Badlands 28/9 Corrila Daevion'lyr

Usually, I’m pretty much a homebody. As in, I like going home with somebody, ideally after pulling a double header, and if it’s my perfect whiteout weekend it’s twins. Brother and sister.

I’ll be honest, they don’t really need to be related.

Sure, people say an endless series of one-night thruplesomes suggests commitment phobia but the actual longest relationship I’ve had was a three-month affair with an Anauroch prince. Oh, the romance. Oh, the glam.

Although technically for the last two months of that I was trapped in his palace by three platoons of eldritch knights, and they had such complicated sleeping rotas it took me ages to kill them all.

But the point remains. Whatever it was.

Anyway, it’s the end of a shocking bender and I’m about to pass out on the penny bouncing abs of either the brother or the sister – my vision isn’t at its best after a couple of nights on kammarth and throatslake in the basement parties of the warehouse district – and I’m looking for a ‘kerchief to scrape the caked kammarth from the nostrils when I find that bit of paper I’d been keeping for days.


Bit of an adrenaline shock right there. It’s not that I’m short of money, it’s that I like to buy what I want without counting the pennies. And I do seem to be working my way through the pennies. And this is slice of jiggery pokery sound Just. So. me.

Combat experience? You trying growing up this gorgeous in a duergar boarding school.

Expect trouble? Honey, that’s my middle name.*

Armed guard? Well let’s not get bogged down by details.

But break my legs and call me Neil if the fucking Anvil & Almiraj wasn’t all about the details. It’s the kind of boozer folk call cute when they’ve saddled themselves with children by accident and they’re looking for somewhere to erase their short term memory by paying twice the price per mouth of obliteration that you could shell out for rubbing alcohol at a couple of dockside wineries-cum-brothels I know.

Plus merchants go there and merchants need to go to places with shit on the walls so they can pretend that shopping for a living is a meaningful contribution to the economy.

Talking of shit on the walls, I’m about eight steps through the door and waving a weak hello to this silver Tiefling, some bad-ass half orc called Itzal, a laid back cat in black who, to be clear, is literally a cat in the form of a tabaxi. I’m not about to start calling folk hep cats daddy-o especially if their name is Prowler. Sounds like my kind of underwear.

And then there’s my dude Raine whose mellow funk helped take out some killer sharks the other day in this kind of underwater temple. Weird scene. But I’m just about to bro chest it out my boy when the Tiefling says “my name is Orianna – are you OK?” and I realise I am very much not OK and I’m about to add some part of my insides to the floor.

I’m not sure which bit’s about to lose it until I’m in sight of toilet and, hey presto, the undigested half pint of coffee I’d used to straighten up has knocked me down and spread itself out across the floorboards looking for some more responsible friends.

The team rally round. Raine waves her hands around and the place is tidy – must get this girl over sometime – and Orianna waves her hands around and motherfucker if I’m not feeling restored.

Fortunately I’ve spruced up the leathers just in time for the elven client to stomp his way in looking like a cock on a stick with a full-tilt Charlie big potatoes attitude and some sort of suit.

Long and the short of it – he’s a dick, he needs protection but amazingly it’s for his convoy and not to stop random strangers punching him in the face.

I know, right? Whodathunkit?

Bandits have been raiding caravans since I was ripping out my first throat but the attacks have stepped up a notch, he’s got precious cargo, 150 gold, off we go.

Now if you’re anything like me you’re figuring there is hot stuff in those wagons – hareem, boyz club, general babes in toyland. But no. The elf esteem issue claims it’s just shit you can’t teleport.

So by the time we’ve teleported to Kundar and the alcohol is starting to sweat out of my pores like a river of tramps piss and we’re standing in front of three armoured wagons with three sullen drivers I put three and three together and twig.

“This is the cargo they’re looking for, right?”

Everything gets shitty for a while, he lies as well as a drunk monk with spunk on his bunk (it doesn’t make sense I know but I like the way the words flow and if you sue me I will literally suck your brains out) and Orianna pets the horses, bless her.

Day three I’m bored.

Bored bored bored. Are we nearly there yet? Bored.

I’m not even acknowledging days one and two, trust.

The wagons creak, the flies buzz, the driver is humming a tune, the crossbow bolt tears through his throat, he slumps forward dead and not-a-fucking-gain it’s an ambush.

I’ve been through tons of these, actually. It’s like a drive through, except everyone has crossbows. I remember my first, I had just had my highlights done for the first time and the blood really didn’t help. I had to have the whole lot done again two days later. I mean, have some consideration useless dead guys.

This one seems a little frisky – there’s two dusty bois like elementals but covered in shit trying to sandwich us with blow jobs and not in a good way. Air elementals may seem like a gust of dust but they’re like the wind in a Patrick Swayze irritating drone kinda way. Plus there’s all these dudes – I’ll call them dude one, dude two, dude three and so on just to keep it simple.

Anyway it starts badly. Someone shoots me. I’m shook – kinda cringe that idiots in trees get a bolt in my collarbone and I’m thinking if they wanna catch these hands, I might as well let the cats out. So I drop the figurine of blah blah and the gorgeous Lion and Other Lion are slavering like my flesh eating babies while I burrow under the drivers corpse.

I’m all in favour of pride when it’s in a parade, but you can keep it if I’m trying not to die.

And things then break down like this…

Orianna is blinded and that sucks.
Raine dies maybe coupla times and that sucks.
Itzal is laying the smack down and Prowler is doing his level best to get involved but his timing sucks.
There’s people falling out of trees left right and centre and firing crossbows and whirling around punching armoured carriages like there’s clearly something enormously valuable in there.

All in all, it’s getting hectic.

But I’m just following my little kittens through the wreckage tearing the brains out of anyone they haven’t eaten the face off of and you don’t get much better than that if you’re looking for a way to pass the time. It’s positively romantic.

Then this… different kinda looking dude shows up. Let’s call them cowboy just for the sake of argument. Why? Look I’m not in the mood to chat shit because I’ve got a hangover that would drag your liver out through your nose and you wouldn’t want that to happen to you.

The hangover. What did you think I meant?

Let’s call them cowboy, OK?

Anyway, my cute little kitty cats rips the limbs off dude 4 and start chowing down. The remaining dusty ball of fuckery vamooses like a fart from a giant ballet dancer and the cowboy says “who the fuck are you?”

Which is a reasonable question under certain circumstances, but this is not one of them.

It becomes clear that just about everybody wants to steal something from these wagons – the cowboy has this thing that’s bound to them magically and its gone, but they can feel where it is and it turns out to be their hand which they want back.

I’m way past being surprised at shit, but this does give pause for thought. Mainly – does this mean we’re not going to get paid?

Whilst I’m perusing the small print of the contract figuring out how complete the cargo has to be for payment in full, cowboy drags a severed hand from Other Lion’s mouth and shows us a moth tattoo on the wrist.

“This keeps cropping up,” they say.

“Honestly, that’s fascinating, but if I’m 150 gold down on this rats arse of a road trip then we’re going to fall out,” I reply.

Cowboy, name of Aream, promises to slip us 100 gold, but this is all getting way complicated. I just wanted to blow some skulls to pieces – which, to be fair, I bossed – and trouser the readies.

The others seem OK with it, Arem hauls a box with a gauntlet out of middle coach of boredom, it clicks onto a severed stump they have, there’s a soft hum and a glow and that appears to be that.

Except the fucking elf won’t pay up and tries to gaslight us into thinking we didn’t understand the assignment.

Ima pop in to have a quiet word later this week and low key brain the cove.

For reals.



*it isn’t, obviously. Corrila Trouble Daevion'lyr is a terrible name. Anyone whose middle name is actually trouble had a very unpleasant childhood and probably has borderline personality disorder at the very least.