“What do you mean, she’s trying to escape? She was there with the rest of us when they brought back Niobe. No way she’d try to get away.” I shook my head.
“Sshe iss. Deniz ran off into the foresst.” Elyse said quietly.
“Okay, we’re going after her. Who can we get to help in a hurry?” I started walking to the door as I talked.
“Do you want to go tell Drill Ssergeant?” Elyse asked, pacing beside me. Her stride was much longer, so she kept going ahead of me and having to turn back as I caught up.
“No way. We handle this ourselves. Get her back before morning and nobody ever has to know.” I said grimly. “Niobe and Izzy are in the baths. Jackson and Marko are in the tavern. Which ones do you want to get?”
“The tavern iss further away and you walk sslow. I’ll go get the fighterss.” Elyse told me as she started running.
The baths were at a right angle to the temple. If the church was at the bottom of the square, the baths were towards the lower half of the left side. It was another stone building, but this one looked very old. A crumbling tower adorned the front wall, apparently long abandoned.
The front door to the baths looked like it was an old fortress door, though poorly maintained with rust dotting the iron bindings and hinges. The sign over it was new, showing what looked like a bowl of soup with what I presumed were heat lines coming out the top.
It looked like a triangular building with the narrow part facing the market square and the remainder extending back to the next block. Ivy climbed up the walls, the green leaves incongruous considering everything else was winter brown. I walked in the door and warm, moist air rolled out.
“Hello, sir.” A bright female voice called out. It took my eyes a moment to adjust from the winter brightness of the day to the relatively dim interior. A relatively short, I mean she was a foot taller than me but short for a human, woman stood behind a podium to the right of the door. The wall behind her was lined with cubbies, mostly filled with shoes and clothing. “A bath for you? Its 5 shields and you can stay as long as you like. 3 more shields and I can have your clothes laundered while you soak.”
“Uh, no thank you.” I tried to look past her through the archway straight ahead, but the room was filled with mist. “I’m looking for two friends. A sea elf and a felinoid. Have you seen them?”
“I have.” She said, holding out her hand. I stared at it for a second before realizing she wanted to get paid for information. I dug out five shields and dropped them in her hand. They disappeared so quickly it looked like a magic trick. “Please follow me.” She walked past me through the archway.
The first room was filled with a large pool, one side shallow for sitting and soaking and the other side deep for swimming. There were a few people doing laps and several people, both male and female, sharing the shallow end. All were as naked as jaybirds, but didn’t make a big deal of it. They were all also humans. Many stared at me as I walked in, conversation largely stilling.
They started talking again as I walked by. The low murmur bounced off the ancient stone walls. “Was this built recently? Most of the village is pretty new.” I asked the woman.
“Oh no. This is old. There were some ruins present when we resettled the village a few years ago. There is a natural hot spring at the back of the place that feeds hot pool. It was still bubbling up in the pool when my father found the place. We spent the last few years rebuilding and just opened back up, hmm, maybe last winter I think it was.” She laughed, a braying sound quite at odds with her demure look. “If you can believe it, the problem was getting cool water. We’d half boil the patrons if we ran the hot spring direct to the tubs. Da thought of starting the laundry service as another use for super hot water that let us vent some of it off.”
We went into another large room with a brick cambered ceiling. The bricks were obviously old with mortar missing or moss covered. “We think whoever built this place may not have been human.” The woman chattered on. “The proportions were subtly wrong and people couldn’t handle the direct spring water that went into the original hot pool.” A handful of people soaked in the water here.
I dipped a hand into the pool as we walked past it. The water was warm but not really hot. Possibly it was warmer for a human than for me. The people in the pool watched me pass without speaking.
“They’re in here.” She said, motioning me through an archway that clearly wasn’t part of the original stonework. Small sunken tubs dotted the room, all made of wood and sized for four or five people. Or I guess ten sea elves.
“Thanks.” I told her and walked past. A couple of the tubs were filled with steaming water, people in them slowly parboiling and laying against the side. Niobe and Izzy sat in a tub to the left. Both lay with their heads just above the water and eyes closed.
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“Hey ladies, we gotta go. That emergency we talked about has happened.” I told them.
Niobe’s cat eyes opened halfway. Izzy didn’t move. “Sorry Mike, can’t help you. My bones have melted.” Izzy moaned and flopped, facing away from.
“For real, Deniz ran. We have to go get her back.” I squatted down by the tub. “Niobe, I know you don’t want what happened to you happening to her.”
“Ugh, bitch.” The cat woman moaned, slowly pushing herself up from the near boiling water. “Can you hand a sista a towel?” She reached out a hand to me.
I looked around, there was a pile of grayish fluffy towels right next to me. A couple of robes were neatly folded behind them. I handed one of the towels to Niobe.
“I’m not getting up and you can’t make me.” Izzy complained.
“Nah, I won’t make you.” I stood up. “Your sense of duty to a squad member will make you.” I grinned. She splashed me.
“Come on, little bit, we gotta fetch us a lizard.” Niobe said to Izzy.
“Noooo! I’m sooo comfortable.” The sea elf still hadn’t opened her eyes.
“Okay, we’ll go rescue a teammate and keep the rest of the platoon from getting beaten again.” Mike handed a robe to Niobe, and they started walking back towards the entrance.
After a moment, “You guys suck.” Came from behind them as Izzy climbed out of the water.
“Okay, what do we know?” Niobe asked as she and Izzy got their gear out of the cubbyhole near the entrance.
“Elyse came and got me. Said she ran. Something about not fitting in at the egg commune, whatever that means.” I shrugged. “That’s all I got. She’s fetching Jackson and Marko. We’ll have to track her down and bring her back before morning.”
“This is seriously damaging my calm.” Izzy shook her head as she got dressed. “What’s she thinking?”
“Sounds to me like she isn’t.” I said. Izzy pursed her lips as Niobe slowly nodded. We went outside to stand near the fountain, waiting for the warriors.
We waited, Niobe sitting down on the stone lip of the fountain’s main bowl. The inhabitants of the village used the other three sides to fill their buckets. Conversation was quiet, but small groups of the women were gathered up and shot looks at us.
I started singing, “I always feel like, somebody’s watching me. And I get no privacy!” and danced a bit by one of the troughs.
“Did you just make that up?” Niobe asked.
“What? It’s a classic. Rockwell released it in ’84 or 85 I think.” I did the moonwalk, which was tough in boots on a cobbled platform.
“Oh my god, what is that dance move?” Izzy giggled.
“You two don’t appreciate the classics.” I rolled my eyes at them. They both laughed.
Izzy waved to a woman filling her buckets at the fountain. “Hi, how are you doing?” The lady walked away, looking back over her shoulder at the sea elf, buckets half full. “Hmm, not very friendly.”
“I imagine it’s the sea elves’ reputation for ferocity.” Niobe said, deadpan. Then she popped out her claws and made a snarling face. The crowd around the fountain cleared. “Ah, it’s me.” She sighed.
Jackson and Marko came staggering up about that time. Elyse walked behind them, working her hands together. “Hey y’all.” The human proclaimed, then dunked his head in the fountain. Coming up, he shook like a dog and yelled, “Aaaah!” Marko laughed, a much higher-pitched sound than I’d have expected from the ogre.
“Where’s that little lizard? We’re gonna get her.” The ogre slurred.
“Mike, are you ssure we need them?” Elyse asked, her hood flaring nervously.
“Yeah, we might need ‘em.” I said quietly to the lizard woman. “Hey guys, do y’all want to check out this cool church I found?”
“Church?” Marko yelled. “Who wants to go to church? We were at a bar!” He waved his arms all around in angst.
“My granny was always dragging my backside to the church. Had to be quiet the whole time, too.” Jackson said to whomever was listening.
“Guys, we need to get them to the building that looks like it’s still growing over there. I think the priestess will be able to cure them.” I said to the ladies. They nodded.
Niobe walked over to Jackson. “Hey you big stud, come on with me.” She put an arm around his shoulders and led him across the market square towards the temple.
Elyse nodded and tried that with Marko. “Hey sstud, let’ss go.” She was nearly as tall as the ogre but a lot of that was neck. Her arms went around his lower back instead of around his shoulders.
“Really?” The ogre looked surprised. “I mean, I’m down if you are, but you’re a lizard. Will the parts match up?”
Izzy started laughing hearing Marko’s comment. Then she kept laughing. I shepherded her through the crowd with the tiny elf laughing uproariously the whole time. She started snorting, which made her laugh harder.
The group arrived on the front lawn of the temple. Niobe’s jaw dropped. “What is this place?” She whispered.
“It’s a temple to the goddess of farming.” I told them.
“You mean Mayrlyr?” Izzy asked. “She’s a companion deity to my goddess, Tearine, the keeper of nature.”
“Yeah, pretty sure that’s the one.” I said as I touched the vine door. They all retracted from my touch, which really impressed my drunk friends.
“Field Maiden Alissa, are you there?” I called out.
“Hello, be there in a moment.” A voice came from the back of the temple. Alissa came hurrying out. She saw us supporting Jackson and that Marko had collapsed on one of the benches. “Oh goddess. Are they wounded?”
“Not really, but I could very much use a remove or control poison spell if you have one.” I told her as she arrived.
“Are you a real priestess of Marylyr” Izzy gushed.
“I am. Excuse me please, I need to get to the patient.” Alissa said to the sea elf, who stared at her worshipfully. Izzy scooted out of the way, never taking her eyes from the human woman.
The priestess opened Marko’s eyes wide, “Poison, what type? Do you have a sample?”
“The poison was ale.” Niobe said.
Alissa stood up and put her hands on her hips. “They’re drunk? You came into my temple to get me to sober up your friends?”