It’s a tie between “talk to other animals” and “make friends with the fox”, and a die roll gives us...
A rabbit litter has six kittens on average, but can have as many as fourteen. So when a group of rabbits in discussion have a pregnant pause, it is a very, very pregnant pause.
“You may need to say that again,” Thyme said, softly, “because it sounds to me like you said, ‘we’ll have to make friends with the fox’.”
“That’s what I said,” Mustardseed said.
“Well, it’s decided,” Cassia said, letting herself flop down and covering her nose with her paws. “Whatever happened to my brain, it’s contagious.”
“No, see, it’s brilliant,” Mustardseed said. “Look, the other options are, run, hide, fight. We can’t run, because we want to be in the same place. The last time we tried hiding, it was in our warren, and the ferrets got us anyway. The last time we tried fighting, those two ferrets nearly killed us, even though we outnumbered them. But the last time we tried negotiating, we managed to get a spider that was really eager to kill me to leave us alone. And that was a spider! Foxes at least have four legs and fur! A fox is practically my brother compared to a spider!”
“I’m not hearing this,” Maple whimpered, compulsively digging with her back legs.
Ivy came to rest against her left side. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Whatever happens, you won’t have to go near it.”
“I suppose that makes… well, not really sense. But the kind of nonsense that seems to be how the world works the last few days.” Thyme flicked an ear. “If Dulce can talk to a spider, I suppose he can talk to a fox.”
“Can I?” Dulce’s eyes were wider than the sky.
“I’ll see if I can gather up some more healing stuff for tomorrow night,” Thyme said. “We should find a place to settle down for the rest of the day. I don’t want us to go right up to a predator while you’re still as injured as you are, Mustardseed.” She didn’t mention her own injuries, which were equally unpleasant. “Tomorrow night we’ll go… talk to the fox.” After a yelp came from somewhere inside Ivy’s flank, Thyme corrected herself: “Tomorrow night everyone but Maple will go talk to the fox.”
And so Thyme went out to gather up the stuff she could mix into a healing concoction.
Mind 4, Wilderness Survival 2, she needs a 6 or less. With a 4, she’s all good. I also came back here to edit in the bits about how rabbits are nocturnal and would definitely not be hunkering down for the night.
And Cassia, for her part, surrendered again to the otherworldly connection in her mind, and tried to guide the other rabbits to a place they could scratch a shelter for the day.
Soul 4, Area Knowledge 1, Sixth Sense 2, it all boils down to another 6. But she gets a 7! So, her usually unerring sense of direction fails her this time… but she doesn’t know that yet.
“Here?” Ivy asked, leaning in to sniff at the little embankment Cassia had drawn them to. “It’s not where I’d dig. Not as stable as I’d like.”
“It’s only for a day,” Dulce said. “And Cassia hasn’t been wrong before.”
“Well. Certainly makes no sense for rabbits to move under the sun.” Ivy began the task of scratching out holes in the dirt. The other rabbits went to help him, particularly after Thyme had brought back her herbs, but none of them were nearly as skilled at digging as Ivy was. Soon, there was a little hollow under the earth, enough for six rabbits to nestle together in something like comfort.
And there was indeed something like comfort, right up until Thyme awoke at the sensation of something apparently attempting to crush her against the wall.
“Mmphmrgle?” she opined, and received a response only from Cassia, who’d already been kept awake from nightmares.
Their rest disturbed, the rabbits are only going to get half their natural healing.
“Don’t wriggle so much,” said a phenomenally deep voice in an odd accent. “Plenty of room if everyone just settles down. Look, I’ll make a bit more.” From the tremendous mass of grey fur at Thyme’s side came a surprisingly nasty looking claw, that pulled out a few clumps of dirt and kicked them out of the little burrow.
“Who are you?” Thyme asked, in something of a panic.
“I’m a long way from home and I’m very sleepy and you’d made quite a nice sett so I thought it would be a better deal to bed down here than it would to eat one of you,” the voice rumbled. “But I’m happy to revise that theory if you’d like.”
One after another, the rabbits rolled out of their little shelter in patches of fur, blinking against the too-bright sunlight.
“What is it?” Thyme asked.
“Badger,” Cassia said. “His face was right up where I was sleeping.”
“Your moon guidance gave you a terrible steer this time,” Thyme complained.
“It’s not the moon! It’s… I didn’t know there was going to be a badger.”
“I can dig out a little more,” Ivy said. “Not too much effort to make sure there’s enough room for the six of us.”
“Why aren’t there six of us?” Maple piped up, looking about.
It took very little counting to work out who was missing; Mustardseed’s great size meant that he stood out by his absence.
“You said you weren’t going to eat any of us!” Thyme accused the badger.
“I said it seemed like too much effort to eat any of you!” the badger responded. “And I didn’t, noways. There were five of you when I came in and there’s five of you now.”
“Where’s Mustardseed, then?” Dulce sniffed at the ground in a fervour.
“Right. Ground’s stable enough to make a burrow for anyone what’s normal-sized,” Ivy said, turning around from his digging. “That big lug brought the roof down on his head. It’ll be okay if it were recent.” With surprising calm, he went to one edge of their temporary scratch, and pulled away clump after clump of earth, until he uncaved Mustardseed.
Let’s do Body+Tough again, for another 6. On a 6 or less, he’s not too badly the worse for wear, and will have taken 1d4 damage. On a 7, injured, 2d4 damage. On an 8, 4d4. And let’s give him a 2 where he’ll be perfectly fine. ...He got a 4, and took 3 damage, taking him down to 21.
The big rabbit coughed and spluttered and spat a load of dirt out of his mouth. “What the hell happened?” he asked. “One second I was having a lovely dream of clover fields and the next I’ve got a mouthful of dirt and I can’t see!”
“Badger,” Cassia said again.
“Quiet,” the badger rumbled. “I’m trying to sleep. You lot should be, too.”
“You nearly killed me, you giant galoot!” Mustardseed accused, getting up in the badger’s face.
“Nearly,” the badger responded, pulling his head up from his rest to get right back into Mustardseed’s face, “ergo, didn’t. Are we not happy with that situation?”
Mustardseed’s brain almost audibly ticked over a few possibilities.
“Right,” said the badger, before dutifully chucking out another few clawfuls of earth. “Good day, rabbits. Get a nice long sleep and everything’ll be nice come evening.”
“Are we sure he’s not going to eat us?” Maple quivered.
“Well, he’s said he won’t,” Thyme responded. “All the rest of the forest still hasn’t committed one way or another. As long as we’re going to meet a predator tomorrow night, I suppose we can rest with one today. Dulce, could you make sure to get the dirt out of any of Mustardseed’s injuries before you bunk down?”
“He’s a badger,” Maple argued.
“He’s rather comfortable,” Cassia countered, moving to get on top of the badger’s back and snuggle in. “When he’s not causing cave-ins, anyway.”
“This is why it was a good idea of mine for us to go treat with the fox,” Mustardseed said to Dulce, as the smaller rabbit…
Dulce’s Mind and Medical are, believe it or not, 6. And he rolled, believe it or not, 4.
...expertly dug out the crumbs of earth from his cuts. “Because the world has gone screeching fantods insane, and all the bad ideas are good again.”
Once proper accommodation had been established, the badger did indeed prove a comfortable burrow-mate, though Maple made a point of keeping Ivy between him and herself. Throughout the rest of the night, their sleep was mostly quiet.
Let’s roll to see if Cassia has a nightmare – 1 on a d4 – and if she does, she’ll subtract another point from her natural healing. She got a 4! She feels fine!
When the moon rose, Maple was awake first, followed by Mustardseed. “Screeching fantods insane,” Mustardseed said once more. “Sharing a burrow with a badger.”
“Happened a couple times back in Landsport,” Ivy told him, trudging out of the hole. “Give ‘em a place to rest and they’ll make good neighbours. Even go poop outdoors.”
“It never happened in my neck of the burrow,” Mustardseed protested, as Cassia and Thyme rolled out of the hole. “Maybe it happened in your crazy neck of the burrow, but Cassia and I only ever had other rabbits around.”
“Well, we’re not in your neck of the burrow any more, are we?” Ivy argued.
The injured rabbits are Mustardseed, with 21 hit points of his normal 60, due to catching the worst of ferrets and cave-ins; Thyme, with 19 hit points of her normal 30; and Cassia, with 30 hit points of her normal 35. Normally, Cassia and Thyme would heal 2 HP for a day where they didn’t spend all day resting, and Mustardseed would heal 3; due to their disturbed rest, it’s halved, so Cassia and Thyme heal 1 HP, and Mustardseed a princely 2. After some discussion of who should get the healing, which is elided – Cassia says she’s feeling mostly fine and that Thyme and Mustardseed should get the majority of the good work – Thyme splits her 20 HP of healing between herself and Mustardseed, ending up with Thyme recovered to full, Cassia still on 30, and Mustardseed on 33. Then, because I am a benevolent gamemaster, I decide they’ve been through enough that the party gets advancement! Everyone gets 1 character point and 1 skill point. Mustardseed immediately buys Massive Damage/slam 1, so that he can actually hit something in combat and make it feel it. It’s very tempting to him to also buy a rank of Controlled Breathing, so that next time a badger caves in his burrow he can avoid suffocation, but that three point for one of Unarmed Attack/Defence is just too tempting. Most of the good Attributes are supernatural in some way, so everyone other than Mustardseed just saves their points for stats later.
“Big boy said you were going to go looking for a fox,” the badger said, lumbering its way out of the scratch.
“Big boy was not talking to you,” Mustardseed made it clear.
“And I wasn’t talking to you, neither,” the badger responded, looking to Ivy. “You dug a lovely little sleeping place for a poor badger on the trail and I thought I should show that I appreciate it. Happens I know where Fervent tends to go, and we’ve had a couple of meetings before, and he only tried to eat me once. So if you want to talk to Fervent, I suspect I can make introductions.”
“Fervent is the name of the fox?” Cassia asked.
“Mmhm. Only one around here. He tells me he’s only here part of the year, and there’s a lot more foxes where he comes from, which means a lot less food for him.”
“We’re already on fairly good terms with one predator,” Dulce whispered to Mustardseed. “Maybe that speaks well for the future.”
“You’re on fairly good terms,” Mustardseed whispered in response. “I’m still tasting dirt.”
The trip that the rabbits took with the badger to the northern edge of the Fenwick Woods was long and strange, going past all manner of plants and hearing the cries of all manner of animals that, apart from Thyme, the other rabbits had no knowledge of. Every so often they stopped to feed on one, surprised by the unfamiliar flavours of even familiar herbs. While the badger stuck his paw in a hole, drew out an earthworm, and put it in his mouth with clear enjoyment, Thyme stopped Ivy from chewing on another plant. “That one’s good for healing,” she said. “Best to let it grow until we need it.”
“Why not use it now, then?” Ivy said, gesturing with his head at Mustardseed. “Couldn’t he use a bit more of your magic?”
“It’s not magic, it’s… It’s something about the way you chew the leaves up, the way you apply them. If I do it too often at once, I suppose I make mistakes, and it just… doesn’t work as well. Besides, the body can only do so much. If you push yourself too hard you just hurt yourself more.”
“It’s for the fact you rabbits only eat the grasses,” the badger responded, picking a piece of beetle shell from between his teeth. “They’re not bad in a pinch, but you should really eat more… eh, p’raps not rabbits. Bugs, though. Good energy in bugs.”
“I will thank you for the advice and leave it as it stands,” Thyme said, in her best diplomatic voice.
The badger rolled its body like a shrug, and gestured with a paw for them to move on.
The night had half gone when they reached the point where the badger stopped them, but the fox-smell in the area was already strong enough that all of the rabbits had their backs arched and their eyes wide, looking about the place. Maple, particularly, was on the verge of tears, and Dulce stepped back to console her.
“Foxes kill us,” she said, her voice aquaver. “Foxes killed,” and then she choked back a sob that threatened to engulf her.
“She’s had a bad history,” Ivy explained.
“It’s okay, Maple,” Dulce said. “You don’t need to go any closer. I’ll stay with you, okay? We’ll stay here together, and…”
Ivy gave him a look. “It’s you that they want to talk to the fox, isn’t it? It’s you who’s got the sugar voice.”
“Oh.” Dulce nodded.
“I’ll stay with her, though,” Ivy said. “We’ve been running together since we left the warren. Knew her mother even before that.”
Maple nodded, and resumed her usual place in Ivy’s side.
“You’re a good lad, Dulce,” Ivy said. “But right now, you need to be a good lad up there.”
As Dulce advanced, he finally saw Fervent for the first time, putting an appearance to the smell. Long, sleek, with fur a golden-red blend going down to black socks, a thick and bristly tail, pointed ears, pointed face, pointed teeth. Easily twice as long as Dulce himself, and perhaps even twice as long as Mustardseed. Deep down, a part of him quailed.
“You may need to say that again, Earstripes,” Fervent said, softly, “because it sounds to me like you said, ‘I want you to talk to these rabbits’.”
The badger’s name in badger tongue was closer to “His Facial Stripes Are Particularly Narrow, Appearing To Disappear Into His Ears, And The Effect Is Comical”, but translating it to Earstripes kept most of the meaning. “That’s right,” Earstripes said. “These rabbits came up to talk to you and I want you to listen.”
“All right,” Fervent said, “why? You don’t have a nice chat with an earthworm before you eat it, do you?”
“Maybe I would, were a worm wanting to talk to me,” Earstripes said. “I get a feeling you should talk more to those you’d rather eat anyway. You might remember, when I woke you up some while back, you tried to have a bite out of my fur, when I was telling you you were asleep on the land of a man with a lightning crasher farkiller. Strikes me you got some pretty good information then that you wouldn’t have got if you’d decided on a snack then, hmm?”
Fervent sighed. “You’ve used that to get me to find your lost nephew, to not eat your lost nephew, and to help you up to that beehive. One of these days it has to wear out its usefulness.”
“If I’da let the man shoot you you wouldn’t wear out of bein’ dead.”
“Right, right, you saved my life and now you own it. Where’s the rabbit?”
Earstripes nosed at Dulce’s back, bringing him forward. “There’s a pack of ‘em,” he said, “but this one does the talking.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Master Fervent,” Dulce said, and managed to keep his voice to only forty percent panic. “My name is Dulce, and I represent a small group of rabbits who wish to establish ourselves in this area.”
“Dulce,” Fervent said, leaning close to smell Dulce’s fur while Dulce blinked at an audible rate. “Like the celery. Isn’t it an odd thing to be named for what you eat? It’d be like naming a fox Shrew. Or… well. Not to be rude.”
The unspoken word was clear enough. “You see,” Dulce said, clearing his mind as best he could, “we were of the Landsport Warren, down by the river. Riverview Plains, you know. But there were ferrets, and they came through our warren…”
“Right.” Fervent nodded. “The ferrets work for the men, around here. When they want a place cleaned out of rabbits, they send the ferrets through.”
“Humans did that?” Dulce asked, put on the back foot.
“Oh, yes,” Fervent said. “Bring the ferrets round and put them in any warren you care to name. Humans do it all the time. You can be wherever you want until humans decide you can’t. But that’s not just a human thing. Think either of us would stick around here if a bear decided to live here? It’d be move on or get ate.”
“R-right,” Dulce said, re-establishing himself. “But now we need a new place, underground. There’s a lot of bad ground around here, but there’s good ground, too. The best ground is here, around the big tree on the hill there.”
“They call it Old Watchman, locally,” Fervent said. “Sorry. Go on.”
(“He’s got a lot to say,” Mustardseed muttered to Cassia.
“I guess he wants to show how much he knows. There’s an old hedgehog saying, ‘the fox knows many small things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’,” Cassia responded.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“I don’t know. How to be covered in spines so a fox can’t eat you?”)
“We’d like to establish a warren there,” Dulce said. “It would be good for us, because we’d have a lot of area to hide underground, and a lot of good vegetation. But right now, this is your hunting grounds, and so if we just set up on our own, you’d…”
“Eat you. Yes.”
“So we’d like to…” Dulce paused, gathered his nerve, and pushed forward. “We’d like to make a truce with you. So that we can live here, and you won’t hunt us.”
Dulce has Mind 4 and Charm 2, and often gets to add a point for his beautiful voice. But he’s making an argument that’s well outside of a fox’s nature, and I’m going to dock 2 points for that. So he needs a 5 or less on 2d4. ...And he rolls a 6, which is a very near miss, so I’ll make it a ‘no, but’.
“Mm.” Fervent tilted his head, looked at Dulce, thought. And then he spoke again. “No, I don’t think so. I understand what you want, and you showed a lot of courage coming to ask for it. But there’s nothing I get out of the matter, you see? Just a bunch of rabbits, always around when I’m hungry, always off-limits. I’m not going to eat you now, but I’m not going to give you that promise in future.”
“Well…” Dulce started.
“Not now, rabbit Dulce,” Fervent responded. “I’m hungry, and I’m going to go find something to eat. I hope you find a good place to make your warren, and I hope it’s somewhere far away, because I’d feel a little guilty if I ended up eating you. But not too guilty, you understand?” And with that, and a flash of his tail, Fervent was back among the undergrowth.
Mustardseed came up to Dulce, settling down beside him. “Honestly,” he said, “that could have gone a lot worse. Not many rabbits can say they had a tete-a-tete with a fox and got away with it.”
“We can’t build the warren here now,” Dulce said, looking about. “And Ivy didn’t say he’d seen any other good earth…”
“Ivy hasn’t looked everywhere,” Mustardseed said. “But it’s true. This is the best place to be.”
“The fox said, there’s nothing he gets out of the deal,” Dulce said. “Could we find something to give him? Something we can do that benefits him?”
“We could find other creatures for him to eat,” Mustardseed said, and then shook his head. “No, we couldn’t. I couldn’t, anyway. Couldn’t live with myself if I did. Surviving on the run’s better than living as long as you can set the fox on someone else.”
“Well,” came Earstripes’ rumbling voice, “you set me up for the day, so I’d be a poor guest if I didn’t do the same for you. You can sleep in my sett the next few days, if you want. Any other badger tries to eat you, I’ll claw their face off.”
“That’s a very kind offer,” Mustardseed said, and only Dulce heard him suffix it with “you gigantic burrow-breaking oaf.”
“All right,” Thyme said, making her way out of the underbrush. “What now?”
1 – “I still believe in my plan,” Mustardseed said. “We’ve successfully negotiated with a badger and a spider, so we can befriend this fox. We just have to find out what he wants.”
2 – “Fervent said that if a bear came, he’d leave in a hurry,” Dulce said. “Could we make him think a bear was coming?”
3 – “No, no, no!” Maple scurried out from Ivy’s flank. “We can’t keep trying to live where a fox is, it’ll kill us! We need to go far away, as far away as we can, and then we can be safe!”
4 – “Old Watchman isn’t the only spot we could build a warren around here,” Thyme thought aloud. “With Cassia’s visions and Ivy’s knowledge, we might be able to find a place nearby that’s safe.”
5 – “Eh, build your warren anyway!” Earstripes said, bluff and cheerful. “Fervent only tried to eat me once, he’s a decent ol’fox. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, eh?”
