The good mood coasted through the rest of the day, buoying the group with a bit extra pep in their step, even as the clay tried to bog them down. Relatively clear skies poked through the canopy, the cacophony of birds seemed to have the flying bugs a bit under control, and the inane prattle between adventurers had an unfounded hope hidden underneath.
It was in a sick sense of dramatic appropriateness, then, that everything came crashing down in the early evening light. The yotel pack that the group had diverted to clean up was a speed bump, but that was something they could address directly. The wildlife-trashed camp of the trappers had no easy answers, just unpleasant implications.
There were not any corpses present, but CSI: Fantasyland sweeping through the newly overgrown clearing only turned up worse and worse evidence. The tents, collapsed in and torn up a bit as they were, painted the camp as one abandoned by its makers, and the rain, quickly growing plant life, and thieving critters mucked any tracks that might have been present before. Apparently, given the scraps of packaging and a bear-bag that something had taken down from on high, the camp had been abandoned with plenty of vital-goods still present. Most damning of all, a few precious personal effects were picked out of the mud and wreckage, put in a bag to return with.
With mundane tracking out the window, the next stint of the job left Hughestace’s hands and fell to the other three magically-inclined folk. Naw-Naw played a long shot, giving a brief prayer for guidance and taking communion in a cathead biscuit form-factor, although the circumstances surely made the snack taste of ash and did not spark any divine inspirations. Rora channeled the higher powers a little more directly and snatched up two slivers of moonlight, concentrating intensely as she shoved the balls of magic into her own eyes, hands dropping away to reveal an alien gaze of unearthly light that peeled away a certain layer of the world to see more than was there. Aluca crouched down in the middle of the camp and began his own esoteric work, verifying math and tiny amounts of very expensive reagents before spilling forth words of man-made power to infuse his work.
Mila could do jack shit in the moment, and it sucked.
The human’s dowsing spell gave the most obvious, actionable results as a powder rose up into the air from his hand and formed a needle-like arrow, even if the specifics of the spell casting put a damper on the man. The magic outright verified what had only been strongly supported by the evidence so far - they were recovering bodies. The corpse compass could not be moved, not without even more time and a lot more resources, but they would have to make do with the initial heading, magic moon eyes, and a regular compass.
At least on this somber stretch of the job, Mila could contribute. They were heading far off the road, and enough plants were busy staking their claim for the year that it would slow the group down heavily to push their way through. Mila had two knives that hacked through plants as effectively as they butchered whatever monster was pissing her off on a given day, and partnered with her lightning reflexes that meant any ambush was probably something she could react to, it made her the best trailblazer by far. That she had to sometimes jump up high to ensure a vine or two got removed for the trio of talls behind her was immaterial.
While Mila was the tip of the spear, Hughestace and Rora were the ones guiding her. The former had his compass and kept their heading centered, while the latter used her magic eyes to make minute corrections or note when it was best to go around an obstacle rather than through. Mila now had a healthy smattering of orienteering knowledge from Scienceland at her disposal, but the foliage of the forest kept any potential landmarks out of sight, which was part of what Rora’s magics accounted for. That both of Mila’s hands were busy chopping at greenery helped tamp down the newfound curiosity for magical path finding that she now vaguely had, which would have surely raised a few questions.
The two more dedicated spellweavers brought up the rear of the formation, ready to intervene if anything tried to take a swing at Mila. No jokes, no chit-chat, only a tenseness that was all simmering, angry readiness. Even Mila’s brutal chopping through the foliage did not take the edge off of her feelings, the knowledge that they were looking for bodies undispelled. She had liked the Bletam boys, dammit, even if they were acquaintances at best. That progress felt so slow only exacerbated their feelings, giving them more time to dwell on it all.
It was hours of sidestepping clusters of poisonous vine plants before Rora’s head snapped to the side, hard enough to make the others flinch from the force. She only gave a short, “This way,” before trundling onward, her usual slow gait somehow making it through the greenery without brushing against any of it. The rest of them were not channeling creepy magic to that degree though, so Mila followed right behind, steel flashing. That put her up as the first other person to react to the scene that Rora guided them to, the pink kobold wrenching back and her blades stopping as she got some fifteen feet from the nearest body.
The last few handful of feet to cut through were the subjective slowest, but the others got up to Rora just as the lunar self-hypnotism wore off, dumping the golden gal’s full consciousness back into her body to suddenly experience the full brunt of the scene, resulting in her vomiting heavily, the distinct stench of a lot of rotting meat pulling the knight’s breakfast up out of her stomach. And gods, it was so much rot.
The fucked up centerpiece to the scene was one of the Bletams, although time, wet, and the attempts of scavengers prevented the human’s body from being matched to a specific man. “Attempts” because while scavengers had clearly gotten some amount of carrion off of him, they had not gotten far with it, birds and mammals falling dead around him and them being scavenged themselves, seemingly more effectively. The man’s left upper arm was simply sheared off through the bone, a cut that even Rora would have trouble replicating, but which decomposing arm belonged to the body was anyone’s guess, because there were more potential partners than there were bodies they could belong to present. A couple legs too, one of which seemed to have been picked over by the local critters much more safely than the other parts.
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Conspicuously absent were the rest of the Bletams’ corpses, and a part of Mila was glad for that, even if the rest of her hated the thought. They had recovered bodies before, seen death and even had to kill before, but Mila had to look away from this and steady herself, just catching her reaction to breath deep before that mistake could be made. Maybe weeks of exposure to the elements were bad enough, but whatever poison he had suffered from in turn killing off the large amount of scavengers made the whole thing worse, preventing them from helping the decomposing process while adding their own bodies to the mess. If this was one body, five would have been so goddamn worse.
Mila could do little for this part of the job too, but where before she had been angry at her inability to help, now the same small part was louder and she was a bit grateful that she did not have to deal with… all of that. Not directly. So while Aluca and Naw-Naw began to assess how best to collect and transport the remains of the deceased with their magic nonsense, the other three began a slow perimeter through the trees around the field of corpses. They were looking for any sign of the others or what was responsible, and while they moved, Mila wracked her memories for what could do anything like that.
She and Rora were from more up north, originally, hailing from different koboldian settlements buried underneath the mountain range that had a lot of names but was mostly known as the Spine. Not all the animals down here amongst the Shoulder were present up there, but Mila felt like she had a decent grasp on most of the wildlife, critters and monsters alike, for both areas. Yet she was turning up empty for anything that could be responsible for that kind of poisoning. The most venomous things that came to mind were a few snakes, for instance, but those did not make sense. No rattler, of much of any size, was going to wipe out so many people, nor would it have been cleaving through an arm bone. And that was all ignoring the weirdest bit - most anything hunting with poison wanted to preserve its resource-intensive chemical weapons as much as it could. Putting enough poison into a person to in turn kill off anything poaching from the kill spoke of a kind of malice that Mila did not like attributing to an animal. That felt uncomfortably like the realm of people, in a different way than the wiles of a yotel spoke of trickery and hunger.
Unfortunately, between the weather that had run through and the detritivores coming through to have their last meals, the trio did not find any sign of what had been the cause, or where the other bodies might be. Rora’s channeling also took a lot out of her, and her footsteps were extra heavy, a sure sign she could not repeat the performance. Without magic to kick them to the next location, there was little they could do without waiting around, delaying their return. And beyond that, they had gotten what they came for - knowledge of the fates of the Bletam boys, as incomplete as that knowledge might be.
By the time they walked the whole way around and came back in, it seemed Aluca and Naw-Naw had put together an actionable plan - the former was busy setting up a long-lasting telekinesis spellform to help move and transport the remains in the coming week, while the latter was busy giving an in-depth prayer to request a blessing on a large, thin bag. The gnoll worshipped the Goddess of Feasts, who was not a deity one normally associated with adventuring, but their holyperson joining the group had quickly dispelled the idea that they were poorly suited at the job.
Naw-Naw’s cooking alone would be plenty reason to keep them solidly in the group, the morale boost helping everyone perform their best, but it had become clear that all the different aspects of feasts could be creatively applied. The sluggishness of gorging on a big meal was deadly when snaked through an enemy in the midst of a fight, as was the gnawing hunger of an anticipated buffet. Food with divine magic infused through it could bolster more than just attitude. Bags meant to preserve food for long trips were more than suitable to safely transport remains without them decomposing more or risking illness to the bearers.
It made Mila kind of queasy to think about, and the mental logic in there felt a little suspicious. Not because preserving food and a corpse were different mechanisms, no, but because the Goddess of Feasts did not mind what felt like a loophole. It was assumably fine by her, and Mila did not like to think of someone she had shared drinks with in the same category as food.
Even if that interpretation was in the Goddess’s mind, though, Mila had to admit that still would make her one of the deities that unsettled her the least. In a way, a deity governing hunger considering *everything* to be equally valid as food made sense, and more importantly, the straightforwardness of it was something she could personally appreciate. You knew where you stood with someone like that, even if you did not like that you were standing in their mouth. The more insidious shit was what Mila had a strong aversion to. Very much not a fan of the God of Family and the frankly horrifying things his followers preached on how a ‘family’ *should* look like.
The unknowable things out there that granted similar power, be it the space mage bullshit Rora utilized or the tapping into natural forces that Hughestace dabbled in, were more nebulous to Mila’s thoughts. There was less explicit guidance behind those forces, less visible purpose, and a lack of organized faith. But that did not mean there was not something there, pressing buttons and pulling levers behind the curtain, and that potential paranoia kept Mila on edge about those ideas.
Aluca’s studied magic, actual wizard bullshit, was at least something that Mila could grasp the high points of. You took A, added B, and got result C, where A and B were weird bits and pieces of significant *stuff* that required specialized training to use, and C was an explosive orb of fire or something. Well, sure, she supposed that she could consider divine magic as much the same, where the ingredients were faith and knowing the domain of the deity, but, well.
Once she was able to stab a god like she could stab a vial of mercury, she might consider them to be equal. Until then, deities could just bite her tail.
All her theology and thaumaturgy philosophizing was to distract the kobold from the work going on in front of her, a fact that she gave a wide mental berth, not wanting to startle that bit of information into action. Four planes of telekinetic force delicately picked up the human remains, allowing Naw-Naw to slide the bag down the length, the mage’s magic not interfering with the bag. Once it was in place, the gnoll kept the bag open and the other limbs were gingerly collected and brought through. Once as much was gotten as could be managed, the bag was sealed.
The awful, nightmare smell that tried to pry its way into Mila’s nose and get down to her forked tongue did not go away that easily. Even as they left the rot-strewn length of forest and began the lengthy, sullen journey back, the stench stuck with all of them long after the wind had carried it far away.