Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-Adventurers: — This ranger left the gold behind - their pack is stuffed to bursting with coffee beans
“Um,” Shear Dampswatchmun says awkwardly, lurking.
The ranger joined them on this job because it involved a trek into the wild woods, deep in the wild woods — one of the small towns that was overrun completely in the Treemarch of the Year of the Golden Eye, woodland springing up like a predatory tide, growth on the order of decades per day, some wizard’s family storehouse of arcane trinketry, the usual oh it’s all just sentimental value! sob story told with the usual avaricious underlying gleam.
Point is, Shear doesn’t really know the ranger. She’s fitted in well enough, friendly enough, but Shear doesn’t quite know what to — do, now that something’s clearly wrong.
“Um,” Shear says, and the ranger shakes herself a bit, stops staring distractedly into the dusk-purpled distance, and smiles weakly.
“Sorry,” she says. “I wasn’t — I wasn’t listening. What did you say?”
Things went weird after they picked up whatever the client’s trinket is — sure, Mr. Wizard, you’re paying us to retrieve grandpappy’s do-nothing amulet, sure — and Harri did the usual: gave them a couple of hours to scramble around the tree-throttled remains of the old town and scrape together whatever extracurriculars look worth their while, no questions asked. It’s neither grave robbery nor burglary, pretty much everyone does it if they’re risking their necks out in the wild woods, but it’s still distasteful to the people who aren’t risking their own necks for their abandoned ancestral stuff, as if they could and would, maybe, one day, and you’re depriving them.
It being a wizard’s house, instead of immediately splitting up, they’d cautiously and cooperatively prodded around it, covered each others’ backs in exchange for having to haggle out who’d earned what if they found anything. The ranger and the Southern elf had helped Shear spring open an old, hastily stasis-bound cache beneath a loose floorboard; coinage, some bolts of fabulous cloth, and a sack the size of your head with seeds in it.
They’d done a little dickering, Shear and the elf, with the ready tongues of comfortable comrades, settled on an unequal split of coinage, the elf taking the cloth, on the promise that Shear could have a garment’s worth.
“Come on, you can’t be shy, or you’ll get cheated,” Shear had said cheerily over her shoulder to the ranger, and the ranger had made an odd, hesitant face, and said she’d take the seeds, if everyone was fine with that—? No, no coins, she didn’t need — thank you.
And she’s been moping around in a daze ever since.
“Is it, like, one of those berserker nomad customs or something?” Shear says now, mouth twisted. “Like — I know I’m dying, so I’ll fill my pockets with flower seeds and walk into the green?”
”…What?” the ranger says blankly.
“You keep staring off at nothing,” Shear says. “And you said you didn’t need money. Everybody needs money, even if only a bit now and then. And I know we’re not, like, friends, but—”
“Oh,” the ranger says, and rubs a hand over her face, grimaces, laughs in a forced sort of way. “I’m not dying. Well, no more than anyone, I suppose, but — no. Sorry, I’m — sorry.”
“You okay?” Shear says, fidgeting.
“I keep going over in my head everything I need to do when we get back,” the ranger says. “How I’m going to find a druid I can trust to help. Palasum, maybe, where they grow all the flowers under glass, you must be able to set up a garden there, aye?”
“Palasum?” Shear scratches the prickling nape of her neck. “Hoy. I knew a guy who made it big in adventuring, moved to Palasum. City spat him back out a year or so later, bankrupt and aged before his time. Why’d you want to go there?”
“Gardening expertise,” the ranger says. “Glasshouses. People used to commercial secrets. Investors, I suppose, to get it started—”
Shear blinks, and blinks again, and looks askance at the ranger’s dazed tone. “What the fuck,” she says judiciously, lowering her voice, “are those seeds?”
And the ranger looks around and crooks a finger at her and breathes a couple of words in her ear that will surely make the elven monopolists of the Highlands extemely displeased, as measured out in world-class assassins.
“Fuck,” Shear says stupidly. “Holy flying harpy shit.”
