I wasn’t necessarily being ‘flanked’ as we approached the building, but it was close enough.

We walked up a winding path the rest of the way to the summit of the hill, the building was a bit bigger than I had first seen. Along one side were columns of huge pieces of glass, some sort of viewing area. Other areas had standard sized windows, though they were set in deep rock. The building looked old, and, if my pointless guess was right, remodeled sometime in the 70s and another time, heavily, in more recent years. I shook my head, useless thoughts.

What’s my plan here? Those animals were going to be a pain in the ass. Maybe I could just lay low for a couple days, trade… Damn. I’m a terrible apocalypse trader, I don’t have crap to trade. What’s even good to trade in this apocalypse? Gold, jewelry, and other stuff seemed pointless. Bullets were possible, but were those going to only be useful for a limited amount of time? I needed to deep-dive this, so I added ‘put an apocalypse trader checklist together’ to my mental checklist.

We stepped onto a large patio and the big guy with the pitchfork grabbed then opened a giant sliding door.

Great. Lots of people. The leader, Morrigan, made an announcement.

“Hello everyone! This is Sir Tom, he was fighting off some animals when we spotted him coming in from the road. He’s going to join us this happy hour as a Guest! Please be as welcoming, gracious, and wonderful people I know that you all are!”

He flashed an electric grin, but stopped as another man came up to his side in a rush. He was big like the pitchfork guy, but a bit taller and not quite as wide, grim look on his face. The guy looked old enough to have wrinkles but it didn’t look like his face had ever seen a smile. Whatever he whispered into Morrigan’s ear was too quiet for me to pick up but the leader turned and smiled wide. Too wide. Maybe I was just being paranoid.

“Sir Tom, if you wouldn’t mind, we must excuse ourselves to… take care of… something. Vivi, could you stay with Sir Tom so he doesn’t get too mobbed by eager questions?”

Vivi’s face lit in a blush, “Sure, no problem.”

His whole phrasing seemed off, but that was of secondary concern. Primary concern was what the ‘something’ he needed to take care o- aaaand it was also now a secondary concern as a glass of wine was smoothly slid into my hand by someone I didn’t catch as the short asian woman named Vivi suddenly came into my attention.

“I like your shirt.”

Her words took a moment to process.

“Do you have salt?” As I asked the question my eyes drew towards a counter that did indeed have a salt shaker on it.

She looked at me and her head even twisted a bit, cute, but I wanted salt. Clumsily rushing to the counter she grabbed it and handed it to me. I got to check out the crowd, a bit standoffish, but I didn’t sense outright hostility. More the normal level of standoffish that would be associated when a heavily armed stranger suddenly appears during an animal attack. Besides a couple of ‘too smart for their own good’ looks, most everyone seemed… strange. I couldn’t place it exactly.

I shook the salt into my drink a few times, might as well make sure I’m not draining even more electrolytes while I’m drinking, then took a big gulp. Not great, but I never had the most ‘refined palate’ anyways. The ghastly looks increased from my surroundings.

“Were you a really big fan of cats before… all this?”

I gave her a raised eye, “What are you talking about?”

“Your shirt. Has a very post-apocalyptic-ironic feel to it.”

I twisted my head to catch what it said, I could barely make it out.

‘Let me touch your Kitty. MEOW!’ in cursive and had a seductively figured cat-human anthropomorphic picture next to it wearing aviators. The cat-person was also licking their lips. What the fuck. This one was waaaaay worse than the usual, who the hell was responsible for QA’ing my shirt selection?

I thought back, me, but to be fair, my shirt selection was kind of a non-issue when dealing with necromancers and hordes of murderous forest critters. And zombies. Can’t forget the zombies. Ugh, and the entire town of Ontiveros. No wonder those old timers were having a tough time getting used to me.

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“Sure, I like cats alright. Real big into douchey-names, titles, and gender identity. Killed most of them clean enough, except the ones I burnt to death. Or fed to the dogs.”

I didn’t wait for her response as I pulled the rest of the wine from my glass then dashed in a bit less salt into the empty container as I wandered through the crowd that made room for me as I moved through them. Apparently some had been approaching me until that last statement.

Why was it so hard to find a damned refill at a winery?

“Which archangel do I have to blo-”

“You want more wine?” Vivi held out a bottle that I pushed my wine glass toward. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

She filled it to the top and I slugged back another chunk of it before feeling a wash of dizziness. I pulled from my bladder and found a seat. I almost immediately stood up as I hunted for a proper sitting place, with my back to the wall and near a door.

“Why’s everyone staring?” Like I’m some deranged hobo, “Just a regular human, like the rest of you!” Shitty snobs. I felt even more embarrassed for making a big deal out of it. Definitely not going to stop here, though, this chair was pretty comfy.

Damn. Okay, I was feeling the wine a bit. Okay, a bit more diplomatically this time around. The combination of wine and the sure knowledge that I could, with decent certainty, a good amount of luck, and not a particularly extreme expenditure of effort, likely murder everyone in the room. The thought really did wonders for my general social anxiety.

“So what’s the deal here? You all just hide behind the barrier that Morrigan sets up?”

Dammit. To be fair though, I did say more diplomatically.

Vivi sat down, not-quite-across from me and set the wine bottle on the table, “Yes, mostly. In the beginning we had a lot more people here, Morrigan could only make the barriers pretty recently.”

“How’d you guys figure out the system?”

She bit her bottom lip, as if she was debating sharing that.

“I’ll tell you how I figured it out if you tell me. No info, just how you found it out.”

“Well, we had someone here, they’re dead now, but they figured out a lot of stuff for the rest of us.”

“Huh, animals?”

“Yeah,” Her voice dropped an octave, “likely.”

Weird way to answer.

She followed it up with, “What about you?”

I felt a strange tingle as I played with the decision or answer or not, like a bit of an itch.

“I discovered it myself.”

“How?”

I shrugged, “It was that, or die.”

Seeing me not murder Vivi was apparently enough for some people to come up and start probing. I traded a question for a question, well as best I could. After all, I was trying to be diplomatic.

Yes, they had been at the winery since it started. No, they had not seen anyone else from ‘outside’. No, I hadn’t run into any other people. Though, that made my scalp itch something fierce when I told that lie. Still, I wasn’t going to reveal that I knew about the Ontiveros people, they were my fallback position for riding out the apocalypse. Find my folks, get back there and ride this shit out in relative comfort drinking with old Joe and shitty Gramps.

After a few uncomfortable minutes the itching sensation started to fade. I was camping when this happened and was fortunate to have stuff packed with me. Yes, all the animals I had run into were incredibly hostile. I also told the group that the beasts were starting to work together, which I felt was a fairly significant piece of information.

I mean, a flock of birds was one thing, but combined force operations with air and ground animal forces was a whole new can of bullshit. The importance of it didn’t sink into everyone’s head but I think it did for at least a few. A few more beyond the initial group reached a state of understanding when I told them I had ‘actually heard’ the animals working together. And like that, I spilled my sorta Speaks with Animals skill to the newest group I'd come across. My operational security was trash. Damned wine.

Most were reluctant to say anything about Morrigan, good or ill. I didn’t necessarily get a bad feeling, but definitely a subservient one. Oh shit, please tell me this isn’t some wine-based slave cult. I’d prefer it to not be a wine-based sex-cult either. No cults please please please.

Once we got some space and people started to mingle away to discuss different things that had come up in our conversation with each other, I tried to probe Vivi, diplomatically, about any sort of wine-based sex-slave cultery that might be going on. Before I could twist that trainwreck into words that were less… trainwrecky, Morrigan and the others had come back.

“Hello everyone, I trust you all enjoyed a chance to talk with Sir Tom? He’ll be staying with us for a while, so I hope you treated him well.”

Wait. I mean, as I shoved more and wine delicious salty wine into my gullet I did, in fact, want to stay here for a couple days, but that didn’t mean I wanted someone else to assume that fact.

“Sir Tom, can I give you a tour?”

“Uh, sure Master Morrigan.”

He nodded genially, or friendly, some sort of nod that rested between those two descriptors. Adjectives, I reminded myself. Gotta ramp up the fancy and ramp down the beleaguered hobo-battle-knight.

Maybe my car wasn’t so bad.

----------------------------------------

“He drank it, didn't he?”

“Yes, I saw it myself.”

“And?”

“And what? There wasn’t any effect.”

“How was there no effect? He should have been twisted around our finger by now!”

“Or dead.”

“It’s underlying factor still applied, there were some slips of the tongue. Why didn’t the other effects reach him?”

“I don’t know. It’s your poison.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter. Not as long as that cat-loving hobo gets his ass out of here sooner rather than later.”

“It’s not like he’s going to change anything even if he does.”

“You said he was Tier 2!”

“That’s what Jeremy said.”