Forums » Fantasy Roleplay » The Drunken Bee (Open to all fantasy OCs.)

(Xib saved the poor ghost. Ended the cursed box. He is hero.)

The Drunken Bee kept its heat as resin seams bled a low amber glow. Smoke lay under the rafters in a tenacious pall. It was a lazy thurible of spice, sweat, and char. The hearth at the center did not merely burn. It officiated. A red altar of coals that drew the room inward, turning mugs and hands and weary shoulders into a congregation that pretended it came for drink, when it truly came to be absolved of the cold.

Ixqueya stood within that sanctioned radius, snow still stippling her cloak and hair in bright flecks that melted into thin, glittering runnels. Hoarfrost clung to her hems like an unpaid tithe. She warmed her palms without hurry and listened to the bar’s undertone. Not the laughter. The quieter psalmody beneath it. Murmurs offered like confession. Little bargains whispered to winter as if it could be persuaded to take someone else.

Then came the wrong sound. A small whirr. A click. A thin, plaintive beep that did not belong to fire or flesh. Her brow rose with the clean inevitability of an omen being read. Her gaze tracked the noise and found it. Xib. Looming over an odd device as though it were a casket that had learned to complain. His bellow cracked through the combwork like a bell struck in the wrong chapel, all ghosts and curses and frantic certainty. The room’s attention tightened into a hush so sharp it could have cut breath.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. The log fell in brutal benedictions. Shards leapt and skittered across the tile like startled chitin. The little whining ceased. Only the hearth answered now, crackling with indifferent continuity. Ixqueya watched the wreckage glitter at his feet, and her mouth curved into a smirk that was almost indecent in its fondness.

Memory rose with it. The training yard in the Winterwake. Snow packed hard as penance. Xib, infuriating and indomitable, teaching by doing and never by explaining. He had shown her the crude catechism of blunt force. How to make weight into law. How to drive the swing from the hips so the whole body became verdict. How to stop treating a shield like shelter and start treating it like judgment. A wall that answers back. He was an idiot. A calamity in a shell. An adorable moron. And, inconveniently, a teacher who had made her better than she had been.

"...hm?" She stopped humming, and shifted her gaze to the bee person.

She didn't see remotely surprised. Anthros are quite common where she came from.

"I'm... fine. Just missing my mom and dad a bit."
She nodded a bit, then...

...

was startled by Xib's whams destroying her work. In an instant, she turned to the mammal's direction... to find the heater now shattered and smashed. "Wha-"

Her shock then turned into discomfort with a small amount of anger also covered. Yet, while feeling all these, she couldn't find words to express it properly.

With an exasperated sigh, she glared at Xib.

Condensation beaded along the Bee’s resin bracing. It gathered at the seams. It slipped downward in thin, patient threads. The honeycomb chambers glowed where their joints met. The radiance was restrained. Amber. Not festive. Functional. Smoke lay in deliberate layers above the crowd. Char. Old tallow and wet fur rose from coats hung too close to heat. Somewhere deeper in the structure, a low drone carried through the hexes. Less a song than a steadied breath of sound. A fiddle worried at a note like wind caught in teeth. A table answered with knuckles tapping time.

Zubaida leaned forward across the table, her golden eyes bright as molten coins. “You asked who He is,” she began, voice low, the rhythm of her words closer to prayer than speech. “The Lord of Light is not merely a god, Lut. He is the Radiant Origin; the first flame that rose from the abyss when creation was yet without shape or sound. All things that burn, all things that yearn, remember Him even if they do not name Him.”

Her fingers brushed the rim of her goblet. The small motion seemed ceremonial. As though she anointed it before she spoke again. “He is the warmth that quickens the womb, the blaze that purifies the sinner, the dawn that shames the night. He is merciful, yes, but mercy to Him is a crucible. He does not heal without first breaking what is weak. To follow Him is to invite the fire into one’s marrow and be remade.”

The Shaitan’s tone deepened. Reverence bloomed into fervor. “When I was lost, when the world turned to ash around me, I saw His light in the smoke. It did not speak; it burned. I felt my heart unravel and take shape anew in His image. Since that hour, I have been His vessel. Every breath I draw is a sermon, every battle a psalm. His fire runs through me, Lut Devante. And now...” she smiled faintly, almost shyly. “Perhaps through you as well.”

Her voice faltered for the briefest heartbeat. It was rare, this warmth. Rare for someone to listen. Rarer still for one to understand. She studied him then, the fox with mismatched eyes that reflected both night and dawn. In their fractured hues she saw contradiction. The very essence of faith’s struggle. Light wrestling with shadow. Around them, the Bee continued its labor of living. Dice clicked once. Twice. Then stopped. A mug set down too hard made a dull, ringing complaint. An undead server passed close enough for the clean sting of preservative to cut through smoke. It carried black bread and smoked fish toward a louder table. The hearth answered with a pop. The sound was small. It still felt like punctuation.

Zubaida’s smile softened, turned almost playful. “You asked what terrors you might face tonight?” she said, her words curling like smoke. “Perhaps none. Or perhaps the oldest terror of all—that something greater than yourself might see you, and not turn away.”

Her hand rested lightly on the table between them. Not a reach. Merely an invitation. “Most flee the flame, afraid of what it will reveal. But you... you speak of it without fear. That is rare.” Her eyes glimmered as she tilted her head. “Rare and dangerous. Because fire, when it loves, consumes.”

She bit her lip slightly, as though steadying herself against her own boldness. The lamplight caught the faint scar beneath her jaw. A pale mark half-hidden by the dark fall of her hair. “Forgive me,” she murmured, “I forget myself. It has been long since anyone spoke to me of faith without mockery." She forgot Florentina in all the excitement. Showing a bit of her true self behind the mask.

(Xib is an idiot savant. he doesnt know tech. he also cant read, write or do math. he is a peasant soldier. )

Salman Timanti had taken his place where dampness pooled like an old tide that refused to withdraw. Close enough to the hearth that warmth could seep into the plates of his carapace. Far enough that the air did not turn brittle and thirsty against his gills. The Drunken Bee heaved around him in its land-born way. A warm, crowded basin of bodies. Talk splashing against talk. Laughter bursting like foam that wanted witnesses. The room’s heat rose in a slow plume and pressed itself against the ceiling like a trapped weather system. Salman let it all break around him without taking him. He was built for pressure. He was built for patience.

His oral tendrils moved with unhurried diligence, combing the seams where mouthparts met shell. A careful grooming that looked almost ceremonial in its restraint. Filaments traced the ridges that held yesterday’s brine. They drew away soot grit from the air. They polished the hinge lines until the plates sat clean and tight, slick as basalt after a wave has rinsed it. It was maintenance. It was composure made visible. He did not seek comfort. He simply refused to be made ragged by a room that was not his ocean. Then the current changed.

It was not a shout. Not a crash. It was subtler than that. A pressure shift you feel in the inner ear before you ever see a storm. At the lintel stood a figure whose presence bent attention the way the moon bends water. Green skin that cooled the hearthlight as it returned it, verdant and mineral at once, like kelp laid over stone. Horns rising in paired crescents, ridged and striated like ancient coral hardened into ivory. Hair spilling in thick waves, heavy as seaweed after a rough tide. The eyes did something the land-born would call unsettling and the sea-born would call honest. Split. Fuse. Split again. Two apertures becoming one, then parting, with the merciless regularity of a metronome that would not forgive a missed beat. And on her shoulder, the conch-creature with its ember eye held steady. A small, unwavering lantern in a room full of flickering, unreliable light.

Zelena. His mother. His Sea Mother. Something in Salman’s chest went taut, not with panic, but with that old gravitational pull that makes a shoreline remember its ocean even after drought. He watched her try to stand inside a room that had no tides to carry her. He watched her words come out clipped and careful, like someone walking a slick pier in high wind. He heard the chant she used as a railing for her mind, syllables laid down in strict rhythm as if she could turn turbulence into something navigable. He saw her retreat to a dimmer hex-cell where the hearth’s radiance thinned. Back to the wall. One approach vector. The posture of a creature bracing for undertow in a place that did not believe undertow existed.

Salman rose. He moved through the honeycomb floor with the quiet inevitability of a deep current. Not hurried. Not hesitant. People shifted without understanding why, the way swimmers drift aside when a larger shadow glides beneath them. He threaded between tables as though passing through kelp beds. Close enough to avoid collision. Far enough to avoid attention. When he reached Zelena’s pocket of shadow, he did not stand over her like a judge. He turned and set himself slightly side-on, presenting the broad plane of his shell between her and the room. A breakwater of living armor. A reef-face. A body that said, without drama, that the waves could spend themselves on him first.

His voice came low. Salt-cool. Weighted like water spoken from depth. “Sea Mother.” The title fell into the space between them like a calm tide finding its level. His gaze did not flinch at the split and fuse of her pupils. It met them as it would meet a lanternfish in black water. With recognition. With steadiness. “You are in the shallows here,” he said, and his words carried the hush of a sheltered cove. “Shallow places are loud. They slap and glitter and panic. They throw spray to pretend they are strong. Do not let it persuade you. Let the noise roll over you. Let it break and drain away. You do not have to answer it.”

He placed a claw on the table’s edge. Not on her. Not an intrusion. An anchor offered. A solid point for a mind that wanted proof the world remained continuous. His oral tendrils slowed, then resumed their gentle work along the seam of his mandibles, a small repetitive motion like counting waves. A rhythm to borrow. A cadence to lean on. “Tell me what you need,” Salman continued. “Clean water. A damp cloth. A seat further from heat so your skin can breathe. A path out that does not force you through the thick of them. Or only this. Me here. My shell between you and the surf of their attention. What can I do for you, Sea Mother. Name it, and I will make it so.”

((Uh, sure. Xib the Brut- *gets smacc*))

((wait you say you can fix what))

Exhaling, Xueqing tried to calm herself down. Smashing one's creation before their own eyes is not very pleasant. While she wasn't short-tempered, she couldn't help but feel offended.

After a bit, she turned to the bee, distracting herself from the mess. Then, she acknowledged the whole hive structure. "This place seems great! Did you design that yourself? Just curious."

Zelena’s chant broke on a syllable that should have landed clean. It did not fail because the axioms were wrong. It failed because the system’s inputs changed. A new stabilizing mass entered her immediate neighborhood. Salman’s shell set itself between her and the room with non-theatrical exactitude. A baffle plate. A living waveguide. An impedance discontinuity that forced the tavern’s social turbulence to refract around him instead of through her.

Her pupils split. Fused. Split again. The oscillation continued. It was not a signal of panic now. It was simply her optics doing what her optics did. Her breathing slowed by fractions. She took the claw on the table edge as a datum. A coordinate origin. A fixed point in a reference frame that had been precessing like a broken gyroscope. She ran the room through her head again. Tried to reweight the priors. Tried to deconvolve fear from evidence. The result was still noisy. But it was no longer an unbounded divergence.

Then she stopped. Not with fright. With detection.

Across an adjacent hex-cell. Past a lattice of chair legs and ankles. Past the amber attenuation zone where the hearth’s radiance thinned into something less aggressive. She saw Watari.

He was not merely “present.” He was coherent. That was the first impression. Coherence as a measurable property. His fur armor held snow in its seams like retained phase residue, as if the cold still respected him enough to cling. His beard caught pale crystals near the corners of his mouth. His hair bore the faint, granular sparkle of frost. Yet his posture was not “cold.” It was thermodynamically economical. Minimal wasted motion. No flaring gestures. No performative expansion of body volume to claim social territory. He sat like a rock in a stream. The stream could chatter. The stream could slap. The rock did not reply.

Tea steamed near his hands. It rose in thin laminae. It climbed. It folded. It vanished into the smoke canopy. He watched the room without hunting it. Not predatory saccades. Not the frantic ocular jitter of the anxious. A surveyor’s sampling. Periodic. Dispassionate. The kind of scanning that says, I know the environment is stochastic. I will not pretend it is personal.

Zelena’s throat tightened. Her chest did a strange thing. Not the spiking alarm of threat anticipation. Something older. A gravitational tug. The shoreline remembering the ocean. She had categorized him, years ago, as an anomalous constant. A benign attractor. A lodestar in the social fog. She had insisted it was not romance. That had been an expedient fiction. A defensive reparameterization to keep her own model from becoming humiliatingly non-rigorous.

Now, with Salman’s shell taking the first impact. With Slouth’s ember-eye holding steady on her shoulder like an unblinking calibration lamp. Zelena allowed the suppressed hypothesis to re-enter the solution space.

“Salman.” Her voice came out soft. Still clipped. Still warm with that heavy accent. But no longer jagged. “Yuh see him.” A minimal tilt of her chin toward Watari’s table. “Watari.”

Her gaze lingered longer than an audit required. She tracked him the way a mathematician tracks a term that keeps recurring in unrelated proofs. His shoulders. Not ostentation. Load capacity. A morphology that suggested endurance rather than vanity. His hands around the cup. Steady. Fine control. No tremor. No impatience. His face in profile. Strong planes. Beard framing it. Eyes that did not overreact to stimulus. The microexpressions were sparse. Not blank. Sparse. The difference mattered. Blank is often concealment. Sparse can be restraint. Restraint can be kindness.

“He have di hallmarks.” Zelena’s pupils split and fused again. “Positive progenitor. Yes. Mi mean dat.” She swallowed. And then she corrected herself, not away from the implication, but into it. “An’ mi also mean mate-candidate.” The admission landed like a stone dropped into still water. No dramatics. Just ripples.

She looked at Salman as if she needed to verify she had said it aloud.

“Mi used to file it under non-romantic constants.” Her mouth twitched. A near-smile. Brief. Embarrassed by its own existence. “So mi could keep mi dignity. Keep mi cognition ‘formal.’ But di truth is.” She exhaled. Slow. Measured. “He reduce mi threat posterior. He increase mi approach tolerance. He make mi body stop actin’ like every gaze is a knife.” Her eyes flicked back to Watari. “An’ when mi see him. Mi mind start doin’ pair-bond calculus. Even when mi tell it not to.”

She turned slightly. Angling her body so she could keep Watari in peripheral view without staring. Because staring felt like initiating an experiment without consent.

“Mi run it like a model.” Zelena said. “Fit parameters. See if it holds.” She tapped the table once with a fingertip, as if enumerating variables. “Temperament stability. Prosocial yield. Dominance style. He don’t destabilize others to feel tall. He don’t harvest insecurity like currency. He don’t need witnesses for his strength.” Another tap. “He treat mi like human. Not specimen. Not monster. Not problem. Before mi have yuh. Before mi have any o’ mi children. He was di only one dat did that consistently.”

Her voice dipped. The accent thickened with something less efficient than protocol.

“Mi used to watch him.” She admitted. “From safe distance. Collectin’ data like a coward. Because if mi label it desire, den mi risk rejection. An’ rejection is not just emotional.” She swallowed again. “Rejection becomes evidence. Evidence becomes a poisoned prior. An’ den mi can’t ever feel safe again. So mi told meself.” She lifted her chin. “It was only respect. Only gratitude. Only orientation.”

She let the sentence sit. Then she dismantled it with the same ruthless honesty she used on sloppy equations.

“But mi body disagree. Mi attention disagree. Mi dreams disagree.” A pause. Her pupils split. Fused. “He never notice mi as woman. Not overt. Not in di way land-born do. No flirtation vectors. No pursuit. He treat mi neutrally. Kindly. Like neutrality could be a gift.” She gave a thin, almost wry breath. “Sometimes mi wonder if he was refusin’ to look. Out o’ respect. Or out o’ disinterest. Mi can’t solve dat one from a distance.”

She glanced down at Salman’s claw on the table edge. The offered anchor. Then back to her son.

“So when yuh ask what mi need.” Her voice steadied further, as if speaking the plan made it real. “Mi need to move to a cell near him. Not crowd him. Not corner him. Just within di radius where his presence acts like damping.” She lifted her eyes again toward Watari. “Close enough dat mi can test di hypothesis with real data. Conversation. Micro-repair. Eye contact. See if di resonance is mutual. Or if it only exist inside mi.”

A brief silence. Then, quieter.

“Mi hate dat mi sound like mi turnin’ longing into math.” Her mouth parted. “But dis is how mi survive it. Mi translate it into solvables. Into observables. Into something mi can hold without drownin’.”

She drew one more controlled breath. Her shoulders lowered by a small increment.

“Help mi get there.” Zelena said to Salman. “Low-density corridors. No sudden turns. No heat pockets that dry mi skin. An’ if anybody look like dey gon’ make sport o’ mi.” Her pupils split and fused once more, slow and deliberate. “Yuh shell take di first wave. An’ mi will take di second. Because mi not here to flee tonight. Mi here to see if di lodestar ever looks back.”

Xib crouched down over the broken beetle box like it was a dead crab he expected to get back up and start arguing. Little pieces everywhere. Little wires. Little shiny guts. No screaming. No whirring. No spooky. Just dead. He poked a shard with one thick claw, then flinched like it might bite him anyway. Xib leaned in close and sniffed. His nostrils bubbled once. He blinked slow. Confusion won. “Uh.” Xib grunted. “Where ghost be?” He tilted his head left. Then right. Like that would make the spirit fall out. “Ghost was in here. Xib hear it. It go ‘eeee’ and ‘brrr’ like sad bug.” He peered into the pile as if a tiny pale man would wave.

Xib lifted one piece, shook it gently, then shook it harder. Nothing. He set it down and looked around the floor, searching for footprints, ectoplasm, or whatever ghosts used. “Ghost run away? Ghost hide in crack? Ghost go in fire?” His eyes narrowed. “Or ghost trick Xib. Ghost very sneaky.” He jabbed the log down beside the debris like a warning sign. “If ghost still here, come out.” Xib announced. “Xib already save you. You welcome.” Then, quieter, with a worried frown, “But if ghost not real… then Xib maybe just bonk nice warm box. That would be… awkward-bad.”

(Not a brute at all. Idiot savant. He is one of the few accurate medieval characters you'll meet tbh. under 1% could read and superstition was very common. To him your box is magic and cursed.)

Zlata looked over at the broken box and the turizen's heroic efforts. If only some people could have half the gusto he had, then the world would be in a much better spot. Once the dust settled she would order one of the ants to clean it up. Taking out the rubbish was their duty.

"You poor thing. Missing family is hard."

She then shook her head at her question.

"I did not build this establishment. My children did. They did quiet a good job of it too. It makes me fell very proud of them."

Salman held still long enough for her words to finish rippling. He did not interrupt. He let them find their own shoreline. In the hush that followed, his oral tendrils slowed at the seam of his mandibles, then fell quiet, as if even his body understood that this was not the hour for grooming. His attention went where hers had gone. Across the honeycomb. Through the amber haze. To the man with winter clinging to him like sea salt to rope.

Watari sat as a stone sits in moving water. Snow held in the folds of his fur as though the cold itself had decided to rest a hand on him. Steam rose from his tea in thin, obedient sheets, then vanished into the smoke canopy like mist losing its name. The room broke around him and did not change him. That kind of steadiness was rare. It was the sort of mass that tides learn to trust. Salman turned back to Zelena. His voice came low and deep, the way sound feels in a cave below the surface, softened by distance and pressure.

“Sea Mother. I see him. I see what your body has already decided. The way your breathing stops snapping like a flag in wind. The way your fear ceases its whitewater and becomes a current again.” He angled his shell, not as display, but as shelter. A broad, dark breakwater set between her and the room’s froth. He looked at the paths between tables the way a mariner reads channels between reefs. He marked the heat pockets that would dry her. He chose the damp seams where the air stayed kinder. The cooler corridors where her skin would not feel flayed by warmth.

“We will go to him as the tide goes,” Salman said. “Without apology. Without theatrics. Slow. Measured. Honest. Not a wave that crashes and begs to be noticed. A rising waterline that arrives because it is the nature of water to arrive. You do not need to turn longing into something smaller to make it safe. You have lived in depths where the world is not gentle. You have earned the right to want a gentler gravity.” His claw returned to the table edge, then lifted, offered to her in the open. Not a command. Not a tug. A handhold. A piece of certainty you can choose when the deck shifts underfoot.

“Take my claw if you wish. Keep your shoulder near my shell. Let the room’s laughter spend itself on me first. If anyone tries to make sport of you, they will find stone and brine. They will find the first wave that breaks. They will not reach the second.” He let his gaze rest on her eyes as they split and fused, as if that rhythm were simply another kind of tide. Then he spoke the last part more softly, as one speaks near open water at night.

“And if it is meant, the sea will permit it. The sea does not force what is false. It tests. It listens. It opens when the current is true. Go close enough to be seen. Speak to him. Let him answer with his own weather. If he is your lodestar, he will look back when the haze thins. If he is not, you will still leave tonight unbroken, because you chose to wade forward instead of retreating into drought.” He inclined his head toward Watari’s cell. “Come, Sea Mother. Let us enter his radius. Let us see whether the water between you settles into something calm, and enduring.”

Whatever prison that held Layla down had finally been broken. Her trapped form began to materialize as the puerskar’s ghostly form began to take form once more. She was hauntingly translucent. Pale blue skin, hair that floated, and these bright special eyes that glowed. Those spectral eyes blinked. It seemed she was in a tavern now.

Layla looked down at the awful contraption that imprisoned her. It used a lot of power just to make something simple like heat. A fire was more efficient. For goodness shake there was one right there, in the middle of the tavern. She looked over at turzien as her small form floated above the ground.

“You freed me. Thank you.”