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The first time they encounter the bird, they hear it coming before they see it. The Mighty Nein are only just arriving in town and looking around for a likely inn, when a jingling noise begins just down the road. A man shouts “Oi!”, and the jingling picks up, coming down the country lane towards them.
“Is that…?” begins Jester curiously, tilting her head at the small white shape hurtling down the road towards them, with a portly man in in a leather apron in close pursuit.
“It appears to be a goose,” Molly confirms.
A goose, indeed, seems to be waddling its way down the dirt road towards them at a surprisingly high speed. The bird is carrying the source of the noise: a small golden handbell that the bird is clutching in its beak, which is ringing out with the bird’s every step. The goose’s head is lowered like a sprinter, with its wings spread for speed, although if the bird can fly it doesn’t make any apparent attempt to do so.
“Catch that goose!” bellows the man in the apron.
The Mighty Nein glance at each other, but before any of them have come to a decision about whether or not to try and corner this wayward waterfowl, the bird in question changes its line of escape. It turns and darts between the legs of two passersby, to surprised shouts, and rapidly exits the main road into a nearby alley. The portly man changes tack to follow it, narrowly avoiding ploughing right into the passersby, and disappears into the alley himself. There’s more shouting, and ringing noises, and some honking.
“Huh,” drawls Fjord. Beside him, Beau has started chuckling, while Jester is laughing outright. “Interesting town.”
They meet the thing again later that evening. Having successfully found an inn to stay at, the party are gathered in the tavern to eat some supper, when Jester suddenly and unexpectedly yelps.
“Something pulled on my tail!” she announces, drawing the appendage up into her arms and looking around wildly. The rest of the Nein look around startledly, Molly drawing his own tail up for good measure.
It’s the goose, now inside the tavern, standing behind their table. It rustles its wings and stares expectantly up at them with its beady eyes. Jester glances at her companions and then back at it. It continues to stare at her.
“How did it get inside?” asks Fjord, staring down at it with furrowed brows.
“Is it… supposed to be in here?” Beau ventures. She glances around, but no one else appears to have noticed. “Guys…?”
“Maybe it’s like a pet goose,” Jester offers, looking recovered from her alarm and now overwhelmingly curious. The goose wiggles its tail in what might be agreement, or possibly aggression. “Do you think I should feed it?”
“I don’t know,” says Nott nervously, sliding down the bench a little ways to get further away from the thing. “They bite, you know…”
Caleb nods in agreement, casting a wary eye at the bird, remembering the scene from that morning. But Jester is unperturbed.
“Here you go, goosie,” she offers, tearing a bit off of her bread and tossing it onto the floor. “Do you like bread?”
The goose waddles forward and picks up the scrap of bread, but instead of bolting it down like one might expect, it just holds it in its beak. Clutching the bread, the goose continues to stare at them for a moment with its strangely intense gaze, and then eventually it turns and walks away. It disappears through the legs of the tavern’s patrons, like a vanishing magician.
“I don’t like the look of that thing,” Caleb mutters, but Jester just laughs and tells him not to be silly.
Throughout the week that the party spends in this small town, the goose continues to appear in surprising places. Once, it appears inside of a bookshop while Caleb and Fjord are shopping around, and the owner chasing back out again takes a full ten minutes of raucous honking and arm-waving. Another time, when the Nein are walking past a pond, Fjord spots what looks like a full clothesline’s worth of laundry floating around in it.
“Why doesn’t anyone get rid of that thing?” Fjord wonders eventually, as they watch a woman across the street trying to hang a line of laundry. Every time she pins an item of clothing up and turns her back, the goose reaches up and tugs the item free and drops it on the ground. The woman scolds the goose away and dusts off the clothing it had dropped, but as soon as her back is turned, the goose is right back there again.
“Goose probably tastes good, right?” Nott says, scratching her ear and watching as the bird throws a brassiere onto the ground for the third time in a row. The townswoman just shakes her head and sighs in frustration. The goose waddles in a circle around her, looking very pleased with itself. Jester giggles.
“I think it’s great!” she says. “This whole town is filled with mischief. Maybe it’s blessed by the Traveler, you know?” The rest of the party level each other with looks of varying degrees of skepticism. Molly shrugs.
“It might be magic, I suppose,” he admits, considering the bird in question.
“I don’t think it is,” says Caleb, “but I’m not sure. It’s rather odd, isn’t it…”
Eventually, the woman gives up and brings her washing back inside. The goose flaps its wings victoriously - or possibly in protest, hard to tell with birds - and ducks under a gap in her hedge, vanishing from sight.
At last, all of their errands are finished, and the Nien pack up to get back on the road. Caleb did manage to find himself a new book about magic, and is currently walking with his nose buried in it. Molly is juggling a coin across his fingers, and Jester is trying to imitate him. Fjord and Beau are studying the map, as Fjord points out the town he thinks they should visit next. (Yasha had wandered off before they hit the town, of course. She’ll catch back up eventually.) But Nott pauses in the road, tilting her head.
“Hey guys,” she calls out, stopping the others. “You hear that?”
The rest of the Nein turn to look back into the town, listening. There’s a jingling sound in the air; a familiar one.
“No way,” Beau says, eyes lighting up in amusement.
Yes way. Down the road behind them, they hear a man’s voice shouting “Catch that damned goose !” And there’s a flash of white, as a lone and determined waterfowl darts across the way, carrying a golden bell in its beak. As it disappears from view again, a woman’s voice shrieks, and a loud honking follows.
Jester claps her hands in delight. “Can we come back here again some time?” she asks.
“Definitely not,” Fjord says, at the same time that Caleb comments, “Probably best if we didn’t.” Fjord takes Jester by the shoulder and pulls her along, and the Mighty Nein set off down the road.