Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-Adventurers — Adventurer who brings a stuffed bear on their journeys
"Listen," the archer says testily. "The yak-headed men from the upland plateaus, they carry around these entire backpack miniature houses. You can open them up and they're all full of little chairs and rugs and even tiny, tiny plates and cups. You wouldn't laugh at them, would you?"
"There's not a lot I'd tease a seven-foot minotaur for," the berserker agrees. "And those are the houses for their household small gods, since their people became nomadic and didn't want to leave their gods behind, and I especially don't want to fight over laughing at a man's little god."
"But you'll laugh at me for this?"
The berserker wiggles the stuffed bear. "Aye," he says cheerily.
"Give it back," the archer grumbles, making a futile snatch for it.
"Hey, Malia!" the berseker calls, holding it out of reach. "Have you seen this?"
"No, give it back," the archer hisses, but the wizard has already diverted her amble past them, and looked up from the battered, leather-bound book she's thumbing through.
"What's this?" she says, and the berserker, grinning, plops the worn brown fabric animal, stuffed with lumpily ancient wool, into the open pages of the tome.
"Our archer's bedroll companion," he says. "His name's—"
"He's called Brown Bear," the archer says, with sulky hauteur.
Malia lifts him out of the book, snapping it shut below him with the other hand, and stares at the bear intently. Then, holding him out at almost arm's length, she bends at the waist — weirdly formal, almost courtly — and presses her lips softly between cloth-nubbin ears.
Still wordless, expession opaque, she shoves the bear imperiously at the archer and walks away.
"Weirdly sweet, that was," the paladin says, as they all stare after her receding, book-leafing back.
"Is there nothing she can't make frightening?" the berserker says mournfully.