This room appears to be a bedroom. Several vases containing dried flowers stand atop sturdy shelves. A heavy armoire has fallen, face-down and open, onto the floor of the room.
Mukluk thinks he hears a faint scuffling sound from under the armoire.
Niksi takes a dried flower and sniffs at it, despite her costume making such gestures all but impossible. She scans about the room herself.
Prism climbs up onto the counter, peeking into the cupboards for a bite to eat. She leaps down and scurries to the armoire as Mukluk mentions the scurrying sound. She knocks on the side. "More spiders?" She leaps back against the wall, drawing her sickle. "Or wasps?"
"Hello?" Rova calls.
If it's not some new attack from nature, it should respond. And if it is just another animal, it probably already knows they're here.
Mukluk draws his twin picks, really hoping to avoid a fight, but thinking that it probably won't be the case.
"Alright now, let's keep calm. Might just be the housecat," Mukluk readies for the thing to be opened.
Niksi also hears a noise from under the armoire. It sounds like escaping air.
Niksi attempts to pull the armoire up, but her hands slip and she completely loses her balance, landing on her butt. She stands up, dusting herself off with a couple quiet curses. She tries again a couple more times...
...to little avail. "Knowing proper lifting techniques appears to be of little help when you lack the muscle."
Prism slides her sickle back into her beltloop and gives it a try to help get the armoire out of the way. "Thatis..heavy."
Mukluk will offer his own attempts if the others have failed.
"You gotta lift with your back, don't use your knees, that ain't how you do it!" Mukluk puts one pick away as he tries to show how it is done.
Athletics
"Now hold on a sec, let me get my grip."
Athletics
"One more go...okay then..."
Athletics
As everyone struggles with the slippery armoire, Mukluk finally gets a good grip and lifts it up. A huge pile of sand and grit spreads out across the floor, making the room difficult terrain. A wispy creature, apparently made of air, rises up and tries to bolt for the window.
Initiative!
Mukluk
Air Thing
Niksi
Prism
Rova
Mukluk is up!
Round 1
”Oh! Sorry to startle you. Let’s get you out of here!” Mukluk steps back to allow the creature to leave. If the window is closed, he’ll go open it so it can go.
The air mephit shoots out the open window.
Out of combat!
If anyone would like, you can attempt a Survival check to know where it's going, or you might have an appropriate Lore.
As you search the room, you find well-made clothing, some keepsakes, and a strongbox under the bed.
Mukluk waves goodbye to the creature, putting away his weapons.
”Poor lil guy seemed all scared. Probably as afraid of us as we were of it,” Mukluk says, closing the window and beginning to straighten up the room.
Rova blinks as the mephit escapes, trying to see where it might be going.
"But how did it get here? Was it part of the attack, or a friend of the millers?"
Rova watches the creature as it flies away, and she notices that it heads toward a barn just outside of town.
"There's that barn there," she points out. "Maybe we should check there next?"
She's distracted, eyes on the mephit, and doesn't pay attention to the strongbox or anything else in the room.
"What was that?" Prism catches the faintest light but it was gone just as soon as it showed itself since Mukluk released it.
Dropping down she drags the strongbox out from underneath the bed. "Mayas..well finishhere..first."
Prism pops the strongbox open and finds the family's valuables: 110 sp, an assortment of jewelry and other heirlooms worth 14 gp, and a
dancing scarf.
Rova shifts from foot to foot. She never had cared too much about wealth -- you couldn't take it with you, after all -- and her gaze keeps drifting back to the window.
"Let's go look in the barn," she suggests.
You open the last room. It probably belongs to a teenage girl. It's decorated with paintings of various fantastical beasts, including a hydra, a manticore, a centaur, and a phoenix. Her clothing and furnishings are both durable and finely made.
Mukluk moves to ensure the final room is safe, going in to poke around.
Perception
”Alright then, let’s not have any trouble in here,” Mukluk offers.
Rova nods. All the pictures of monsters clearly indicates the girl is learning well what might be coming.
She looks around to see what other warnings the girl might have had.
Mukluk and Rova perform a thorough search, but do not find anything else of interest.
Niksi smiles to herself as she scans the room. She never had a room like this decades and decades ago when she was a child. Her childhood feels far away and disconnected, but not because of the distance of time. A childhood should feel free, but she--forced to hide who she really was--found it stifling and overbearing. She remembers stories and interests and thoughts, for those were where she lived. She's not even sure that she would have liked a room such as this. But the quiet solitude and sense of fantasy are appealing enough.
”Bah! There is nothing here! Don’t want to be cooped up inside all day,” Mukluk growls, making his way outside.
He breathes deep outside, looking around.
”Where to next? The chapel, mayhaps?” he queries, nothing having a perfect memory of all the turmoil in the town.
"I believe Rova mentioned the barn first, and it seems only fair to acquiese this time after we so cruelly spurned her opinion last time."
The group starts to head toward the barn. The route takes you through town and you are suddenly shocked to see three members of the Celestial Menagerie! Jellico Bounce-Bounce the clown, Daring Danika and her lion Leandrus, and Viktor Volkano the fire-breather are right here in Abberton!
A small crowd has gathered along the street to watch three colorfully dressed people shouting and playing tambourines and pipes. “Prepare yourselves and your souls, people of Abberton, for a cavalcade of celestial marvels! For sights so spectacular and so marvelous, that you shall speak of them forever after with awestruck tears in your eyes! Prepare for the show to surpass any you have ever seen, either yesterday or in days before! Prepare for the dawning of... Mistress Dusklight’s Celestial Menagerie!” The speaker is a tall, broad-shouldered woman carrying a whip and accompanied by a magnificent lion. A shirtless man covered in strange tattoos walks to her left, periodically breathing gouts of fire across metal batons he carries in his hands. To the woman’s right is a brilliantly bedecked clown who leaps, rolls, flips, and cavorts in constant feats of acrobatics.
Mukluk seems confused about going to the barn.
"Niksi, why are we going to the barn? We already scared that little critter and I don't see a need to go scarin' it again. We can avoid going to the barn, can't we?" Mukluk asks, looking at the doll like elf.
"And Prism, if you can speak slowly, I'm sure one of us will understand why you want to go to the barn? Why?"
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"Oh I do not feel particularly strongly. I simply like to be fair. I want everyone here to feel appreciated and welcome to speak their mind. It is easy to be discouraged from such when ones advice is not heeded." She leaves unsaid that this is a rare opportunity to agree with Rova, given the halfling's tendency towards escatalogical fancy.
She switches to her "puzzled" face, one eye drawn in abstract cubist style, the other in cartoony exaggeration, and the mouth in meticulous chiaroscuro realism. "That said, it appears that we have distressed you, dear Mukluk. I assure that I take no pleasure in violence and do not seek it, if that is what worries you." She will definitely need to have that talk with Mukluk sometime so she can better understand how to avoid causing him distress such as this.
"And Prism, if you can speak slowly, I'm sure one of us will understand why you want to go to the barn? Why?"
Prism blushes a pale red and her hair turns an even deeper crimson. "Sorry, can't help it sometimes."
"Everyone else just said they wanted to go speak with it, so I figured why not! it might know something about the missing Millers."
*****
As they are walking Prism scrunches up her face as she recognizes Jellico the clown. "You jerks have nothing better to do than follow us around?' Jellico always drove on her nerves, the two faced clown. In front of the audience he was kind and funny. But behind the curtain he liked a darker side of his 'jokes' and Prism tended to get the brunt of them with an injury or two as a reminder.
"It might know something about the missing Millers."
”Oh yeah, the Millers, who are Millers, are missing, aren’t they? Huh? Yeah, okay, then it makes sense to check out the barn. That little guy was probably trying to help us find them. Ah that’s good, very good,” Mukluk says, understanding the plan now.
Just as he seems focused on the plan, he realizes that there are some bozos about, including Victor Volkano.
Mukluk’s hands curl in to fists as he sees the firebreather.
”Viktor. What are you doing here?” Mukluk utters with as much contempt as he’s ever shown anyone in the past few years.
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Niksi freezes as she spies Danika. Of all the times to run into her. At the bare facts, they broke up for the simplest of reasons: Niksi left and Danika stayed. They never talked about it. They both knew there would be no point. Danika needed the stability of an established circus and thought the ringmaster’s intensity pushed her to be better and opened doors, while Niksi needed the freedom to build something that she could fit into and thought the ringmaster was a fascist piece of shit, to use a popular turn-of-phrase. Niksi and Danika’s strong personalities were what drew them together in the first place, so maybe it was bound to happen. Well, and Danika’s strong shoulders. The muscles on a woman’s back have been known to literally make Niksi gasp. And let us not even get started on collarbones.
But we digress. It was not the kind of relationship that ends with shouting or nasty words. They had had their issues, of course—the layers upon layers of walls Niksi has put up around herself, Danika’s impulsiveness, and of course that incident with the storage container—but nothing insurmountable. They made different choices, each for good reasons and each believing they were right, and they knew the consequences. It was less of a break-up and more of an estrangement, as Niksi thinks of it, because of course she does.
But here we come to the snag. Niksi’s biggest secret, the one she is the most ashamed and protective of, is that she is a great romantic. As much as she tries to dismiss romance as formulaic, trite, and based in shallow sentiment, she can’t help but feel the pull of love’s dance. She has always dreamed of being swept off her feet by a daring, strong woman, and she thought she had finally, actually fulfilled that desire, but she was just slapped with harsh reality once more. And now she does what people tend to do when they are unaware or unwilling to face their internal issues: find an easy target for a hate sink, and what easier target than the ex?
Therefore, Niksi has convinced herself that Danika was actually a selfish careerist all along and no, she was not actually in love, why would you say that? How dare you even suggest such a thing.
And so we come back to the present moment. Niksi lingers at the back of the group, trying to keep people in between her and Danika’s line of sight. She does not have the energy to deal with that whole mess right now.
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Rova's face darkenedRova's face darkens as she sees the other circus performers. Most of her memories were mostly happy times from her childhood -- learning how to hunt and track and survive outside, how to hide from "the guard" or "evil Desnan zealots" along with her parents; being sent to talk to children because they were the same size, warning them of what was coming and taking pride that she'd gotten through to them as they went running off in tears; getting to stay up late for parties in their fancy gray and black robes on nights of the full moon as they urged Groetus to come close -- but other memories were darker, more painful. Memories of Mistress Dusklight’s Celestial Menagerie.
Rova lets out a cry as she feels herself shoved forward, hard enough that it's no accident, ending up sprawled in bloody, raw meat she was preparing for the animals. Her ears burn as she turns around and sees Viktor laughing.
"Viktor? What are you doing here?" she'd asked, but gotten no answer. She wiped blood and offal from her face and hair, obscuring her sight of the fire-breather as he tucked a small vial of ... something ... back in his pocket.
His cruel laugh mocked her. "Oh, nothing you need to worry about," he sneered. "I had the misfortune of stepping in some tiger shit today. I thought I'd come see what exactly it was I stepped in, but there's nothing here that's any more recognizable than that dung. It's all just ... waste."
She was about to reply -- but hesitated as she looked for the right words. Before they came to her, he was gone, having turned on his heel and stalked away, leaving her alone with her task. And much as she wanted to clean herself, the animals took priority. They had to be fed, and then she could take care of herself.
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Thkrull trumpeted in alarm as he saw Leandrus. He stomped his foot, digging up a trough of dirt, and shook his tusks menacingly before wrapping his trunk around his halfling and pulling it back away from the big cat.
Oh, yes, he remembered. He remembered what his halfling hadn't even known almost happened.
He had been excited when it had come with food that night, but immediately recoiled, his sensitive nose filled with the iron tang of blood. It often smelled bad like that at feeding time, but usually because of what it was carrying for the other, lesser beasts, the meat eaters. The smell didn't cling to it like it was tonight.
He watched warily, disdaining the peanuts his halfling offered before it went to finish its other tasks. It laid out the seed for the dumb birds, which flocked to the food with no realization that the halfling was so filthy. Then it entered the big cat's cage, as it did almost every night, knowing the creature would let it be in return for the food it provided. But this night seemed different. The lion crouched, his tail twitching, ready to pounce. He smelled the blood too, and was ready to make a meal of it.
Thkrull trumpeted loudly -- as loudly as he ever had, startling Leandrus and his halfling. It turned in alarm, not even seeming to notice Leandrus, and rushed out to see what had alarmed Thkrull. The iron cage door snapped closed behind it, keeping it safe from the fangs and claws of the lion. Thkrull smiled in the way of the great pachyderms, knowing he had once again outsmarted the stupid cat and kept his halfling in one piece.
Oh, yes, he remembered, he thought, glaring at the stupid lion with his dumb neck hair. Just let him try something again and Thkrull would teach him a lesson that he too would never forget.
As you draw near, they overreact with dramatic expressions and outbursts of alarm, warn the people of Abberton against these “cheap imposters,” and promise to show the townsfolk “a real show, not some amateurish parade of feeble animals and struggling charlatans.”
"In fact," Danika adds, "why don't we have a competition, right here and now, to see who the best circus is?"
It's a circus throwdown!
Jellico is up first against Prism. The clown starts juggling bowling pins and then moves on to juggling daggers, finishing with a flourish!
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Prism leaps out, 'borrowing' one of Jellico's daggers.
But Jellico seems to catch her and snatch it out of the way. In mild frustration she causes every inch of her skin and hair to burst with scintillating and rapidly alternating colors to dazzle and distract the audience. "What a jerk."
Despite not being able to snatch a dagger, Prism puts on a brilliant display that has the audience ooh-ing and aah-ing.
Next up is Viktor Volkano. He alternates between two different torches, breathing fire in different patterns to impress the crowd.
Mukluk tries to avoid sneering at Viktor, but does maintain steady eye contact with Viktor. He moves up to the notorious mule kicker, not flinching from the fiery torches...and tries to steal one from the air...
Athletics
...and if successful, Mukluk takes the burning torch and bites into it, putting it out in his mouth. He maintains a dominant eye contact with Viktor.
Performance
Realizing that Mukluk is about to put the torch into his face instead of his mouth, Rova calls out to her elephant, to get him to snatch the dwarf out of the way. But when he instead smacks Mukluk with his trunk, she plays it up -- and Mukluk's own failure with the torch -- leading a series of pratfalls. It's not her usual show -- she doesn't have time for a whole build-up to Groetus' arrival -- but she hopes it will distract the audience at least from realizing the dwarf may have made a mistake.
Mukluk does some impressive athletics, but when he bites into the torch, the audience seems confused. Rova, on the other hand, turns Thkrall's mishap into a hilarious show, and the audience cheers again, delighted by the antics.
Danika steps forward and winks at Niksi. "It looks like it's down to you and me."
Danika takes one of Viktor's torches and lights a large hoop on fire. She uses her whip to direct Leandrus through the hoop. The audience holds their breath as the lion leaps through, but he doesn't even singe a single hair. The audience applauds and looks expectantly at Niksi.
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Niksi smiles, thankful as usual nobody can see as she walks past Danika. ”It always is.” She still thinks fondly of how well the two of them worked together. They were the “power couple,” as others described it.
Niksi remembers exactly where Danika keeps Leandrus’s treats and snatches for one as she passes.
Niksi approaches the center of the circle of onlookers, her movements suddenly overly precise and mechanical, no muscle moving without her permission. She begins dancing in her typical animator style, finally twirling as a pirouetting ballerina in a music box, stiff yet completely precise and balanced. She stops and begins to teeter over. Her arm suddenly shoots up as if suspended by a string and she stops falling. More “strings” pull on each of her limbs in turn and her movements turn jangling and loose. She plays at being drug along into a jaunty marionette dance. She stumbles, then mimes anger at some heavenly puppetmaster, then finally snaps off the strings one-by-one. She falls to the ground, too weak to stand. She discretely shows the treat at Leandrus, and he comes over and paws at her, just as they had practiced back when she was at the Menagerie. He licks her wooden face and she suddenly stirs, movement beginning to itch throughout her body once more. She slowly, muscle-by-muscle, rises. Then bows. She walks back past Danika, dropping the treat in Leandrus’s mouth as she looks right at Danika. ”Well, down to you, me, and Leandrus, that is.” She pets his mane.
Still too focused on the lion to even realize his halfling had tried to get him to do something, Thkrull trumpets in anger as the Leandrus' thing and his former thing completely ignore him!
Danika's eyes narrow as the audience erupts into applause for Niksi!
The three members of the Celestial Menagerie go into a big finale working together! Jellico Bounce-Bounce starts juggling bowling pins even as Viktor lights them on fire with his breath! Danika sets up a ramp and gets Leandrus to jump over the clown's head!
Mukluk moves up to clap Niksi on the back. "That was really nice lass, real nice," Mukluk offers a gruff hairless smile.
"Why don't you do the encore. I think...I think that would be really nice," Mukluk urges her on.
Rova nods at Mukluk's words, encouraging Niksi to show up the others again.
She calls out in her strong voice, honed from years of hectoring warning people about the approaching End Times, as she narrates the elven woman's performance.
Prism continues to scowl at Jellico, keeping her eye on the clown. "Yougot..this Niksi."
Niksi is so caught up in her own one-up-womanship with Danika that she forgets momentarily that she is also here as a member of a group, a representative of their circus as a whole, not just a singular performer. That everyone would choose to put their trust in her, now, should have been an honor, one that would rally her to devise a quick routine to smash the final encore. Instead, all she feels is shame that she does not deserve the trust of these fine, talented people because of her lapse of selfishness. She also cannot help but feel a twinge of regret as she saw Danika smile and wink at her earlier. Her friends deserve someone directing them who doesn't have her head sunk in the past.
The routine she devises is passable, serviceable. She is noticeably distracted as she directs the others. Regardless of the audience's reaction, Niksi considers the encore a deep failure.
While Niksi's performance is not up to her usual standards, the excellent work by her and Prism in particular have the audience primed to enjoy the show. They applaud loudly and start asking about the next performance of the Circus of Wayward Wonders.
Jellico Bounce-Bounce and Viktor Volkano scowl while Danika coolly stares at Niksi. Leandrus growls a little at Thkrull. "I guess these people have no taste," says Danika as the group leaves.
"Ay, best please beetles no replace."
"Have replaced what, you daft cow?!" Looks at Danika with annoyance. "If you're not going to make any sense, you probably should get outta here. You're just gunna confuse people," Mukluk growl. "Now scram."
He turns away from the confusing trio, clapping Niksi on the back.
"That's good work," Mukluk says to Niksi, for she did better than he ever could. "Let's get to the barn."