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They is my family, they is my family
They might be crazy, but they is my family
You can’t get through them unless you get through me
You fuck with them you fuck with me
“A fucking blight on society, that’s what it is!”
The guardsman’s blade lifted high for a forceful blow on the goblin who crouched below him, hissing furiously. Her short sword was drawn, and lifting up into a parry, but not quickly enough.
Mollymauk got there first. His scimitar caught the guardsman’s longsword and the tiefling twisted his blade so that the man had no choice but to step back, allowing Molly to step firmly between him and Nott.
“You’re the blight on society, my friend,” he hissed. He drew his blade back and stood in a defensive guard. Both scimitars were icy blue.
Around him, six more guardsman had drawn their longswords, watching the six travelers in open hostility. Their gazes were mostly directed at Mollymauk and Nott, as well as the second tiefling and the half-orc that were just now running up alongside Molly, their horses left further down the road. Jester had a hand clutched about her holy symbol, the other holding her shield in front of her. As Fjord stopped just back and several feet to the left of Mollymauk, he made a flowing motion with his clenched fist, and his otherworldly falchion was drawn from thin air, dripping saltwater.
“You have no eyes of your own, no thoughts but the Empire’s. It says jump, and you jump, even if it’s off a cliff to your deaths.” Molly continued talking, allowing Nott the chance to regain her footing and scramble backwards until she was standing beside Caleb.
They were lucky not to have any witnesses to the standoff. On the outskirts of a farming village adjacent to Rexxentrum, long after nightfall, there were few bystanders around. The party was had been attempting to quietly and quickly leave the large swath of land in and around the Empire’s capital, having received a less than warm welcome, and discovering some dark details to the inner workings of the government. But a patrol group of Crownsguard had intercepted them at the border to the village, not even a mile from the capital’s walls, and demanded their business being out after dark.
Things were indeed much harder further north.
After Nott had refused to remove her hood and had it forcefully removed, well… Things did not go well.
“Rare enough do we allow your ilk this close Rexxentrum, and obviously for good reason,” spat the guard. He sneered at Nott. “You bring nothing but trouble and monsters - you are nothing but monsters.”
“We are not!” protested Jester, looking genuinely offended and hurt by the man’s words. He hardly acknowledged her, focused on Mollymauk with a deep hatred in his gaze.
“You give us that creature, and you can leave here with your lives. But you are not welcome in Rexxentrum again. Any of you.”
“That’s not an option,” said Caleb, at the same moment that Mollymauk openly laughed and said, “Oh, no, no, no.”
“She’s one of us,” said Jester defiantly, eliciting nods of agreement from the rest of her party. “If you want to kill her, you have to kill all of us, too.”
“My dear friend is right,” said Mollymauk casually. He twirled one blade in a languid circle and tilted his head back at the guardsman before him. “While we’re happy to walk away from this, and let you walk away with your lives, it is only under the condition that we all walk away. You will not take a single one of my family from me.”
He could practically feel the sharp gazes of his friends on his back, and could just see Fjord looking at him intently at his side, but he ignored them. They were his family, after all. Months of traveling now, of going to hell and back several times, and more often the further north they traveled, had bonded them together in a way Mollymauk hadn’t felt since his first year in the carnival.
The guardsman in front of Mollymauk glanced at the rest of the group, sizing them up. He seemed unsure of whether this fight would be worth the potential losses of his men, despite his obvious disdain for the lot of them.
“Captain!” a woman in the back suddenly spoke up, her eyes sharp on Fjord, then on Jester. “These people match the description of the offenders from the Academy, as I had been telling you before we were interrupted.” She said nothing more, allowing the captain - apparently the man who had attacked Nott - to connect the dots and make his own decisions.
“Fuck,” muttered Molly in Infernal. He braced himself.
The guard captain took a deep breath. “Right. Well, that changes things up a little bit. My apologies-” he did not seem remotely apologetic - “but we’re going to be taking all of you in.”
“Your ears will bleed and your eyes will be gouged out by carrion before that happens,” Mollymauk hissed, imbuing the Infernal with the rage of uncountable ancestors into a stinging Vicious Mockery .
The captain staggered back, shaking his head in pain, though he managed to keep his sword up in defense. The migraine that would follow the onslaught of psychic damage would not do him any good for the next precious seconds.
The moment it became clear what had happened, the quiet road erupted into a cacophony of shouts and activity.
The captain recovered in time to rush forward and swing his longsword at Mollymauk, who managed to slip to the side just in time to avoid the blade. He countered with two quick hits of his own. The first one struck true, biting into the captain’s sword arm; the second strike was parried.
At his side, Fjord had backed up several paces and fired off one of his Eldritch Blasts , before a guardsman got close enough to strike him. Jester was keeping two guards occupied; one with her Spiritual Weapon , and another with whatever spell it seems she could think of that would keep him away from her. The three others were attempting to surround the party, but were so far being forced to take cover by Caleb and Nott’s spells and crossbow.
In the split second Molly took to assess the scene, he stood still long enough for the captain to shout triumphantly and swing his blade hard into Molly’s side. He stumbled backwards and gritted his teeth; just a nasty scratch if he was lucky, but he had no time to think about it now as he was bringing his scimitars up to catch another blow.
Beau was there in an instant, taking advantage of the briefly locked blades and letting loose two rapid-fire punches straight into the captain’s abdomen - looked like a kidney shot - before she danced away, grinning in the excitement of the fight.
There was a shout somewhere behind him. “Zurück!” Caleb was calling out for them to back off in Zemnian.
It was specifically code for them not to fight this to the end. The party had agreed on Zemnian because, despite the Zemni Fields being a part of the Empire now, very few people who were not native spoke the language. Caleb had decided on several simple words to use in battle in case they needed to be discrete, such as in this situation.
Mollymauk immediately switched to a defensive fighting stance, and feigned weakness from the cut in his side. Beau slipped away from him and the briefly distracted captain, and casually dealt a couple of blows to another guardswoman caught off guard by her sudden approach.
Molly dashed away several feet at the last second, narrowing missing an opportunity attack from the captain as he backed away. As he backpedaled, Caleb and Nott ran up alongside him. While he was running, Caleb was pulling a sticky mass of what looked like spiderwebs from the pouch at his hip. In practiced unison, Caleb weaved the webs around his hand and then touched it to the ground, muttering in Zemnian, while Nott cupped her hands around her mouth, and appeared to whistle.
No more than five feet in front of Mollymauk, a tangle of white, messy webs bulged out of the ground like rapidly spreading fungus, covering the entire area and the guards in the sticky material. Molly had little time to admire the trick, before it became hazy and disappeared from few. Fog was spewing heavily from Nott’s cupped hands.
No more than five seconds had passed since Mollymauk had retreated, and now he turned and sprinted down the lane where five horses waited - all they had managed to get out of Rexxentrum with.
Beau was already mounted and Jester was in the process of mounting. Mollymauk stayed back until he was bringing up the rear with Fjord, who kept a watchful eye behind them, where the Fog Cloud and Web lay heavily in the street. Shouts could be heard from within, but so far no one had broken free. Caleb leapt up onto the third horse and swiftly pulled Nott up after him. Mollymauk admired their teamwork. They had been practicing spells that could work in tandem like that for a while now.
Finally Fjord and Mollymauk were up on their horses, and the party was galloping away as fast as they dared go in the dark on an unfamiliar road. It would take only another minute or so before the spell faded, but the Crownsguard would have to gather up their own mounts that they had left tethered nearby if they wanted any chance at all of catching The Mighty Nein.
In the meantime, the now-fugitive party ran on, disappearing into the darkness.
Mollymauk reflected on the confrontation as they rode on through the night. Family. That was a comforting word. He had always felt most comfortable surrounded by people like him. First, it… well, he didn’t know who he might have traveled with just under three years prior. But he had an inkling. Then the carnival, all weird and accepting a lavender tiefling with open arms. He hadn’t expected to stick around with this bunch beyond maybe Zadash, but by the time they had reached the city down south, he had found himself enamored.
After what they had found in the capital, and the almost hostile rejection of Fjord from the Academy, well. Family stuck together. They might be crazy, but so was he. And he wasn’t letting anyone near them, no matter the cost.
Much later, as dawn was just brushing the horizon a deep blue, they stopped in a sheltered alcove where the forest butted up against a small cliffside. They were far from the road, but not so far that they couldn’t find their way back later. Here, they made camp. Everybody was exhausted from riding through the night, their poor horses included.
After they were watered and left to graze, the group sat. Everybody seemed ready to sleep, but no one was making any move towards their bedrolls. Mollymauk looked around at them. Unspoken words filled the silence, everybody thinking about the past couple of days spent in Rexxentrum and the hasty retreat.
Finally, Nott broke the silence. “I’m s-sorry,” she stuttered, wringing her hands. She was huddled against Caleb, staring hard at the ground. “I didn’t mean to get us in that fight.”
“You know that isn’t your fault,” said Caleb soothingly. He pulled her tighter against him in a hug. “It’s never your fault.”
“But if I had just- if I had a better disguise, or hadn’t come with you, or something, then maybe we wouldn’t be-”
“We won’t ever leave you behind,” interrupted Mollymauk, leaning forward intently. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I would never just up and leave you, or advocate for you to stay out of somewhere you might be unwelcome. If that became the case… Well, it wouldn’t be worth it to enter such a place to begin with.”
The others nodded agreement. “Exactly,” said Caleb. He pressed a kiss to Nott’s head.
“We’re a group, you know,” said Jester, shrugging nonchalantly. “Why would we leave each other behind or try to push someone away? I mean, you guys are my best friends - after the Traveler, of course - and that makes you very important.”
“We stick together,” said Molly. “After what just happened, after what we found out… We don’t stand a chance on our own.”
Another round of agreements came from the party. Mollymauk stood up and walked over to Nott, where he crouched before her and Caleb. “You’re a part of this weird, weird family, little one.” Nott smiled hesitantly, and nodded. Mollymauk grinned right back and, like Caleb, gave Nott a kiss on the head. Then he patted Caleb on the shoulder and stood up. “You’re all a part of my weird family, personally. Of course, it’s up to you how you feel about me or each other.”
He shrugged casually and sauntered over to his bedroll. “If you don’t mind, I’ll take the last watch. Wake me up when it’s time.”
That marked the end of that heart to heart, leaving the rest of the party glancing at each other rather sheepishly. But no one argued. No one protested Molly’s little announcement. Slowly, they settled down around him, while Fjord and Beau sat a way off talking quietly together, taking the first watch.
And despite the high tension overnight, Mollymauk felt comfortable and relaxed enough to fall into a deep, refreshing sleep, around people he found he trusted.