Vraxious- Hopes Path
Vrax and Torvald had spent a well-earned night of rest at the inn, Torvald sleeping like a giant’s baby, snores tormenting everyone in the building as they rattled through the walls. Vrax had fitfully slept in a corner with his cloak and a spare blanket, jealously eyeing Torvald’s bed for most of the night. With the rising sun, they had made their way back to the city to sell their small hoard of treasures.
The first stop they made was in the mercantile quarter. Vrax should have stopped here to sell the fire balm when they arrived in the city, but between Torvald rushing him and the desire to get to Crucible before dark, he had put it off. The store Vrax had chosen had a beautiful illusionary garden filled with slowly growing and wilting lilies fading in and out of existence across the side of its walls, making it stand out even by mercantile quarter standards as they walked down the rather bustling streets. Vrax glanced at the glass sign hanging above the door, lettering spelled out with dried wolfsbane somehow trapped artistically within; it read Luna's Enchanted Arborium.
The inside was a sight to behold: winding glass cases wound around the room in spirals filled to the brim with living plants of all varieties. Vrax could tell at just a glance all of them were useful for alchemy. The center of the room was neat shelved rows filled with uniform glass jars, a tidy handwritten label on each, and a price on the shelf below. The back of the room where Luna herself stood held the truly expensive reagents in dark metal cases. Luna was a rather ancient, by any standard, though still beautiful, elven woman whose white hair violently contrasted with her immaculate black overalls. She gave them a glimmering smile as they walked in.
“Welcome, darlings! You look like you either brought me something from the dungeon or need to get something before you go there!” She chuckled to herself briefly. “I have an eye for these things, you see, dearies.” She leaned forward and pointed toward a shelf in the middle of the store. “Health potions, antivenoms, and potions of haste are all on that shelf, deary, all made by my very practiced hands.” She looked up and down Torvald with a bit too much enthusiasm.
Torvald audibly gulped. Vrax stepped between them before Torvald went and got sidetracked at the first damn stop of the shopping trip. “Hello, ma'am, my name is Vrax. Thank you for such a pleasant welcome. I actually have a few things to sell from the Forsaken Lands.” Vrax said diplomatically.
Luna cocked an eyebrow and made a disappointed pouty expression, eyes still trained on Torvald while she talked to Vrax. “Ma’am, huh? Well, aren’t you polite? Well, then, deary, lay the goods up here on the counter. It’s always very useful to meet new people who gather there,” she said, clearing a small space and laying down a slightly plant-stained towel.
Vrax went up to the counter and began laying out an assortment of radiant grass, fire balm, and other assorted dried medicinal herbs from his last few forays. Luna’s eyes got wide at the perfectly preserved and rather fresh balm bulbs, then her gaze scanned across Vrax’s spear with a hiss of surprise.
“Vrax, dear, where did you get that… and how much would you like for it?” She practically growled out.
Without even slowing his unpacking of herbs, Vrax responded, “Sorry, ma’am, the Spriggan sapling isn’t for sale, and where I found it was multiple leagues into the forsaken lands.” Vrax responded he didn’t see any reason to lie about it. Spriggans did roam the Forsaken Lands, just usually farther in than where he encountered the betrayed in the Grove. And then, as an afterthought and because he just couldn’t help himself, he added, “It makes a truly wonderful spear!”
Luna choked, actually choked, trying to spit out a response before she gathered herself. “Well, if you change your mind, I will pay an exorbitant sum for it. No one has managed to get one to root and grow in several hundred years, and I would relish the opportunity to try.” She ripped her gaze from the sapling back to the goods on the counter.
“Hmm, I think 4 gold for the lot would be a fair offer, young man.” she said slyly
“Yeah, and I think I might as well just put them back in my pack if that’s where we are starting at, with all due respect, of course, ma’am.” Vrax said, really stressing the word ma’am this time.
They bickered back and forth for a good ten minutes before settling on a sum of seven gold, a large amount of money but slightly less than Vrax would have liked and certainly slightly more than Luna wanted to pay, but he knew the goods he brought her could be sold quickly even if the profit margin wasn’t astounding.
Vrax handed Torvald a couple of gold to pay him back for being a beggar earlier this week and then immediately spent another gold on a health potion, bringing him down to four plus the dungeon silvers—still a fairly large sum of money, but probably not enough for a magic item. Vrax spent a few more minutes browsing the store's wares, especially drawn to some of the plants in the arboretums that he had never seen before. He was about to leave when he heard the softest singing from one of the glass cases. It soothed him slightly, causing a slight tug on his psyche, pulling his interest that way.
“Luna, what plant is doing that?” Vrax asked, an evil idea forming in his mind.
Luna pried herself from beside Torvald, where she had been enthusiastically espousing the benefits of haste potions. “The singing? That’s a Siren’s Call Daisy, a very rare flower I happened to come upon from a merchant caravan from the far north,” she said while opening a case to Vrax’s right and gently pushing aside a shrub to show the almost transparent purple flower within.
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It was gorgeous, almost angelic in its fragility, with leaves so thin you could see the plants behind a large royal purple flower on top, fading from the deepest eye-catching purple to shimmering transparency on the edges, and two bell-shaped purple buds hanging almost like arms on its stem. Vrax’s eyes lit up with the possibilities held by a mundane flower that naturally had a psychic pull to it.
Torvald stepped over, a look of concern on his face. “Hey, Vrax, buddy, can we not make another daisy horror? Didn’t you want to get a nice, normal Mandragora and just make it bigger and stabby or something? It is pretty though…” Torvald trailed off, admiring the flower, his lack of mental resistance not letting him realize its slightly hypnotic effect.
Luna looked thoroughly confused by Torvalds' outburst, but smelling gold in the air, she continued her sales pitch: “Very rare indeed. This one was left potted in the amphitheater of a fine opera on the northern steppes for over a year, and now it mimics the songs it was raised in…” She trailed off to let Vrax listen to the almost whispered crescendo of a song drifting from the case.
Vrax looked at Torvald apologetically. “How much for the brainwashing, Daisy?”
“Eighteen gold coins,” she said, smiling like a shark.
“Fuck…” Vrax muttered and turned to leave, making it halfway out the door before going back and shaking Torvald from his stupor, halfway dragging the confused warrior out the door.
“Please come again. If you need more money to buy things and the dungeon isn’t doing it for you, you could always fight in the Dragon’s Maw!” Luna shouted cordially after them, obviously hoping they would return for the flower when they had deeper pockets.
“Vrax, what is the Dragons Maw?” Torvald’s eyes had lit up at the mention of fighting for money because, of course, they had.
“It’s, uh, something I hoped you wouldn’t hear about because I knew you would immediately sidequest us to go beat the shit out of some initiate knights.” Vrax said with trepidation obvious in his voice.
Torvald fully turned around, stopping in the street. “Details, Vrax, details!” Torvald said excitedly.
Vrax sighed; he knew where this was going. “I heard about it years ago from Gregory, actually. The knightly academy owns a rather high-end inn in the nobles' quarters attached to a reinforced amphitheater. They host nightly combat as a way for the trainees to experience combat against a wide range of other fighting styles. There is a whole lot of betting and decent prize purses.” Vrax said, waiting for Torvalds's destined response.
“Oh! Great, let's do that before we go back to the guild and check the copper board!” Torvald said with such certainty Vrax knew he wouldn't be swayed.
“Fine, but can we finish window shopping first? If you are going to make me scar a generation of rich kids with plants that rip people's arms off, I would like to be able to leave quickly after when their pissed-off parents want to have a word with us, and maybe I'll have enough for the mind-melting daisy afterwards.” Vrax said, once again imagining the things he could do with the siren's call, Daisy.
The duo wound through the streets, dodging street vendors and overtly pushy shopkeepers on their way to the second-to-last stop they had to make. They would check out the Beast Market, and then, to Torvald's delight, they would make a stop at the Dragon's Maw. If they were in decent shape after that to the guild to see if they could creatively skip the grind to the next rank.
The Beast auction house loomed in front of them, wide doors of metal flung open enough room for four carts to pass side by side through the inside, was lined with neat rows of cages. Most were of a dark metal similar to the corrugated walls and roof, but a few more exotic ones were present. One cage appeared to be made of solidified fire flickering soundlessly as some arctic elemental inside recoiled from the bars. Another was made of wood, and a single creature hung from its ceiling vines and roots draped all around it, sinking into the walls of the cage, a massive yellow pupil-less eye the only defining feature.
Vrax and Torvald stepped aside as two men hefted a metal cage the size of a cart past, a panther with white fur snarling within. Torvald grunted amicably at them, impressed with the obvious feat of strength. Vrax gawked all around himself in sheer glee, rushing from one cage to the next, darting through groups of traders, and ignoring any salesman who tried to catch his attention.
The animals, while stressed, were obviously well cared for; there was no foul stench of animal droppings nor sickly creatures here. Most would not be here for longer than a day or two at most before going to a tamer, a tanner or, in a few cases, a kitchen.
Vrax stopped short as he reached an intersection of the cages that was roped off, a guard in front handing out waivers for anyone who wanted to go past him into a walled-off section of the auction house storage.
“Excuse me, sir, what kind of animals are in there?” Vrax asked after peeling his gaze from a flaming sparrow in a small cage next to the guard.
He looked at Vrax with a well-practiced smile. “Dangerous monsters section, young adventurer, the kind of things that can kill you if you get too careless around them, cage or not. You are welcome to enter; you just need to sign a waiver and understand that if you step beyond the clearly defined lines on the floor, your life is probably forfeit without proper protection.” The guard handed Vrax and Torald a short form that boiled down to You have been told this is a bad idea.
Vrax signed without hesitation and passed down a short, narrow hallway leading from the warehouse-like expanse he had been in. The room ahead was well lit; a chandelier with four piercing white gems shining above gave it a very serious, clinical atmosphere. In the center of the room, two heavily armored and armed men stood, weapons at the ready. Between them a mage with pearlescent robes and a purple wooden staff capped in what looked like frozen lightning stood vigilant. The room currently only held three cages, each five strides apart, with a painted red do not cross line three strides around it.
The leftmost cage held what looked like rage incarnate, a swirling mass of red stones and lava bubbling over themselves and forming into the shape of a humanoid with bladed limbs and a featureless face. It melted across the floor of its cage towards Vrax before hitting a previously invisible barrier a few feet past the cage bars and reforming back inside the cage with a roar that sounded like a boulder sliding down a mountainside. Its blades slammed against the barrier, sending shuddering waves of mana spiraling across the room, and the stone floor near the cage heated to a simmering red.
“Holy shit, I do not want to fight one of those.” Torvald said, stepping farther back from the rapidly heating corner of the room.
Vrax didn’t respond; his eyes were locked onto the monster in the second cage, adapt already shimmering on the tips of his fingers, begging to be used. Torvald looked at him when he didn’t respond and then at the monster in the cage.
Torvalds eyes got wide. “Vrax, dear gods, please no. I would like to not die in the next week. Let's go back and get the daisy; I'll even help pay for it!” Torvald said, pleadingly staring at the horror peering intelligently at them from within the cage.