Survivors Not Heroes

[wrecking_yard]

I’m doing my regular maintenance on the pepperbox, off the side of camp looking out over the underdark lake, when Kima goes from rattling around camp restlessly to sitting close nearby. She’s definitely started to calm down some from when we first met her, which is a frankly miraculous recovery considering how we found her.

“So.” It’s the casually awkward tone of someone who’s trying to recover from a messy first impression. “You’re from Whitestone?”

I freeze; Klorota actually physically looks up and over for a moment from where they're resting, on the other side of camp.

Kima gives me a very odd look of confused concern and gestures. "Your coat."

Buttons. I'm wearing the family crest and she recognized it. I can feel Klorota do the mental equivalent of rolling their eyes, tentacles curling as they mostly stop paying attention to us.

"Sorry. Yes." I go back to cleaning with a vengeance, barrels resting so the faint etching will be out of her sight.

"How's it been up in the mountains lately? I haven't been up that way much." She's trying very hard to be friendly in a situation where she has no idea what she's dealing with or any normal easy way to approach any of us, and she has no idea what she's put her foot in. I pause, setting down the cleaning brush to adjust my glasses.

"Lady Kima. There's something of a basic understanding around Vox Machina. If someone's past isn't eating your face, and they aren't volunteering anything, it means they don't want to talk about it." I shoot her a pointed look, and then go back to cleaning my gun.

She raises an eyebrow with a careful nod, and the last bit of Klorota's attention on us drops. For her part, Kima is having a thoughtful pause. "So. What is safe?"

I glance up for a moment, not sure what she's getting at.

"I ... haven't been at my best, but it seems like I'd do well to get a better idea who I'm working with before I trample anyone's toes. ... Again."

It's a reasonable idea, I'm just not sure why she's asking me. "The twins or Pike are more likely to keep all of us on track than I am, usually."

She glances back over her shoulder at the main camp; Vax is helping mind food, Vex is fussing over Trinket, and Klorota is sitting quietly by the fire, although there's a couple tentacle twitches and another flicker of attention.

"Ah." I'm the one sitting furthest from Klorota, because I prefer to keep space on anyone else when I might need to make more ammunition.

It's probably just as well - I'm not sure anyone else grasps the gravity and very real impact of a paladin’s oaths, judging by other conversations when she’s been out of earshot.

"Well..." I click the top-break back into place, clicking through empty chambers to make sure everything is in proper working order. "I think the important thing you need to understand is that most of us have been knifed in the back, sold out, screwed over, or otherwise had to learn fast and hard how to survive and to be cagey about who we trust or die.... and of that, a couple more just had to learn to be wary with less dire consequences."

To my knowledge the only people who didn't end up starting from a complete shit situation are Keyleth, Tiberius, and Pike. Keyleth's got her own mess of anxieties and things she avoids talking about - and Tiberius is only hazily a part of that, since he's brought up dealing with politics and using false pretenses to get away from them. I'm never sure how much of his occasional failures at dealing with people are being sheltered and isolated to academic and authority circles, or just having a hard time navigating societies that don't work like he's used to. Pike probably has the least background horrors behind her, but she also wasn't a wide-eyed innocent, either.

I still have a good supply of rounds, so I don't bother pulling out anything to make ammunition and load the pepperbox; better to have it ready at a moment's notice, here. "We're survivors who lived long enough to start learning to fight back, before we're 'heroes' of any stripe."

She's thinking while I holster the pepperbox and pull out Bad News to go over it.

"I'm guessing there's not much conventional training."

"You guess correct." There's some general habits and patterns and ground rules you'd get from mercenaries that started out as military or such, and none of it shows up around Vox Machina.

While she's thinking that over, Klorota shifts with a couple more agitated looking tentacle twitches.

"How did a bunch of cautious survivors end up adopting a mind flayer?"

"Like knows like." Bad News is a little more complicated and needs to be disassembled more than the pepperbox to properly clean and check over, which has more of my attention for a minute. "Have you gotten a good look at the state he's in?"

She does pause to look them over from where she's sitting. Klorota's head turns just enough to look over with one eye, a couple sharper tentacle twitches - and a sense of query my direction.

|I'm trying to defuse this and get her more focused on the common enemy in front of us.|

There's a sense of being very tired and annoyed, but that they're going to try to ignore her.

"Keyleth and Vex'ahlia found him asleep, hiding in a tiny cavern near the mines; we'd already found what we now know were signs of him preying on goblins and the occasional duergar that strayed too far from the war camp. He was desperate, panicking, in ill health, and desperately trying to hold the shreds of his dignity together to stave us off." He might look somewhat less sickly than when we found him, but he's in the same ragged robe, and he still looks off compared to the others we've faced, including his hide clinging closer to his skull. "We didn't call him on it but everyone there, him included, knew he was at our mercy."

And he's not the first one Vox Machina has picked up desperate, in dire straits, and clinging to the last tatters of their dignity, although I know to be cautious of that bit of sympathy.

"We believe his story because we've seen the proof of it; he was exiled for manifesting arcane power, then had to block out what lingering bits of connection to the colony he had to evade K'varn. He's more dependent on us right now than we are on him; it'd be suicide for him to go back on his word." He gives me a very long-suffering and irritated mental nudge, but he's not putting much energy into it, since Kima's visibly thinking it over and seems to be bristling a little less.

"I suppose that's reasonable enough for now." She settles and turns her attention more to watching me clean Bad News, and Klorota seems to vaguely relax and drops their attention on us again. "What is the deal you made, anyway?"

"We free his city from K'varn, he helps us find you and navigate the Underdark; he thinks freeing them from its control will be enough for them to accept him back into the community in spite of his other power." From what he's told me of them, I'm not sure it's going to be that easy. "We have a mutual enemy."

"And when he gets back to his people?" It's a clear point of paranoia. Going by his explanations of their history, it's entirely likely they won't be on board with just letting us walk away even if they do take him back, whatever he said when he was half-starved and we'd first found him.

"He said he'd do what he could to get us safe passage out of the city - obviously even if they take him back he won't have any control over whether they agree to the same thing or not. Vax grilled him about it when we made the agreement."

She raises an eyebrow. "That seems dicey."

I pause in my cleaning. "Oh probably. We're not strangers to doing business with dangerous people, and the more I learn about his people, the more I doubt he can convince them to just open the doors for us to leave... but it's still better than leaving them in K'varn's control to swarm us with."

I get a very brief mental 'glance', but it's a conversation I've already had with Klorota - he knows what I consider Fair Business, and that it includes ‘I keep my word but I will shoot you if you do not keep yours’; my personal agreement with him is that I won’t shoot him if he makes a reasonable good-faith attempt to get us out, but he's getting a long-distance introduction to Bad News if he tries to sabotage our escape. Kima definitely has some misgivings, but she's also thinking hard.

"Can't say I can think of a better answer to that problem either." She sighs. "I need to mind myself around here more - trust being earned and all that."

"It'd be a good idea." I take a moment with the detached top piece, checking over the lenses and making sure everything is sighting straight.

"That's a beast of a weapon you've got there." She nods towards Bad News. "Where'd it come from?"

"I made it." I hold the sight up with a proud grin. Everything's clean and in order; I start carefully putting it back together. "Both of them. I finished the pepperbox when I set out on my own originally; I just finished Bad News here not long before we were asked to find you."

She gives a low whistle and a respectful nod as I give it one last check before storing it. "I've never seen anything like them."

"Gods willing, you won't again for a long time." I pat the makeshift padded satchel. "I'm sure someone else will figure out the same ideas, but I don't plan on sharing the designs to help that along." I have my own moment of thought once Bad News is packed back up. "I don't know if Bahamut has an equivalent tenet, but I know a paladin of Pelor I crossed paths with mentioned being expected to have a sense of priorities - to be tolerant of some things he normally wouldn't in the face of a greater threat, so as not to put innocent lives at greater risk over it."

Kima heaves a deep and heavy sigh. "That's the only reason this works at all." She motions back at camp, where Klorota is by the fire; she must've calmed down about it, since there's no sense of Klorota's attention shifting our way. Either way, it's good to know I have that as leverage if she gets too paranoid. "Funny question, but - do you trust me?"

That's loaded, but she's too chagrined for it to be intended as a trap. "More than some of the others. I don't know any details of your oaths, but I know Bahamut will swat you fast and hard if you break your word or any of your oaths, whether you intend to or not." I'm glad Vax is helping with Keyleth's misgivings; I'm not sure how to explain to her that Kima's powers would stop working if she went full zealot, no matter how righteous she believed her cause was.

"That's fair." It's not making her any less stressed, but she's respecting the pragmatism - and considering what she’d said about her encounters with Klorota’s kin before we rescued her, I doubt she’s going to calm down completely as long as Klorota’s in our camp.

"If it helps your nerves any, you can tell when Klorota's paying attention to you - there's a faint sense of presence, like being watched but a little more solid."

That gets me the strangest look from her.

"I have prior experience with other things in my head." I give her a lopsided smile and catch myself before I mutter anything about Klorota being less of an asshole; it’s not like that’s hard to do. "Also focusing on him too hard is as good as yelling his name across the camp; it will draw his attention even if he wasn't paying mind before. If you keep doing that you're both going to drive each her insane."

That does get a moment of alarm as she visibly puts together the implication that he's always 'listening'; she looks over at him, and after a few moments of frowning, asks, ".... he's not paying attention right now, is he?"

No sense of even the slightest attention to me, not even the 'glance' that comes from too much passing thought about him. He's hunched into his robe more than normal, tentacles twitching with occasional knots; at first it's concerning - then I notice Grog grinning and fixated on him.

"No. I think he's distracted right now."

Grog has realized he only needs to think at Klorota.

I don't think Kima's been figuring out how to read Illithid expressions, but it's not hard to tell something is bothering Klorota, until suddenly there's a shift and his tentacles are less clumped. Grog falls over backwards flat on his back. Kima bristles, and I reach over to grab her shoulder just as Grog starts laughing.

"I CAN TASTE COLORS!" He sits up, grinning even wider at Klorota, who looks like nothing so much an offended tentacled cat. "DO IT AGAIN!"

Klorota crumples in with his tentacles in a knotted clump and both hands over his face, making the most nightmarish, unholy noise of frustration I could ever imagine - and out loud, at that; I hadn't been sure Illithid COULD make any kind of vocalization. As soon as it stops, Pike jabs Grog in the ribs.

"Grog! Stop teasing Klorota!"

Grog wilts, and starts poking the side of the campfire.

Kima sits back down and looks to me. "What in the Nine Hells did I just watch?"

"Vox Machina."