Molotov's Adventures in Fairy Land

[Molotov]

(Closed to None So Blind)

“Bloody fairies,” the mutant cursed. “I hate these damn things. I bloody wish these sodding gems were in the bloody ruins, I’d fight monsters for them before I’d talk to a sodding fairy.” He preferred the monsters in the swamps of Fiorair. At least those he could kill with violence. The Fae were a different story all together. In his history with them, they had done nothing but kill him with kindness and stupid questions.

At the moment, though, Molotov didn’t have much of a choice but to brave the Fae. As he cut through the vines and rough foliage of the rain forest, he just thanked his luck that he hadn’t met any of them yet. Eventually, they would find him of them, either by the time he reached Donnalaich or in a hamlet that was haphazardly placed among the forestry. Molotov regretted that fates had placed the crystals that were so important to his fate somewhere so terribly hard to reach.

Now, as the mutant forced his way through the underbrush, he regretted having given up blades. Ever since he had sworn to change his ways, he had opted not to have them. They made it too easy to kill, especially in situations where killing wasn’t warranted. However, now that he was trudging through rainforest with only a nightstick to bat away at foliage with, he was starting to wonder if killing a few people would be worth moving through the rainforest easier.

Fortunately, he was well dressed for the occasion. Despite the protection it offered him, Molotov had left his dragonscale cloak behind in favor of nothing more than an open shirt and britches. He knew it wouldn’t leave him all that physically appealing when he met the Fae, but he figured that would give them just one more reason to leave him alone. Though he had normally moved away from his Mohawk, for fear of the attention it would attract, he had made an exception in that regard. He was hoping to scare away as many of the Fae as possible. From what he heard, there were two kinds of Fae, the ones that were almost as rational as one of Althanas’ more tolerable races, and the ones that would keep asking him questions incessantly. He hoped by looking intimidating, he would scare away the latter and get to deal with the former. He came bearing gold to pay for the things he needed.

Eventually, Molotov reached Donnalaich. His first impressions of the city were ones of astonishment, so much so that he couldn’t even think of a sarcastic comment to make. The architecture was elaborate, there were buildings with long twisted spires, the kind of which the mutant believed could have only existed in Eluriand, if anywhere at all. Framed by ruins that were, in and of themselves breathtaking, the city of the Faes glowed brightly with the way their buildings of glass reflected the sun's rays.

“Bloody hell…” Molotov thought. “These Fae really can build. Too bad they’re the least tolerable race since those sodding kender…”

[Chromanon Rockskin]

Sodding was precisely what this kender was doing. The trip from the Red Forest to Dheathain had been pleasant, but perhaps taken a day or two longer than her friend had expected. Donnacadh would just have to understand, she decided. After all, she had suffered at least one point of extreme duress, and three points of boredom. In her mind, the boredom had been the worst part of it.

These days the denizens of the elven nation were far less talkative than they had ever been before. They just wanted to attack her and burn the town down afterwards. Perhaps if there had been one maniacal world domination monologue, she would have been fine. The simple fact, however, was that when all was said in done, she'd been standing in the middle of a smoldering husk of a city without one person having said "hello" to her, a stubbed toe from kicking an armored assailant and she came darn close to losing her petrified monkey foot in the eye socket of another foe. Despite such a brutal state of affairs, the kender was willing to look cheerfully upon it. She had, after all, discovered that the elves were now more prone to fall apart with a sharp prod of her hoopak, and she'd been using feet as projectiles from her hoopak's trusty slingshot to help her get out of the city. She'd once tried a head, but the jaws had come down on the sling and it stubbornly refused to be lobbed, no matter what direction she flung. In the end, she'd had to beat her hoopak against a still-flaming pile of hay at the end of a barn to free the sling. Hands were no good as well. They grabbed on to the hoopak and tried to crawl down her arms to her neck, and really, that would have been far more amusing happening to someone else.

She and David, the fat and cantankerous gnome had slipped out of the small town, and lost their hunters in the vast Red Forest. No matter what forest she was in, she was usually reminded of a thick pine wood in Salvar, where she'd met a gigantic man dressed in fur. Sleeping near pine would bring about dreams of a great and terrible shield, blindingly blue and ringing with the faint sounds of screaming. It was with quick and nimble hands that she had gathered seeds and chunks of grassy earth to place in the special bag that Donnacadh had given her. It was filled with peat moss and after her collection was done, quite heavy. After a day of wandering around the Red Forest, trying to find the road that would lead her to the same port city she'd entered Raiaera from, she had grown strangely irritable. She'd snapped angrily when the gnome stopped following her footsteps so that he cold gnaw at an acorn buried deeply within a pile of crisp reddish brown leaves, dropped the bag on him and demanded that he carry it.

After several moments of silence and stillness from her sporadically twitchy little pet, the kendergoyle began to grow worried. Her dark grey eyes watered a little in worry, her brows bowing as she crouched down, scuttling through the leaves to the bag. Small, frail hands grasped the handles of the cloth thing and she heaved upwards, to reveal a rather flattened little gnome. Setting the bag to the side, she brushed off the leaves that clung to her bright blue tights, and nudged the body with her scuffed and fraying boots. He didn't move. Instead, he seemed quite content to lay there, his arms spread outwards as if he were making leaf-pile angels, his eyes bulging from his head, one of them red from burst blood vessels. It was, on whole, the most adorable look he'd ever given. She could even make out a slip of his pink tongue poking defiantly from the side of his lips.

After staring at him for a while, her mind racing through every dead frog she had ever seen make just the same face, she decided that it was time to go home. Chromanon Rockskin was not a woman who would leave a man behind, and she bent over to pick up her fallen comrade. The moment her fingers touched his chest, his open eyes swiveled down to look at her hand, and his mouth loomed open as he growled, spittle flying upwards before spackling his face. Chromanon paused, blinking at first in surprise. It did not, however, take long for a large grin to find it's way across her face. She picked up the gnome, holding him to her chest as if she would never let go. It was easy to ignore the fact that he was desperately trying to gnaw off her hand; an accident involving a gopher and a coconut had knocked out all of his teeth ages ago.

The miracle of David's reanimation had brought new luck to her endeavor. That day Chromanon found herself on the road again, and in a much better mood. She felt afterwards that it had been their proximity to the big black tower she'd gathered the grass beside that had put her in such a foul state of mind, but it didn't matter. She had David and she was helping a good friend. That was how the little kender came to be in Dheathain at the same time as her hero. No matter that she'd all but forgotten her husband, her true friends held a special place in her heart. There had been Snow, silly and quiet but still nice, Edgar, who was made of jelly and sticks, and then Molotov. They were her family in her eyes, an inseparable force for the common good of Salvar, for shields made out of Pray Val Eats Us.

Who would have thought that she would have been on her knees in Donnacadh's lawn, carefully pushing seeds down into the earth and peat next to the chunks of slightly sanguine grass patches, yanking David back with his leash every time he began to wander in the clueless way he had taken to, that she would look up and see him. His hair had reminded her of a rooster at first, and maybe she had been right. He had the same kind of strut, and she liked him even more for it.

"Stars and Wind it's you!" She exclaimed as she got up and ran, her feet pounding on the stone walkway as she flew out of the garden gate. David, attatched to the leash that was around her wrist, was as helpless as a leaf in a hurricane, pulled through the air with all his rotting flesh rippling in the breeze. As she squealed, he made a much more basal sound that was not quite unlike it, though rather more baritone. "Eeee! It's you! It's you it's you it's you it's you it's you! Where have you been all my life!?" she screamed as she finally took a flying leap towards the mutant.

It would appear that Haidia hath no fury as a kender's love.

[Molotov]

If there was one thing that was more unbearable than kenders, it was a certain kendergoyle who had an incorrigible habit of jumping into Molotov’s arms at the most inopportune times. He tried to catch her, a somewhat daunting proposition given that his hands were practically exhausted from beating his way through the rainforest, only to fall backwards once she was in his grasp. He had forgotten how her stone form had made her so heavy. She landed on top of him, practically crushing his chest, laughing and giggling, oblivious to the effect of her weight.

“Bloody hell,” the mutant wheezed, struggling underneath the weight of the heavy kendergoyle. “Chroma, bloody hell… you’ve got to get off me love. I’ve got to get on with some important business- I don’t have time to play.”

The kendergoyle obliged excitedly. She moved enough so that Molotov could get up, but the moment the mutant saw the eager look in her eyes, he realized that he shouldn’t have mentioned that he had things to attend to. “She’s going to want to help me,” he realized, rolling his eyes visibly. He grunted a little as he picked himself up. “Bloody hell, she’s going to want to help.”

“Chroma, my business here is very boring,” he continued. “Bloody bloody boring. Sod-awful boring, and not the kind of business for kenders. The kind of business that kenders hate, it’s all bloody boring and full of people talking about mining business and capital gains. Bloody boring stuff. “

However, Chroma’s was not pleased. "Oh, that's really boring. You're right, no business for kenders." She nodded sagely and shook a finger at him. "And no business for Molotovs either. I'm going to come with you and save you from boredom! It's Divine Salvarnation!"

Molotov shook his head. He noticed that a rather large group of Fae had assembled near him and were looking on with an equal amount of bewilderment. Some of them were laughing, and Molotov felt that he could even overhear a few of them mention things about how excited they were to have a new visitor to play with. He groaned loudly. Things were going even worse than he imagined.

“Alright love…” Molotov said. He hoped that the kendergoyle would soon find something else that entertained her and would leave him alone. He was about to pick himself back up, when he noticed something gnawing on his elbow. It was unable to pierce the skin, but it was still a bit unsettling. Molotov turned to look and see an gnome zombie chewing on him without any success. He shook his head in disbelief.

“Of all the sodding things…” Molotov thought. “Bloody Chroma went and got herself a pet raised by Xem’zund. Guess that makes sense for the girl who thought Ashiakin Azzarak would be fun to play with.” He thought about killing the creature, but it seemed harmless enough. After all, if it had been with her that long without having eaten her, it was likely that it wouldn’t be able to later either. Without teeth, Molotov was willing to accept that the undead gnome was harmless enough.

As he picked himself up, Molotov looked on at the crowd of Faes and cringed. Chroma and he were the center of attention. “Someone save me from this is ‘Divine Salvarnation,’” he thought sardonically.

[Chromanon Rockskin]

He hadn't argued, and really, she'd been expecting that. She knew that Molotov was a smart guy, and surely he knew that if he didn't take her along, he would be missing out on the greatest adventure in the history of the world. She wondered which of the gods would bless the writer that finally put that history down on parchment. Suddenly, purely, inspiration came. She would call down a god to help him banish the boredom. She didn't care if it came and resolved things for him so that he didn't have to go to some smelly old meeting, or it decided to add a little pizazz to his day. Her excitement started to bubble upwards and she jumped up and down, punching the air as she proclaimed her genius to the old friend.

"I can call down a god of interestingness to save you from all the boredom! I can do that now, y'know!" As she grinned at him, waiting for him to show the same excitement that she did for the plan to rule all plans, she found that he merely brushed her off, saying in the kindly way he used to talk to her, as if she were a child, "Thats cute love, just be careful calling the gods, they don't come sometimes when you call them."

She stopped, her head tilting as her mouth drew into a quivering frown. How could he say such a thing? Of course they came. Hadn't she been the one to call Flatulencia, the god of gaseous expulsions, when she'd been in need before? He had helped her by bubbling up from the swamp floor when she'd been so lost. It was more than a little obvious that Molotov was talking without really knowing what he meant.

"They always come when I call. That's silly to think that they wouldn't. I've done it lots before." she assured him, picking up David and nuzzling the little zombie gnome with care. She hadn't been looking at Molotov; she hadn't been expecting him to say something like "Are you sure, love?" However, that was, in fact, exactly what he had done. Her brow rose, she backed away from him and cracked the knuckles on her hands the way she'd seen a draconian barbarian do the day she aquired the coins that had been lying abandoned and unused on the table by his ale while he looked at little cards with shapes on them.

"Stand back, I'll show you..." she said, the end of her sentence floating off absently, as if her mind had begun to wander before she was even done giving instructions. She scrunched up her fist, closed her eyes tight and screwed up her face in such a position that it closely resembled the orcs that had been known to lope through the forests of Raiaera en masse in times past. From the air, there was silence for a long moment. It would have been easy, perhaps, to believe that nothing more would happen outside of the realm of the kender's mind. With the face she was making, perhaps more than a few paltry brain cells were giving their last hurrah, but as the watching fae seemed ready to give up and go to find more interesting things to watch, there came a sound that broke through the silence, dashing it to pieces on cobblestone and cloudcover alike.

It was like the twinking of a hundred tiny bells, exploding in song all at once. The sunlight seemed to gleam brighter in that moment, and tiny suns blossomed around them only to fade away in a moment. The bursts of light had a dancing quality, appearing in a rhythm older than time itself. Finally, the began to get closer together until the shape of a woman, long and languid with curves that swayed as she moved, dancing around Chroma and by Molotov with a laugh that echoed the belltones that brought her.

"Schimeraaa!" Chroma called cheerfully, and began to dance with the goddess. When she passed by Molotov, the kender held out her hand, beckoning the mutant to join in the revelry. Despite his slack-jawed expression of confusion, she would not be daunted. She laughed and held the other hand out to him. "Dance with me Tovvy!" she urged her friend. "Schimera loves to dance. She's the goddess that makes the light dance on moving water."

[Molotov]

Molotov didn’t want to dance. However, before he could tell Chroma that their very important business could not be interrupted by dancing, his attention had turned to the Fae. Some of them were squealing and clapping their hands in delight, dancing along with Chroma and her goddess of making light dance on moving water. They were laughing and celebrating, and Molotov was ignoring all their calls to have him dance.

“Oh of all the sodding rot,” he thought. “The bloody Gods have to be touched at this point if they send down their dancing water gods to dance with Chroma and a bunch of Fairies.” A pair Fae had begun to pull Molotov into their cluster of dancers, each grabbing him by one of his wrists. The mutant resisted, but the shrill screams with which the Fae were begging him to join them were making him relent, if only to shut them up.

Then, before Molotov could have even asked for it himself, he heard a booming voice shout the word quiet. Suddenly, there was a hush everywhere, except for Chroma and her goddess, who were dancing happily as if nothing had changed at all. Molotov, however was staring at a new Fae who had appeared, dressed in satin robes and carrying a large glass scepter. The mutant looked at him warily, wondering what this regal Fae might want to say. He also wondered why someone would be dressed in satin in such a hot climate, but he was willing to chalk that up to another stupid decision by a very stupid race.

“This woman has summoned a god and you want to dance with her?” the regal Fae declared. “Why I declare, it has been such a long time since we’ve had such an esteemed visitor! We should not just be dancing, we should be having a feast!”

Molotov groaned audibly. He didn’t want there to be a feast. He wanted to find out if the Fae could help him locate the crystals he would need in order to create his staff. He didn’t want to have to go to go to some feast, especially if Chromanon was going to be the guest of honor. “And oh bloody, what are they going to talk about there, how sodding wonderful it is to have her summon up the archangel of third rate peons of Radasanth? These fairy people… they can take Chroma if they like to their party, I’ll bloody loot their houses of crystals just for being such a bunch of peppy buggers…”

The Fae all around him were cheering, but a young female went up to Molotov and gave him a big hug. “I like your hair,” she said. “We should keep you for the feast and never ever have you leave!”

The mutant cringed at the thought of that. “I’ll have to leave sometime,” he said, trying to pry the Fae away by pushing her shoulders off him.

“But you can’t!” she insisted. “No one can leave! We have to have a feast!”

“You already said that love…” Molotov said.

The Fae reached into a small pouch and blew some powder into Molotov’s face. The mutant coughed, and after he’d managed to wipe it away, he turned and looked at the Fae as if he couldn’t understand how anyone could be that completely stupid. “If you want to keep me here love, you can’t throw things at me…” he began. “Bloody, that’s no good…”

“But you can’t leave now!” the Fae chirped back. “I’ve put a spell on you! You have to stay forever and ever and ever!”

Molotov winced. He didn’t doubt that it was true. For all their infantile affectations, the Fae were quite a powerful race in terms of magic. “Oh hell love, I just came looking for a crystal…” he protested.

“Ooooooooooooooh!” the Fae said, her eyes opening wide. She rummaged through a satchel that she had at her side and produced a very large crystal. It shone brightly, almost blindingly with the bright sun shining down. “You can have this one! You still can’t leave though!”

[Chromanon Rockskin]

Schimera leaned over, whispering in the kender girl's ear as she stopped dancing to take a breath. It is important to note that when you hear a promise from a god or goddess, it needs be taken into account just what they represent and how powerful they really are. So while Chroma really shouldn't have listened to anything that might have been said by a minuscule goddess that no one could really remember and who presided over something so fleeting as a sparkle of light on the surface of water, there was no one around who thought to make sure the kender knew that.

Bursting with pride, she turned to search for Molotov, only to find him arguing, in his gentle way, with one of the fae. After the presentation of the gift, Chroma grinned, sauntering over to the two. She felt it was her civic duty to help her friend, and maybe in a way it was. After all, she didn't mean just to allow the man to escape boredom, but any other trap that may befall him as well, herself not included. Putting her hands on her lips, she chided the fae through half closed lids.

"This is my best friend in the whole wide world, and so he's my royal adviser. He's going to have to leave on official business and the like, you know, so you're just going to have to clean up your faery eyelash boogers or whatever you gave him. If he goes to sleep, I'm going to be mad because I didn't know the Sandman was a fae either. You can't keep things like that from me, you know. I am the Queenie of this town. I think I'm supposed to get a crown too."

She turned then, pointing at another fae with what she hoped was a business-like look on her face. All in all, she appeared to be rather constipated.

"Have you seen the royal prince?" Taking a step around the closest fae to her, her eyes searching the cobbles at the edge of the square for David, her foot settled on something soft, a harsh squeak rendered from beneath her foot. Looking down, worry in her face, she scooped up David from beneath where she'd flattened him on the pavement. She hadn't heard any crunching or squishing sounds as she had thought she would, but one decomposing arm was hanging by only a few gnomish tendons from his shoulder, the broken, jagged bones jutting out in places her brain wasn't quite sure it could accept.

"You should watch where you're going," she muttered before placing the zombie gnome in one of the myriad of pouches strung along her person. "If you don't," she said, still talking to the creature that didn't appear to be paying her much attention at all, "I'm going to have to start charging you an obligatory foot hindrance tax. That's what Queenies do, you know."