Mia joins in the fight with her machete, both she and Surma slicing at the little creature, but neither one lands a good hit.
Griffo and Eilyne both fire into the melee, but both wind up missing as well. The kineticist moves away from the enemy to seek healing.
Minto, however, manages to get his teeth around the creature. He shakes back and forth, dragging the twig-thing to the ground.
"Ah! Let me go, you overgrown mutt!" the creature shrieks. It launches another blast of splinters at Minto and Surma.
"F%&*!" Surma snarls out before bringing her axe down on the prone pile of twigs.
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Minto again avoids the worst of the splinters, but that doesn't predispose him to treat the twiggy creature any better.
With the small creature pretty much surrounded and lying prone, Griffo decides that trying to whip a sling stone at it will be far too difficult. Instead, he moves to heal Eilyne.
Mia lets out a growl as the creature continues to hurt the others.
The prone creature doesn't stand much chance as Surma and Mia hack at it with their blades. Minto finishes it off with another savage bite, and it collapses into an inanimate pile of twigs, its tiny spear the only recognizable piece.
Mia gives an oddly wolf like snarl as the fight ends. She turns and sees the wounds the others have. Her anger goes out like a snuffed candle and the tension in her shoulders fades.
"Can I help?"
Surma takes a breath as the pile of twigs becomes... a pile of twigs before noticing Mia has asked something. Looking down at her pincushion of a body she looks back up at the Ranger and shrugs. "Sure."
Mia, seeing the number of thorns shakes her head and starts working on plucking them out.
"Surma, are you sure you're okay, there's a lot of bleeding," Mia says with more than a little concern.
"I'm good. I still feel pain!" she boisterously replies. "Soooo, thorns and blood aside, like what you see?" she adds to break the tension.
Surma, you could swear that you saw something underneath Mia's hood move when you ask is she liked what she saw.
"What?! I-I-I'm sorry it's just that... that I'm... I mean..." her voice trails off as she hurriedly finishes picking out the thorns and is silent as she bandages the worst of Surma's wounds.
Her work done, she leaves the apples and gathers Mama wolf and her pups before heading out to scout the path ahead.
"Hmm?" she replies while smirking, crouching a bit she tries to get a better look at Mia's face. "You're rather pretty, why do you wear that hood all the time? Don't care for the sun?"
"No, I'm not," Mia denies as she turns away and ducks her head while pulling her hood lower.
"What?! You are too!" Surma lets out as she circles around and crouches. "You smell good too."
Mia tries to turn away again, but her heel catches on a root sticking from the ground. Unbalanced, she begins to fall.
Surma quickly catches the clumsy Ranger with both her arms. Wrapping her up she holds her close. "Whoa, calm down, what's up?"
As Surma catches her, Mia's hood falls away, letting the group that she'd been with since the hobgoblins attacked see her face for the first time. She's young and pretty. Here eyes are large with one being silver and the other being sapphire. Her hair is long and raven black and her skin is fair. The most unusual thing, though, are her ears. Two pointed ears like those of a wolf twitch then flatten against the side of her head, almost disappearing into her hair. She doesn't meet Surma's eyes and waits for the inevitable revulsion.
Surma stares in shock for awhile, silent. "You're beautiful." she says in a rather husky tone. "I knew I liked your smell." she adds, her grip tightening.
Mia looks up in surprise.
"Wh-what?"
This close, it's hard to miss the small fangs she has where her canines should be.
"Mm, yes, it's really nice, just like the rest of you, my fine little pup." Surma coos.
"S-surma, c'mon. Let me go," Mia begs the taller woman.
Surma chuckles before doing as the smaller woman requested. "I'm sorry, you're just so adorable. You're eyes are rather pretty, almost gemlike."
"They mark me as something less than human," Mia counters as she pulls her hood back over her head and hides her face in shadow once more. Before Surma can say anything else, she runs off, down the path ahead.
"No, it makes you something more." Surma replies solemnly as the young woman runs off. Letting out a sigh she collects all that they had gathered to take back with them.
Griffo chimes in, "More than human, less than human - none of that is here or there. Mia's just a little different, and different is good. You think the forest would thrive if every tree in it were the same?" he says as he gestures about. "Deer browse on beech, maples make lots of leaves that fall and feed the worms and earth dwellers, ash makes high gaps for nests and dens. They all make the forest stronger and healthier but none is more or less than the other. If they were all the same the forest would be out of balance and vulnerable to fire, disease, and disaster."
Surma blinks as Griffo educates her on trees. "... okay... and?"
The look Mia gives Griffo is cold, like frost left by a winter storm.
"Then tell that to townsfolk. Not to me," she says before walking down the path.
Some of the survivors look askance at the interaction between Mia and Surma. Edran, especially, watches quite intently. But soon Mia walks off, and Aubrin hobbles over to tend to the injured. The retired ranger calls upon Cayden Cailean, channeling positive energy.
"Is everybody alright? Let's press on before more of those weird creatures show up."
You leave the ruined farm and continue north. Sundown approaches, and you are about to call for a halt when Mia, scouting ahead, comes upon a woman's body lying in a creek bed. The body has been brutalized both before and after death, and her face is almost unrecognizable beneath the bruises and wounds. Her pack lies nearby.
The rest of you arrive as the ranger examines the body, she sees that the wounds came from the same sort of weapons the hobgoblins use. She also discovers a broken black fingernail, like a hobgoblins's, in one of the injuries.
Eilyne was relieved by the death of the twig creature and went to collect some of it's remains. She wasn't sure if they could be manipulated any better than regular plant life could but she figured it couldn't hurt. As she was doing this She could see Surma and Mia speaking and noticed the actions of the lustful Surma towards the ranger. It wasn't until Mia tripped and the hood fell off that Eilyne realized why Mia wore it all the time.
Rising from where she had knelt Eilyne approached and said, "I don't know that it makes you more than human, certainly something other than human. It's perfectly acceptable and they need to learn to live with it. Us non-human types need to stick together it seems." Despite her words it seems obvious to look at Eilyne that she is human and her revealing clothing of living plants does nothing to hide that fact. Why she thinks of herself as something other than human is a mystery.
As she returned to the group Eilyne felt the healing burst from Aubrin and nodded as she said, "Thank you." She nodded in agreement as the woman suggested that they should move on and began to follow the procession to one side just at the edge of sight in the woods along with Rocky, right up until they reached the creek bed. She approached to see what Mia was examining and knelt beside the body on the ground.
Beneath the bruises, Eilyne is able to recognize the woman as the trapper Gilida Dravonich, a part-time resident of Phaendar. The kineticist is able to determine that while the injuries were fatal, none are decidedly lethal bows. Instead, the wounds were shallow and carefully placed to cause pain and a slow death.
Her pack turns out to be magical, capable of holding a large volume items inside an extradimensional space. It currently hold some traps, provisions, and animal skins.
"She must have gotten away from them somehow. I can't imagine they'd leave her with her haversack." Griffo starts to look about the area to see if Gilida (and anything else) left a significant trail.
Griffo finds Gilida's trail, a seemingly haphazard path through the woods. It looks like she was staggering and leaned heavily on trees along the way. The tracks of a large group of humanoids wearing boots follows her trail. The deep prints seem to indicate a leisurely pursuit.
There are perhaps a dozen or so sets of prints, and their tracks lead north away from the creek bed.
Mia, without a word, slips into the brush and follows the trail. She knew without a doubt what she was tracking.
And she was good at killing goblins.
When she sees that she is getting closer to the gang of goblins (or hobgoblins) she readies her bow and begins to sneak around, looking for a good position to snipe them from.
"Wait!" Aubrin calls as Mia starts to rush ahead. "Night will fall soon. Is it wise to chase down such a large band of hobgoblins in the dark?"
Surma starts cursing to herself when they find the woman's corpse, and louder once Mia takes off. "Get back here!" she hisses.
Hearing Aubrin's comment she was reminded that humans weren't the best at seeing at night, especially compared to hobgoblins. She, and she guessed Mia, could see just fine though. She didn't know if Halflings could or not, she'd need to ask Griffo later.
Mia stops and turns to Aubrin.
"Should we leave them to come attack us then," she asks, her tone frigid. "I can see well enough in the dark, and most of the townsfolk would be glad to be rid of me just as soon as have those monsters taken care of."
"If you want to scout them out, Mia, go ahead. I won't be too happy setting up camp if I don't know they're well away from us. But come on back when you've spotted and assessed them. We've got too many people to protect to rashly charge in to attack, particularly when we're outnumbered," Griffo advises.
"What he said. Also the Ironfangs and Molthune aren't going anywhere any time soon, so you'll be wanted for a long while. So if someone doesn't want you protecting them just because of how you look, f$&# em, they can fend for themselves." Surma adds.
Mia lets out a sigh of defeat, her shoulders slumping as her head bows.
"I guess you're going to be following me whether I want you to or not. Fine, we'll just see how far away they are then," she says, really not wanting to admit that Griffo had a point, and that she is still not sure she believes that Surma likes her and wants her around.
Surma lets out a sigh of relief.
Mia and Surma follow the hobgoblins' tracks to the north. The trail isn't difficult to pick up, so they are able to move at full speed through the woods as sun sets and evening approaches. After an hour, they can see smoke rising above the trees from a few miles off--exactly where Gristledown is located.
Another hour or so and the pair of rangers come to the logging thorp, a grisly scene indeed. The longhouse, huts, and work shed are all ablaze, flames crackling as they consume the wooden buildings. A dozen hobgoblins are throwing bodies into a shallow pit nearby, burying them in a mass grave.
A hulking bugbear crouches over another body, working at it with his blade. With a final cut, he finishes his work. He laughs as he rises up to his full seven-foot-height, holding his victim's flayed skin as a prize!
On edge when she sees and smells the smoke the anxiety turns to full on dread when they come upon the inferno, seeing an all too familiar scene as bodies are tossed into the pit she clamps her hand over mouth to muffle a wail.
Frantically she begins looking elsewhere, catching the bugbear as his grizzly prize before turning to Mia. "We need to go. Now" she whimpers.
Mia has her hand over her own mouth as she witnesses the scene. Terrified of making any noise, she nods at Surma's words and follows her back down the trail. Once there are away from the graveyard that is Gristledown, she clings to Surma as her knees buckle with fear.
"Why," she whimpers, "why are they doing this?"
Where could they go? The rangers were likely dead as is anyone else that might help. Are they doomed to die? Will they be hunted down like game, for sport?
Mia was lost. If it was just her, she could hide, go deeper into the woods, but with the townsfolk, does she even dare?
In that moment, she begins to hear the voice she'd almost forgotten about, calling to her.
"Because they're f!$*ing Evil." Surma comments when she finds the words. Supporting the Ranger with her arm to keep her focused on moving forward she adds "Come on, little pup. Your new friends are waiting for you back with the others."
It is late by the time the rangers make it back to where the group has camped for the night, not far from where Gilida's body was found. Several of the villagers are asleep, but a few have waited up to hear the grim news they have brought back with them.
"Okay, change of plans everyone! We're going to the Rangers, everyone likes them! Fun for the whole family!" she announces to those still awake with a wide smile on her face.
"Yay, I love rangers!" Rhyna says excitedly.
The others, though, look at Surma worriedly. "What happened? What did you find?" Aubrin asks.
"You don't want to know." she says to Aubrin, that smile still frozen on her face.
Kining lets out an annoyed harrumph. "Don't be coy, girl. We ain't children. Out with it!" the dwarf says.
"They're dead. And the burning. And the skinning. And the screaming. No, they weren't screaming, but I could hear the screaming. They were definitely screaming before."