Once inside she visibly elbows Pickle Tooth so he takes point, then starts speaking anyway."What's that you're holding?"
"This one is curi-" Pickle began at before the elbow had even hit his side. The kholo let out a little "oof" at the sharp elbow.
He turned his attention back to the odd man, "We came to deal with this town's mosquito problem...and its witch problem...and its Mosquito Witch problem. We were told that you have you been interested in these things as well. Care to share anything you might have uncovered?"
Pickle eyed the paper doll on the floor, and debated picking it up.
"Meeee? Interested? Oh, my dear hyaenoid. I don't want to be here. I was called. It was trying to scare me, so I wouldn’t come...but what if it was being straightforward with me to trick me into thinking it was trying to trick me into staying away? So, I came."
He wrings his hands and stares at Pickle Tooth.
“It’s in my nightmares. Go on, laugh!” Quintus snaps, then wipes his mouth.
“Laugh at the paranoid madman! Ever since I came too close to this damned town, I can’t get rid of it. It shows up and doesn’t say anything but when I wake up, I know things. I hear it buzzing words in my ear. Six and four dead on the Shimmerford road. But how? But why? Is the witch causing it? What does that have to do with the mosquitoes? And why is someone stealing shovels? I don’t even know how I know it... Maybe I’m supposed to cause it.”
Ethel picks up the doll, then tries to clean as much gunk as she can on Quintus's tunic.
"Don't want to be here? That makes two of us, mate. Go touch some grass outside," she says absent-mindedly whilst dedicating most of her attention to examining the doll.
The doll has "The Iron Cave Will Fall" written on it in a neat, albeit slightly shaky hand, the ink starting to bloom due to sweat.
Dorgrum carefully observes the strange man as he talks.
hmm... all that sweat could be a sign of fever, maybe what seems like madness to most might really be illness... if that's the case, what he has could be related to whatever was going on with that white-haired guy... that would mean its somehow contagious... is there a contagious illness that could cause fevers or cold-sweats, and madness...
"'Six and four dead.' What is that supposed to mean?" Pickle asked. "Is that a riddle? How are the shovels related? Were they stolen to burry those who died?"
The man turns to stare at Pickle further.
"My name is Quentin, by the by," he says with complete clarity, if not complete sanity.
"I don’t know what it means. I have to figure it out. It is trying to make me do something and I have to make sure I don’t... ah gods, what if telling you was what It wanted? No, no, it couldn’t have known I would talk...yes, good, destroy that doll..."
He wipes his hands on his trousers.
"What’s been happening with the shovels? No, no. No one burying the dead. But the shovels. They’ve alllllll gone missing." He makes a theatrical sweeping motion across an unseen horizon.
"And picks. Hammers. Rope. Maybe it’s a thief? Digging something. Deep. But no lanterns. Hands in the dark, scrabbling. ...Ah...but maybe that’s what It wants me to think. There must be some significance... it’s probably staring me right in the face and I just. Can’t. Think of it!”
He places his hands on his face again, weeping silently, smearing dirt on his cheeks.
Ethel shows the writing to Quentin.
"You wrote this too? The Iron Cave Will Fall? Ever thought about making some f*$+ing sense, might do you a lot of good."
Dorgrum cocks his head and leans closer to the broken man, first examining his dirt smeared face and then the hands the dirt came from.
Quentin's only reply is to weep more loudly and begin to shake. You don't think you'll get much more out of this wretched man.
"This one is sorry if we have caused you distress," Pickle said. He reached out one hand to pat Quentin on the shoulder but merely mimed the act in the air a few inches from touching the man.
His hand still moving as if comforting the crying man, Pickle spoke to the others out of the corner of his mouth. "Perhaps now would be a good time to head to that hill, no?"
"Yeah, let's go shoot some witches and leave this sod to drown in his own sweat."
She offers the unwrapped paper doll to her companions and, if they don't want to hold it, leaves it on the Quentin's table.
Believing the doll to have upset the unwell man, Dorgrum accepts the piece of paper from Ethel, commits its cryptic message to memory, then crumples it up and tosses it into the fire. Once they've moved away from Quentin he asks, "should we ask some of the locals about the 'iron cave' while we're still in town? If its a real place, it might be near the hill and we could save ourselves a trip out there?"
The Whitefish and Stag, you have noted, is next to two places that would use iron or metals. The tannery nearby, and the smithy. There's a chance either owners could be around right now, as most workplaces double as houses/dwellings in Shimmerford. The general store was one of the places you saw boarded up on the way in, so if there were shovels in there, they aren't there now, and nothing else is to speak of as well.
As you open the door to the inn, you nearly bump into another gnome, with rose-pink hair and yellow eyes. "Mercy, pardon me," says the gnome, curtseying. "Bringing evening breads and cakes." Her basket is covered but smells delicious.
You hear the distant whinny, almost scream, of a horse, and faint pounding.
"Mmm, town coach is early," says the gnome, and heads into The Whitefish and Stag.
A town coach is drawn by six horses and carries four people. Six and four dead...
Pickle Tooth stumbled as he forced his feet to stop before toppling over the pink-haired gnome. He turned his attention to the sounds coming from outside.
"Town coach?" He asked no one in particular. Pickle glanced back to the strange man weeping back in the corner and his eyes grew wide. "Quick!" He bolted through the door, "Six horses, four people!"
Ethel sighs.
"So you can catch the crazy from people here. Great. You distract Pickles and I bonk him on the head until he passes out," she tells Dorgrum before running after Pickle Tooth with her gun and her frying pan in hand.
"Those smell delicious!" Dorgrum calls back to the brightly colored gnome as he chases after his companions. Once out of earshot of the baker, he adds to Ethel, "don't bonk too quickly, there's always a chance he may have stumbled onto some understanding of the truth behind the sick man's ramblings."
or, maybe, he just caught whatever was ailing that human and in a few hours he'll be running the same fever... better keep an eye on that, and perhaps a little distance between me and him...
You dash out into the damp, warm, buggy streets of Shimmerford...
...out to the main Road. It parallels the wall of the town and turns into the open gates on the eastern side of town, some half-dozen buildings past the inn.
It's dark, but Dorgrum and Pickle can see fairly clearly that there is a town coach with a small coachperson (gnome or halfling?) slumped to one side, tearing down the ridge of the Road and pulled by six screaming horses, with blood streaming down their flanks and muzzles. The road curves towards Shimmerford, but if left unchecked, the coach will go directly off an embankment and crash into the East Sellen river.
Pickle skidded to a halt in the road. "This one thinks we should try to calm the beats first, no?," He said to Ethel and Dorgrum.
He slung his lute from his back and began playing a tune in hopes that his music truly had the charms to soothe the savage beast.
"An excellent suggestion," Dorgrum calls back to the gnoll. He raises an eyebrow in pleasant surprise at the quality of the music wafting from Pickle's lute and does his best to make calming noises and gestures toward the animals.
Pickle is able to make the horses hesitate enough that one passenger, a female goblin with one side of her head shaved, tumbles out to safety, gasping.
"Oh, for f***'s sake," Ethel says whilst pondering whether it wouldn't be an act of mercy to let people die instead of enduring possibly years of life in Shimmerford.
She jumps on one of the horses and hits it with her frying pan whilst screaming at the top of her lungs. She proceeds to ungracefully jump from horse to horse democratically distributing bonks, then grabs the reigns long enough to somewhat slow down the carriage.
"Jump, you barmy scrimshankers!"
Thanks to Ethel's and Dorgrum's efforts, the halfling coachperson comes to and slides off the coach-bench almost bonelessly, fluttering their eyes in shock. The carriage slows a bit, but continues to careen towards the River Sellen!
Still atop the coach, she looks inside the two remaining passengers and yells.
"What part of 'jump' is hard to understand, you dim-witted clods? Move, move! Yo, Pickles, Dorgrum, pump up the Enya cover easy-listening music!"
Unsure of what else she can do, Ethel resorts to violence. She spots the weakest looking part of the structure connecting the animals to the carriage and fires at it.
Pickle nodded in response to Ethel and continued with his performance. It had, after all, appeared to have calmed them momentarily.
...and he strung a wrong chord.
The carriage shaft cracks sufficiently that one horse stumbles and manages to run to the side, pulling away from the other horses, and another passenger leaps out--another goblin, older, with peppered white and grey hair and a lip ring.
Pickle doesn't appear to affect the wild-eyed horses.
Without any better options, Dorgrum frantically one more time to calm the horses.
Together, you fail to stop the carriage from careening towards the Sellen. It seems that all is lost, and the two goblins clutch each other in terror as the horses run pell-mell, carrying the coach and its final passenger towards the rocks and the river.
Then, sudden swarming darkness falls upon the first two horses and you hear them screaming, not in terror, but in sheer agony. You hear a great cracking and then only the panting of equines.
When the swarm lifts, you can see the carriage on its side and two horses laying on the ground, their forms appearing to wriggle and shift, and the four other horses baring their teeth and salivating in mute fear.
An older, stocky dwarf with a long forked silver beard climbs painfully out of the side of the cab facing the sky. He is bloodied on his face and shoulder, but he looks alert and hale despite his injuries.
Ethel, who jumped away from the wagon at the last moment, spits on the ground and whistles.
"Can't argue with that type of results. This Mosquito woman sure knows her s@@&."
She looks at the survivors, shrugs and yells at the female goblin.
"You there, what the hell just happened?"
"Not so loud, longshanks!" The female goblin rubs her head ruefully. "Horses be bad enough. We make charity mission to help citizens of Shimmerford, but horses get bitten by mosquitoes and go mad, start running, and poor Cabbie Tellarfoot got a tree branch to the head."
She moves towards the stunned halfling and gives them a healing potion, offering words of comfort.
"We thank you longshanks for stopping the carriage. Owe you recompense. Did you hex the horses?" The older goblin rummages through his things, and eyes the two fallen horses curiously.
Pickle trotted over to the carriage, making sure to give the horse a wide berth, and helped the dwarf to his feet.
"This one is surprised to see you moving," he said. "Come. Away from the horses before they spook again, no?"
"Nah, only hex I know is shooting and hitting s!#$ until it stops moving. Take them to the inn, I guess? Should we punch that weirdo to see if he says something that's useful to us?"
The four standing horses begin to scream, injuring themselves as they try to move away from the two fallen equines, whose bodies begin to erupt with maggots and wriggling larvae, giving the horses a bizarre and macabre semblance of animated life.
"That...that is disconcerting, Pickle said at the wriggling vermin.
He set the dwarf down in the road and moved to untether the remining horses from the carriage.
Ethel crosses her arms and watches Pickles work.
"That nose of yours can feel any magic around? My left toe hurts in this weird way when there's magic nearby. Or it could be arthritis."
Dorgrum pulls his dagger and frantically joins in trying to cut the remaining horses free. "We didn't do that!" he exclaims to the goblin. "We were trying to calm them down and get people off of and out of the carriage... I don't even have the first idea how someone could do something like that, muchless why..."
well, the witch stories seem more likely now... I wonder if maybe they helped her with their charity work so she helped them now in return...
Pickles can sense the hum of primal magic, although the aura is already fading. Mercifully, the tide of wriggling grubs soon ends and the horses lie still as the grave once more. The freed horses whinny and nicker and keep their distance.
The passengers pick themselves up and come up to you, save for the dwarf, who soothes the horses and gathers them by their broken bridles.
"We are grateful for your rescue, good longsh-er, good sers," says the female goblin, speaking in more refined Taldane than before.
She offers Ethel a vial. "A healing potion. We have enough to spare." She removes a delicate silver filigreed bracelet as well. "And this. We prefer not to carry coin on missions--but please take this. I owe you my life, human."
Pickle gave one of the horses a pat on the side, "I am sorry for their fates." He turned his attention to the dwarf, "This one is sure the will mourn the losses."
With that the kholo bard headed back over to join the others, all of his teeth showing in a wide grin. "Our first test of mind and body as adventurers, no?!"
"I suppose we could think of it that way," Dorgrum answers with some reticence. "Although, I'm not entirely sure we should be happy with our results. If it weren't for somebody else's work we wouldn't have stopped the carriage at all."
He sighs slightly and then looks around. "I don't know anything about magic... do you think what happened could have been caused from far off or would the witch have to have been close enough to see it happen?"
You don't notice anything out of the ordinary, aside from Pickle scenting the faint aroma of dissipating magic.
The passengers give you their thanks again and walk with the remaining horses towards the gates of Shimmerford, leaving the carriage askew in the mud for someone else to right, or for no one at all and to simply rot.
"Well, it's getting dark. I can't see s@&* in the dark like you folks, so I reckon it's best if we find somewhere to lay low until morning."
"What's the matter, scared of what torchlight might reveal in the spooky forest?" Pickle's chuckle was cut short when a mosquito bit the inside of his ear.
"Should we search the carriage before we go?" Dorgrum asks earnestly. "I don't know if it would count as stealing if we took any of their stuff from inside, but maybe there might be some kind of... clue, or something... another paper doll like the man at the tavern had, or a rune carved into the wood that we could ask people about?"
He pauses for a moment in case there are any strong objection, and then begins his inspection.
"I suppose we could take a look. Perhaps there might be something like that hidden." Pickle joined Dorgrum near the overturned carriage.