was certainly clear that she had gone into full road-trip mode, not a shred of anxiety in her bones.

Siwon, of course, couldn’t really hurry up. Snowy terrain made stray sticks hard to find, and they were on the plains anyways, no real vegetation to be found. Romping through the snow and enduring his demon’s paranoia, the Fiend Knight didn’t have all that much luck at all, forced to scour the banks instead. Driftwood from the forest upstream, drenched and miserably cold to the touch, were all that he could find, and, well, something told him that it wouldn’t make for good firewood. Ettamri would probably break his kneecaps and leave him here to die if he came back empty-handed though, and thus, the Fiend Knight continued to pick up sticks where he could, occasionally taking a couple steps into the river itself to snag himself a couple of branches.

Indeed, it was in reaching for one of those branches that Siwon noticed it.

Noticed that the white branch he grasped wasn’t a fallen branch, but the bone of a beast. Red meat still clung to it, signs of the freshness of the kill. Now, the question could only be…what had been eaten, and who was eating?
[hr][u][b]Oscar and Muu - Up the River[/b][/u]

The answer to that question emerged forty minutes later in Oscar and Muu’s winterscape romp. The snow made it a difficult stroll, even with Muu’s specialized gear, and the distance to the treeline was fairly far to begin with, a trek made slower by Oscar’s constant vigilance. Between trying to spot out ambush predators camoflaguing against the snow, looking for the silvery-glint of tripwires or the unnatural disturbance of pitfall traps, and trying to gauge the depths of the river itself, it all ate away at their progress, to seemingly little effect; the river became neither more shallow nor more narrow, leading them further and further away.

And that was when vigilance paid off.

Though the wind from behind them, numbing their ability to hear, the splash of red the white of snow and the black of bark was all too obvious, Oscar waving Muu down as they both dropped low. They hadn’t been spotted yet, not sensed by the monsters that lurked just past the brush, and oh, how monstrous they were. Eight, no, nine mud-skinned goblins surrounded the still-steaming corpse of a large elk, taking turns diving into its innards and pulling it apart. Ribs were snapped, chewed on, stripped of easy-to-get meat before being tossed into the river, food for the fishes. One of the larger goblins pulled off the elk’s ballsack, doing a silly little dance with it that drew the laughter of its friends, before summarily tossing that into the river as well. They chewed, they feasted, and despite the cold weather surrounding them, they were warm in their comradery and their dining, the snow around them becoming steadily redder and redder.

The two Silver Moon soldiers could count the weapons and armor of the gang of goblins easily enough: two crossbows, three short swords, two spears, a longsword, and a dagger. Armor was a mismatch of chainmail draped around them and leather, as well as untanned animal furs, but at least three of them had metal helmets of varying sizes.

Getting a drop on them would be easy enough, and if their initial ambush killed enough goblins, the rest would be easy enough. But they had no priest to heal them, no tank to shield them, no mage to sweep them. More importantly, goblins didn’t go for that much money to begin with. Was the risk even worth it?

Then again, if there was another bridge within the forest that they could pull the wagon over, taking out the goblins now would practically be mandatory.

Decisions, decisions, decisions…
[hr][u][b]Argen and Renault - Down the River[/b][/u]

Downstream, the river became even wider, splitting off into individual streams. Some carved deeply into the marshy land, while others spread out, ice forming over them as cold water dispersed further. Each step through the frozen swamps was accompanied with a solid crunch of ice, but observing the network of streams from a distance, it was clear that the landscape there was made of smoother, more slippery ice. A broken ankle wasn’t a job-ending injury, of course, not when they had Katya to offer benedictions of mending onto them, but if the horses slipped? The effect that it’d have on the wagon would be much greater. There was no magical healing that could repair a shattered wheel, and a wet sack of grain was functionally worthless.

Still, the swamplands made for easy travelling otherwise, and the further they went down, the more dispersed the river became. If they truly committed to it, by travelling southwards enough, perhaps they’d reach the point where the river simply died off, leaving easy travels for them all? It was something to dream about.

Argen and Renault, of course, could also dream about the [i]other[/i] future where they earn the approval of the giant female knight by dragging the log bridge over to where the wagon was, and flat-out repairing it on the spot. After all, a swift stream could only pull a large log for so long, and once it spread out, there it was: the thirty meter long tree just lying in line with the wider river, clear water flowing around it. Looking at it now, it was only maybe two to three meters wide itself, easy for adventurers to cross but requiring some other method for a wagon laden with grains to traverse.

It [i]was[/i] the bridge though. It [i]could[/i] be used.