Birds of a Feather

Birds of a Feather
Date	7/15/25
Storyteller	Aru
Tier	Trainee
Player Characters	Capri, Hiroyuki, Muldog, Kora Caroli, Evalynne Stoneking, Wander & Wonder
Rewards	Pendant of the Occult, Charlatan's Gloves, Striking Rune, 275 XP
Result	Success
Author	johnnysupernova
Downtime	9

Chickens went missing. An easy job for trainees.

Log

Wonder had tipped me off to the notice posting for this job, he likes to read the postings in his idle time. He’s always saying, "Wander, you need to get out there, and get us some money" and I’ll always tell him, “Have you seen the sky out there?” and that usually shuts up his intrusions into my mind. Anyway, this particular job looked easy: find some missing chickens.

Simple, right?

I showed up to the designated spot 5 minutes early, I always strive to be five minutes early. Too early, you look paranoid. On time? You look performative. Five minutes is perfectly respectable. No one notices you when you’re five minutes early. It looked like two had already showed up, a Hobgoblin with shades who called himself Muldog.

The other was a friendly dwarf, she was passing out snacks. She brought snacks for everyone, including Wonder. I made a mental note to be on guard for such overwhelming kindness. Who could be that kind? Wonder disagreed and insisted I pay her in good luck, so I gave her one of my little good luck charms. One of my favorites.

Evalynne pat Wonder on the head, and, well, whatever Wonder said to her mentally scared her enough to send her reeling to the floor. Wonder insists he only said thank you to her. I suppose, not everyone is used to him talking into their minds. Some sort of Raccoon Dog sniffed at Evalynne on the ground. At the time, I suspected this to be another familiar, but I would later realize this was a member of our group, Hiroyuki. Regardless, she wanted the snacks Evalynne brought.

The next to show up was a Merfolk in some sort of… water chair. Never saw anything like that before, but I suppose the Round Table has all sorts. Her name was Kora Caroli and the last to show up was a man equipped with a considerable amount of weapons named Capri. He said this was his first job but the weapons he carried bore a different story.

They both showed up exactly on time. Did I mention how performative that is?

The Rancher, his name was Owen, led us to a large wagon with– do I need to describe the wagon? It was a wagon. It’s not important. Evalynne seemed to like the horses. They were horses. Owen didn’t have a lot of information to give us. “Chickens are missing. Don’t got any leads.” He told us, in the gruff voice only a farmer could have. “That’s why I hired you four.”

This confused me. “Four?” I had asked, for you see, well, there were six of us.

Owen blinked at me. Wonder’s words echoed in my mind, “He said ‘for’, Wander.”

The trip to the ranch took four days. Nothing interesting happened, at least nothing really worth talking about, at least.

The ranch was huge. Apparently, Old Owen had a hundred chickens. He only had about 10 left. There was a noble looking cat perched on a rock. Evalynne insisted the cat was some sort of royalty. I don’t particularly care for monarchs, feline or otherwise, so I gave the two a wide berth.

Wonder insisted he talk to the chickens. He said they have a shared lineage with dragons. I didn’t quite understand it, but he’d know better than me, wouldn’t he? He flew down into the enclosure, and tried speaking with the chickens. They thought he was terrifying and ran away as soon as he landed. Oh well.

My next step was to survey the land for magic. There was no magic. Capri, Muldog, and Kora were searching the grounds for clues as to what happened to the chickens. Evalynne and Hiroyuki were… playing with the chickens. Maybe they were onto something I wasn’t, but I know Wonder was greatly offended that they ran from him but not them. What can you do?

Muldog and Capri found a pair of footprints, a lot smaller than Owen’s, leading south into the woods. “We found a path in the woods!” Muldog called out to the chicken pen.

“What’s it do?” Evalynne called back.

“It’s a clue.” Muldog shouted back.

Did I mention how performative shouting is? No? Well, it is. “Well, there’s only one way to find out what’s going on… Let’s follow the path.” I said to the group, as we assembled around the path.

Capri jabbed me in the side, I think he meant it lightly, but it hurt a little. “Looks like this path needs someone to Wander it, eh?”

I gave him a grimace and a forced laugh. At least Wonder liked the joke.

The trail of footprints led us deeper into the woods. Oddly enough, the foot steps disappeared and turned into giant… well, dragon tracks. At least, that was the deduction most of our group came to. Hiroyuki insisted they were actually giant chickens. The whole thing, to me, sounded preposterous. Giant chickens? Bah, I say.

We crossed a makeshift bridge into the woods and came across, well, giant chickens. I know. I know. There was an armored fellow with a big spear. He looked like a walking corpse. He saw us approaching and he hopped onto one of the giant chickens. He was some sort of… hen cavalier.

Capri shouted something as the man mounted up. I think he had his own phrase for what the Knight astride chicken was called, but I didn’t quite catch it.

I’m not much of a fighter, you see, but I can set things in motion. A little bit of magic channeled into Muldog to nudge his fate along, he’d need it since he was charging into the chickens. Did I mention these chickens were giant? They were also round. Do you know what giant, round things do? They roll. These things started rolling at us, like giant boulders down a mountain. They weren’t that fast, so we were mostly able to sidestep them the first time, not so much the next time.

Evalynne and Muldog set up a defensive line between us and the chickens. She didn’t look much like it, but that shield can take a punch. Seeing the perfect opportunity to show these fellows what a real dragon looks like, I channeled my magic into an illusion of a dragon. It didn’t do a whole lot, but it looked magnificent. I think, at some point, it made me laugh maniacly, but- No, it’s not performative.

Muldog knocked the rider off of the chicken, from a certain point of view. The thing was still standing, but he was off the chicken at least. This made the chicken incredibly mad, and it knocked him down and well, they started kicking a Muldog while he was down.

Capri and Hiroyuki were making pretty quick work of their Chicken, Capri looks scary and he is scary. Hiroyuki doesn’t look scary, but she is. I’m not going to pick a fight with the two of them. Evalynne too, pretty scary. She was beating these Chickens senselessly.

Me? One of them took a huge cut out of me with their beaks so I ran. It was hard to follow. I let the illusion dragon fight for me. Okay, I didn’t run run, I just made some distance. I was close enough to see Kora Caroli explode? She was giving off some kind of light, and then she shot some kind of beam of magic at one of the Chickens and the undead Cavalier. Left a smoking crater in their wake. Also a scary person. Look, it’s hard cataloging everything in a fight. We beat the chickens and the rider. That’s what matters. I helped Muldog out, and I grabbed my healer’s kit to tend to his wounds. The rest of the party gathered around and helped set up camp, and, you know, ruminated on what happened.

“I had my butt kicked by a chicken.” He told me.

“It happens.” I told him.

“If chicken… then eggs. Lots of eggs.” Evalynne said, astutely.

“Mindless undead are a symptom of a larger problem… we might not have found the root cause.” Kora Caroli said.

This was supposed to be a simple job.

Capri found some more tracks leading deeper into the woods, but lost the trail in the darkness. We decided it’d be best to make camp for the night and start looking again tomorrow. Before we could turn in for the night, we heard something rustling in the woods. I have theories on what attracted the thing, and– Okay, it’s not important.

I don’t know how to describe the thing that came out of the trees, but I’ll try.

It was a shambling mass of chickens. It was horrific. I shudder to imagine the nightmare this thing walked out of. I hope you never have to see something like it. I, for some reason, was right there at the front with Muldog and Evalynne. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know why. As it lurched towards us, I managed to side step its horrific maw, but, well, it got Muldog. Don’t worry, he lived, but for a moment we thought he wouldn’t because the thing swallowed him whole. We were doing good work in slowing it down, between Capri’s glaive, Hiroyuki’s scarf, Evalynne’s fists, and Muldog’s hammer thing. I could see Kora channeling some kind magic with her mind into it, but I'm not really an expert in that sort of thing so I couldn’t tell you what that was all about.

I ran from the thing because the thing was terrifying. Wonder, brave little Wonder, lagged behind a bit, thinking it wouldn’t see him, and, hey, he could channel some magic into our allies. The rest of us were pushed back from the thing, Muldog managed to climb out too, I told you he lived. The creature could sense some kinship with Wonder, I think, and well, it tried to eat him. And Evalynne and Kora Caroli.

I could feel it crushing Wonder, my friend, to death. I’ll be honest, I can’t really tell you in detail what happened after that. I was too focused on killing this thing before it could kill Wonder. I cast a curse on the wicked creature, the most dangerous one I know, I won’t tell you what it is or what it does, but it’s bad. Hiroyuki strode up to it, and killed it with a dagger– my dagger. When did she get that? Whatever, if she had asked I’d have let her borrow it. After the monster had died, I found Wonder’s unconcious body, he wasn’t dead yet. I cast a healing spell on him, the only one I had prepared for the day. Obviously, he lived, you’ve seen him around town since then. It was my only heal spell though, so we struggled a bit getting Kora back up, she was also in bad shape. She’s not as frail as she looked, and she shook off death well enough for us to heal her back up.

Something we noticed after the fight, not during it because we had bigger things to worry about, was that as we cut into the mass, chickens kept escaping and fleeing from it. They ran to the west, deeper into the woods.

Our job wasn’t done yet.

It was supposed to be simple.

We took a well needed sleep in the woods, with a watch between the six of us in case any more monsters came after us. In the morning we prepared ourselves and set out even deeper into the woods. We had to finish this.

We found some kind of skeleton woman in the woods. A ring of chickens surrounded her, and she stood at an altar with a collection of strange objects set atop it. I found the whole thing quite performative, but you know how magic types are. As we approached, she turned to us. “Ah, apologies guests, you’re late for the experiments.” She said to us, in a raspy voice.

We asked about the chickens, and the monster out in the woods. She had made it, and she had experimented on the chickens. Some kind of attempt to create mounts for her undead army. Lovely. There were more of the Chicken Lancer out there, somewhere.

Muldog started talking to her, I didn’t really follow the conversation. I was trying to figure out what we were supposed to do about this thing. Oh, and, where had Hiroyuki run off to? Surely she had a plan for this. I had learned at that point to trust her when she disappeared. I had Wonder deliver a message to Capri. Were we going to fight her? Before Wonder could deliver the message back to me, Muldog was grabbing onto the Skeleton, to try and- I don’t know what his plan was.

The Skeleton turned to him. “Oh, I’ll remember you.” She said, in a low voice. It sounded like she was smiling. Can skeletons smile? She disappeared after saying that, leaving us all a little scared.

“I think I fucked up.” Muldog said, simply.

“Yeah. I wouldn’t have done that. I think she cursed you.” I told him plainly. I wasn’t sure if there was a curse, and to be frank, I wasn’t going to look. We had the chickens and that was enough for me.

Hiroyuki and Evalynne lined the chickens up, and led them home. We brought up the rear. When we got back to the Ranch, I recounted everything that had happened to Owen. He seemed unsurprised.

“Figures.” was all he said.

“You could have warned us.” I said back to him.

“Ain’t my job.” was all he said, as he brought our payment. A fine haul of gold, coupled with the magical items Kora found at the altar. All in all, a good payment for a few day’s worth of work.

Giant chickens. Bah.