Prissy spent the whole time sleeping, and Corbin could tell because he got some pretty surreal flashes of her dreams when he concentrated hard enough. He didn’t bother trying to get into her bizarrely twisted mind, especially not while she was in dreamland, but after a time Darryl and his greedy little men departed, leaving him to peck at a bowl of stew from the innkeeper.

He also did a bit of feeling sorry for himself, mostly because he smelled rotting meat in the inn’s kitchen and wanted it way more than this stew.

Following this, he had a sudden suspicion, and launched himself upward into the sky. For a time, he traveled southeast in the direction of the bronze eagle. If The Five hired some people to find him and kill him again, well… he had no idea wha would happen to a familiar upon death. He didn’t have any inventory; it was entirely possible he’d just begin losing levels right from the get-go. Or worse.

A shudder went through him.

The eagle almost smashed into him when it burst out from behind one of the buildings in the town where he’d woken up.

“Shit, shit shit shit.”

Evasive maneuvers! He veered around, got beneath the canopy, and zipped around the long way. If it was tracking him it would definitely get the impression he was heading straight west.

But he made it back without incident a good hour later, snuck into the inn’s kitchen, and ate a whole bunch of rotting meat before he knew what he was doing.

“Blech! Gross!” And delicious.

And not long after that, the innkeeper and his wife started lugging buckets to a back room, and pouring them into a small bucket. This bucket immediately drained, but magic flashed that told Corbin it was being transported, and probably up to Prissy’s room. He watched everything intently, trying to make memories come back. He had no clear idea of what might trigger one… apparently just looking at a castle was enough. Next, he wondered what magic was at play with the buckets and the tub upstairs. Did the innkeeper and his wife also have ability cards, which weren’t combat focused at all? Theoretically Silent Step and the item Prissy had picked up weren’t combat focused, but this… this was something else entirely. He focused on the bucket in the back room and tried to Inspect it.

Success! You have inspected the item.

Bucket of liquid transport. Use the dial at the base of the bucket to indicate which room you’d like to send liquid contents.

(The exact crafting makeup of this item is unknown at this time. Why not increase your Inspect skill, or your Intelligence?)

Brought to you by Harriet the Enchanter™, for all your incredibly specific magical crafting needs. Scry HEnchants to 500-500 if you too have a specifical need that would be made so much easier with the magical, fantastical knowledge Harriet is famous for.

“Why not increase your mom,” Corbin muttered, then took a second look at the prompt. “Pff, Hen Chants.”

He hadn’t noticed the dial at the base of the bucket, which was pointed at room two, Prissy’s room. Fascinating, first that Harriet the Enchanter™ even existed, second that scrying text messages even existed, and third that this Enchanter™ lady left her calling card on all her products. It made sense, in a bizarre way.

Time to get back to business. All this country bumpkin slice-of-life stuff was nice, but he had a job to do: win back his card and find someone actually capable of helping him not be a raven any longer. And in the meantime figure out what beef he had with the Five. Maybe it had something to do with the black-haired girl from his first amnesia flash. Like they’d killed her or abducted her, or turned her into a hideous harpy or trapped her in the underworld forever or something.

He sent a mental note that he was coming, and to open the door, but was pointedly ignored. Prissy sang in the bath, as it turned out, loud enough to drown out Corbin’s repeated and shouted demands to be let in.

Nothing doing. He was forced to wait outside until she was done with the loud singing, the bathing, the drying, and the horror she had over the clothing she’d cast off. Begrudgingly, she let him in.

“Time to shop,” she said.

“Look, we have about 75 silver to go before we’re at 400… right? You’re keeping with your end of the bargain. No reneging… right?”

She didn’t respond at first. Obviously she and Patrick the nellwynian were of a mind, and that mind was me first, screw all others.

Corbin didn’t need a boosted intelligence to know he was getting short shrift.

She went and spent another handful of silver on new clothes, and nearly a hundred more silver at the armorer. She had specific ideas, which meant a sit down with the tailor and armorer to suss out whether they could be carried out. At first there was confusion, until she drew a crude diagram with charcoal on a bit of parchment, at which point both men had a shared eureka moment. All that was left was to hash out sizing, materials, and time.

The contract was to sew pockets onto the clothes, and plates of stiff leather or steel could be slipped into these pockets, over the thighs, knees, shins, upper arms, elbows, and forearms. They could also be taken out and slipped into the inventory for easier or quieter movement. But she also bought a breastplate of stiff leather with padding within, and earned a defense bonus from that, which would negate a few damage from many types of non-magical damage. She did sell some of her inventory back for store credit, but filthy pelts and throat sacs weren’t in high demand, at least not in this quaint little podunk.

“What’re we down to?” he asked. Thirty silver to Darryl’s boys, seven to the innkeep, around a hundred to the leatherworker for the armor, another twenty plus for the new clothes and a cloak, and then roughly a hundred to the tailor and armorer for her weird sneaking armor.

“Uh…”

“Less than a hundred, aren’t we?”

She had the grace to at least look ashamed. Then inspiration struck, and she pointed an accusing finger. “You caused me to lose me pack, ya did.”

“And this pack was worth over two hundred fifty silver? You know what, never mind. Let’s go get us a mob and make some coin.”

Unfortunately Darryl & Co. had gone out on adventures close by, and didn’t have any contracts available. They settled instead on recruiting Darryl’s boys to go after one of those armored crocodiles.

“Level what now?” Darryl asked.

“Twelve.”

“And what, twelve hundred HP a pop?”

“Yeah, so what?” Prissy asked.

“And you got a plan to separate it from the rest of them? How many’d you say there were?”

“I didn’t… but there were at least six.”

They exchanged a few glances, then shrugged. “Okay. Worst that happens is we die and respawn back in the village.” Corbin hadn’t died yet as a raven, and didn’t know where he’d respawn. Was it just the last safe place?

“An’ eyes on the prize, right?” she said. “I heard everythin’ you talked about with me Familiar here.”

Lots of exchanged glances here. Clearly Charm was a dump stat for all three of these boys. Intelligence wasn’t too high on the list either, given that she’d been asleep the whole time.

“You can trust us,” Darryl said.

“I could trust ya a lot more if each of ya took the oath.”

Groans all around, and more considering glances. Patrick, in particular, had a look of measuring going on, like he was about to unleash a hail of arrows on her and see whether or not he could kill her, snatch half her loot when it dropped, and go murder her again from wherever she spawned.

The bed. Duh.

He’d woken up as a raven in a bed. They’d talked about killing him a whole bunch of times, and Prissy prissy princess here had immediately gone for a long nap in a room with absurdly strong security features. Of course, wherever you fell asleep would be your spawn point.

Oh geez. He had killed that fae girl with the blue hair the exact moment he teleported her bed out to the edge of the ‘real world’. He didn’t have a chance to murder her permanently, since she’d just come back to life at her spawn point… but he could take her out of the picture, especially if he had people working on the outside to remove her from the game area.

Was he the Big Bad Evil Guy? Killing the main character of the story was definitely BBEG behavior.

Amnesia was seriously messing with his concept of everything. What could he say he knew for sure? How could he be sure he knew that?

But he couldn’t be the BBEG, given that he’d been killed by the Five over and over and over again after he removed the blue-haired girl from the picture. It wasn’t a comforting thought, because it felt a whole lot like they’d been perfectly justified in killing him for something evil he’d done.

“You with me, hey?” Prissy asked.

He blinked the ruminations out. “Sure, sure.”

“You havin’ blackouts or somethin’? We need to talk?”

“No… some memories coming back.” She knew about his little problem of not knowing about his life.

Ugh, maybe he didn’t want to know about his past life. No… that little rumination was immediately squashed under his overwhelming need to piece things together.

All three of them had taken Darryl’s oath spell while Corbin went off and figured out something super freakin obvious, and the glow was being sucked into their bodies.

“What can they tell us about the Five?” Wait, the Five had kept Prissy from leaving this fantasyland area and getting back to real life. They were also known to be weird and brutal. Whoo, conscience averted. “Never mind,” he told her. “Let’s go kill us some armadiles or whatever they’re called.”

The crocadillos were easily twenty-five feet in length, nose to tail, and did indeed have just over 1200 HP each. With bodies the size of a rowboat and heads some six feet long, they sent a shiver down both Corbin and Prissy’s spines. They’d found a swampy part of the little valley here, and lounged in the waters. Their armored plates, slime covered as they were, looked like dead logs or huge mushrooms, and they were almost impossible to see clearly with only their eyes and armor visible. They sat perfectly still, which was an effective strategy, if you counted the pile of disgorged bones and bits of armor on that grassy hillock in the middle of the swamp.

“I’ve already used the fear aura three times today,” he told her. “I’m out. You let these idiots face down the one I pull out, and you head around and get a bunch of dagger jabs in, got it? Use that weapon enchant you just got. You want to pierce through that armor and deal a lot of damage in a hurry.”

Instead of sassing him, she nodded. When he didn’t say anything else, she turned to him. “That it?”

“You think these guys will listen to you?”

She shook her head.

“Then just let ‘em do their thing. Oh… how long have you been in here?” he asked. “How long has this anomaly thing been here?”

“Going on three months.”

He saved that for later inspection. If she knew what created it, she wouldn’t have been a starving street rat ready to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down.

She turned to the boys and produced the Spectral Blade. “Me bird ‘ere is gonna scare one up for us. Keep ‘is attention, eh? Us Shadow Walkers need ta walk in shadows.”

Patrick frowned but Darryl nodded. Soon enough, they got into position, with the three of them with Corbin and Prissy well off to one side, the better to stab backs. Corbin fluttered down directly onto the first one, and communicated with Prissy for a moment, and then he stabbed a Spectral Blade beak down into the back of the thing’s neck.

He had to give this thing a lot of credit: it was bloody fast. It practically leaped out of the water and attempted to snap directly behind its own head. A half second later, blades made out of chitin popped out of its back and nearly sliced him in half. They didn’t fly out, but rather made it look like a porcupine on meth.

He landed a few feet away, cawing loudly at this thing that was a million times larger than he was. The croc had a second set of eyes, two in the back of its head that were scanning around behind it. For his part, Corbin flopped around on the ground, trying to appear for all the world like he was wounded, and that he might just be a delicious appetizer.

The croc took the bait, but another one surged out of the water as well, and he was forced to flap back out of range, croaking angrily about how the aggro had gone bad.

This was the moment Prissy landed on the first one’s neck. She’d just leaped a good thirty feet, and landed with two blades held down, just to spite him. She got in a good six slashes before getting to her feet on its head and springing off to safety. She almost immediately followed this with another identical attack near its tail. Slash slash slash slash, and she was gone again.

All three of the guys stared from a good thirty feet off, while the cat and the bird worked these two croc things like it was their job.

Since Corbin wasn’t within twelve feet of the swampy muck it liked to sit in, both of them seemed to go completely limp. Out of water, they seemed impossibly huge: large enough that the nellwynian could fit in its mouth and none of him would stick out before the croc decided to swallow.

“Come on!” he shouted at the boys. “Get it together.”

If only they could understand him. In the meantime Prissy landed on the first one again, stabbed it repeatedly until she took one of its armor blades in the shoulder, then pried herself off it and stabbed a couple more times to grab some free hit points.

Ugh, it was only down to 1007. This would take all day… and the thing had angled itself a different way to ensure it could watch where the crazy cat lady was coming from. Corbin told her, and she switched efforts over to the other one.

Darryl was the first one to pluck his guts up and begin moving. He engaged his protection aura, a pretty and pure white thing spreading out from his feet, looking like a summoner’s circle with its twisty symbols and geometric shapes. It rotated slowly around him, and little motes of white light fluttered up off it like sparks off a bonfire. Still, he had no wish to engage it, and threw a hand forward muttering an incantation. A beam of holy light splashed against their first croc, just above the foreleg, but nothing they’d done so far seemed to hurt it in the slightest, just piss it off.

Patrick finally did something as well, which amounted to fanning out around behind Darryl, and drawing up his bow. All the arrows lit with glowing green energy.

“Don’t jump in,” Corbin called. “Wait.”

The arrow split in the air, then split into four, then eight, and finally sixteen, all with the green radiance flowing back from the arrowheads. A handful clattered off, and another couple splashed harmlessly in the water, but at least a dozen thudded into the croc’s broad back. Now it roared, just as Bob the dwarf rushed in, axe held high.

“Wait–” he cawed, needlessly.

Two things happened at the same time. First, both of the crocs chose that moment to dart out of their stupor, up onto four legs, and crash into Bob full force. Second, Prissy landed directly where the first croc had just been right at the moment when Patrick loosed another of his energy arrows.

Bob was a lost cause. He had time to shout once before the blood started flying. Prissy, however, was fast enough to dart in and, with a dagger at either side of its tail, stab their first croc over and over, right up its ass. One arrow got her in the shoulder, but the others all fell where the monsters had just been.

“This moron doesn’t know how to use his abilities!” he shrieked. Prissy glanced up from her surprise rectal surgery a second before he used her Berserker’s Bellow. He sucked in a big deep breath, and unleashed a shout only an orc mother could love.

Both crocs reacted at once, hissing and dropping the dwarf, but most importantly, backing the hell away from him. Darryl surged in, grabbed Bob’s bleeding body, and shuffled him back while both crocs freaked the hell out. He had no clear idea of how much damage Bob had just taken, or what his HP total was, but he was out of the fight. One chomp from each of these things and he was done.

Patrick kept strafing to try and get a better angle, but he too had gone and done the stupid thing. While Prissy kept up a continuous backdoor assault, Corbin’s True Sight beeped a warning in the form of a red dot over beside the little archer.

“Hey!” he screamed. “There’s another–”

Nope. Patrick locked eyes with Corbin a half second before a third crocadillo exploded out of the swamp and disappeared him entirely.

The first one was now leaving a trail of blood behind, while it tried to circle around and get at whatever devil had turned its ass into a pincushion, but Prissy kept shuffling around, and kept stabbing. She was like a cat possessed back there. Or really every cat, he supposed.

Before it could pull any other attack, she’d whittled the last of its HP away, and it fell dead.

You have defeated the Crocadillo!

You gain 700 xp

You have gained 3 gold and 90 silver.

Loot fell: a big ass shield, two cards, crafting items, and a whole pile of coins, but Corbin wasn’t close enough to get all the infuriating loot messages he normally received.

She shuffled back away from the second one warily. It eyed her, mouth agape and spines raised. When it didn’t immediately flash forward, she reached down and looted the corpse, then leaped thirty feet the hell away from this slaughter.