Your Featherlands CYOA Journey ~ Chapter 9 (Act 2) (Patreon)

A sinking feeling in your gut reminds you of the obvious.

This is a bad idea.

But you know that you’ll find it harder to cope with the guilt of not trying whatever you can do to return for the nymph girl. The elves may have their own plans and ways of doing things, but with each passing second, the nymph girl suffers ticklish agony. Her gargled laughter echoes in your head. You sigh and collect yourself, questioning whether or not you’re even able to do what you’re thinking. You know that none of the others, not even Tia, will allow you to leave on your own, nor will they accompany any mission so late and recklessly unplanned. It was risky enough coming back with two rescued victims during the day. You know that telling, or even asking, any of them is a good way of being monitored, keeping you stuck within the compound while the girl shrieks into the night. You recognize that the elves are just being smart and looking out for their own kind. You can’t blame them, but you also can’t find it within you to simply let the evils of this world persist.

“I can’t believe…” you mutter to yourself, your mind still trying to wrap around all of the events that have happened. Your head pounds through the tugging struggle of rationality; the longer you spend in this strange fantasy world of tickling, the more real it all becomes, and yet the more you see that defies your own preconceptions of reality. Banking on the fantastical over the realistic is how you begin largely rationalizing the more extreme conclusions and answers to the numerous questions that continue to compound.

You turn to an open window in the hollow tree of the elven comune. The darkness of night presented qualities as opportunistic as they were detrimental. Still, your racing thoughts continue to emphasize the right thing to do over the sensible one. You quickly make your way to your room, avoiding contact with any close peers that may note your position in the moment. Once there, you slip into the utility armor that you’ve used for spell training with Tia, along with a black cloak. You put on a pair of black boots and tighten your wand harness to your arm. You look to your bag of supplies, opting to travel light and as soundless as possible. You flip up your hood and begin to head out.

Navigating your way out of the elven compound proves easier than you imagined. Most of those that you know have retired to the beds for the evening. While you still haven’t familiarized yourself with where everything is, you know that your main goal is to simply find a way outside, which you’ve known for a while. You slip outside into the chilly darkness of night. Glowbugs buzz and light up the sky with wavy streams of colorful vibrance. Distant croaking of nocturnal creatures echoes through the surrounding trees. You stay low as you venture out onto the same path that you followed with Tia earlier that day. You look to the ground and the surrounding shrubbery for reference, only then realizing the dangerous possibilities and implications of simply getting lost.

You find yourself doubting the ability to follow the right path in the night’s cruel blackness. The bright twinkling of fluorescent insects and the vast blanket of stars which present a whole new realm of questions left to be answered offer only slight amounts of light, enough to keep you from running directly into trees. They highlight an outline of the sandy path, the same one you remembered following with Tia. You wish that you had made more distinctive observations before, but are committed to your rescue mission in the present.

Carefully, you carved through the forest in largely the same direction as you had before. You look out for signs of the troll campsite. You’re cautious not to be too loud to keep from attracting predators, including the trolls, but also tread through the brush with a potent sense of urgency. You wipe sweat from your brow. You keep your wand hand steady and ready to fire at a moment’s notice. You step carefully to keep from activating anymore floor traps like earlier. You wish that you had rested more before going out on your own, but you remember why you’re doing this and why it had to happen sooner rather than waste anymore time.

About an hour after leaving the elven compound and it has vanished from your rear path. You can’t even see the torch light lining the roadways. The hometree and all those that live in it have been swallowed into the vastness of the night forest and the uncertainty of your dreadful unfamiliarity. You can vaguely point to the general direction in which you left it, but it only occurs to you then how little you know about this place and how alone you are once again.

You come across several relics that spark recognition. You find the log that you and Tia walked past. You carefully step around the trap that you fell in on the way back. You duck under the same low hanging branches that you remember dodging before.You stay shrouded and as silent as possible as you feel confident in your ability to track down the troll camp from earlier, hoping to not set any of them off to your location. After another hour or so, you come up on the familiar markings around the camp. Strung tents, lightly flickering torches, and ropes lining the higher regions of the perimeter, all decorated with originate flags and cloths, greet you in the dark. You stay low, becoming noticeably more quiet as you come closer.

Bugs chirp in brazen choir all around in the forest. The night stirs restlessly for the tree-bound creatures. Calls that sound remarkably like laughter sing out in the distance. You hope that such natural sounds may drown out any that you make within the troll camp. Out of all the sounds you hear, however, you notice that the nymph’s laughter is not one of them.

You hope that they’ve provided her a break in her torment. Or even the more more distressing conclusion that maybe, through the endless assault of tickling, the poor, ticklish nymph simply fainted into her own reprieve from the torture. Regardless, you carefully navigate around the camp, looking for the device that the trolls had the girl hooked up to.

After a while of tireless searching, you find it. The collections of contraptions are all empty, even the tank where the nymph girl was being kept before. You search the area thoroughly. You scan across the surrounding ground for any sign of where they may have taken her. You look for footprints, a watery trail, anything at all. But the ground, beneath the cover of night, yields nothing of use. You sigh heavily, turning toward the camp to gauge where it is that she could have gone. You can’t bring yourself to imagine that they simply let her go. The options presented are then that the trolls either have her kept in a special place overnight or have already shipped her off somewhere else, possibly to sell in their supposed underground tickling market. The latter suggestion is grim but at least allows you to leave under the shallow satisfaction that you did what you could short of actively attacking and interrogating the trolls, likely initiating an ordeal that transcends bravery into abject foolishness. The former, however, presents a new challenge with which to scratch the itch of guilt squirming within your mind. As you’re analyzing these options, however, a jarring tension surfaces in the stillness of the moment.

A pair of arms swiftly wraps around your body. You’re immediately hoisted up into the air as an incredibly strong force binds your arms to your side and lifts your feet off of the ground. You catch a foul odor penetrating your nose as you kick and squirm in place.

“Got it!” You hear a deep, bassy voice bay right outside of your ear. A dread sinks through your chest as you immediately begin looking for a way out of your capture before you’ve fully realized the situation playing out. The troll holding you directs your attention to more standing up from behind bushes and trees. Even in the dark, you can see all of their grisly, toothy sneers pointed in your direction. You close your eyes, beginning to steady your mind to use a spell, but a painfully familiar voice brings you back to the dismal circumstance in which you’ve landed yourself.

“Just couldn’t stay away, could ya?” Flauntroy says. The massive and lanky troll steps out through the brush to greet you. He wears the same tattered clothes he had on earlier. You groan and squirm in place.

“I… I came back for the girl…” you mutter, grunting as you struggle. “But she’s not here, so just… let me go…”

“Let you go?” Flauntroy asked with a deep belly laugh, signaling a chorus of laughter echoing out around you. “Twice now we’ve had you and yet you still come back here. I’m not sure if I should be offended at your impression of us or impressed by the kind of guts it took for you to come back here alone. Either way, you’re not leaving, and we’re going to make good sure of that right now.”

The circling trolls surround you closely. You close your eyes again and focus, but just as you feel the magic within you channeling toward your wand, the arms wrapped around you throw you to the ground.

“Gah!” you grunt. Strong, massive hands descend down upon you. Several reach for your wand harness first, ripping it off of your arm. “No! Let me go!” Your wrists are grabbed as the cluster of trolls giggle and comment tauntingly about what all they’re going to do to you.

“Human’s gonna get the tickles!” one chuckles.

“I’m gonna get this one good for what they did earlier!” another adds.

“Save some for the whole camp!” The trolls snicker and taunt as they begin dragging you across the ground by your wrists. Your wand is flung off into the bushes. You kick and tug at the beasts as you’re being pulled to no use. You scream, hoping to alarm someone, anyone, nearby to come and help you out of the conundrum.

“Help!” you yell. “Someone! Please!” The trolls merely laugh at your efforts, growing in desperation as you realize just how helpless you really are. You struggle and strain, but your strength simply cannot match that of a Featherland troll, let alone an entire camp of trolls. You scream because you can only scream. Your voice carries through the surrounding darkness to lengths that far surpass what your eyes will allow you to see. The trolls drag you through the leaves and dirt before coming up to a contraption, a new device different from the ones you had seen before.

“Tie it up to the spokes,” Flauntroy says. “We’re going to have a fun night ahead…” Before you can get a good enough look at the contraption, the trolls surrounding you begin holding you up to a large wheel. It appears sturdy and made of the same rough cuts of wood as what appears to be common around the camp. Three trolls move you with ease despite your constant struggling against their collective grasp. You grunt and pull and fight back as much as you can, the dread of hopelessness steadily creeping in.

“No!” you shout. “Please just let me go!”

“Nope, not this time,” said Flauntroy. The towering troll watches as the others fasten you to the wheel. They hold your arms and legs splayed out and tie them tightly to notches of the spokes with rough strands of rope. You shout and pull and fight back as much as you can, but the force of the many trolls quickly attaching you to the device is simply too much for you to win against. The trolls giggle with their deep, menacing voices. They taunt you with phrases muttered in your ears, promises of the ticklish torment to come. As you struggle against the ropes, you start to get the feeling that you may not have an adequate idea to stop them.

“Please… I… I, uh…” you stutter nervously. Sweat trickles down the back of your neck. As the final ties of the ropes wrap around your ankles, leaving your body splayed out in an X formation, you stare back at the trolls eyeing you down in the dead of night. Another longer strand of rope is tied around your waist while a troll approaches the device with a jar, the same jar you remember seeing next to the earlier victims. He hands it to Flauntroy, who looks it over carefully.

“Yes, human laughter goes for good feathers on any market,” he says. “So sell you off or keep you for ourselves. Quite the dilemma, wouldn’t you agree, human?” 

He walks up closer to where you hang, suspended on the wheel. You shoot him a snarl that teeters between trying to be threatening and to convey sympathy, not knowing which would be better for granting you your freedom. He sets up the jar nearby, twisting the top which causes slotted openings to appear. The other trolls continue to handle you, however. They use large hunting knives to cut away the armor from your body. You struggle and grunt, pulling at the ropes binding your wrist and ankles. You know it to be fruitless, that even if you were to get a limb free that you would likely end up right where you are anyway, possibly facing an even crueler sentence. The trolls chuckle as they pull off your tunic, leaving you only the bare covering over your chest and hips. Others work below, removing your boots from your feet. A harsh coolness brushes over your newly bared body. The nightly elements gaze upon and caress your delicate, exposed skin; the atmosphere of the Featherlands itself skittering tickles that resonate inward. You blush and writhe, never having felt so vulnerable before in your life. The stares from the lingering trolls around you, already formulating plans on how to properly tickle the body that hangs before them, bury into your conscious mind. The pit in your stomach deepens into a hollow chasm of hopelessness. You only hope that their ticklish punishment for your brazen foolishness is, at the very least, bearable.

Flauntroy turns to several others, telling them to fetch more supplies for their ‘new guest’. You huff, not knowing whether to cry or continue screaming in anger. The latter has done you no good up until now and you dread succumbing to the former. Flauntroy turns back to you and smiles.

“Now then, human,” he says near your face. “You’ve caused us a lot of problems. Had you just ended up in our care, all easily and willingly like, we may have still gone easy on you. But you’ve dug yourself quite a hole here. Coming into our camp, robbing us of supplies, attacking us for simply trying to do what we do… And now, here you are. Under our care at last. And you’re going to make up for every second of screaming laughter that you took from us, on top of the laughter you owe for simply being here. It’s going to be a long, long night for you…”

“Please… please, you don’t want me…” you say, not even sure how you should be begging under these circumstances. You know that you have nothing to offer them, how badly they want you, and how much you’ve intruded on their camp thus far. Your breath quivers in your throat as you struggle to formulate words that may, at the very least, stall the creature a little longer. Another troll approaches with a wide cart full of various tools and supplies. Your eyes glance over it in horror. Feathers of varying colors lay in a messy clump. Brushes of different sizes sit out in a row. Strings and utensils and vials of strange, glimmering liquids are all also out in plain sight. “Listen, I… I… uhhh…”

“Shhhh,” Flautroy says, holding a finger to his lips. “You’re done talking now, human. Probably forever. There’s only one kind of sound you get to make now.” Flauntroy smirks. Not the cocky chuckle that you’ve heard from him before. His voice omits the charmful flair he once had to try and sway you to his side. He speaks low and gravely, tempting with deeper, more natural roots. He chuckles faintly as he steps back, better observing your predicament as more of the trolls close in around you. “Alright boys, make it squeal.”

The trolls, for whom you have no names, quickly close in around you. You squirm frantically, absorbing the seconds that you’re spared before the inevitable tickle torture begins. You grit your teeth and pull desperately at the ropes holding out your arms and legs. The warmth from the enclosure of trolls envelops your body. You shake your head and cry out just as pitifully and hopelessly as you were when you first arrived in the Featherlands.

“No!” you scream. “No, wait! Please d-aaaaaaaahhhahahahahAAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!!” The creeping tension of your capture culminates and surges into rising ticklish forces that fall inevitably upon you. As much dread as you both felt and equally pushed away in some desperate belief that you would again escape their efforts, the tickles come upon you in a force of even greater potency, guided by the many, hungry, scribbling fingers of your troll captors. They circle you, encase you in a humid, bodily enclosure of eager hands reaching out to your noticeably ticklish areas. Four– no, five, at least– trolls crowd around you. They giggle and chuckle and continue to mock and taunt your disposition while their long, grizzly nails skitter against your skin.

“Heh, heh, heh!” one laughs. “Think you could just come back to us, didn’t you, human?” one asks in your ear. Their hands focus their attention on your stomach. Splayed out, completely accessible from how your body is framed in immobilization, your belly receives ample and easy attention. His fingertips fly into a scurrying fury of scratching tickles. The billowing sensations blooming outward through your nerves, his fingers tickling faster than you’re able to keep up with.

“I think it missed us, don’t you?” another says. “Just couldn’t stay away? Hehhehe!” Their hands squeeze at your sides. Straying out of the way of the first troll, they stretch their mighty hands out wide, able to encase the entire edges of your midsection in their splayed fingers. They squeeze and claw lightly and quickly, sending many pulsing tickles through your body per every torturous second.

“NAAAAAHHHAHHAHAHHAHAHAA!!! STAHAHAHHAHAHAAAAAPPP!!!” You hear the pitiful desperation in your own voice. It calls into question everything you had learned up to that point, everything that you had been taught and told. Would the ‘human savior’ really be caught and tormented in such a way? Would even a novice mystic apprentice be where you are now? The questions resonate through your mind without even the words to bring them to the forefront of your thoughts, occupied exclusively by the ticklish turmoils coursing through your senses. You squirm and fight, screaming into the cold, night air as the feasting fingers funnel the ticklish laughter from your mouth.

“Not gonna get away again, this one,” another troll says. None of them feature any distinguishing qualities in the night, especially while you endure the ticklish onslaught, but you catch minor differences in their voices. This one stands mostly behind you, off to one side. It reaches its long, lanky arm around the back of your body with ease as both hands drive an assault of tickles into your plush, helpless armpits. His fingers scratch and dig, the tickles that pour into your sensitive hollows bursting through your whole upper body. Colliding with the other tickles from further down, it becomes nearly impossible to tell which area delivers the most crucial reactions. All that you know is that the tickles scurrying against your pits only add to the symphony of sensory hilarity surging through your body.

“GAAAHHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA!!! PLEEEEEAAAHAHAHHAHAHHASSSEEE!!!” Your scream echo through the surrounding trees, presumably heard by nothing and no one that can save you. Sweat mats your clothes to your body. It drips through your hair as your cheeks glow a beaming shade of red. Tears bead in the corners of your eyes. Even if you had a plan of escape to execute, focusing on anything outside of the tickles quickly becomes an impossible task. The bearing presence of the trolls alone leaves you feeling crucially outnumbered and hopeless. Even without the constant streams of tickles rendering your body and mind fully engaged, you know that you’d have fatally few options with which to help yourself.

“Get ‘em good,” Flauntroy says, standing back and watching. “I’ll forgo my turn to give everyone a go first. Little something for troop morale, you know? You got a whole camp to go through before we decide what to do with you, human.” Their voices are deep and devilishly distinguishable from your manic fits of laughter. Moment by moment, the realization of what’s been stripped from you becomes frightfully transparent. Not just the ability to run or defend yourself, but to speak, to reason, to even breathe properly. You feel the desperation that you saw in the faces of the captured victims from before and the full force of what you had experienced when caught in the trap. Except now, no one knows where you are. You left no note, told no one, all in an attempt to save a soul and not be hindered.

“Oh, we’re gonna have lots of fun!” another troll says. You can see them, through teary eyes, take a few items off of the cart. They make their way downward to the bottom of the wheel. They catch one of your bound, failing feet with ease and begin wrapping a small cord around your big toe. They tie it off and stretch it back, tying the other end of the cord to another section of the wheel. It forces your toes back in a familiar, yet sinking, fashion, further eliminating any movement that may interrupt their ticklish agenda. As they finish doing the same with the other foot, the troll snickers and begins to stroke at your soles with a pair of feathers bearing strange and effective properties.

“NAAAHHAHAHAOOOO!!! NAAHHAOOOO NAHAHAHAHHAT THAHAHAHAT!!!” You thrash about in your binds, pulling and tugging at the ropes holding you in such a vulnerable position. Tears streak down your cheeks. The feathers that taunt your soles do so with a more omnipresent sensation than any other feather you had felt before.

“Ah yes, the Lowland Scavenger feathers…” Flauntroy says with a soft chuckle. “Great for ticklish feet like your own. Not sure if you’re familiar, human. Well, you are now.” The fibers on the feathers seem to spread about, creating a more wide area of effect with each sinister swipe. You can also feel them more plainly than any feather you had ever known, each swipe sending what feels like hundreds of little feathery scratches all over your ticklish bare feet. The troll snickers as he brushes the feathers across your helpless soles. Up and down, back and forth, he covers your feet in stroke after stroke of the feathers reaching out for and attacking your most sensitive nerves directly. Every brush of the feathers comes more ticklish than the last, compounding their effects over and over again, building up the maddeningly ticklish sensations throughout.

“GAAAAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAAA!!! SAAAAAAHAHHAHAHAA!!!” You can only laugh. The tickles pour through your body, crashing into one another in explosive waves that leave your body trembling and useless. You experience physical recollections of all the other times you felt so powerless against your own ticklish sensitivity while in the Featherlands. It leaves you questioning your very presence in the Featherlands, your identity in this strange land that still seems so alien after all this time, a feeling of alienation only realized through your own helpless predicament, too late to do anything to stop it.

“We’re gonna play with this one all night long…” another troll says. “The others can have their turns after sunrise.” He visits the cart of supplies and positions himself behind you, coming down below next to the other tickling your feet. A small tool jingles in between his fingers. He golds it up to one of your soles and begins stroking. Several pinwheels, lined up in a concentrated row, scour up and down one of your soles. The other troll focuses both of the peculiar feathers on one sole, letting each play with both your arch and your toes, while the other rolls the device up and down your trapped, ticklish foot. Another wave of ticklish agony washes over you. More tickles pour through your body than neither your mind or senses know how to properly comprehend. Nonetheless, all you know is that more tickles ravish through your body, stealing away even more of your composure.

“FAAAAAAHHHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAAA!!! PLEEEEAAAAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!!!!” Your laughter is only challenged by the giggling and teasing comments of your captors as they torment your bound body. They fill your senses with tickles over and over again until tickles are all that you know. Seconds feel like minutes. Minutes pass like days. Moment by moment, you don’t know how it is that you’ll be able to endure the next, but the moment comes anyway as you scream with ticklish laughter.

“Heh heh, good little human!”

“Yeah, laugh just like that!”

“Tickle, tickle, tickle!”

The phrases repeat through their own taunting laughter. The tickles surge through your body. Your mind struggles to hold onto basic cognitive thought, to try and comprehend anything beyond the ticklish stimulation tearing through you. But as the moments of ticklish torment pass, exhaustion leaves your mind surrendering. You can only think of the tickles until you start to doubt that you can even ‘think’ at all. Tickles simply flow through you, commanding all of you, all of who you are, with reactionary impulses. You dance and laugh and sing to the will of your captors. Your body glistens with sweat and tears. You can barely even form words through your laughter, your body becoming so spent from the ticklish stimulation that words cease even coming to your mind. You are a vessel for tickles, their vessel for tickles, and any impression otherwise slips away more and more by the second.

“Very good work so far,” Flauntroy says, standing by the jar. He looks over it, observing the illuminating energy glowing from within. “Human laughter, mmmmm…” Flautroy picks up the jar, closes the lid, and replaces it where the old one sat. “Keep it going. Maybe don’t let it pass out, at least not for a while.”

“NAAAAAAHHHAHHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAAAAA!!!!” What little energy you have left inside you becomes dedicated exclusively to laughing and the erratic, impulsive writhing of your body desperately trying to protect itself. You no longer pull at your binds, your arms and legs do on their own. You no longer gasp for air, your body simply fights back against the laughter for the air it needs. Little by little, you feel yourself slipping away in the fits of absolute ticklish mania. The trolls don’t hold back. They tickle as much and as quickly as they can. Creatures built for abrasive tickles all crowd around you, gleefully engaging your body with their abilities of direct contact.

“Coochie coochie coo!” One says. He digs his boney fingers into your stretched pits, scribbling and scratching your slick, plush hollows again and again.

“Tickle, tickle, little human,” another mutters deeply. He pinches at your sides, focusing his ticklish administration up and down from your hips to your ribs. Every spot he reaches tickles, but in patterns that you’re unable to predict.

“I like hearing it scream,” says another troll. He weaves the Lowland Scavenger feathers in and out of both sets of toes, leaving no spot unexplored by the ruthless, Featherland effects. Each flossing swipe brings upon surges of tickles ravishing through your toes, resonating and tingling long after the plumes move from each spot.

“NAAAAHHAHHAHAHHAAA!!!! STAAHAHAHHAHAHHAAAAA!!!!” You scream teary bouts of laughter, gasping for air while the creatures surround you. Tears and sweat drip from your body. Your shaking makes the wheel creak and groan. Escape has long since been impossible. Even breaking free would yield nothing useful in your state. You can’t even picture yourself getting free from their trap. You can’t think of anything beyond the tickles, or even anything at all while the tickles surge through your senses.

“Let’s keep this one around for a good long time!” another troll says. He scribbles his nails against your stomach. He drives a skittering fingertip deep into your navel while his other hand scratches all over your vulnerable, quivering stomach.

“Nah, let’s keep this one forever!” another troll answers. He runs the pinwheel tool up and down each of your soles while the other focuses their feathers on your toes. The tool scratches and tickles up and down, over and over again, at a rapid, scrubbing pace. It leaves your soles in a perpetual state of endless ticklish sensations.

“GAAAAAHHHHHHAHHAHAHAHAHGAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!!” you scream frantic fits of laughter. It’s all that you can do. No spells. No allies. Nothing around to save you from this fate. The new jar fills up quickly once again. Faluntroy replaces it, having a whole case of empty jars by his side, presumably for you to fill. He chuckles as he watches your little display.

“Nothing like a good little ticklish trophy to look at and play with, huh fellas?” he rouses the others. The others agree, showing little sign of fading interest in your ticklish torment.

The evening continues on. You lose track of time. You lose track of even where you are. In that moment, that moment that seemingly lasts forever, you simply exist to be tickled. You’re not to concern yourself with the concepts of time or space, let alone ponder upon the deeds that led you to such a conclusion. You are there to be their newly acquired tickle toy. They play with you with an almost childish carelessness, giving no concern to any need for air and water. They were wholly interested in extracting their ticklish revenge upon your body. One of your final cognitive thoughts was accepting that they had won, and much… much… much later than that, you ceased thinking all together, letting the mercy of total exhaustion carry you into a forced, yet much desired, sleep.

Act II

You wake to a blurry world around you, endlessly morphing and shifting. Your head pounds as your vision slowly begins to make sense of where you are. You move freely, your arms and legs no longer bound to the contraption that the trolls had you in. You wake lying down on a bed of soft, feathery straw. You raise your hand up to your head as you push yourself up to your knees.

“Wh… wha…” you mutter. Your eyes squint, only able to take in so much of your surroundings as your mind struggles to process. You look around and steadily attempt to calibrate your thoughts.

You remember leaving the elven compound. Shortly thereafter, you remember why.

You remember going through the forest alone to save the nymph girl. You remember thinking that it was a bad idea, but your conscience pushed you into it anyway.

You remember encountering the trolls again at the camp. You remember how they strung you up with ease.

You remember how they tickled you, or simply that they tickled you until you could no longer absorb any retainable information. You remember the tickling lasting longer than any other you had ever endured before, long past you mental means to even comprehend the ticklish torture.

You hold your hand to your chest. Remembering the tickling awakens the soreness ringing through your belly and jaw, strained from the constant fits of laughter.

Your clothes are all strikingly different from the ones in which you left the elven compound. Your robe and armor have been completely removed. Instead, you wear an off-white sheet more akin to tattered cloth across your body. You’ve also been left defenselessly barefoot and your wand is nowhere to be seen. Touching the back of your neck introduces the metal collar fastened around your neck.

The ground moves beneath you. As you look around, you notice that it’s not ground upon which you kneel. The trolls are nowhere to be seen. Instead, thick wooden bars line the walls around the small compartment in which you find yourself. Above you is a wooden ceiling too low for you to stand. Looking out between them, trees ease by at a casual pace. Fields of flowers, small wooden structures, and old, withered sign posts also pass by on the road atop which you are carried. It becomes painfully clear that what you’re in is a cage being pulled across an uneven path. You turn to the front where the cage is one of several in a row, evidently being pulled by a wrangler on horseback, or by creatures closely enough resembling horses. Inside each of the cages are others wearing largely the same thing you are, a tattered robe with a metal collar. They huddle together and hold one another. Some weep while others provide comfort and reassuring words.

“What is… happening?” you mutter to yourself. It’s the second time you’ve woken up in a strange place, presumably still in the Featherlands. The others you see carted are from many different tribes, most of which you remember learning about in the books that Tia gave you to study. You look around the outside of the cart. There doesn’t appear to be any distinguishing features about where you are or where you’re heading. You don’t recognize anything on the outside with what limited resources you have to go on. There also doesn’t seem to be any handlers nearby. A few grisly looking individuals walk alongside the carts several cars up, taunting the prisoners with sticks rattling against the cage bars, but other than that, the outside seems to be a cobble path cutting through barren woods.

You take a look around the cart that you find yourself inside. It appears to be in the back of the long, winding caravan. A guard does walk behind the cart on foot, paying little attention beyond just following the trail. Inside, you don’t find much in terms of things with which to interact. Your clothes and weapon are missing entirely. The only other thing to find inside of the cart is a girl huddled by the bars on the far edge of the cart.

You can tell by the ears sticking atop her head and the long, thin tail curled up beneath her that she appears to be some sort of cat-beastie. Her hair shimmers a shade of glowing cyan. Her flowing locks match the colors of her ears and tail, both slumped sadly over. She sits with her knees tucked up into her chest. You can barely see her face. Her long, forlorn expression boasts a look of distant sadness. Her eyes are puffy, her nose slightly red. Her features are gentle and soft. She sniffles and doesn't seem to give much notice that you've woken up.

You sigh and stay vigilant to your surroundings. You don't know how long you've been in the cage, where you are, or where you're going. A line of questioning to the best source of answers could potentially solve that issue. Or taking action regardless may make for the better option through which to try and break out. You don't know which will work, which will provide the best possible information, or which will even affect your current situation at all. You take your time weighing your options before coming to the best possible solutions.

Top 3 choices will be the course of actions you will take