The wagon groaned to a halt in the Hamlet of Hammingburg, so Pandora owed Plume a copper piece. She had been sure a 'hamlet' was a little sandwich. Her companion, however, did not seem to give a spit. Plume flowed off of the wagon like a housecat, which was apropos, as he was a Tabaxi. A 'cat-folk', according to the humans working the ox-train river barge. They just did not give a shit what the 'catman's' ethnicity was. His velvety fur was a distinguished orange color, with black spots and stripes adding accents throughout. His fur was mostly covered in a tattered purple robe embroidered with fading mystical symbols and arcane magical hieroglyphs, and trimmed with a yellow wear-seam. He had confided in Pandora, after their first week of travel together, that all of the symbols were just gibberish. He just thought they looked really cool and sparkly.
Pandora had had fun playing Up the Ante with insulting phrases, hurled between her and the teamster driving the barge her and Plume found themselves assigned to. She still thought she had won all of the contests, especially since the bargeman had turned purple and sputtering by the end of each one. She had had a blast, laughing and escalating the mockery with each volley. She had been doing it her whole life! Granted, she was young even for a halfling, but those had been extenuating circumstances.
"Bloody halflings. Where the hell are all these 'lings coming from lately, Carls?" The plug-chewing driver had taken on the air of an aggrieved wise-man. He had, apparently, been gleaning bits of knowledge from sources far, wide, sober, and drunk. Carls, a young man working the barge route as an ox handler, was doing his best to ignore the driver altogether. He had had the grace to look embarrassed, glancing back at Pandora and Plume with many a look of embarrassed apology.
"I dunno, Boris," the youngster began, but he was cut off with an all-too ready cuff to the ear by the older man. Carls winced, but he sure corrected his syntax quickly enough. "I mean, sir," Carls muttered.
"Hmmm," thought Pandora to herself. "Carls aint none too fond of Boris."
"I'll tell ye where they're all coming from. They're all seepin' out o' Feynor like its a burst zit. They're comin' on over here to the civilized part o' the world, and I tell ya, Carls, it's an invasion." Boris glanced back at Pandora, who was busy pretending not to listen. Indeed, it had become hard to pay attention, as a line of ants had started marching across the gunwale of the barge carrying seeds stolen from one of the bags that were riding in the barge with her and Plume.
"Where the hell are they all going?" she thought to herself. "We're on a boat..." Shaking herself out of her reverie, she turned her attention back to the teamster driving the barge, leaning on the rudder's protruding handle.
"...and then, Carls? Then we'll be trying ta bow our own heads to them. It ain't natural, I tell ya. All the creatures of Tellus were put here for our benefit, not the other way around." This last part had been intoned with a suspiciously religious fervor. So, Pandora had done what Pandora did best. With a big smile, she invited chaos to the party.
Pilfering a few of the teamsters' bottles of "special stock" whiskey, Pandora went and found plume. It only took about half an hour until they were both starting to get a fine buzz going.
Neither one of them noticed the nervous glances their laughter was enjoining from some of the barge men. Pandora, coming out of a gale of laughter that had her holding her sides together, accidentally kicked the empty bottles off of the high stack of crates she and Plume had been perching on, shattering them into several shards of razor sharp glass.
She swore loudly and (although they would not ever admit it) impressively, to the teamsters. Who then all took in the fact that three bottles of their special stock were now gone...either into a puddle on the barge's huge timber floorboards, or into a 'ling and a catman, and for many of them, this affront could not be tolerated.
They began to converge on the tall stack of boxes and barrels and crates Plume and Pandora had chosen as their drinking aerie, but before they had the chance, a profusely apologetic Pandora was on the deck, cleaning up broken glass, swearing like a sailor. Drunkenly weaving about, with her arms waving around holding bleeding edged daggers of glass, she "accidentally" slit a rope close by to her. She dropped the shard of glass, and brought her hand to her mouth in horror, as what transpired next was as horrible as it was confusing.
Now, these barges were of the ox-team variety. What that means, essentially, is that while it was a little complex in the set up, it was very easy in the execution. The system was implemented with a simple premise and worked pretty flawlessly, with a trained crew. Flat bottomed, these shallow draft barges were essentially a massive raft of timber lashed together with braided leather thongs. The braided leather would shrink when wetted, serving only to tighten the bonds. A hefty bollard is then installed on either side of the bow and stern, and four teams of oxen, two per river bank, could then haul the barge upriver by brute force. There was a rudimentary, lever-type rudder installed on the stern of each one that was controlled by a large wheel on the bow, where the drivers would lounge and traditionally harass their apprentices. The steering wheel and rudder were cleverly connected using rilworm-silk rope, something called a "steering compass", and other gnomish gadgetry. Namely something called a "cotter pin". The sturdy bollards, too, were connected to their ox teams with three inch, three-strand hemp rope, via a two-block tackle system that applied mechanical advantage to the ox teams (who really did seem to appreciate it) while they plodded along the cleared route along the River. Plume had gotten the impression more than once that the oxen were the only actually happy ones of the lot; at least, they never complained, and seemed to have a flight of inside jokes they would lowly laugh about amongst themselves, from time to time. The humans that owned and ran the whole shebang, which was technically called Boris and Sons Freight Hauling, were seemingly a miserable lot. They woke up miserable. They spent their day miserably gossipping about misery. They drank every night to numb the persistent misery. It seemed, to the Tabaxi, like a poor way to live. His people lived free, roaming the slopes of Mount Toppick far to the north and east, riding the mountain breezes in the enormous fields of the mountains' northern slopes. There, and then, however, on that cleverly designed and crafted barge, crewed by miserable teamsters who seemed bent on making their apprentices just as miserable as they were, Pandora had slit a rope. She had no idea what that rope did (or did not) do, so she was just as surprised as everyone else when the barge lurched to the right, the driver fruitlessly spinning the steering wheel the other direction.
'Ahh!" Pandora silently mused. "That must have been one of the 'steering cables' I heard them talking about...' Indeed, that seemed to be the word being bandied about by the frantically panicking bargemen, who had forgotten all about their fear of 'lings for the moment, and were sprinting toward the uncontrolled barge. The ox team on the southeast side of the river just kept plodding along placidly, munching on cud, and chuckling to themselves. They were unattended right now, as their handler had run to the crippled barge, which had by now turned almost forty five degrees, its front left corner pointing upstream like a wistful road side sign. This had the consequence of a series of events that Pandora would later call "poetical".
The front-right ox team kept on trucking, like nothing was going wrong, having seen none of this occur. The right-rear team, meanwhile, had stopped when the emergency first began. Both teams were now unattended.
The front left team had been pulled into the water, and were now working their way back out of the muddy bank with the determined help of one of the apprentice animal handlers, a large and solid looking lad of maybe fifteen summers.
The left rear team was left unattended as the handler had been trying to chat up a pretty passenger on one of the other barges in the train behind them. So, the massive bovines kept walking forward, bells clanging and balls swinging, until they reached the determined kid trying to haul out the oxen from the river mud. Thinking quickly, he unhitched those oxen, and re-hitched them onto the yoke of his own, mired pair. Slowly but surely, they finished the process of saving first pair's lives.
Thus, however, the left side of the barge was completely unattached to any ox teams, so the river's current, coupled with the two remaining ox teams, served to bring the barge up against the riverbank with the sickening crack! of snapping timber. The sheer weight of the barge and its cargo helped the sharp edged teeth of the newly broken timbers eat a huge gash into southeast riverbank before it stuck fast, the force of which started a series of events Plume would later call "magnificent".
The oxen on the front right (Bledsoe, a spotted brown, and Louis, a white long-horned, from left to right respectively) kept slowly plodding along until they were finally fetched-up by the barge being stuck in the mud of the riverbank. They almost instantly discovered they were in a field of clover, however, and proceeded to ignore the silly bipeds altogether. They had a feast to attend to.
Meanwhile, the ox team to the back right (Canton and Bolero, both a uniform reddish brown with a white star on their foreheads) had a loose noodle of a lead and had also discovered a feast; a patch of red sorrel that they were slowly but steadily consuming. They were languidly savoring the thought of savoring it again later, and Canton was musing on how life as an ox could be pretty grand, if one could ignore the bipeds. The little bipeds were always trouble, young or old. You had to watch the little ones.
His partner Bolero was the one that had discovered their lead had been severed altogether when the loose bight of the tow line had been cut between the huge inertial force of the barge hitting the bank, and the large rock that had broken the barge's right three deck timbers dead amidships. They looked at each other placidly, chewing and swallowing and flapping their ears at the flies. Canton chuckled lowly and went back to eating. Then slowly; oh, so slowly, he and Bolero just...walked away, unnoticed. Which was fine with the ruminants, because 'the bipeds' were running around in circles like chickens around a fox.
The comedy of errors occurring at the riverbank had continued unabated, much to Plume and Pandora's delight, and they found that it was just then that the ox teams that had been coming up behind them made an entrance. Halfling and tabaxi, both had been ejected from the first barge during the collision, and had both rolled casually to their feet like it happened all the time. They were in the midst of brushing themselves off when they noticed the arrival of the barge to their rear. The humans were making noises neither of them had ever heard a human make, so the two of them decided their best course of action was to stand back and watch the fun.
The first ox team catching up to them, though, had them jumping quickly into action. Plume (annoyed at the interruption) grabbed the left front rope of the incoming barge, trying ineffectively to help the ox team hold back the massive weight of the barge's inertia. He discovered (to his feigned amazement) that the rope he was holding had been severed, "somehow," when barge number two pulled its lead out of his admittedly weakish hands, and smashed itself into the stern of the one they had been riding on with a glorious Crash!
The bump and jostle of the impact gave Bledsoe and Louis (remember Bledsoe and Louis?) even more slack in their lead, which was fine with them because they had discovered Canton's and Bolero's patch of red sorrel. But now there was another ox team from a rival barge getting all tangled up with them, trying to horn in on their lovely sorrell. After a very brief discussion, they of course settled upon a light-hearted duel to the death which broke out between Canton and his mate Bolero, and the visiting team, whose names were Jonesy (a sleek, velvety gray) and Jonesy's partner Max (white, with black spots). They did their level best to keep it as loud, and as frantic, and as fun as possible for as long as possible.
Just like any group of teenagers.
It quickly got way out of hand though. Again just like a group of teenagers. Of course the literal stampede, and the crashing and roaring of the bulls, caused such a racket that the husbandry experts and animal handlers abandoned their "friends" at the barges like rats deserting a sinking ship and sprinted toward the oxen's death match.
The loose end of a rope caught Pandora's eye, despite all of the action going on around her (a teamster went staggering by with an empty barrel over his head and torso, promptly fell flat, and smashed the barrel to splinters) and she fixated upon it immediately. In a nearly hypnotic daze, she took the only step necessary to pick the rope up. She needed to explore and find out where it was going, like some kind of trance had taken hold of her.
She frowned in frustration for a moment, then leaned back and hauled on the rope as hard as she could to expose as much of it as possible, up and out from the sand and sorrell. She needed to figure out where it led! Plume, seeing her frustration, bounded on over to help. Between the two of them, they managed to pull on the rope hard enough to have it spring crazily out from under the sand and leaves that Bolero and Canton had conspired to cover it up with.
The timing of this could not have been better, from Pandora's point of view, because just at that moment somewhere on the order of twenty five animal handlers and the guild husbandmen who cared for the livestock began their panicked sprint to save their brawling oxen, who by that point had collectively lost an eye, four teeth, and a quarter of a left horn, not to mention numerous cuts and bruises. All of them, all twenty five or so of the human teamsters, stumbled. Oh, it would not have been strong enough of a tripwire to mechanically just trip them all up, no. Especially with only a halfling and an orange tabaxi anchoring one end of it! It was only enough to trip up the first, oblivious line of wide-eyed teamsters. The rest tripped over them, and a cloud of elbows, knees, heads, and asses ensued as they all tried to get up at the same time.
In quick succession, they all fell, once again, since they were trying (futilely) to use one another to lever themselves to their feet. Their second attempt to rise was much more successful, but Pandora and Plume, in response to being jerked forward by the weight of the animal handling team, found their own feet, and backed up quickly to get out of the way.
This only served to, once again, add tension to the rope, again causing it to jump crazily into the air. The newly standing, and still scurrying, teamsters tripped over the perfectly timed obstacle once again, so Plume dropped his end of the rope with a tabaxi swear word that translated into something about a barbed penis and the teamster's anuses.
Pandora dropped the rope, also. If the teamsters were going to keep kicking Pandora's new toy, fine. They could have it. There were other things to watch and do, after all. So, when the prone teamsters who had grasped the situation also grabbed their own end of the rope, and yanked with all their might, there was no halfling stumbling along with the end of a rope. There was no tabaxi to pull off-balance, in retribution. The long lead line snapped back towards the teamsters, who reflexively swung their arms in the other direction, which only caused the loose end of the rope to snap, crack!, like a whip.
A whip that sailed past the husbandmen, back towards the wrecked barges, snapping Boris square in the dick. Boris yowled like a tabaxi at a rocking chair party, going down so quickly it looked like he was throwing himself at the ground. He was rolling around in a foetal position, which intrigued Pandora so much she yelled loudly and sprinted over to him. Making sure he was alright took a lot of back-patting and cringing, yet myriad helping hands from the other teamsters gave Pandora the perfect cover for picking Boris' pockets. All of his pockets. She looked around quickly to find some place, any place, to stash the highly uninteresting and inimitably boring contents of Boris' pockets, pouches, and for some reason, his right sock. Grinning, she immediately found the perfect place; or rather, several perfect places. Hiding the illicit gains, Pandora extricated herself from the crowd of people and returned to Plume, who was busy encouraging the teamsters who still needed to get up from the muddy ground.
"Oi, mate! If you get your feet underneath you, it might help a little."
"Naw, mate! Not like that, at all!"
"Don't fall back down, c'mon mate!"
"Nah, ya bleedin' bogan! On yer feet, not yer arse!"
The humans' usually pallid faces were becoming more and more purple as their ego and anger began to conflict with one another, falling yet again as his feet slipped out in front of him like a toddler on ice. "Aw, mate. you're not even trying, are you?"
One human, a weasel-faced man with a comb over and bad teeth, was spluttering in rage. "Just shut up, you!" was all the poor man managed to say before he fell again, this time as his feet slipped on the grass and mud and flew out behind him in a graceful arc. He fell prone. Face first. Hard. Pandora ran over to "help", but was shooed away by an apprentice who was trying his best to not laugh at his master. Who was still stuck in the mud, face down, and now motionless. The boy pushed his master up onto his hands and knees, then directed him the shortest crawling distance to a convenient tree that one could, theoretically, use to steady and pull oneself up with.
An hour later, and the swirling chaos of panicked activity fell predictably into a much more regimented recovery mode. All of the crates, barrels, boxes, bags and parcels on both of the crashed barges had gone ahead and used the collision as an excuse to launch themselves off of their barges and onto the riverbank. These all needing to be sorted, stacked, and redistributed amongst the remaining three barges, which had all managed to slow and stop themselves before catastrophe befell them.
An in-house investigation was launched into the cause of the accident, aided of course by Pandora and Plume, who threw so many light hearted and unpredictable wrenches into the process that the investigator, a mousy older man wearing round rimmed glasses, wound up concluding that some sort of bird had, at some point, defecated on the left-front lead line. The light of the sun dried it out, said he, allowing the saltpetre so prevalent in bird guano to burn the rope away over time, weakening it enough to break, and wreak the resultant havoc. Pandora nodded innocently during the investigator's pronouncement of cause. He was the oldest and most experienced of the group, so the role was technically his. But he also had terrible eyesight (although his eyes were truly beautiful), he habitually sniffed from a silver snuffbox, and never 'officially' learned to either read or write). Plume had jumped to his feet in appreciation at the end of the bespectacled man's somewhat florid speech, whistling loudly as was the tabaxi tradition. This served to confuse the old, bald man, until Plume raised a fist in solidarity.
"Ah, finally! Something I really understand!" was the first thought to flit through the old man's tired and snuff-befuddled mind. The second was, "Who the hell is that? Cousin Marvin from Puddleton? What's he doing all the way down...oh, right. the catman." He really did have terrible eyesight.
