Dark Jack

The Prophecy

@yoshua171, do you have anything to add before I start writing a post for the Drunken Dove scene?

The Prophecy

Duchy of Pelgaid, secluded pond

Red burning coals flared brightly within the gloom of the Grand Master's hood, narrowing cunningly as he gazed at the sorceress, pleased and surprised – and pleased with his surprise – that rather than do as he had expected and dismiss him for not answering her question, she inquired further about the Skull Tower. She was not the first, of course; countless others, mortal and immortal alike, had sought the tower since the days of the Nomad, when the seat of the Infernal Empire had become its emperor's prison... the mythical “sixth prison”, with the first five being the crystals used to seal his generals, one of which was currently located on Gerald's chest. Some of those who had sought it had meant to slay the Grand Master while others had meant to free him; both errands equally pointless and impossible. Not many had ever reached the Skull Tower after the Nomad had cursed the place, and only one person had ever managed to leave.
And excited shiver went through the Ancient One's robe, only a single quick tremor this time. He raised his hands in front of his chest and brought the tips of his slender, elegant fingers together with their matches on the other hand.

“Did you ever wonder why the land you call Rodoria used to be called ‘the Land in the Middle’? Why Kreshtaat decided to unleash the Withering here, of all places in Reniam? Why the demon prisons are here? Why so many relics are found here, and why immortals are so interested in this particular region?” His eyes burned with eager anticipation. “It’s because of me, Jillian. When I came to Reniam through Stupor, this is where I landed. And after I had plummeted from the sky, I created my tower in the crater left from my arrival. Filled it with the secrets and treasures of another world, the one I came from. What would you gain? Use your imagination. Would you not be interested in examining the artifacts of an alien world? Obtaining some of the ancient secrets buried here with me?”
He shrugged, smiling imperceptibly within the illusory darkness. “As for ‘how’, there are two ways, though I fear a carriage would only get you partway here. One is to lift the curse from the tower, undoing the seal and freeing me. Doing so will also restore the Skull Tower to its true imposing glory, for the world to see and tremble at.
The other is to swim here, since the crater filled with water and my tower was lowered into its depths. You see, the Skull Tower and I are at the bottom of what you’ve named Center Lake.”

The Prophecy

Duchy of Pelgaid, secluded pond

“No, I didn't,” the Grand Master shrugged. “And my fixer did not make a deal with me for power, nor did Eliza. The dear girl was actually quite powerless when she went out in the world to make use of her new ability; it has taken her, oh, how long has it been? Three thousand years? Quite a few lifetimes to obtain her power. And before you ask, no, she did not buy longevity from me either. Her deal was for her to be able to master every school of magic she ever dabbled in.”
“Speak no more,” Crone uttered angrily, and somehow Gerald could not help but to smile with vicious pleasure at her anger. “You possess no right nor need to divulge -”
“I have every right to say as much about your deal as I want,” the demon broke her off. “Your contract didn't include a clause for my silence. But you're right, there's no need to explain.” He turned his attention back to Jillian. “As for my fixer, the reason I don't know the extent of his abilities is simply that I, despite appearances, am not omnescient; I just have a lot of ears and eyes in a lot of useful places. None of those have ever observed this agent unleash his full potential, however... indeed, I'm not certain that he himself even knows his limits.
As for how he has come to wield such power, part of it is simply due to innate proficiency. Talent. Extraordinary natural ability. Part of it is from his past as the Grim Tool, shaped into a human weapon by the Corpse Forge. And part of it may also be because he killed several Shards of Sin once. It all adds up to make him very valuable to me.”

When the witch asked for an explanation as to why they were being sent to end the Withering rather than the supposedly much more capable Fixer, however, the Grand Master seemed to lose interest in the conversation. Indeed, he even turned his head and looked off to their right, looking at the rocks over there as though they were the most unusual and interesting thing he had ever seen.
“You should really come and visit me in the Skull Tower someday,” he said, blatantly changing the subject. “There are many things here I imagine both of you would be quite interested in seeing; unusual things unlike anything you'll find anywhere else in the planes.”

The Prophecy

Duchy of Pelgaid, secluded pond

Gerald felt somewhat conflicted in terms of what to think about the Grand Master's way of treating them, going as far as to calling their relationship that of partners, and citing that he thought of the three of them as equals. It was all very nice in principle, of course, which was probably what made it seem so suspicious to him. Demon lords normally did not do “nice”, unless they did so in order to manipulate someone into doing their bidding somehow. Add to that that the demon lord in question was the worst of the bunch - the infamous Lord of Lies, master of deceit and manipulation, and the single most nefarious demon in existence – and his uncharacteristically humble and pleasant way of treating them, as well as his generosity when helping them, had plenty of reason to make them paranoid.
He did not say anything, though, nor did he have any reason to protest against the notion of them being partners and equals. Speaking purely as two businessmen making a deal with another, the Grand Master's logic made perfect sense... but he was beginning to seem far too altruistic for one of the prime evils of the planes.

The matter of their protector during their potentially coming back for them later on in order to erase another couple of witnesses was something the necromancer had initially just presumed they would be safe from, but which he did offer a nod of acknowledgement to Jillian for actually questioning. With how cooperative the Grand Master had been thus far, it would not at all be surprising to Gerald if the cunning fiend had managed to weave a trap into all of this somewhere, and giving his “exceptionally capable” servant a reason to come back of his own volition to kill them after succeeding did seem like the Grand Master's style.
“Of course,” the demon waved her off. “One of the two things that can keep him from killing you is if I tell him not to, which I will, and I will continue to prohibit him from killing you even after you've won our wager. Although... it is worth noting that I could retract that prohibition at any time. Not that that matters a lot; if you ever gave me a reason to want you dead, all I had to do was to tell him to kill you. It won't change anything in that regard; you will be no more in danger of him than you would normally be if you made an enemy of me.”
“Is that a threat?” Gerald hissed, immediately on the defensive.
“Of course it is, I thought that was obvious,” the other confirmed with a shrug. “But then, my entire existence is an implied threat to all beings of the planes, is it not? It's no different from anyone else, no different from before: my enemies die. So don't be my enemy.”

“Dome of hands?” the Grand Master repeated in wonder when Jillian confronted him about it, and the demon lord looked up puzzledly before bursting out laughing. “Oh right, of course, the hands of fate. I didn't even think about that. I can't see these hands, you see; my hands of fate form around my real body, in the Skull Tower. What you see is your hands of fate. It's one of the aspects of the power of my contracts; they aren't really 'about' anything, nor am I the one causing them. They are a manifestation of our intertwining fates and redefined limitations, as far as I know. Only someone physically present and with a connected fate would be able to see them... which I should imagine means that Eliza sees them. Did you know she made a deal with me once? Oh, how young and selfish she was back then...”
“There is no necessity for these two to obtain awareness of that,” came Crone's voice through the wall of their shadowy cage, not at all muffled by its ephemeral presence.
“You want to silence me? Feel free to deactivate the sigil stone. In the meantime...” The Grand Master waved a translucent hand, and the shadowy hands surrounding them rapidly dissipated, leaving no evidence of their passing behind. Once again visible to the duo of magi, Crone appeared angry, probably because of the Grand Master's unnecessary revelation, and Renold – as far as the dragon's mien could be compared to humanoid expressions – seemed worried.

“As for your other questions,” the demon continued, “my agent will find you in Fokon, likely while you are still a ways off from the Joint Temple of Immortals, and he will take care of the planning from there. And those two,” he gestured at Renold and Crone, “can do however little or much they want, though it's worth noting that the dragon doesn't carry my protection, and Eliza is seriously gambling with hers by disturbing me with my own sigil stone. I can't guarantee that my agent won't kill them on sight.”
Gerald stared at the Grand Master incredulously. “Are you saying that if we accept the help of your agent, he won't allow Crone and Renold to help?” He shook his head. “I realize that they haven't agreed to help us, but I can't imagine that your man is anywhere near as dangerous as the two of them.”
“You have no idea,” the fiend laughed. “Not even I know this agent's limits. He is my fixer, and I have yet to encounter any situation that he haven't been able to resolve.” He paused thoughtfully. “And even if the two of them were a match for him at their best, weren't you going to go after my general first? Hunt down and seal away Hazzergash, before he can escape back to Cave Bear's Keep? Do you imagine that those two will have much strength left after facing off against the demonic Lord of Fire? Believe me, you would be much better off relying on my fixer than on those two. No offense.”
“Didn't you say that your agent was human?” Gerald asked. “Renold is an elder dragon, and Crone is an exceptionally powerful mage! Can he compete with that?”
“There is no competition; the Fixer is more dangerous than both of them combined.”

---

The Duchy of Zerul, by a road in southwest

Olan smiled widely, looking from Iridiel to Domhnall as each of them expressed their surprise at his ability to speak their language. It was not that he wanted to impress them, though; he was just happy that this strange ability of his to understand and communicate with anyone in any language proved useful. Somehow, it did not even occur to him that it would be better to keep the ability a secret from the others – why would he, anyway? They were his friends – or that it might seem intimidating. He just wanted to be useful somehow, rather than just being the old guy with amnesia.
Where that thought came from – the thought that he was “old” - he was not sure. He appeared middle-aged at worst, and his body generally felt as energic and capable as that of a man in his prime, but there was something indeterminably and fundamentally true in the presumtion that he was old, he felt.

When both of them spoke to him, though – Domhnall in Rodorian, Iridiel in Éireann – he decided to answer both of them, though he felt something in his head stretch... and when he spoke, without meaning to or even being fully aware of what he was doing, he did so in a language that was Rodorian and Éireann... and every other language in existence. Without even realizing it, Olan's confused mind switched to speaking in True Words.
“I can speak any language, you know” he shrugged, not even fully conscious of small amounts of magical energy being drained from his soul with every word he uttered. “I don't know how, but I can, somehow. Lost my memory earlier today, when I got roughed up a bit by a god, so...” He looked back at Jaelnec, Thaler and Aemoten, the former of which seemed dumbfolded by what was happening. “I don't even think I told my friends about it, you know? Besides Thaler.”

From Downfall ReRisen

Oh? This is interesting, she thought, her walk through the forest coming to a halt as she looked around, trying to spot the bird yelling at her... or at least, yelling near her. It was not a cry she was familiar with, and if her gramps had mentioned this kind of thing, she either had not been listening properly or forgotten about it since. It was not the same as the one they used when scolding, as they were doing to the other person nearby, that much was clear. Also unlike their scolding, this cry was issued only half a dozen times, rather than repeated tirelessly over and over. What purpose did it serve, she wondered? Was it simply informing its kin that another creature was approaching the area occupied by its flock, or... could it be that it was not warning against her, but warning her? Were the birds smart enough to do that?
Intriguing stuff, but not really the most useful thing to obsess over. She had always felt more in tune with electrical circuits and mechanical devices than she did with ethology or biology, even if she did love roaming around in the wilderness like this more than sitting behind a desk. She wondered whether she should try to find the bird, but figured that there was really no point. Not only was there nothing to gain from doing so beyond the satisfaction of having discovered the bird’s exact location, but there was also a much more urgent issue she had to deal with first.

Considering how clearly she could hear the birds yelling at the person up ahead, it was probably fair to assume that it had also heard the bird at her location and reach the conclusion that something had caused them to cry out. She bit her lip, hesitating to proceed any further. On one hand, this other person was an unknown entity beyond the fact that it had a gun - and no flimsy sidearm either, judging by the gunshot earlier - and that it had provoked the spotter birds’ ire. If one were to presume that the birds were really smart enough to try to warn members of other species against danger, and such was actually what the bird had tried to do with her, she had every reason to turn around and run as fast as she could propel her cart across the terrain, with no other means of guarding her life than weaving between the trees and hoping a bullet would not burrow into her back as she fled... But on the other hand, she was really, really curious. She had never actually met anyone from another faction before.
So she did not flee. What she did do, however, was kneel beside her cart for a moment, opening one of its side-compartments and looking at the airborne drone she had been using last night, sitting neatly in its charging station. She could send the drone ahead of herself and scout the area from a safe distance, maybe even figure out where the stranger was and what it looked like, so she could better decide how to approach the situation. She actually reached for the drone, with her right hand while her left started extending towards the compartment where she kept her mechanical glove, but then froze in mid-motion, chuckling to herself quietly as she closed the compartment and stood back up.
What kind of message would it convey to the stranger, she wondered, if the first experience the one had with her was to catch her spying on the one with a drone? If the person ahead was not already paranoid or downright hostile in the wake of last night’s battle, then surely being spied upon like that would be more than sufficient to make it suspicious, and perhaps even motivation enough to shoot first and ask questions later. Scouting the other would put it in a vulnerable position, and people in danger were generally also the most dangerous ones.
She had already been hit by one bullet and a shower of brass-fragments - not technically “shot” as much as “causing the cartridge to explode - and she would rather not experience that again.
But despite her reluctance to get shot again, she kept going; her curiosity kept driving her. And to make matters worse, in a further effort not to appear as an obvious threat to her soon-to-be acquaintance, she refrained from drawing her unwieldy pistol.
She had to know.

Her precautions, foolish though they would have been if her objective had been to kill the stranger, proved to at least buy her a few extra seconds of life soon after, when she - as she neared the scolding spotter birds - abruptly found the person causing all the ruckus. Her heart actually skipped a beat, causing her to jump on the spot in surprise when the other was just suddenly there. As in, right there, appearing in front of her with a gun aimed right at her. A big gun. With how patiently and quietly the other had waited, the speed and stability with which it had stepped out from cover and its equipment, there was probably very little doubt that this person was a proper soldier. She could not say for certain the gender of the person just by looking at it, with all the armor in the way, nor did it really matter. Whether this was a man or a woman, the gun in the one’s hands was liable to kill her all the same.
From the one’s speech, though, this was a man. She threw her hands in the air immediately, trying to stifle a shocked yelp as she listened to the other’s burst of rapid-fire questions with wide-eyed surprise. Even if she had expected something like this to happen, anticipating the situation and actually being in it were two very different things. It was like the difference between playing with the parts of a disassembled gun and handling a fully functional specimen... only even more dangerous.
Am I human? The question took her somewhat aback, and her first reaction - her fear dispersing quickly once she confirmed that she was not about to be gunned down without hesitation - was to respond to the question humorously, make a joke of him questioning her humanity in the first place, but luckily she caught herself before actually replying like that. This guy was the serious sort, that much was quite evident, and he meant business with that gun; who knew whether he had short temper, and something like that might antagonize him unnecessarily. Better to be concise and give a simple answer to a simple question... though was that not exactly what a machine would do?
In the end she had to speak before thinking about it too much, or her hesitance would start to seem suspicious, particularly after the grin she had displayed immediately after the question, even if her hands did stay up in surrender. For better or for worse.
“Yeh, I’m human,” she said somewhat breathlessly. The way she pronounced ‘human’ made it sound almost as though she said ‘who-man’. “M-My name’s Kay-Gee, from Eighfour. That’s, eh, southeast of here?” She chuckled nervously and nodded in the general direction of the spotter birds’ cries. “I was just curious who’d pissed them off.”

The Prophecy

@Mercinus3? @Shienvien? @Ashgan? @yoshua171?
...Post?

The Prophecy

Just to be sure that I'm not twiddling my thumbs when I should be posting: there are others that want to post before me in the Drunken Dove scene, right?

The Prophecy

Oh my god, all this time and I didn't realize that it was my turn to post in the Drunken Dove-scene... gah. Well, I posted now.

The Prophecy

Zerul City, the Drunken Dove

Violet shook her head no at Morgan’s question, making a gesture in the Dirge’s general direction. “Bane-weapons possess something much worse than any kind of enchantment you are likely to have encountered, I’m afraid. It’s a property of the Stones that are imparted to and corrupted by whichever weapon they are attached to; they are capable of injuring souls, not just flesh. Wounds caused by a bane never heal, not even in the afterlife, and if one hurts another enough with a bane, one can cause the soul to unravel... effectively destroying it permanently.”
“Even immortals fear banes,” Rose pointed out grimly, “and with good reason. A bane can kill immortals, too. Permanently.”
“Dirges are no different from other bane-weapons, except for their appearance. Though their scabbards are also enchanted, made so that they will destroy the Dirge if it is within them when its wearer dies.” Violet eyed Ixion curiously. “Which meant that the Blue Tool must have been made to draw the Dirge before she was killed. That’s quite the feat; as far as I know, they are forbidden from doing that except under extraordinary circumstances.
All Tools supposedly have one,” she continued, “one for each master. We’re not sure how many of them there are, but we do know that there’s at least one in each of the Rodorian duchies... and that the Fixer has a Dirge, as well. Which means that he has either killed a Tool before, or that he was once a Tool himself.”

“Before we go on about this,” Rose interrupted her sister, holding up a furry finger to call attention to herself, “there is something I want to know.” Now it was her turn to look curiously at Ixion. “When you fought the Fixer, did you notice anything odd about the way he fought? I mean, maybe he never took his hands out of his pockets, or he refused to draw his weapons; things like that.”

From Downfall ReRisen

I wonder how they work, she thought, cocking her head to the left as she watched the distant fireworks over the treetops, hearing the bone-rattling booms that would definitely be deafening up close as the odd extremities she could see over there, reaching above the trees like fallen giants reaching for the sky. Those were obviously guns of some kind - big guns - but of a sort she had never had the chance to examine before, or seen before, even. There were also airplanes of some kind, though it seemed they were being chased off by some kind of beam weaponry from the ground. She could not see the weapons that discharged these rays of destructive energy, which bothered her, but she did not dare move any closer than this. Though her view of what was happening was far from the best - she was maybe a dozen kilometers from the battlefield, and already had to zoom a lot in the image to tell what was happening, to such an extent that the image grew pixilated and difficult to see details on - it was as good as she would let it be.
These other factions were really dangerous; she knew this before as well, of course, but this was her first time actually witnessing the work of more warlike factions as they had unfolded. She had visited battlefields before, but only once things had calmed down and the areas were left abandoned. Her own faction had never really done any fighting, aside from scaring away some animals now and then, or fending off someone who thought they would steal from them or sabotage their work somehow.
They were not soldiers, nor were they thieves; her faction were scavengers. Whenever something like this happened nearby, they would wait a fair amount of time - several days, at least - to give the people fighting a fair chance at recovering anything they had left there, before they went to pick through the remains. Sometimes they found little besides scrap, which was useful in and by itself, but the really exciting stuff was when there were little bits of technology left behind. A blown-up vehicle, a broken gun, a smashed helmet full of little gismos inside; all kinds of fun stuff could be found on even old battlefields, though nothing beat finding abandoned ruins or the like, where treasure awaited to be claimed by whoever found them first.
Intriguing though technology could be, however, it seemed as though battle itself was pretty boring... at least from this distance. Maybe something more interesting was happening on the ground, but from here it just looked like weird little towers expulsing tracer rounds and sending them skyward, and flashing beams keeping airplanes that looked the size of insects at a distance.

Deciding that there was nothing to be learned from observing the battle from this far away after all, she bent her left little finger inwards, manipulating the mechanical glove on her hand to make the device zoom back out until the battle was little more than distant flashes across a sea of trees a couple of plates over. The first bit of zooming was purely digital and silent, and just served to remove the pixilation until the image improved to the point where it was immediately indistinguishable from what a human eye would see, and then was accompanied by a quiet buzzing noise as the mechanical zoom took over.
She moved her thumb in a sort of counterclockwise circular motion, and the view of the camera panned to the left; when she bent her ring finger inward, the camera panned down until it was looking at herself, sitting cross legged on top of her black-and-green little cart. She could visually confirm herself smiling at the sight of herself sitting there, eyes closed and left hand held up in front of her chest, looking almost as though she was just meditating.
Manipulating the mechanical glove on her left hand some more the drone flew back down to her, and the subtle whirring of its small rotors became audible to her ears in addition to the microphone in the drone. It was still a fairly novel experience, existing outside of her body at the same time as inside of it like this; being able to see herself as though she was someone else. Brown boots the design of which had probably come from a military of some kind, good for rough terrain, warm and waterproof; grey trousers the legs of which were in two layers, each layer capable of being detached and removed on its own just above the knee, rendering them into a pair of lighter trousers or shorts as befit the temperature; a light, black jacket lined with more pockets than she knew what to do with, wind- and waterproof and with a matching hood. She wore a holster under her left breast, secured by two straps - one around her waist, the other diagonally over her ribcage and shoulder - containing an unusually large handgun of sorts. A unique specimen, that one; she knew, because she had built it herself.
Her face was a little on the round side, with faintly pronounced cheekbones, a little button nose and a bit of an overbite. She had thought herself pretty cute, once, before her accident... but now that the upper right side of her skull was occupied by a dark-grey device - about five centimeters tall and ten centimeters wide, and stuck out some three centimeters or so from her skin, placed just at the edge of her right cheekbone - surrounded by gnarly scars, which extended even onto the rightmost part of her right eyelid and eye socket, it was hard to think about herself that way. She found her current state interesting, to be sure, and she was deeply fascinated with the things it allowed her to do and the possibilities it had opened up for her, but she could never bring herself to be completely happy with what had happened. She had tried to comb her brown hair over the device for a while, making sure to grow it long enough to do so, but ultimately she just gave up and accepted her current state. Maybe some part of her used it as an excuse to leave when she did, but it had never been a factor that had had an effect on the conscious decision to leave her faction behind.
Opening her left eye, she both confirmed through the drone that she did indeed still have shockingly blue eyes, and let her real eye look back at the drone, watching the little matte-grey spherical construct hovering in front of her by the power of three rotors. Smile widening, she reached her right hand out and picked the little robot out of the air - it was just around eight centimeters in diameter - and allowed her to turn off the rotors. She left the audio-video feed on for a little longer, though, bracing herself as she opened her right eye.
The experience was, as it had always been, oddly disorienting and left her feeling dizzier and dizzier the longer she let it continue. Her right eye looked at the drone, and the drone looked back at her right eye, telling her that while it did indeed look somewhat normal in shape, it was still a bit off. The white of that eye did not have any visible veins nor reddish areas, but was a much too pure white color, and the iris had an obviously artificial clean and regular pattern in it, in addition to being metallic grey instead of blue.
Her having a cybernetic eye was not what affected her so in itself, though; rather, she suspected that it was a matter of her technically receiving visual input from her right eye twice, and her brain having trouble coping with that. The eye was connected to her through the same interface as the drone, after all, so right now she was getting two interfering images and could not properly deal with it.

She turned off the drone completely with a little wince, opened a side-compartment of her cart - it was the shape of a long box with six wheels on the bottom and a handle at the back end top, about a meter tall and wide, and one and a half meter long - and put the drone in its charging station in there.
The plates on top of the cart had the dark side turned outwards at the moment, since not only was it night, but she did not want the solar panels on the other side to accidentally reflect something that could alert the distant warriors to her presence... which was obviously a ludicrous thought. She was far away, so there was no way anyone over there would see her, and even if they did, she was of no consequence to them. She was no soldier, she was just an engineer out seeing what amazing wonders this planet had in store for her, what new devices she could find, take apart and either restore to working condition or make new things out of. There seemed to be plenty of interesting stuff over there, but it would be a few days before she would be even remotely comfortable picking through the leftovers over there. It was fairly likely that there would be nothing but scrap left, but you never knew when a treasure was going to show itself.

She had been almost due south from where those giant war-machines had been firing, and considering how undesirable it would be for those big, powerful factions to notice her moving around, she figured that she had better not get any closer, at least. She sort of wanted to head west, to where she knew there were some old ruins she had not explored yet, but she also knew that since her faction had known about that place for a while, and with it being so close to them, there was no way that there was anything interesting left over there. Going even further west meant getting close to another faction’s territory, too, and one that she had been warned against going anywhere near many times in the past to boot. Odd thing, too, since no one else seemed quite as scared of the place when they were not talking to her. They kept telling her to stay away from there because they had “thinking machines” that could get inside her head because of the interface in her skull. They sounded really interesting over there, and she would love to learn more about these machines, but she was curious, not stupid; west was not an option.
South seemed like the obvious choice - away from the battle, into the safety of the forest - but it was boring. Her people had meticulously recovered everything worth anything in that entire area, as far as she knew, and she did not want to return home empty-handed once her trip was over. Southeast would take her back home, or at least closer to it, so that was out of the question...
By the process of elimination, then, she reached the decision to head east. That area was scarier, since other factions occasionally fought this far north - as they were doing a bit further north just now - and not nearly as thoroughly explored. She might find some goodies yet... though it was better to wait until sunrise, at least, so she could use the solar panels on her cart. It had batteries, but she did not want to drain them unless she had the ability to recharge them easily afterwards, so that she did not end up stuck with the heavy thing all of a sudden, with no power for the engine that helped her push it around. She would just head east a little, then settle down for the night.

She had barely gotten moving the next morning when she heard a gunshot, followed by some spotter-birds giving someone - likely the shooter - a hearty reprimand not too far away, and immediately stopped dead in her tracks, staring in the direction of the sound. Her immediate thought was that she had better run away - there had been a major battle just hours ago, after all, and she had no way of knowing if the fighting was still going on or if the battlefield had moved during the night - but the more she thought about it, the less anxious and more curious she grew. If it had been soldiers fighting each other, there was really no way she would have heard just one shot; there would have been follow-up shots, returned fire, and all those vaguely familiar noises that came with fighting using guns. Even it just being two straggling soldiers from last night that strayed close to each other, one shooting the other, seemed unlikely; if someone had actually died or gotten hurt, she did not think the spotter-birds would have dared to speak out against the ones disturbing the peace. It was a lone shooter who had shot at something, but without hitting the target or the target counterattacking, and who did not feel it necessary to fire a second shot despite missing. She did not exactly know what to make of that, and not knowing made her curious.
The spotter-birds were not actually scolding the shooter, of course, as much as they were warning others of something dangerous and trying to call nearby predators - such as humans - to eliminate it. She was quite familiar with them, and knew better than to get on their bad side. They were awfully smart, those birds... and as long as one stayed on good terms with them, they did not get in one’s way.
The shooter must have really antagonized them, though. As she trekked through the forest, being drawn toward the sound to sate her ravenous curiosity, the birds kept issuing their call, most likely following the scoundrel as they did so. They were unlikely to stop until the person left their territory, or something showed up to remove it for them. That also meant that they would most likely stop crying once she got close, which would probably alert the person to her presence.
Had the shooter shouted a warning before shooting? She did not know, might have been too far away to hear... this was dangerous. Stupid and dangerous.
And yet she kept walking, pushing her cart in front of her, driven forward by the need to know the answers of just some of all these questions. Looking for scrap in the forest could wait; this was much more interesting.