“Is that all of them?” I mentally queried Night as my eyes roved the shadows for flickers of movement.

“Smells like it,” she sent back along our attunement, including a jumbled image of prone forms around her. Before I could quip about it being sight not smell, she followed up with an overpowering scent of spilled intestines and voided bowels that made me regret the question immediately. I was clearly much better at receiving smells than sights or she was better at sending them.

Night did like to make me work for it most times, and overpowering me through our shared telepathy was one of her favorites to, and I quote, ‘make me aware.’ Trying to clear the mental smell and its subsequent physical reaction of watery eyes, I squinted and listened – for what I wasn’t sure.

Being extremely low leveled and unskilled meant I was constantly learning what was an accurate assessment and completely off the mark. It didn’t help that I couldn’t be bothered with the leveling mechanics and normal day to day expectations of how to be in our world. Which was only realistic because Night tolerated that part of me and made up for it.

Most people I had interacted with in this instance so far thought that made me an idiot, which worked since that was the perception I was going for. I was aiming for dismissal while still achieving survivability and a pause long enough for me to slip away before people could mess up my day.

“OK, can you find the main campfire? They were there when this started.” I didn’t expect a response, and I didn’t get one other than the sense along our attunement of Night moving deliberately west of me. I carefully wiped off and kept my short sword in hand as I started heading that way myself. My night sight wasn’t leveled enough yet for me to treat this like daytime, but even at its low level I wasn’t likely to trip and stab myself in the face. I hoped.

Night had stopped moving and as I came up to her I could tell it was bad news for me. “Dead, eh?”

“Smells like it,” she started.

“Original. Cool, thanks,” I broke in before she could send me another brain full of horrible. Having a bonded companion is indescribably awesome is what I said just six short months ago. These days I just think it’s indescribable. Fleas, flatulence and foul humors accompanied me everywhere - ev -re – where! It was a fair trade though, as I brought a lack of wisdom, fake bravado and a ton of hubris for my half of the equation. And Night didn’t ever drop their stabby stabbies like I did, so there was that. She also had been in this instance longer than me, so while we shared the load of our day to day equally, she definitely had a paw up on me for skill levels and stats and it came through in various ways.

Having not yet been stabbed in the face during my silent observation, I made the grand decision to bring real light to the situation and sparked up my oil lamp and set it down next to the main campfire. “I’m gonna brighten things up,” I cautioned so Night could turn her gaze. As an aside, oil lamps smelled funny, and there wasn’t really an “unscented” version. Layering that smell on top of the ones already cascading in my head and crawling up my nose was not at all enjoyable.

The scented light illuminated somewhat decently the drenched wood, half-burnt body and stew remains that had successfully doused the campfire’s former glory. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, the poor soul that was part roast was not the droid I was looking for and so my eyes scanned out from there.

Sure enough, another ten feet away, in a pose too many corpses strike in the frigid grip of death, was the person I was looking for – Margaret, no Maven? Madison? M someone. Hey, Quest hunter, not long lost lover, here. Search complete, I now needed to do the homework portion. “This is gonna be a minute if you wanna do other stuff.”

Night glanced at me, huffed (was that a laugh?) and melted into the shadows. “Good, you’ve been complaining a lot and it’s making me weary. Try to address that too,” were her parting words.

Somewhat startled at the feedback, I reviewed the evening. We made it to the area in a decent amount of time considering I had been working on my tracking and Night her stealth. We got in no less than three games of Find It, resulting in some stuff for our deposit when we turned in our Quest. It had all been going swimmingly actually until we found the Hobgoblins.

Unlike my past experiences with Hobgoblins, finding this group went radically different than what I was used to. Instead of being able to engage in a conversation like normal people, a huge warrior that Analyze said was Jiba ran up on Night and tried to chop her head off with their double-headed axe. While she leaped out of the way I had the misfortune of being ambushed with a hot pan fresh from the central campfire. A spatter of animal fat across my lower body was the only proof that the pan had passed by and bounced off my greave.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Things had devolved from there with every attempt to avoid a fight bringing even more Hobgoblins to the scene with righteous fury burning in their eyes led by Jiba’s shouted encouragement of mayhem. Fortunately there were only six of them, because any more or better armed and we would have been toast. Besides Jiba’s axe there were pans, wooden sticks and a couple of eating knives at play.

Once it was clear there was only violence to be done, the fangs and sword had come out on our side. Night did most of the dispatching while Igno, a particularly pernicious pesk, shanked me in the hip before I had a chance to bring his ability to do harm to an end.

All we had been able to see with the analyze skill were the Hobgoblin's names, races, classes and levels. Night had wondered if they had a cursed tag or something, and that I should try to remember to ask Valen if there was another way to know so we could avoid this scenario of senseless slaughter in the future. While I was definitely not a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination and loved loot at the end of a struggle, needless violence never sat well with me and I could tell Night felt the same though for different reasons.

With all that reflection, yes, I had been complaining and grumbling since Igno stabbed me. I touched my hastily bandaged injury, sending another glance around the clearing at the work that still needed doing. Sighing, and being pretty sure I wasn’t going to get any of the results of whatever Night decided to hunt up next, I pulled out some jerky from my belt pouch and sat down gingerly to get started. Ok, Show Articles Greenvale Gnomish Burial Customs I internally commanded to the place that wasn’t just me talking to myself.

My interface screen popped open in front of my face with several potential articles, and I selected the first one, Whoops Shortie Died, and got to reading. I still needed to take the time to tweak how much visual space and opacity the interface took up but was too fatigued to do that in the moment.

Just a few months ago this entire process of having menus blocking my sight had me running into large and obvious objects, getting massive migraines and frankly questioning the sanity of the Sentient minds capable of coming up with a system that would grant you encyclopedic knowledge that you could query whenever you wanted – and it showed up in your eyeballs.

Menus of skill statistics, leveling trackers, maps I could place markers on, journals, the list went on and on of what was available. If I wanted I could set permanent displays of my health or thirst meters versus having to call them up each time - anything really could be set that way. And it had handy dandy voice-over commands for when you just needed someone to talk to – which is, I’m sure, why that feature existed. I did like the part where it had ”mood” selections of how it displayed the information.

The current one I was trying, “so you think you’re funny – check this out,” was actually kind of fun. Mostly because no one could see it and it did make me chortle out loud in crowds more often than not. I could go on, but the article was short and so I was moving on to Burn Bodies for Eternal Salvation 1 of 12 to get the feel for my next steps. Looks like I wouldn’t need a shovel at least, which was great because I didn't have one.

Knowing I wouldn’t be reading the scintillating 2 through 12 of BBES, I willed closed my interface and dragged my carcass to its upright position. Fire pyre it is.

After spending an incredibly lengthy time gathering deadfall with Jiba’s axe and working on leveling up scavenging – wood, I had a pile big enough for little M to safely be ensconced in the flames of eternal salvation. Fortunately for me, the rites didn’t need a specific time of day, because I was exhausted, filthy and ready for some shut eye. Also, dawn had arrived, so I could snuff out the lantern and wrap this up using the natural light.

Not waiting a wink longer, I began the “simple” process of getting the fire going. Thankfully I did have fire starting at level 2, so I wasn’t a complete new person at it (totally a noob), and after sparking everywhere but the tinder with my flint for a good half glass, I managed to get the party, err, solemn event underway.

I then turned to the Hobgoblins and got to work dragging them into a line and setting their bodies to the proper death poses I had learned a couple of months ago from a different encounter. As a society that generally preferred to give back to the land, the hardest part of being respectful was the physical strength and endurance to get it done without my stamina tanking. Once that was done I headed back over to M’s pyre and settled in to watch her move on.

Startling awake several hours later I quickly assessed and realized M had indeed moved on to ethereal pastures, the fire fortunately had not burned down the forest around me, and Night had returned a while ago if their paw twitchy REM cycle was any indication. The reason for my awakening screamed again from a nearby tree causing me to clench my bowels in visceral alarm for a second. So rude. I side-eyed the red-plumed scavenger and rolled to my knees to get the process of “awake” going. Clearly moving on so folks could do the next natural part of this cycle was up next.

Gently nudging Night with a toe, I started reviewing what I needed to gather up, and which direction we needed to head so we could report back to Valen on the fate of M. The axe would have to stay since it would just slow us down from the weight and bulky shape. Skipping checking my Quest, cuz gotta pee and Scary Red Bird, I pulled everything together into my bag that I scavenged from the scene. While I definitely wanted to delay, the smell of death, cooked gnome and flatulence was enough to prod me from turtle pace to hare pace.

I was just going to have to take my lumps with Valen, and rolling in smoky stank wasn’t going to do it so creek bath first. Yay…