Nerd Pride Radio

[This is the first in a series of character building/flavor posts for Kiara about her time spent in and around Sandpoint leading up to the beginning of the Jade Regent adventure path.]

The Long Bounty

Kiara was leaning near where Ameiko was whistling a happy-sounding tune while wiping down the bar. She was sipping her second tankard of mead for the night when one of the younger guardsmen she had met while chasing bounties around Sandpoint came in with a couple of other young lads.

“Kiara! I was hopin’ you’d be in ‘ere tonight!” He called.

Kiara struggled to recall his name and was saved by Ameiko’s steel-trap memory. “Whatcha drinkin’ tonight, Davin? And are these two lads havin’ goat’s milk?”

Davin laughed and ordered ales all around and introduced his young friends, who were just joining the city guard. “So, Kiara! I told the lads about yer tale about that big bounty out o’ Whistledown but thought it’d be better if you told ‘em the tale yerself… if ya don’ mind, that is…?” Davin looked at the older Bounty Hunter shyly.

Kiara set down her tankard, rolled her eyes, and shook her head, “Aye, THAT headache!”

Ameiko made eye contact with Kiara and, with a look, verified that she wanted a refill and went about getting her more mead, setting it down with a wink. “I get to hear about the beautiful Janice again. Wonderful!”

“Oh, Janice doesn’t hold a candle to the proprietress of a certain other establishment I’m so very fond of!” Kiara grinned.

“Is it the establishment or the proprietress you’re so very fond of, you flirt?” Ameiko rolled her eyes.

“I wonder?” Kiara scratched her chin and winked. “Anyway… that ‘huge’ bounty… yeah…” She turned to the three lads. “So, I was workin’ as a guard for a merchant from Palin’s Cove who took his goods by river between there and Magnamar and back on the regular, stopin’ at every town for a week or so to trade with the locals on the way. When we stopped in Whistledown, I went into the local constabulary to check the bounty boards, as was my custom, and what did I see but a bounty that would keep me in coin for at least six months if not a year if I spent wisely. It was too rich to pass up! So, I gave my notice to the merchant and picked up the bounty, laying my claim to it, not that other bounty hunters couldn’t do the same if they beat me to it.

“It was a bounty on a creature. Some local ranchers were having problems with something killing their livestock. It’d been going on for several months it seemed, and they’d not had any luck catching the beast in traps or even identifying what kind of beast it was, though some had said the bite marks seemed the right size to be a wolf, they weren’t really sure about that because there wasn’t any history of packs of wolves in the area.

“Now, I had experience tracking beasts from growing up in Crying Leaf.”

“Ain’t that an Elf Village?” one of the lads chimed in.

“Oh… I wondered how you got that Drow slicer you’re carryin’?” said another.

“It was a gift from my mother,” Kiara said, her expression flat.

When the three young guardsmen stared at Kiara like she'd just said she was from the moon, Ameiko patted Kiara's shoulder and said, “She was adopted, lads.” She set down a bowl of salted nuts next to the group and nodded to Kiara. She clearly knew that the younger woman disliked dealing with questions about her sword and why her name sounded elven.

“So, anyway…” Kiara rolled her eyes and tugged on her braid, “I figured it wouldn’t be that big of a problem to track down the beast… That was my first mistake in Whistledown!”

“Falling for a cute barmaid was your second?” Ameiko whispered with a smirk as she wiped the bar on the other side of Kiara.

“Oh hush!” Kiara whispered back. “Anyway… I went to the ranch where the most recent complaint was from and tracked the beast as best I could but couldn't find a den to save my neck. I eventually lost the trail. When I went to the second most recent ranch, I found out that the attack was too long ago to even be able to find tracks. They’d all be washed away by the weather.

“So, I decided I’d need to wait until there was another incident and hope to get better results with fresher tracks. It took about three weeks before there was another complaint. I was out there that afternoon checking the tracks, but you know what I found, right?”

Kiara shrugged, “Same story, different ranch. I could track the beast, but before I found anything that looked like a den or a place where it lived, the tracks just went away. It also looked like there was someone else on the beast’s trail, so I was worried that I wasn’t going to get my bounty if I didn’t find it soon because I found tracks from some other person near where the tracks of the beast stopped.

“At least I was able to tell, for certain, that it was wolf tracks that time. But that brought even more questions since I was positive that there was only one beast and I found no evidence of a pack in the area and, in looking through the forests of the area, had found no wolf tracks anywhere else.

“I kept pounding my head against this for another couple of months, then I noticed a pattern and made a guess on the next ranch the beast would attack and started the boring process of staking out that ranch. This was a bit of a hardship, because by that time I had discovered the lovely… entertainment venue… in town.”

“Her name was Janice,” Ameiko adds with a snarky tone.

“Janice was not an entertainment venue!” Kiara protested.

“Much to your displeasure,” Ameiko winked.

“You wound me…” Kiara put a hand to her forehead and pretended to swoon.

“You’ll live!” Ameiko rolled her eyes. The three guardsmen could barely catch their breath from laughing at the two of them.

“Anyway, I staked out the ranch for a few nights and got lucky. The beast showed up and I attacked.” Kiara mimed firing her bow.

“So, you finally got your bounty?” one of the lads asked, leaning in.

Kiara shook her head. “Not that simple, I’m sorry to say. I fought the beast. Wounded it badly, but the longer I fought it, the less the first good shot seemed to bother it, and it was always fast enough to keep me out of sword reach. It was a cloudy night, with rain on the horizon and a thick cloud cover, so I could barely see the thing, but I knew I hit it a couple of times, but it just seemed to be able to stay far enough away that I couldn't get close enough to kill it and I wasn’t able to prevent it from running away, but I figured it would eventually fall from the wounds, so I followed, the dripping blood making tracking even easier. But along the way, it got harder and harder to track the beast even though the weather cleared up, partially because the blood trail got further and further apart. This either meant that it started going a lot faster than it had been, which didn’t make sense because of the injury or the way the tracks were spaced, or the wound was healing. I put two and two together, looked up into the night sky, saw it was a full moon, and thought I’d figured out the mystery. Just to be sure, I went back to the complaint history, and, sure enough, they were all just about one month apart going back to the very first complaint. I’m no astrologer or whatever, but I’d be willing to bet they were all on the night of a full moon.”

Kiara paused and looked at the lads.

“Werewolf!” They all said in unison.

“Yep! Now, I’d never dealt with nothin’ like a freakin’ werewolf in my whole life! This was a whole different level of tryin’ to get yerself killed! All of a sudden this didn’t seem like such a great bounty for the amount of work required, ya know? But I’d taken the task, so I was by gods gonna complete it! I decided that I’d need to get me some silver arrows for my pigsticker here,” she patted her short bow, “and that ended up takin’ another two months since I had to go all the way back to Korvosa to find a weapon seller that had any silver-coated arrows I could afford. I only bought five of ‘em.

“The next problem was that I’d disrupted the lousy bastard’s pattern, so when I tried to stake out what I thought was the next target, I was wrong. The attack came somewhere entirely different, on the other side of the river. I’d been at it for six months by now. It took me another six months to learn the crafty wolf’s new pattern and lay in wait for him at the right place. I unloaded all five silver arrows into the bastard and watched as the wolf died and transformed back into a scrawny, malnourished, pitiful-looking man.

“Then, when I took the body in to claim my bounty, the freakin’ sheriff tried to welch on paying the bounty! I had to bring in a priest to do their magics on it to prove to the tightwad that the poor bastard had been infected with lycanthropy and I hadn’t just killed some poor, sick bastard and brought him in claiming he was a werewolf that was eating everybody’s cows and sheep.

“So, it took me a year to make enough coin to last me half a year, and I had to spend about a quarter of years’ worth of coin to buy the silver arrows to put the bastard down!”

Ameiko patted Kiara on the shoulder. “And you hated the town so much that you stayed on another year to flirt with a barmaid, until she got engaged to an old buddy of yours from the Korvosa guard and broke your heart, making you the sly womanizer you are today.”

The lads laugh and blush.

“Hey!” Kiara winked. “I never make any promises I can’t keep with the ladies, and I never say anything I don’t truly mean. That includes the fact that the most beautiful bar owner, inside and out, in all of Varisia is right here in Sandpoint!”

Ameiko rolled her eyes again. “And we’re all lucky you chose the sword instead of the lyre, though I would love to hear you sing a song right about now.”

“Anything for you, Ameiko,” Kiara said, with a look that made Ameiko look away without rolling her eyes.

“Let me get my lyre, you silver-tongued fake-elfling,” Ameiko teased.

The smile on Kiara’s face as she strolled toward the stage suggested that Ameiko was probably the only person who could get away with saying something like that to her without at least a snide comeback.

The two sang several songs together, as the time to close the tavern neared.

[EDIT: slight edits]

I am digging the story!

Memories from Home

Kiara arrived back in Sandpoint after finishing a job in Magnamar, catching her favorite ship back up the coast. She preferred taking that ship for a couple of reasons. One was to save time getting back to Sandpoint, but more importantly, that particular ship had the best galley cook she’d ever known, and taking a meal while sailing up the coast was certainly a pleasure. In addition, there was a regular game of poker she sat in on whenever she was there that, sometimes, paid for the cost of her travel… sometimes it doubled the cost… life was like that sometimes.

It was after sundown when she got back to the Rusty Dragon, and she was looking forward to seeing her friends. Ever since that group of adventurers returned from their quest, she’d taken to spending time talking with several of them. Dothan was a clever lass and had a voice like an angel. She could craft a tune nearly as well as Ameiko… alright, probably better than Ameiko, but Kiara would never actually admit that… she was a bit biased. Kay and her husband Eldthor were the two she spent the most time with, though. There was something about Kay that made Kiara feel… strangely comfortable. Kay reminded her of home, which is something she’d not thought she would ever think of Crying Leaf as again but meeting this half-elven rogue/sorceress just made her feel a connection and, if she were honest with herself, which she tried to be most days, a bit homesick. After careful consideration, Kiara decided it had something to do with Kay’s eyes. They reminded her of her mother’s, though her hair reminded her of her birth mother’s, or what she’d been told about her birth mother’s hair. She had no memories whatsoever of her.

When she walked into the tavern, she spotted Kay’s red hair instantly at her usual table, near the bar. She had a heaping plate of food, as usual, even though it was a bit past dinner time by most people’s reconning.

“Ah, I see you decided to come back and pay for this week’s room fee!” Ameiko tossed her towel over her shoulder and put her fist on her hip. “I was wondering if I was going to need to try to sell off your meager possessions to cover expenses for the week?”

Kiara rolled her eyes, “If my spare clothes and a bar of soap are enough to cover your expenses for the week, I don’t think you’ve got much to worry about, M’Lady!”

“Well,” Ameiko grinned, “if you left your soap here, I’ll be sure to have some hot water and a tub sent up for you… and stay a few feet away from the paying customers, if you please! You’ve been gone for a week and probably tracking who knows what through the forest the whole time!”

Kiara looked down to Kay and Eldthor, who motioned for her to have a seat. She rolled her eyes. “Are you implying that I stink, Ameiko?”

“Let’s just say that you’ve been living here long enough for me to know what to expect when you’ve been out on a bounty for as long as you were this time,” Ameiko winked and brought over a tankard of mead, setting it down in front of Kiara. “Welcome home, lass. Good to see you safe,” she said more quietly.

“Keep this up and you’re going to make me think you missed me…” Kiara looked up at the bard with a rakish grin.

“In your dreams, lass!” Ameiko laughed as she went back to the bar. “Let me know if you want anything to eat.” She looked to Kay, “or anything more to eat.”

Kay blushed slightly, “I’m good, Ameiko… thanks…”

“Wait… are you sure you’re alright?” Eldthor teased as he put his hand up to her forehead.

“You…” Kay grabbed his hand and kissed his palm, effectively silencing him.

Kiara looked away from the flirting couple and her eyes naturally went to Ameiko and found the bard looking at her as well. “I missed you!” Kiara mouthed with a wink.

Ameiko shook her head and went back to her tasks tending bar.

Turning back to her new friends, Kiara looked into Kay’s eyes as she devoured a chicken leg and couldn’t resist bringing up the topic that had been on her mind much of the past few weeks, ever since Kay had told her a little bit about her childhood in Riddleport. “So, Kay… I recall you mentioned that your mother was a sorceress and had hair about the same color as yours, right?”

Kay cleared her throat, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and tilted her head toward Kiara. “Yes, that’s right… why?”

“Well… I know I’ve told you about my dad and my mom who adopted me, but I don’t think I ever got into the story of how I ended up in Crying Leaf in the first place.” Kiara tugged on her braid. “You see… my birth mother was also a sorceress… and she also had red hair, much like yours. I don’t really know what she looked like, other than my mother and father telling me that I look just like her other than my eyes and hair. Her eyes were all green and, well,” she fiddled with her hair, “you can see that my hair’s not quite the same color. They also say I’m taller than she was, but until I grew, they thought I looked just like her.”

“That explains why you look more Varisian than Chelaxian,” Kiara nodded. “I know you’ve been dodgy about who exactly your father is, but it’s clear that he’s from some Chelaxian family, right? Your mom must have been from Varisian stock with hair like mine.”

“Shouldn’t have even tried to pussyfoot around it with you! Yeah, dad’s a disgraced noble.” Kiara shook her head.

“Well, that’s one more thing we have in common!” Kay laughed. “But it was my grandfather. I think he might have even been from Korvosa... though I'm not sure. Nobody ever told me what town he was from… He was an old pirate by the time I knew him.”

Kiara laughed. “Small world, I guess… but… the thing is… when I was a kid, I overheard my mom talking with my uncle, a ranger named Cerenel, about my birth mother. Cerenel said something like, ‘so she was a red-haired sorceress?’ and laughed. Then he looked thoughtful and said more quietly, ‘Who knew we had the same taste in women? I guess we are siblings after all!” At the time, I wasn’t sure what it meant, being just a kid, but that conversation stuck with me for some reason, probably because it was about my birth mother. I didn’t understand yet that Kiaranel, my adoptive mother, and my birth mother, were more than 'good friends' until just before I left Crying Leaf. I finally pieced together that my birth mother had been in love with both Kiaranel and my father, but she went to live with Kiaranel when she got pregnant. It was around the time that I was figuring out that I thought girls were really prettier than boys, even though some elven boys are really, really pretty... I guess it led me to figure other things out... But anyway, once I figured that out, I understood what that conversation I had overheard meant... that my uncle ALSO had a lover who was a red-haired sorceress.”

“Oh…” Kay blinked a couple of times and set down the chicken wing she had been eating.

Kiara took a deep breath. “Yeah… He came back home to Crying Leaf shortly after the Drow raid that my mother was killed in. That happened when I was two years old. I’m three years older than you are, Kay. My uncle, Cerenel, has the same eyes as my mother… and to be brutally honest, you have his nose. Ever since I met you, I feel… a sense of being at home around you, which is something strange, because I stopped thinking of Crying Leaf as home a long time ago. But being around you has made me feel like it is home again, just because you remind me so much of my family. Kay… I really think Cerenel might be your father.”

“Oh… wow… that’s… wow…” Kay blinked back a tear and Eldthor put his arm around her shoulder. “I never thought…”

“It’s alright, Kay.” Kiara reached out and took her hand. “I understand. In a sense, though… we’re kind of like… cousins… by adoption at least.”

“Yeah… we would be…” Kay smiled. “I like the sound of that. It’s been a long time since I had family and now, I’ve got one growing by leaps and bounds. A husband… a baby on the way… a cousin… Dothan’s been like a sister for years… Illian’s always been like an uncle to me, as well… and the rest of the Company are all like family as well. Or I’m just emotional because of this one…” she patted her belly.

“No… that couldn’t be!” Eldthor said with a clearly sarcastic tone.

Kiara rolled her eyes, “Anyway, sometime after the little one’s older, if we’re both free for a few months, I’d be happy to take you to Crying Leaf to introduce you to… your family… if you’d be interested?”

“I’ll have to think on that, Kiara… I might just take you up on it,” Kay said, “if you stay around long enough. I know you’ve got a worse case of wanderlust than I had before I fell in love with El. I suspect you’ll be off on your next adventure before long, but I’m pretty much ready to settle between here and the place outside Rannick that we’re planning to build, so you should know where to find me.”

“That I will,” Kiara squeezed Kay’s hand once more, then picked up her mead and took a drink. “So, this bounty was a boring slog!”

“Oh, do tell your boring tale! My customers always need help getting to sleep this time o’ night!” Ameiko set down a plate with a slice of pie next to Kiara.

“Did I order this?” Kiara asked.

“Did you need to?” Ameiko winked.

“Touché…” Kiara blew a kiss at Ameiko as she walked away, “you know me so well, love.”

“Oh, hush you!” Ameiko rolled her eyes. “Incessant flirt!” She mumbled as she went back behind the bar.

“There are times when I think you might actually get her flustered…” Kay mused as she went back to her chicken feast.

“I can always hope!” Kiara grinned. “I wasn’t blessed with your looks, but I do as well as I can with what I was given.”