20210102 War and Peace, and Tense Negotiations

"I have a dragon! ☺" - Last words of the finale of Galavant.
 
Wrong Way always used to tell me I was Neutral with Good tendencies, which is fine for a druid.
 
Now, he's saying, "just Neutral".
 
Part of me thinks that's what I'm going for.
Part of me thinks that's not what I'm going for.
Whenever I'm confused, I know I can consult my bestest buddy in the whole wide world, Wrong Way. But now he's the one confusing me, so I guess confused is where I'm supposed to be right now.
 
Speaking of, now that I grabbed an old hanky from the Higgins' ranch house, I can start diarying again, or journaling, or whatever.
 
So, when last I left off, Bruthazmus was possessed by a Banshee, like Miro thought had happened. It's easy to tell. She swishes when she walks. He lumbers.
 
It was Bull Hester and his lovely bride, Gore, whose dark magic made Bruthasmus that way. But the Banshee had no love lost over the Hell-hands couple, and would enjoy serving them a knuckle sandwich with no bread, so no problem after all.
 
So Miro went over to smack them with his lightning bolts and stuff. And I stopped at that spot in the cavate where your voice carries so well, and I shouted, "Prepare Topiary Rex for battle!", hoping somebody would do it. Then I sat down that potted plant I was talking about last time in it's yellow bucket on the stairway, and I jumped down five flights of stairs (which is a thing my boots can do for me, so no problem), and I ran half way across the biggest cave room in the whole cavate, which is where we assembled all the townsfolks/hostages we had rescued from the arguably-evil plant army. That's also where the main front door is.
 
That's also where Mr. and Mrs. Hester entered. You could also call them Mr. and Mrs. Devil-Possessed Ranch Hands Mutated into Mountain-Goat-like Green Glowing Creepy Monstrosities. I'm sure they would answer to that if you called it out across a crowded battle room like we were in now.
 
So on one side there was me, and Piera 'Princess' Alfredo-Alston (She's hyphenated by marriage. She used to be the Hesters' ranch boss now that Big Lui and Big Mauri are missing, presumed dead from battling the evil they helped to bring around here in the first place.) and Topiary Rex, the carnivorous plant the shape and size of a thunder lizard, and a half dozen Briarseed Babies, way too young to be on a battle field, but on the other hand, they don't gain intelligence just by growing bigger, so it's kinda even. We went after Gore.
 
On all the other sides, everybody else went after Bull.
 
Oh, except all the nearly-worked-to-death hostages. They were standing about all over, causing Miro to hold back on the lightning bolts, which probably would have sped up the whole process. So I think Sephia herded up the hostages, which didn't slow her down from shooting arrows at Bull much at all.
 
So, first strike, Princess walks right up to Gore and spits long thorny tentacles at her out of her mouth.
 
Yes, I wrote that right.
I did not see that coming.
Neither did Gore.
 
That kinda made my T-Rex attack anticlimactic, but I did it anyway. I know he's a plant, but he rides like an animal, the kind that can swallow a person whole, and then digest them with stomach acid, which also contains a paralytic poison. Add on a sharp rusty nail sticking out of him that would give you lockjaw, and he's the whole package. So, game over pretty quick, I figured.
 
And I threw a Briarseed Baby and hit Gore right in the face, I mean right in the face.
 
But he's a partially mobile plant grown onto a bamboo trellis shaped like a dragon or something, so he's only as strong as his trellis. So that became a problem when T-Rex accidentally bit his own arm/tentacle/vine/whatever and started to unravel.
 
And then Bull (remember Bull?) although he'd been hit by Everybody and his brother, he sees his wife get smacked by - not T-Rex, not my fast ball right in the face, but Princess' tentacles with thorns. Not blaming him; I still can't get that out of my head either. Even just the shear mechanics of how you would do that boggles my mind. So he blasts Princess, I mean just blasts her with thunder crackling hell fire right in the shoulder blades. Pow! She goes down, like flat down, like mostly-dead-and-getting-worse down.
 
Then things get weird.
(I know, right?)
Of all people, Miro and Gore and I all pounce on Princess, each trying to keep the others from attacking her so we can help her.
And I'm like, "Wha?" And she's like, "Don't you touch her!" And he's like, "Huh?"
So like when Gore's standing over Princess stabbing at Miro, I can barely give Princess the healing touch. And when Gore is stabbing at me, Miro can tap Princess with his Healy stick, which I may need to get me one of those if I keep hanging out with this crowd. And at some point I have to back off and ask Mother Nature to lay down on Princess that magic spell that keeps you just mostly dead and not slide into completely dead.
And we're all like, "Huh?", "What?", "Who?", "First base!"
 
And then the green tentacles with thorns that Princess spit out at Gore... remember those? …either they jumped out into Topiary Rex's mouth or another one jumped out of his mouth, and now there are two of them, and I lost track of one of them, and it's probably about to strike now while I'm journaling. No. It's not behind me now. It's still waiting for the worst possible time to show itself. Well, Gore tells me it's a griefgall. Like any druid should recognize a griefgall. Wait, maybe it was Bull that said that. But anyway - whoever - its like I used to specialize in insects and arthropods, and then amphibians, and plants are like a whole different kingdom, a great big kingdom, but then I come out here to the wild west where the arguably-evil plant army gets dropped in my lap (and I had plenty other plans for what I wanted to do with my lap, thank you very much) by a moss lich they call Evil Seed who was in way over his head and basically tells me, "The job is to eradicate every demon and everything even close to a demon For-Ever, so thanks for volunteering; I'm going to Hobbitown to smoke the finest weed in the shire until you get the job done. Good luck with that," and now everybody expects me to know what in Mother Nature's Green Earth a griefgall is!
 
Well, the obvious part is that a griefgall is a plant that starts as a seed that gets planted down your throat. And it starts to pull the puppet strings inside your head for a while and makes you do what Evil Seed tells you to do - I mean what I tell you to do - and then at some point it grows too big with thorny tentacle vines and it jumps out of your throat which hurts a lot and then it bites somebody's face off.
 
So that's a thing in my life now.
 
So I go with the obvious again. I grab the griefgall, or ball of two of them, whatever, and I throw it up in the air and yell, "Pull!", and Bruthasmus and Zhang Sephia pepper it with arrows, and Miro shoots a lightning bolt at it, (a rare case of him making lightning go in the right direction like it should), and it's dead before it hits the ground.
 
And then we are left with: we all want to protect Princess and get her back together with Chica and live happily ever after, and we each want to do one more thing which no one else agrees with, but we all agree we want to protect Princess and get her back together with Chica and live happily ever after, so that becomes everyone's new priority number One.
 
A close or distant second place is getting all the humanoid (Is that racist? Like Lee Chung and I are nearly the only humans around here. maybe gentlebeings? sentient life forms?) freed hostages somewhere safe - safer - safe-ish.
 
So I pack up Topiary Rex and the Briarseed Babies in the nursery to heal up and make repairs and improvements to his trellis. And I tell him to wait and rest up until Wrong Way comes to get him. And Wrong Way tells us we should stuff the really good soil into the trellis and put a nice blanket over T's back so I could ride on him comfortably. That's Wrong Way, always thinking, always practical.
 
So there we are: like thirty nearly-worked-to-death hostages, the nearly-worked-to-death SNAFU Posse, and the nearly-beaten-to-death ranch hands from hell, (who turn out to be not so bad people when you get to know them,) and one horse.
 
We trudge to the nearest ranch, the Higgins' Ranch, Juniper Trail Ranch, the well-known cattle rustlers and probably horse-thieves' ranch. Yes, that one.
 
So Miro goes and knocks on the door. What luck he has. A voluptuous young lady halfling answers. Somebody needs to lock those two up in a room with about 45 minutes of privacy. (Wrong Way signaled that now I'm vicariously doing my thinking with the wrong head, but if you saw them, you would think the same thing with whatever heads you've got.)
 
The Higgins' make us an offer for a room for a price. We discover we have every moral alignment represented, forming every possible plan including buy, beg, borrow, or steal the rooms. So, to make a long story short (not gonna happen), I go to the door and offer my services as an alchemist. They told Miro they have a supply of leather with a vegetable-based stain on it which needs cleaning. I told them I could do that. They take me to their chef's kitchen. You know how most chefs don't like another chef cooking in their kitchen? Multiply that by two when the other chef is an alchemist brewing a leather-dye-removal potion that might explode if you do it wrong. Fortunately, many years ago my dad beat it into me that you don't do it wrong and let your potion explode on you. So, good potion. They didn't mention that the pieces of leather are attached to live stolen cows from other ranches that turned up in their barn, but that is probably what is happening here.
 
Then a big dinner, which we desperately needed, which Mrs. Higgins loaded with magical truth serum, except when Miro noticed and removed the magic to protect us, but it was still magically delicious.
 
Oh, and griefgalls! We didn't know how many of the hostages were implanted with griefgalls by Evil Seed, but it was more likely than not. Fortunately, I'm still wearing Evil Seed's robes and I'm still his chosen successor, so I just ordered the hostages to stand in a sleet storm that I asked Sister Rain to produce out front, so the ones that told me they would rather that I go do unnatural things to my back side - those ones were already free of griefgalls, and the others got chilled until the griefgalls jumped out of their throats and died of exposure fortunately before the humanoid (there I go again) hosts caught pneumonia.
 
All done. No more parasites. Now let's all go to bed in those rooms we rented.
Sweet dreams after that scene!