A jostling of the shoulder woke Shen from an uncomfortable slumber. As she stretched and rose, she opened her short-sighted eyes and took in the room around her: a glorified crate as her bed, an old barrel she used as a nightstand to her right, a massive, hideous spider-beast above her, and a quaint little bookshelf to her left, sorely lacking books. Highly concerning, indeed. No books to read on a terribly long road trip would drive anyone mad with boredom, but the arachnid was pretty entertaining sometimes. She’d normally question being entertained by a giant arthropod over reading, but for Shen, this had just been her life for the past three and a half weeks. 

“W’d’ya want, Sep?” she mumbled coherently enough, fumbling for her glasses. “It must be important if you’ve decided to menacingly hang over me while I sleep,”

On the ceiling, Septimus snorted. “Well, good morning to you, too! I was planning to wake you in a more dignified way, but the last time I tried that, you hit me with a heavy instrument. Also, your room is hard to stand in,”

“Not my fault that this carriage is tiny. And once again, I’m sorry for hitting you with your guitar, but you need to understand how it was a little disturbing to wake up with eight yellow eyes and a fanged mouth about three inches from my face,”

“It’s called resuscitation,”

“Okay, fine, whatever. For one, I was still breathing. Probably, at least. For two, I don’t have giant spider people where I’m from, so you’ll have to forgive that little culture shock,” Finally finding her glasses, Shen clambered out of her tiny bedroom and into the carriage’s main cabin. “Now, what is so important that you needed to drag me out of bed at…” She hesitated. Sep, still clambering down from the ceiling, helpfully called out that it was noon. “...way too late a time to be asleep?” 

The many-limbed musician explained himself as he attempted to get out of the back room. “I managed to snag the both of us a gig that’ll pay handsomely. And it’s stupidly easy!” he said excitedly. 

“Does it involve more duels with living furniture? Or are we going to be dealing with more rowdy party animals?” Shen aksed dryly. The last two ‘gigs’ had the two of them fighting for their lives instead of playing music, but apparently, that was pretty normal. 

“A sweet forty-k, and all we have to do is a 30-minute rehearsal. They didn’t even give us a song list! Just says to ‘start playing and don’t stop ‘til the coast is clear’, whatever that means,” As he spoke, Sep finally righted himself relative to gravity and exited the bedroom. 

He had to squeeze a little bit, of course. Shen already had to duck under the doorway, and she was a short teenager, while the main cabin wasn’t even tall enough for Sep to stand in without craning his neck. In general, the carriage interior couldn’t properly house him, and Shen was reminded of that fact as she took another studious look at him.

Septimus was a twenty-something humanoid spiderfolk of some kind, of which he refused to elaborate further. Not that much elaboration was needed, as you could get a vague idea just by looking at him, with his extra limbs, purplish chitin-like skin, and eight yellow eyes. It was initially very unsettling when Shen first met him, but his creepy nature was quickly overshadowed by his more  ridiculous elements. Being built like a very tall stick figure reduced the fear factor a lot - the guy was beanpole thin, and had a spherical head and willowy limbs - and dressing like a vampire lumberjack with dark flannels and a black tunic made him look just shy of ‘goth icon’. He also had the gray-purple spidery hair (she vaguely recalled that it was known as setae) on top of his head done up in a way that resembled skater hairdo, which Shen found hilarious.

Sep’s personality was also absurd for how he looked. He was a geek, and a music geek at that. He was a self-described bard; effectively just a glorified street musician who was occasionally hired to play at gigs (or paid to leave, depending on how well he was doing), but still with magic beneath his fretless strings, both figuratively and literally. Figuratively he was rather good at it, but not particularly amazing, and literally as he could do some manner of spellcasting with his tunes - which, to Shen’s understanding, was about as unique as being left-handed in this world. Lastly of note was his name, Septimus, or ‘seven’. Fitting, as he was missing a single limb where the human equivalent of a bottom right arm would be. It seemed to be either a cruel joke or a moment of extreme foresight from the people who named him.

Shen herself was a little out-of-place. A kid from suburban Colorado, falling into a fantasy land beyond imagination…stuff like that belonged in a book about red slippers or cursed mirrors, but it had inexplicably happened to her, and nearly a month later, she still had no idea why. Her memory of the day she disappeared was spotty, but she still distinctly remembered walking into the woods near her home with a backpack full of supplies, never intending to return. A while later, she realized the area around her wasn’t familiar, then backpedaled into an area that definitely wasn’t there beforehand. She was totally lost. Not only that, everything felt slightly off; the clouds were a little too swirly, the trees were a little too big, et cetera, and it was making her feel a little unwell. She tried to soldier on, but then she tripped and fell into a hole that wasn’t there a second ago, blacked out, and woke up with a giant arachnid in her face.

At first, neither was in the mood to work together. Shen was distrustful and a little terrified, as one would be if a humanoid spider was the one giving you first aid, and Septimus was irritated because Shen thwacked him a couple times with his favorite guitar before running away with said guitar. Things cooled down a little, though, when Shen went numb with realization that she was definitely not in Colorado any more, and promptly broke down. This confused Sep even more, but recognizing this was a scared kid and not some thieving little wretch set off some sort of ‘responsible adult’ switch in his mind. The bard tried his best to approach and comfort her, and it oddly worked, as the two began talking. Shen explained where she was from and how she didn’t understand the world around her, and in turn, Sep answered as many questions as he could about the land she found herself in. He told Shen that she was in a land known as ‘Fortune’, and began explaining what he knew about it (“...which isn’t much, okay? I’m not an encyclopedia,”). 

Many questions later, Shen could gather that Fortune was not anywhere on Earth, absolutely dominated by magic, and weirdly modern, or at least in its own modern era. Clean running water, gas heating, steampower, the works. They didn’t have electricity, but that was apparently substituted by, unsurprisingly, magic, with many conveniences of Earth replaced by magical items, spells, and machines. It was never quite one-to-one - at its closest, there were slight caveats in how the things operated, while at its worst it was only similar in function alone - but it seemed vaguely contemporary enough. 

Fortune wasn’t a total paradise, though. Shen had landed in a very rural area, far from any large collections of civilization and instead conquered by wild things, cave-dwellers and creatures of the night. The unyielding nature of…well, nature, combined with the amount of things trying to kill you didn’t exactly make for promising real estate, but for roadside travelers, wanderers, criminals and the like, it was manageable. Towns and waystations had sprung up all along the forest paths leading from one end of the Wilds to the next. Septimus himself was a traveling musician, living in his self-pulling carriage as he went from place to place. It clearly wasn’t too illustrious of a life; he often complained about not being able to upgrade ‘this dingy old thing’, and constantly took odd jobs alongside routine performances, but he had a small reputation among tavern and innkeepers of drawing in a crowd, be that a good or bad thing. So at the very least, getting recognized might lead to a pleasant bed and breakfast every once in a while. Evidently, though, having to care for a whole extra person was a bit of a financial strain on the bard. 

So the two reached an eventual agreement. Shen needed a guide and a way to get home and Sep didn’t want to send a hapless kid out into the wilds of Fortune, so they’d stick together until one or the other felt satisfied. Septimus would take the human to a safer, more permanent place where she could find help getting back home - currently, they were eyeing a respectably-sized port town close to the edge of the Wilds named Brukavn - and in return, Shen was to help out with various jobs that Sep took, which he referred to as ‘gigs’. She was basically just an assistant-slash-roadie, but occasionally Shen used what little musical experience she had to provide support if he couldn’t find anyone else to perform with.

The bard initially gave her a timeframe of only a fortnight’s worth of travel, but as their journey neared a full month, so far the road had not been plentiful in homes for wayward world-hoppers. The two had been on the road for much longer than they intended, and both were starting to feel it in different ways. Septimus grimaced every time he looked in his coin pouch, and Shen was honestly starting to accept this as her reality. 

Maybe I’ll live out the rest of my days in Hobbiton, she thought humorously. Shen was slowly coming to terms with the fact that she might not be out of this place for a long while. It wasn’t entirely blameless to hope that a solution might just fall out of the sky, but she had been waiting on that since she got here. Home won’t be coming anytime soon, and I have to deal with that. I can deal. I am so good at dealing. She’ll just have to survive this crazy place for eighty plus years. She could thrive. Maybe. But no matter her actions, it wouldn’t change the fact that she was stuck here for -

“Shen!” Septimus called, snapping his many fingers in her face. “Are you there?”

She blinked and realized she had been staring off into space. “Oh, yeah, sorry. Just got a little caught up in my thoughts,”

Sep gave a small laugh. “A little? I’ve been calling your name for what felt like a month!”

Shen looked down and smiled. “Something like that,”

His eagerness regressed into a more considerate demeanor.  “Thinking over this whole situation again, huh?” to which Shen nodded. He briefly frowned, but quickly changed it to a toothy (fang-y?) grin. “Well, I do have some good news that’s somewhat related to that!” the arachnid proclaimed in a bit of a singsong voice.

Shen’s interest was immediately piqued. “You mean the job you just mentioned?” she asked, to which her companion nodded quickly. She remembered that it was supposedly quick, easy, and well-paying with a healthy count of forty thousand reeds. Shen didn’t have a direct frame of reference for how expensive that was, but she did know it would at least pay off one thing -

“We could get a bigger carriage with that kind of money,” she said out loud.

“And we’d still have some left over!” Sep continued. “But that’s not the best part - guess where it is!”

“...Oh, shut up. There’s no way you found a job in Brukavn,”

“Correct!...I, uh, didn’t find a job in Brukavn,” The teen’s face fell, causing Sep to double back. “No, no! It’s still really close to the city!”

Shen breathed a sigh of relief. “Alright, then. Where is it?”

Septimus went over to one of the many random compartments the carriage had and pulled out a map of Fortune. He unfurled it against the ceiling, pinning the corners with four arms and using his fifth to point to a little dot that laid on an outcropping of land where the ocean met a wide river. “That’s Brukavn right there, on the tip of the peninsula. And right over here…” …he ran his finger along an eastward road until he found some kind of unclear landmark that Shen couldn’t make sense of… “...is where we are right now. That’s about another three days’ journey,” he explained.

“And the job’s location?”

“A place called Seabrook. It's a little out of the way. Right now, I’m trying to make out where it is,” As Sep contemplated the map, drawing weird lines along the riverside, he went further. “It’s a quiet town that functions as a residuary - like banks and stuff - for a couple of larger cities such as Brukavn, so it’s pretty close to it as well. Bunch’a retirees live there. Had an undead problem at one point, but nowadays it’s pretty inactive.” Suddenly, he made a little aha! and pointed to a seemingly random divot along the riverside, where the road they were on met the water. “The inlet right there. That’s where it is,”

After hearing all this, Shen was skeptical. Something didn’t feel right. “Forty thousand for some little banker town? Surely nothing they’re doing would involve spending that much money on a bard-for-hire…uh, no offense,”

Septimus dismissed this with a roll of his eyes and a wave of his hands, dropping the map on Shen in the process. “Pshh, who cares. Forty thousand to play for some old people is normal! It’s probably just a funeral or whatever,” Shen cringed at the thought of playing at a dead man’s party, so Sep added, “Or maybe a retirement ceremony,”
“Where’d you even get the job from, then?”

“Nearby bulletin board,”

“...The town is two days out from here, who would ever stick a job for it on a random bulletin board a massive distance away from it?!” responded Shen, incredulously. “And don’t even get me started on those instructions! ‘Until the coast is clear’? Clear of what?”

Septimus raised an arm in refutation, but stopped himself. Thinking for a moment, he eventually conceded. “Okay, it’s a bit shady. I can’t deny that,” He looked away in discomfort.

“A bit, sure,”

“But…”

“Don’t you dare,”

“...we really do need the money,” he tried.

Shen sighed. “Surely there’s another gig we could do,”

“No, we’re doing this one,” Sep stated firmly. “There wasn’t anything else that would’ve given us even a quarter of the reward for the work we’d put in. It’s gotta be this one,”

“I’m telling you, it just doesn’t feel right,”

“It probably won’t be anything bad! Just some extravagant elderly folks!” Shen tossed her hands up in frustration, nearly knocking them against the roof of the carriage, but didn’t say anything. “Please?”

Taking one last doubtful look at her friend, Shen finally relented. “Alright, fine,” she sighed for a second time. “I’ll do it. I don’t like it, but you know this place better than I do. Maybe you’re right, and there isn’t anything to worry about,”

Septimus’ face lit up. “There we go!” he exclaimed. He took Shen’s shoulders with his right arms and made a beholding gesture in front of the two of them. “In two days, all forty thousand of those reeds will be ours!” Opening the carriage door, he stepped outside. “I’m going to send a messenger spell to let them know we’re in!” he called back. “Don’t worry about a thing - what could possibly happen in a town like Seabrook?”

“Absolutely nothin’,” laughed a scratchy voice. “It’ll be the easiest mark in the world, I’m tellin’ ya,” A group of three sat around a dimly lit table, dressed in varying shades of green. The speaker had a rather boney physique, seeing as he was a skeleton, and wore a hunting cap. One companion was a willowy woman sporting a cavalier’s hat. and another was a thick-as-bricks man with a respectable pair of horns. They were occupied with a pile of various documents and a glowing game of cards. As they spoke, they placed down various playing cards, each setting off a little show of sparks, which were also green. “It’s just a glorified retirement home at this point, we can go in and out,”

“Eh, it feels too good to be true,” the cavalier - much less raspy, but still quite rough - contended. A card flew from her hand and drifted down to the table. Upon landing, a hazy picture of a (yes, green) snake popped into view and appeared to swallow Hunting Cap’s cards right out of his bony hands. “How are we gonna get a whole town to look the other way?”

He irritatedly drew eight more cards before continuing. “I sent out a discreet job offer for that. Just gonna get a guy to play some tunes and keep the grandparents occupied, for a little cut - but they don’t have to know that,” 

“You better not have taken too much out of our cut, numbskull. We don’t even have the money yet,”

“Listen ‘ere, Snake Eyes - “
“Enough, you two!” the horned third player snapped with an incredibly deep voice. “We needn’t fight over this. Everything is falling into place exactly like I said it would,”

“Okay, fine, you saw the plan in the future and it works, we get it,” Hunting Cap snarked. He drew another playing card and cackled. “But tell me you foresight-ed this right ‘ere!” Slamming the card facedown with bone-rattling force, it began to smoke and sizzle. It floated upwards and flipped over, displaying a shifting pattern of laughing skulls to the man with the horns.

Horns simply sighed. “For one, it’s ‘foresaw’. For two, yes, I did,” He then pulled two similar cards out of his hand and let them float towards Hunting Cap’s single. The three formed a rotating triangle over the discard pile, made a whirring noise, and zapped the whole deck into oblivion. It left the skeleton looking dumbfounded.

Cavalier started cackling. “Oh, he got you good! That’s the best round of Bad Omen I’ve ever played!”

The horned man simply smirked. “Let that be a lesson to you two,” he said smugly. “I can’t be cornered or outsmarted. I’ve got every angle covered. I’ll never lose a simple card game,” Pausing as he picked up his tablemates’ bets, he added, “Nor will I ever mess up a heist like this one,”