Work Text:
One:
The first message fuzzes through Beau’s frantic, adrenaline-shaky brain as the sun breaks the horizon.
It’s been less than an hour since they woke up to find just a feather in the grass, amid bent stalks and signs of fighting, where the others had been taken. She holds the feather delicately between her thumb and finger. She punches the shit out of a tree with her other hand. The bark cracks under her knuckles.
Fuck you, tree, she thinks at it viciously. Where was it last night while some people were getting kidnapped right in front of it?
She guesses the feather was from one of her companion’s cloaks -- Maybe Yasha’s, maybe Jester’s -- Do any of them have cloaks stuffed with down? Beau has fought for her life with these people and she can’t remember what their clothes are made of. Yasha carried her yesterday and Beau can’t remember if her hood has feathers in it.
“HEY!” says Jester in her ear. Beau jumps and drops the feather.
“We’re okay! You’ve probably figured out we’ve been taken by now, but we’re -- well, we’re not okay, but we’re alright, the three of--”
The message ends.
“I,” Beau begins to say, and then continues to say, as she remembers that Jester said her mom spoke back to her when she cast the spell to talk to her, so Beau should probably reply. She’s still making an “ayyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” sound but she doesn’t know what to say. “Iiiiiiii…. Hope you can hear this. Um, I hope you’re still not talking. Shi-- We’re coming after you.” She doesn’t know if she’s over the word limit, but she doesn’t take the time to count before adding, “Be careful, okay?”
Beau waits, stock-still, for the magic fuzziness to return. It doesn’t. Beau is left with the quiet shuffling awakening of the woods. Birds calling to each other, trees shifting, and absolutely no Jester.
She swings around and shouts, “Hey, Caleb!”
Nothing.
She runs back to the campsite.
No, wait. First she picks up the feather. Then she runs back to the campsite.
As she expects, Caleb is already back at the cart. Molly and Nott are still in the woods looking for anything that will help. Possibly punching trees.
“How often can Jester use that message spell she has?” Beau asks with no preamble.
Caleb blinks at the ground in thought. “Er, once a day, I think?” He seems to check with the database in his mind, and then nods. “Yes. Once a day.”
“Well, fuck. Okay, the good news is that they’re okay.”
“You know this for sure?”
Beau’s knuckles throb. “The bad news is, Jester sent me a message and forgot about the word limit.”
After a beat, Caleb’s head droops. “Ah.”
“Yeah. So we’ve got at least a day before we can pick up any clues about where they are or who took them or whatever.”
She glances back, nerves on fire, at the sound of cracking sticks. But it’s only Nott emerging from the forest. She’s clutching something in her hands.
“At least in that time,” says Caleb, as they both hurry over to Nott, “we can make some headway on finding out where they’ve gone.”
“Yeah,” says Beau. “Hey, also, do you know if she receives my message if she’s still fucking talking?”
Two:
The second day almost reaches noon before Jester sends another message. Beau is tracking ahead of the cart. Molly wants to keep scouting, and he’s still restless, twitching and probably driving them all mad back in the cart, but Beau won shear-parchment-boulder fair and square and she’s won the right to be the scout for the next few hours.
Her search is eager. She still has energy to be hopeful. She can’t let go of that hope, she can’t bend to defeat. Not yet. Not for Jester and Yasha and Fjord.
And she has to find something easier to call them. When she’s talking about them, she just says “them,” because the other three know what she means. It always comes out miserable and small. Maybe if they come up with a catchy nickname it will feel better to talk about them. The Thirsty Three. What? That doesn’t even make sense. Beau’s the thirstiest of the whole group and everyone knows it.
The Thhhh…. The Thidnapped Three.
Was it just yesterday that she swooned into Yasha’s arms and peeked up through her closed eyes to see Yasha smiling? No, it wasn’t. That was two days ago. Time marches on, as do the kidnappers who took Beau’s… comrades? Companions?
Friends. Oh, right. That’s what she should call them, instead of “them.” Friends.
Godsdammit, does she ever get to just have something without it being taken from her?
She feels the spell settling around her, but she’s still glad that Molly can’t see her jump a little as Jester’s voice sounds next to her ear.
“Hey Beau!”
The fuzziness of Message is weird. Beau always thought that hearing someone in your thoughts would be invasive and slimy, but she can’t feel the message entering her brain. It’s just like, oh yeah, Jester’s talking to her, and she hears it, but it’s also in her brain. Which is really where you hear stuff anyway, so?
Jester’s voice continues. “Fjord says to give clues!” There’s a pause, as Jester probably rolls her eyes up in concentration and counts on her fingers. “Yasha says we’re going northeast. Passed tall dick rock. Leader of caravan ugly.” Jester’s voice cracks: “Children. Here. Taken.” There’s a pause, and then a rush of her last few words: “Okay love--”
The panic at the ends keeps something from breaking inside Beau. When Jester is crying, there’s no time for Beau to feel sorry for herself. Instead, she nods encouragingly.
“Good job,” says Beau into the air. “Those are good clues.” She has words ready; had practiced a message with the others so they’d be ready when Jester spoke to one of them again.
Beau opens her mouth to say “We miss you, we talk about you every night, we’re not stopping until we find you,” and closes it. That’s not part of the plan. It’s not going to do Jester any good.
“Found witnesses,” she recites instead. “We’re following your trail. Sit tight. Don’t rile up your captors, I mean it. Take care of the kids.” She’s lost count of her words. “We love you too, okay?”
Beau stands in that spot for another minute, trying to hear Jester across the distance. Then she turns around and goes to see if Caleb has enough ingredients to change Frumpkin into a bird.
Three:
By the third day, they’ve found more than witnesses.
They follow Jester’s directions and find a tall rock shaped remarkably like a phallus. Neither Beau or Molly have the spirit to make jokes about it. It’s Caleb who makes a crack about a dick naturally pointing the way to Jester, who regularly draws them in his books, and Fjord, who is after all associated with seamen. From there it becomes a puzzle to figure out how Yasha is dick-adjacent as well. Even in their frantic anxiety, the four of them are predictable.
But more important than witnesses, more important than dick-rocks: about ten miles northeast of that distinguished landmark, they find a small, isolated village with a whole caravan’s worth of wheel tracks leading into it. Caleb just barely managed to do some kind of spell that helped them follow the caravan’s swept-up tracks, but the kidnappers didn’t do such a good job here. Beau can’t wait until their sloppiness came to kick them in the ass, in the form of her foot kicking their asses.
The caravan is gone, and everyone’s tight-lipped, but it’s obvious that the villagers know about the people who drive it. From what Molly and Frumpkin have gathered via charm and eavesdropping, respectively, the village frequently plays host to a large “merchant” group that comes through. The caravan always stays for one night and departs the next day.
“‘Merchants’,” Nott spat, after they gathered this information and huddled to form a plan. It’s a tighter huddle with four than with seven. Eight, counting Kiri, but she had never really huddled up and had mostly poked things with her dagger. “Slavers, is what they are. Worse than goblins. They’re human, but they’re monsters.”
No one had disagreed.
Now they’re hidden in a storeroom, trying to listen in on some conversation and figure out what’s going on and whose ass they have to kick. Beau is shut in a wardrobe with Molly, of all people -- she’d snagged the closest person when she heard footsteps approaching.
They got about ten minutes of good eavesdropping in before someone interrupted by coming into the room with what sounded like lunch and drinks. The conversation in the storeroom has gone from promising mumbles about slavery to idle talk about crops. For fuck’s sake, can’t evildoers just monologue about their evil plans at a convenient pace? Her knees are beginning to stiffen up.
“Beau!” says Jester.
Beau jolts minutely. Molly huffs in her ear and elbows her. Beau just barely holds herself back from retaliation, but that’s because information is more important. She’ll get him back later anyway.
Beau slides her eyes over to look at Molly. “Did you hear that?” she whispers.
He shakes his head. His eyes hold a question.
“Nothing.” Good to know. It seemed that Jester’s message was delivered inside Beau’s mind, somehow. Not great for Beau’s itchiness about privacy, but at least Jester wouldn’t give Beau’s position away if she sent her spell when Beau was hiding somewhere, like in a storeroom full of people who traded with slavers.
“We can get out,” says Jester. She’s murmuring this time, a little softer than she was before. Not for safety, but for secrecy. Beau’s stomach sinks, because she recognizes it as Jester’s sneaky voice. “We’re not leaving though. Something hinky is going on. We’re headed into Rottendein, okay? Meet us there.” Jester’s voice bends a little, like she’s now addressing someone to the left of Beau’s ear. She says, “That’s it, I think,” and then nothing more.
Beau flexes her leg muscles carefully. She doesn’t bother whispering as she addresses Molly again. “Okay. New plan.”
She kicks out with her feet and knocks the wardrobe door off its hinges. In another second, she’s standing and jamming the heel of her palm into a villager’s nose. She laughs with the force of her bunched-up nerves that had all piled up on top of each other while she was waiting in that wardrobe, and she laughs with excitement and terror.
This is more like it. This is what Beau expects from her asshole friends.
“That’s kind of inconvenient,” Beau says loudly, over the commotion that breaks out. Will Jester hear the yelling, or does she only receive the sound of Beau’s voice? Something to ask her about later. When they find them. That’s confusing; too many similar pronouns. When she and her friends find her other friends. Man, she really has to think up a better name for each part of their group.
She gets brained with a lunch tray, which is embarrassing, but she retaliates with a one-two stomach punch. “But I get it,” she says to Jester. “We’re not far behind, we’ll find you.” She spin-kicks. Molly slides out of the wardrobe and joins the fray. Nott jumps down from the rafters with a blood-curdling yell.
Beau punches, and smiles, and feels blood on her teeth. “Just don’t get too fucked up, okay?”
Four:
They don’t go into Rottendein. They go under it.
The tunnels underneath the city ooze a weird, sweet-smelling goo that makes Beau’s stomach turn. Jester was right: something is hinky about this place. There are sigils carved into the walls of the tunnels. They make Beau uneasy and send Caleb into fits of scholastic ecstasy, obviously.
The quiet of the tunnels puts Beau’s nerves on edge. They make edges of her nerves, and then put nerves on those edges, and those nerves are on edge. Something is probably fucking up… they. Her friends.
She spins the bare shaft of the feather between her thumb and forefinger. She’s had it for days, now, and it’s dirty and bent. She keeps spinning it.
“Hey,” she says. Her voice kind of echoes, but then also kind of gets sucked into the gooey walls. It makes her cavalier tone more subdued, more than she’d meant it to be but also more like she really feels. She doesn’t look at any one of her companions when she asks, “What are we?”
She can sense them looking around, maybe at her and maybe at each other, trying to figure out what she means. She really hopes no one starts rattling off their respective races, because that’s the dumbest joke ever.
“Us?” says Molly. His tone is light and just-barely-bored and, as usual, Beau can’t tell if it’s forced or not. He drives her crazy. “I can think of a few good words for us. ‘Idiots’ comes to mind.”
“The four of us,” Beau elaborates. “Are we still the Meighty Nein? Even though there’s just four of us?”
“Well, we were never nine to begin with,” says Molly. “It’s kind of an abstract concept.”
“No, I get it, it’s ironic,” says Beau. She stops walking. Tries to put her thoughts in order. She wonders if she’s going to regret asking this out loud. How the fuck can things seem so deep and floaty in her mind, and when she speaks them they turn into, like, a tangled-up ball of wet string?
“I mean, are we ” -- she encompasses the four of them with a gesture -- “the Meighty Nein, or do we need Yasha and Jester and Fjord to call ourselves that? Should we be calling ourselves the Fab Four, and they’re the Thaumaturgy Three, or something?” She can tell by their reactions that the nicknames aren’t great. She’s had days to come up with good ones, and they’re the best she’s got.
Nott squares her stance and glares up at Beau. “Of course they’re still the Meighty Nein!” Her finger tightens on her crossbow. She’s been practicing not aiming her bow at anything and everything that upsets her, for which Beau is grateful in this moment. “And we are, too! Just because they’re not with us doesn’t mean they’re not part of our group.”
Caleb makes a noise of assent. “Just because they’re not with us right now,” he echoes Nott, “doesn’t count them out.”
Oh. Beau looks at the grimy floor of the tunnel and thinks about th--
“Hey, Beau!” says Jester’s cheery voice. She sounds tired, but pleased.
Beau is kind of beginning to associate the fuzzy feeling of the spell in her brain with the moments where she feels relaxed with Jester in their room at an inn, listening to Jester talk to the Traveler as Beau does stretches and readies for bed. It’s not like she thinks Jester is with her, but when she feels the spell take hold there’s a flash of comfort and security, and familiarity, and Beau has to think, ‘Huh? When was the last time I felt like that?’ and the answer is always, ‘Oh, with Jester,’ and now she’s made herself depressed. And vengeful. Whole new levels of vengeance coming for the people who took… them. The Meighty Nein.
“So, it turns out this slavery ring is actually connected to some occult shit that’s ruining the city!” says Jester. “And it’s connected to the Gentleman’s--”
Her voice stops.
Beau sighs.
“Cool, I guess?” she says to Jester. She’s also speaking kind of toward Nott, which makes Nott’s face do alarmed and confused things as she tries to figure out why Beau is telling her that her idea of loyalty is cool. Beau starts visibly counting her words on her fingers, which seems to get the gist across.
“If you can hunker down somewhere, we’ll catch up with you. We’re in the tunnels underneath the city.” She’s got four words left. “See you soon. Promise.”
She drops her hands and looks at the others.
“Well,” she says, “the Meighty Nein just got into some more trouble. Which, I guess, is what we’re good at. Oh, and when we find Jester I’m going to make her get “TWENTY-FIVE WORD LIMIT” tattooed on her arm.”
Five:
Annoyingly, but predictably, the other members of the Meighty Nein do not hunker down and wait for their group to be whole again. Beau does find Jester’s scarf, laid in the place where they must have rested yesterday, so at least she knows they’re all following the same path. But come on, guys, when does splitting up the party ever work out?
Any hope of catching up to the other three today are dashed when they come up against a thick metal wall. It looks like it was here first, and the tunnel was made after. Basically, it looks old, and heavy as fuck.
It doesn’t take them long to realize that the door is also a puzzle. Beau won’t admit under torture that they only figure this out after twenty minutes of fruitless banging on the door, when they spot one of Fjord’s red ropes dangling from what turns out to be a moveable knob about eight feet up, in the middle of the door.
So they figure out that the door is a puzzle, and then they’re kind of stuck. Because Beau is educated, and she can read, but she always liked punching things better than trying to figure them out. Molly’s more of a fan of trying different shit and seeing what works. Nott’s ability to check for hidden things is way lower than they keep giving her credit for. Caleb is the only one who really likes this puzzle stuff, or knows anything about what the arcane symbols on the door might mean, and if he had his way he’d stare at the door and his books for eight days and then try something.
Beau ends up siding with Molly and trying something, which turns out to be not a great move because a big scorpion comes out of the tunnel and tries to stab them a bunch and light them on fire.
“At least we know one thing that doesn’t work,” says Molly, kicking the carcass of the scorpion. Beau tries very hard not to hit him. She succeeds only because Jester’s voice pops into her head at that moment.
“Beau,” says Jester, “write this down.” There’s a long pause.
Beau turns to Caleb and gestures. “Paper!” she says. “Give me some parchment. And a, a writing thingy.” She snaps her fingers at Caleb, who looks confused. “Jester’s talking to me and she says I need to write something down.” She mimes scribbling. Her gesture adds more confusion to Caleb’s eyes, but she gets the parchment and a nub of charcoal just as Jester starts speaking again. She sounds like she’s reading a list.
“Dragon, left two. Turtle, forward. Stand in circle, light lamps. Turn wheel counterclockwise. Follow tunnel. Two statues attack. Go through.”
Beau jots it all down. She can see, now that Jester’s pointed them out, the dragon and turtles markers on the door.
“Thanks, Jester,” she says. “Hey, you couldn’t wait for us to catch up, huh? What the fuck, dudes? I’m so pissed at you right now, I can’t even. This better be, like, time-is-of-the-essence shit or I’m going to kill you when we find you.” And now she’s the one who’s forgotten the word limit. Eh, Jester probably got the picture.
“This,” Caleb mimics her scribbling motion, “is writing? That is jerking off.”
“You’re fucking doing it wrong, then,” says Beau. “Listen, this is what Jester told me.” She turns the parchment toward the others.
“A shopping list for a pet shop,” says Nott, nodding. “They want a dragon and a turtle.” Beau rolls her eyes.
“Isn’t it nice,” says Molly, “that Jester waited until she was sure we’d be here, at the door, to give us the directions?”
Beau trades a glance with him. His eyebrows are raised and he’s got that little smirk on his face, like he wants someone else to say a true thing first because he doesn’t want to take the blame. Beau doesn’t mind saying it. For once, they’re on the same page.
“Yeah,” she agrees. “That was definitely Fjord’s idea.”
Plus One:
Jester lets her spiritual weapon disappear. It winks out of sight. With it goes the main source of light. Now, without the lollipop’s glitter, the patterns on Jester’s dress are just monster blood.
“You okay, Jester?” says Fjord. He’s a little ways off, tending to the kidnapped children and making sure they’re okay. They’re not too hurt; Jester saw to that. Yasha took a lot of damage, but luckily her divine powers or whatever they were gave her some protection from the octopriest.
“Yeah,” says Jester miserably. Her pretty dress is all stained with the guts of a demon-worshipping evil guy. She’ll have to do so many cleaning spells on it. She sniffles.
Okay, okay, okay. Time to be strong. Beau and Caleb and Molly and Nott are on their way, and they can help clean up the octopriest’s body. And help Jester loot his robes, maybe. And get the kids back to their parents and stuff. Oh, and finish their job for the Gentleman.
Jester pulls out her wire that she uses to cast Message. It’s been in her hand for every moment that she hasn’t been fighting slavers or scorpions or weird tentacle cultists. It’s been her tether to the others.
She squeezes her eyes shut and casts Message. She feels it stretch across space and hook into a brain. Not in a gross way; in a secure way that feels like having friends, maybe. The way that it feels to reach out and have someone there to catch your hand, you know?
Then it falls away. The connections breaks.
“No,” says Jester. “No, no, no!” She clutches the wire tighter and tries Message again. Her spells are all gone, but maybe -- a cantrip --
The second attempt fails. Jester is not a big baby, but she’d been through a lot in the past few days, so maybe it’s okay if she starts crying a little right now.
“Beau,” she says. She squeezes her eyes shut tighter, trying to reclaim that feeling of security and connection. “Are you there?” There’s no answer. Well, maybe Jester has to finish all her words before Beau can reply. “We’re at the center of the maze. There was a priest with tentacles coming out of his chin, but he’s dead now.” Jester would add more information, but that’s all there is. There’s at the middle of a maze, and their enemy is dead, and Jester feels very alone right now even though she has Fjord and Yasha, but they’re just not the same as having Beau and Caleb and Nott and Molly here with her too, and---
“Come find us,” Jester says to the wire. “Please.”
Jester sees Fjord turn first. He looks toward the entrance to the maze and summons his falchion. The kids look scared. Jester thinks of Kiri and her heart hurts. She scrambles to her feet.
But instead of bad guys, it’s Beau who runs out of the maze. She sees Jester and she keeps running, she doesn’t slow down. Jester knows her eyes are wide and her mouth is open, but she can’t move her face because it’s Beau. And behind her are the others. The rest of the Meighty Nein.
Beau doesn’t stop, even when she gets right up to Jester, and then she’s crashing into Jester and throwing her arms around her. Jester lands on her butt and doesn’t even feel it. Beau is squeezing the life out of her. The others are calling out to each other. Jester can’t see anything through the thick tears pouring from her eyes. Her chin is caught in the muscle of Beau’s neck but she doesn’t care.
“Hey,” says Beau. Her face is buried in Jester’s hair. And even though she never got Jester’s last message, she whispers, “Found you.”