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'And this is supposed to be the hero to save us all from Valsharess...' Valen snorted, eying the slender frame of the half-elf coursing all around the Lyth Myatar inn, with her small shoulders, probably unable to lift anything heavier than a bag of feathers, and thin waist he could probably encircle with his palms only. Not much more than a thin stick… In melee fight with something bigger than a starved goblin she wouldn't survive a second. He'd find ironic the situation in which this frail creature was meant to save their whole rebel while he could not, that is, if he wasn't stuck in the middle of this grim reality. He scowled at her again trying to discover in his heart some hidden stash of enthusiasm for being assigned as the half-elf's guard by the Seer.
He already had an ample opportunity to express his feelings towards their newest savior and they weren't of the friendly kind. On their first meeting in simple words he openly voiced all doubts he had about her being a hero sent here by Eilistraee to protect the Seer in his stead and defeat Valsharess' army, doubted that the Seer's visions were in fact sent by her goddess and not from some more nefarious source, and even outwardly threatened the small half-elf not to even think about trying to betray them. All his warnings seemed to have fallen to deaf ears however, since the supposed hero shrugged off all his attempts of intimidation, and the only response Valen received was an absent smile and a question.
"What are you doing tonight?" she asked him then, still smiling with her eyes glowing strange, like if she was high. He was taken aback by it for a moment long enough to send her into a fit of giggles. She left without saying another word, moving gracefully through the crowd of guards, acolytes and faithful filling the temple, humming some indistinctive melody. He stared at the crowd for a long moment after she left.
In drow society such a question would equal a suggestion, if asked by a female it could even be interpreted as an order, but she was from the surface… Valen didn't have the slightest idea what could she possibly mean by asking that.
Soon he found out that drow and surface societies weren't all that different, at least in the terms of communication between the opposite genders. The half-blood elven woman shamelessly flirted with every man she met, battling her eyelashes at Rizovir, Lyth Myatar's best smith, to get a discount on extensive repairs her armor desperately required, twisting strands of her long brown mane between her fingers until Thamas the mage sold her potions almost for free and making eyes at him, her new bodyguard, for some unfathomable reason. There was no sign of dominance in her advances towards other men, but not much of respect either. She was just like any drow woman, using her 'superior' set of chromosomes to win her goals, only that she was completely different.
Valen let his eyes linger a bit longer at her silhouette, picking a moment when she stood in place ordering a drink by the bar, or rather asking the barkeep to give it to her for free. A perfect manipulator, if not for the fact that she didn't seem to take the effect she had on man as some sort of advantage, almost as if she believed that they all were doing it out of sheer goodness of their hearts, instead of being blinded by her looks. And she was something to look at. Her frail build Valen wasn't so thrilled about, made her look fragile and harmless, a good feature to attract drow males, while her curves were defined and made her look sensual but not plump. With her face she could be taken for a model of a statue of a goddess, but when looked closer Valen couldn't tell what made it so. Her lips, eyes, nose, all looked perfectly ordinary, and only when regarded together were creating a beautiful vision her face was. No wonder all she needed to do was to smile for almost any man to want to jump into fire for her.
Valen cringed, seeing he picked her attention watching her from his table in the inn. The Seer made him the half-elf's personal guard only an hour ago and she already annoyed the hell out of him. Through all her beauty and charm he couldn't find it in himself to stand her constant flirting and general mindlessness. What she was saying made sense only as long as no one listened to her. Most didn't bother with listening though.
"You need anything, my dear horny protector?" she asked sliding her fingers along one of his horns, leaning forward to give him a nice lookout at her cleavage. Valen tried hard to suppress his irritation.
"Do you even know what a tiefling is?" he asked rhetorically, pushing her hands away from his horns. Her fingers looked slender and frail, like if she hadn't held a weapon in her hand even once. It was doubtful that she'd be of any aid in an upcoming conflict, but then again if she was to betray them to Valsharess the threat would be minimal.
"A creature with a sexy pair of horns?" she asked in response. Intelligence didn't seem to be one of her best traits either.
"I have demon's blood in my veins" he explained as shortly as he could, already aware of the fact that his new companion had an attention span of a gold fish. Definitely not a material for a spellcaster.
"Cool!" she uttered with awe in her voice. Valen fought the urge to bang his head at the wooden surface of the table.
"Don't you understand what it means?! I'm partly a demon, I have to control its rage for every moment of my life. I…" Valen stopped, realizing that not a word of what he says gets to the woman standing before him. She was already looking around for a new target of her primitive advances.
"Get ready to travel through the Underdark" he sighed. "We depart in seven hours." And he was to keep her safe while traveling through one of the most dangerous places in Aber Toril… Rarely Valen doubted his strength, but now, in face of this new challenge, one of such moments came.
"It'll be fun together… I promise" the half-elf licked her lips in what was meant to be a seductive manner and sat close beside him. Valen wasn't surprised to realize that her supposed 'charm' didn't work on him at all. His tail lashed back and forth speaking of his irritation.
And then she beamed cheerfully and disappeared, when one of the drow heading to the bar passed her on his way, probably the last male in the inn she hadn't irritated or provoked with her tactless flirts. She was clearly off her head.
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"How was your first day in drow city, Deekin?" the same woman asked seven hours later, after they crossed the outer gates of Lyth Myatar, despite the fact that only a moment ago Nathyrra warned her against speaking out loud in the caves without authentic need.
Their party 'leader' looked quite different now, with her brown hair, previously set loose to fall in a wavy cascades on her shoulders and back, long so it almost touched the tiled floor of the inn, now tied on the back of her head and hidden under her ornamented helmet, her lithe waist covered by her repaired armor, blackened not to betray her position in the darkness and with half-elf's goddess' holy symbol carved with care, placed on the front of the plate by Rizovir, so far a devoted if secretive follower of Lloth. A solid hammer hung by her belt and she looked like every inch an adventurer.
She remained just as mindless though, Valen noticed dourly.
"It was nice!" her reptilian pet croaked in answer. The tiefling weaponmaster couldn't guess why she would take a less than three feet tall scaled songster for a venture into Underdark. Not that after what he saw from her character Valen suspected the Seer's supposed hero had any slightest traces of common sense.
"Everybody was nice to Deekin, boss! They were all looking at Deekin and everybody smiled! When Deekin writes another book about your adventures, there will be a lot of good things about drow!" The little creature went on about how the day has been perfect.
"There is something about her, isn't it?" Nathyrra's whisper sounded to Valen's right. He was used to not seeing her enough not to flinch every time she spoke from the shadows even demon's eyes couldn't penetrate.
"You're kidding, right?" Valen snorted quietly, not to be heard by the half-elf or her kobold friend. Yes, there had to be something that made her survive, even on the surface, for so long. But it wasn't intelligence, or strength, or endurance. Either it was hidden very deeply, or it wasn't there at all.
"You tell me. You're the one staring at her all the time." Valen heard Nathyrra and with some surprise he detected some measure of jealousy drow assassin wasn't able to conceal.
"I had great time too" the half-elf ahead of the pair finally managed to interrupt Deekin's waffle. "Everybody is so nice here, in the Underdark. It's really not true what they say in all this tales…"
"Err… boss? Not everybody is nice. Goatman isn't."
'Goatman? And who would be…' Harsh truth cut Valen sharply. A quiet sound of Nathyrra's laughter came from the shadows to his left.
"Valen?" The pair continued their conversation, despite the fact that its object stood only three steps away and could hear their every word. "He's just a bit shy. I'm sure that deep inside he's just a timid kind-hearted man who doesn't know how to behave when people are nice to him."
Nathyrra's laughter became a choking sound of someone rolling on the floor, holding her stomach like it was about to burst. Valen grunted, desperately wishing for some monster Underdark was supposed to be filled with to come, lured by the noise of their constant yapping. 'You are here to protect her' he reminded himself over and over again, in an attempt to stop thinking about ending this idiotic conversation, or even better, leaving her to her own fate in the middle of the Underdark.
"And besides, he was nice when he told me he was a tiefling and he had demon's blood in him, and that's why he has these sexy horns!"
The former Red Sister was probably on the verge of fainting from the lack of oxygen already, unable to take a breath through giggles. Where did all the umber hulks go all of sudden?! Valen didn't remember walking longer than five minutes in these corridors without budging on at least one of those monsters. Now of course they all had to vanish.
"And I talked to the Seer and she told me that Valen is only so unpleasant because he's afraid that…"
Some merciful hooked horror finally appeared, leaping from the ceiling only inches before the surprised half-elf. Valen sighed with relief and charged at it, drawing his flail.
"Into flames we leap!" he yelled, aiming a blow at the creature's head. Just happy not to be forced to hear what the Seer told about him, he missed to see one of the monster's hook-like limbs as it slipped through his defenses and bore a long gush on his arm, tearing through the enchanted metal and getting stuck in it. Valen hissed in pain and fell to his side, his weapon missing the monster's head in wide arc. Thanks to years of practice with his flail, the tiefling managed to hold on to his weapon despite the throbbing pain in his arm, radiating to his whole body. Not that he could use it, now that he was on the ground in his plate not sturdy enough to protect him, but heavy enough to keep him where he was. Last time he heard her, Nathyrra was rolling on the ground and probably wouldn't get on her feet on time to stop the monster's curved claw, heading towards his exposed head…
A smash of sound made Valen see stars for the first time in his life and he wasn't even in the centre of where the spell hit – just between hooked horror's eyes, or rather a place where a surface creature could have eyes. The tiefling had a place in a first row to watch the flirt, the unpromising, stupid, feeble half-elf smash the creature's head inside its shell-armor in what could truly be called a fountain of blood, even without involvement of an aspiring bard.
"Die filth!" the armored woman hissed, changing her handgrip on her hammer. The blue gem on the weapon's pommel instantly sent a sparkling wave of electricity through enemy's body, frying it to a smelly crisp. The empty shell of a hooked horror, now filled only with burned remains fell on the ground just before Valen, giving him a nice lookout at the extent of the damage the monster was exposed to.
"Who's supposed to protect who, sweetheart?" she gave Valen a smile, just as absent-minded as usual, that would better befit a village idiot, than a woman who just crushed a monster's scull to tiny bloody bits. She knelt by him, touching the wound on his arm, ignoring his flabbergasted expression.
"Sharess, your faithful war priestess Varia'del calls to you. Let me heal my horned protector."
The pain in his arm lessened at once, becoming o wave of pleasant warmth and with shock Valen noticed the wound closing before his very eyes, leaving only tingling sensation, without a trace of a scar. Only one cleric he ever saw could perform such a powerful healing in one instant. The Seer.
And he thought… She was too different from any priestesses he ever saw… the evil ones, summoning his demonic masters from the depths of Abyss, the vicious priestesses of Lloth, the gentle and wise Seer… Only now he understood how different gods could be outside the monotheistic drow society.
"Goatman is not as strong as he looked" Deekin commented from his boss' side, with a comical frown of a reptilian mouth, holding his little crossbow, which looked more like a toy than a weapon. "And the drow lady only lied on the ground and then watched boss fighting wide-eyed. They be not good."
"Don't worry Deekin" Varia rose to stand and patted dumb-struck Valen's shoulder reassuringly. "We'll take care of them."
