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Percival - [Variant - Intermediate], Educated [Lord], Wanted By [The Emerald Slavers - West Empire] - f7941d
Xian-Fu - [Beast] - ed1c24

It was a wonder if Lord Percival Ashcombe was actually paying any attention to the instructions given by the guard. His expression was one of pure delight every single time he brought the rather expensive-looking chinaware teacup to his lips and slurped on the steaming beverage. “Mmmm, the tea is absolutely delightful today, Xian-Fu.” His monocle zeroed in on the towering tigress, head tilting slightly. “Which blend is this?” He asked, taking another sip from it.

“Dark Phoenix Roots, my lord.” She answered him, one shoulder rolling, cracking audibly while she prepared herself for the dungeon delve. “Its defining characteristic is a warm, lingering spiciness.” Adding with a growl, she shifted her attention to the gathered others, guarded-stance but not unkind. “This is Lord Percival Ashcombe.” The tigress gestured towards the man. “And I’m Xian-Fu, his valet. I’m adept with the sword, getting things out of the way, and can keep track of my prey.” She smiled, showing a sharp row of teeth.

“And I’m quite the hunter.” Percival began, as he finished his tea, handing the teacup to Xian-Fu, who promptly stuck it into her Pocket Dimension. “I can find the trails, fix things of a more mundane nature, and I’m also quite skilled with the rifle.” The words were accentuated by him removing his hunting rifle from his shoulder and holding the gun with both hands. “Ah! Retrieving treasure to whom it actually belongs, it reminds me of home.”

Taking the first steps forward, boots hitting the ground with hefty thuds, he looked over his shoulder at the curious woman with the rather scandalous skin-tight suit and the man with the ponty-ears. “Shall we?”
Fredrick’s second attempt lands with the kind of blunt certainty that ends arguments. The runner—already half-tangled from brush and vines—tries to twist free with a sharp inhale, shoulders turning as if to slip past the bind one last time. Fredrick closes the distance instead, drives a compact strike into the side of the jaw and follows through with his weight, forcing the bandit’s head to snap sideways. The runner staggers, feet skidding in the leaf litter, then collapses in a limp heap among the roots—breathing, but out cold. Whatever warning they meant to carry deeper into the woods dies with them for now, bought with seconds and bruises.

Low to the ground, Jilly’s scouting run keeps to the treeline, her height limited and the undergrowth doing most of the hiding. From the bushes near S7, the camp opens up in broken sightlines—clear enough to count bodies and landmarks, but not clean enough to guarantee every corner. Still, the important pieces are hard to miss. A steel cage sits at E14, and inside it a small figure shifts—Marra’s daughter, alive, curled tight and motionless between moments. A bowman at F12 keeps a steady angle that watches the cage and the clearing, while another archer holds a wider overwatch at I4. Three melee bandits patrol the open ground—one near H7, another at J10, and a third acting as the cage’s leash at H13, pacing to G14 where the cage gate and lock sit within arm’s reach.

Voices carry in clipped bursts: talk of “the others” returning later, of needing to move before they’re pinned, and of their leader “working the new plan” beneath the central tent at E9. Whatever this camp is, it isn’t settled—it’s bracing, watching, and waiting, and the window to act feels measured in minutes, not comfort.
Itsy



Titles:
Beastkin - Mundane, Small (4ft) - 6ecff6

"Its... its down b-but..." Itsy muttered as his quarry slumped to the ground. Yet the twitching movements told him a clear picture: it wasn't fully dead. "T-thank you for joining me." He told both KaMara and Varius briefly, but his eyes were focused on the undead group. He wasn't about to allow himself to get distracted.

The little shrew began heaving from side to side, excitement and nervousness growing as even more zombies joined the fray. And, seeing how the swordswoman was already engaging the one closing towards her, he decided to help Varius instead. Just as before, the small beast's movements were quick. He Fleched quickly, stepping forward with his full weight behind it and extending his arm in a quick, stab against Zombie4.

Afterward, he would cross-step and spiral around the creature, scurrying back into KaMara's protective shadow.

Actions
1/2 - The Shrew Charge! - Fast F + Fighting Style [Swords] F + Hot Shot F - Itsy covers up to 20ft in a lightning charge, attacking a target and trying to hit a vital part for critical damage - Grade F 0 Post Cooldown - STR E (2) + SWORD F (1) + ABL F (1) = 4 BE vs Zombie4
3 - Move backwards 10ft
Garreth didn’t let the knife-man recover. He drove in close, caught the man’s forearm with the flat of his blade to keep the weapon-hand off line, then turned the hilt and cracked the pommel across the side of the bandit’s head. The strike was short, ugly, and final; the man’s knees buckled and he went down into the moss with a wet exhale. Garreth immediately melted into the brush, dragging the bandit with him, disappearing the way professionals do—no dramatic flourish, just a shift of weight and a vanishing angle between trunks.

At the clearing’s edge, the runner strained against the vines and brush Fredrick had forced them into—tangled, off-balance, still armed and very much still fighting. The bandit thrashed and twisted, trying to free a knee, trying to find purchase for a boot, trying—most of all—to get enough breath to shout. Each attempt made the bind bite tighter and the struggle louder, and Fredrick’s presence in that same foliage turned “call for help” into a gamble the runner didn’t quite dare to take.

Then the forest signaled again. A clipped birdcall—wrong for any bird—answered from deeper east, followed by the faint rhythm of feet on packed ground. Not a stampede yet, but purposeful movement, closing. Whoever the runner had been trying to reach had heard enough to start reacting.

Jilly’s “Plan J” took her low and fast, limited to short bursts—ten feet up at most, skimming beneath branches rather than soaring over them.

From that height, the canopy still blocked the wider world, but it couldn’t hide everything: cart grooves that cut east, a strip of trampled fern where bodies had passed recently, and—through a thin slit in the trees—a darker pocket where smoke thickened and voices murmured around something larger than a lookout fire. A wagon silhouette, maybe. One or two shapes posted where the logging cut narrowed.
The knife lookout tried to capitalize on the chaos—one quick step, blade angled low, the sort of ugly, practical lunge meant for ribs.

Garreth didn’t meet it with force. He met it with precision.

Steel kissed steel with a short, biting ring, and the old captain slid inside the bandit’s reach as if he’d been born there. The sword’s edge snapped down in a flat, punishing cut across the man’s knife hand—not enough to sever, but enough to make fingers spasm open. The knife fell into the moss with a dull thunk. Before the bandit could recover, Garreth’s shoulder drove forward, compact and brutal, and the guard staggered back a step with a wet grunt, pain flashing across his face as red began to bead through his sleeve.

He was hurt. Disarmed. Still on his feet—still in the fight—but suddenly very aware he wasn’t bullying villagers anymore.

Near the firepit, the whistle lookout made the only sensible choice left to him: panic.

He tried to backpedal away from Jilly’s shifting, hungry-looking jelly form, heels skidding on the softened ground. His foot caught—half in the churned mud, half in the viscous drag she’d left beneath him—and he went down hard, arms flailing for balance that wasn’t there. The back of his head clipped something unkind—a rock or a root jutting up through moss—with a sharp crack that made the sound in the clearing go momentarily thin.

He slumped.

Not dead. Not neatly restrained. Just sprawled with his eyes rolling, breath coming in uneven pulls, jaw slack as if his body hadn’t yet decided whether to wake or drift deeper. If anyone wanted answers from him, they would have to force him awake quickly, and even then whatever came out could be muddled by pain and shock.

At the edge of the clearing, Fredrick’s pursuit paid off despite the runner’s nasty elbow. He surged after them, driving a fist into them, using the momentum as his weapon. Vines and low branches snapped tight around limbs as the runner hit the tree; roots and brambles caught boots. The runner twisted and snarled, fighting the bind, but the greenery held fast enough to steal their mobility and turn speed into struggle.

Tangled.

Still dangerous. Still breathing.

For one precious breath, it looked like the clearing might belong to the party.

Then the forest answered.

Somewhere deeper along the logging cut, a branch snapped with purpose—not like a startled deer, but like a man shifting position to run. Another sound followed: a faint, sharp birdcall that didn’t match any bird in the marsh. It came once… then again, answered from farther away.

Garreth’s head lifted instantly, eyes narrowing toward the direction the runner had tried to flee.

“Signals,” he said, voice low and urgent. “They’ve got ears out there.”

And as if to underline his point, the smoldering firepit’s lid rattled faintly—vibration carried through the ground—followed by a distant murmur of movement: boots on packed earth, not close yet, but closing. The kind of sound that meant the window for leisurely interrogation was already bleeding away.
The whistle lookout snapped the cord up and drew a sharp breath, lips already pursing around the metal as his eyes fixed on the absurd blue figure in front of him. For a split second it looked like the shrill note would cut through the trees and wake the whole cut of forest—

Jilly’s punch landed.

It didn’t hit like a fist so much as a springy, impossible force, and whatever magic clung to her jelly-limbs flooded into the contact. The lookout’s cheeks ballooned on instinct, not with air for a whistle, but with a thick, glossy bubblegum swell that pushed out past his lips in a wobbling pink dome. His eyes went comically wide as the bubble grew—bigger, and bigger, and bigger—until it obscured half his face.

He tried to gasp, tried to spit, tried to pull the whistle away and make it work anyway, but the bubble only trembled and then—

POP.


A wet snap of sugar-scented goo burst across his nose and chin. Strings of gum clung to his mouth and the whistle alike, sealing his lips in a humiliating mess. The lookout staggered back coughing, shoulders heaving as if he’d sprinted a mile, one hand pawing uselessly at his face while the other shook with sudden fatigue. The alarm, for now, died in his throat.

To the side, the second lookout—knife already out—moved to pounce on the distraction.

He never reached Jilly.

Steel whispered, clean and practiced. Garreth’s sword slid into the gap like it had been waiting there all along, intercepting the knife hand with a sharp clang that rang off the low trees. The old captain didn’t waste words; his blade pressed, angled, and turned the bandit’s momentum aside, forcing him back a step, then another. It was not flashy. It was efficient—wrist control, footwork, and the quiet message of a man who’d fought in places where mistakes were fatal.

Above and beyond them, at the clearing’s edge, the runner bolted—fast, light, desperate.

Fredrick dropped from the canopy with the kind of decisive weight that should have ended it in one clean motion, a falling strike aimed to hammer the fleeing figure into the ground and keep them there. For an instant it looked perfect: runner distracted, Fredrick descending like judgment.

At the last heartbeat, the runner turned.

Not a panicked flinch—an uncanny, trained pivot as if they’d heard the shift of air itself. An elbow drove hard into Fredrick’s stomach the moment he came into range, a compact blow that stole breath and forced his body to fold just enough to ruin the angle of the drop. Pain flared, sharp and intimate, and the runner used the contact like a lever—slipping under and past him, twisting away into the brush with a burst of speed, gaining ground instead of losing it. [Fredrick's actions reduced from 3 to 2 this round]

The clearing held its breath.

No whistle screamed. No horn answered. But the forest was no longer asleep: the runner’s retreating footfalls were already carrying the news deeper into the trees, and somewhere beyond sight a branch snapped—either a second set of feet moving, or someone changing position to watch.

In the firepit, the coals still smoldered under the hurriedly kicked lid. Smoke continued to seep, thin and accusing.
Aslan’s skyline rises like stacked miracles—needle-towers linked by glass bridges, terraces hanging over terraces, lanterns drifting in lazy orbits along invisible spell-lines. From the lakeward side, the air tastes clean and wet, and the distant roar of docks and sky-carriages is softened by a thousand little warded silence-charms.

The restaurant is built into a cantilevered balcony halfway up a vertical district-spire: The Ascendant Spoon, an upscale place that pretends it isn’t upscale by using words like “taste atelier” and “casual wizard fare.” A ribbon of illusion starlight drifts under the awning, rearranging itself into constellations that don’t exist anywhere in the real sky.

At the entrance, the city’s threshold-barrier makes itself known as a faint pressure on the skin—like a hand hovering near the collar, polite but ready. A pair of carved guardian statues flank the doorway: tall, leonine figures in ceremonial armor, eyes dim as banked coals.

Then the door swings open.

A greeter steps forward with immaculate posture, a crisp vest, and a smile that is technically welcoming.

The only problem is that the smile is too wide, the eyes are too delighted, and the tail—no, surely that’s a fashion accessory—flicks once behind the vest.

Greeter



“Good evening, valued patrons! Welcome to The Ascendant Spo—” The greeter clears their throat with grave dignity. “—Spoon. Your reservation is under…?”

They produce a ledger and ink-quill with the practiced flourish of someone who has done this a thousand times.

The quill squeaks.

The greeter stares at it, offended on principle, then tries again with even more flourish.

The quill squeaks louder.

From somewhere deeper inside, a muffled voice calls out, “Burenyuu—!” followed by the unmistakable sound of something being flambéed that was never meant to be flambéed.

One of the guardian statues’ eyes brightens by a hair’s breadth, then dims again—as if reconsidering the value of movement.

The greeter leans in conspiratorially, lowering their voice to what they clearly believe is a professional whisper.

“Please ignore the ambience. It is… curated.”

A beat.

“And if you see another member of staff who looks exactly like me, no you didn’t.”

They straighten instantly, all poise again, and gesture inward toward a dining room of floating table-lamps, slow-rotating illusion murals, and diners pretending they aren’t fascinated.

“Right this way!”
The canopy swallowed sound the moment Jilly dropped below the treeline. Up close, the “smoke” wasn’t a towering plume at all—just a thin, gray smear seeping from a shallow firepit dug into damp earth, coaxed to burn low with green wood and wet bark. It smelled of soot and resin and something greasy that didn’t belong in a forester’s cookfire.

Jilly’s arrival turned that quiet into chaos. Her shouted declaration and earnest attempt at a heroic landing sent ash puffing outward in a soft burst, scattering pale flecks across moss and bootprints. For a heartbeat the clearing froze—then two men in drab travel leathers snapped upright as if yanked by strings. One kicked a pot-lid over the coals too late to hide the heat, eyes wide and unfriendly; the other’s hand went straight to his belt, fingers curling around a whistle cord and then—after spotting the jelly figure—hesitating, unsure what exactly he was looking at.

Fredrick, moving above it all, reached a branch thick enough to hold him and went still. From there, the scene sharpened into details a ground-level glance might miss: the firepit was positioned where the logging cut could be watched through a slit in the trees; the men weren’t relaxed like hunters or workers, but keyed tight like lookouts. Near the edge of the clearing, a short length of rope lay half-buried under leaves—an improvised snare line, the kind meant to trip an ankle in the dark. And leading away from the fire, pressed into softer patches of mud, were tracks that didn’t belong to villagers: heavier boots, irregular spacing, and the faint double-groove of a small cart that had been dragged rather than rolled.

Behind the treeline, Garreth moved with a veteran’s economy—no wasted steps, no snapped twigs—keeping close enough to Fredrick’s line of travel that a quick glance upward could still catch the old man’s position. He didn’t climb as readily as the younger man, but he knew the ground routes beneath the canopy, weaving between trunks to stay parallel, one hand occasionally raised in a silent signal: slow, watch, don’t commit yet.

In the clearing, the lookout’s fingers tightened on the whistle cord the instant Jilly’s landing scattered ash. The sharp inhale that followed was the kind Garreth had heard a hundred times—an alarm about to be born—giving only a breath of warning before sound would carry far beyond the trees.

The man with the whistle recovered first. He raised it toward his mouth, breath already drawing in—either to warn someone deeper in the woods or to call for help that wasn’t far. The other slid a knife free, not yet lunging, but angling his body so the firepit and the thin path behind him were both covered. Neither spoke a name. Neither asked who Jilly was. Their eyes kept flicking, not just at her, but past her—measuring whether more were coming.

In the hush between breaths, a third presence made itself known: a soft shift in brush off to the side, the sound of someone who’d been crouched low and was now moving away fast, careful not to break branches. Whoever it was didn’t want a fight—they wanted distance, and then they wanted to be a problem later.

The clearing held several truths at once: this wasn’t the bandits’ “home,” but it looked very much like a forward tooth of it—a place to watch the road, rest briefly, keep a fire small, and vanish when needed. And right now, the difference between a quiet lead and a raised alarm was the space of a single breath through a whistle.
Itsy



Titles:
Beastkin - Mundane, Small (4ft) - 6ecff6

Itsy could smell them, before he saw them. The sweet, yet disgusting scent of rot made his long nostril crunch sideways slightly. "T-that smell like... really, really bad..." He murmured just before he could see the shifting figures on the horizon. Without delay, he drew his rapier from its scabbard, metal rasped as the thin, metallic tip was freed from the sheath.

"T-the time is now..." Steeling his nerves, the small beastkin charged one of the five Zombies (Zombie5). Darting through the snow, quick on his feet, he charged with the tip of his rapier pointing forward, almost as if he were a knight performing a cavalry charge. And, when he got close enough to his target, he thrusted the sword against it, aiming right at the epicenter of their chest. [Action 1/2]

Afterward, he moved backwards, creating some distance from the zombie.

Actions
1/2 - The Shrew Charge! - Fast F + Fighting Style [Swords] F + Hot Shot F - Itsy covers up to 20ft in a lightning charge, attacking a target and trying to hit a vital part for critical damage - Grade F 0 Post Cooldown - STR E (2) + SWORD F (1) + ABL F (1) = 4 BE vs Zombie5
3 - Move backwards 10ft

E 1/1
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