"Works every time!" I could hear Leo boast.
My head...
Unfortunately, I was on the receiving end of the prank. Leonard unwound the end of my tail, making me fall on my head, and here I was. On the grass. In the middle of the night.

"Let's go. It's past ten, we were meant to leave an hour ago," Adrian yawned. I nodded, and we headed out of Ragni and into the Nivla forest.

~

"I CAN'T TAKE ANY MORE OF THIS!" I screamed, pulling at my hair. "TREES, TREES, TREES! ALL I SEE ARE TREES!"
"Calm down, Rinire," Adrian sighed patting my shoulder. "We've only been in the forest for five minutes-"
"FIVE MINUTES IS A LONG TIME WHEN THERE'S NOTHING TO DO!"

"Leo, tell her to shut up," Alistair, Adrian's brother, snapped. "I swear, my hangover went away an hour ago, but I think it's coming back."

"Rinire," Leo sighed, "shut up."

I grumbled. While I am normally as wild as a lone wolf, Leonard has a sense of authority over everything. Whether it be animals or people, even Alistair who is a complete different species, they listen to him. I heard him force a bandit to apologize when we were being robbed.

We were traveling as a party: a small group of people in a temporary guild working towards a common goal. In it were me, the Ranol brothers, Leo, Meda and Scalia. I was tired of my bland surroundings.

'Big tree, small tree, weird tree, tall tree,' I thought, now coming up with a poem about my favourite hunks of wood. 'This tree has a little bird! This tree is a mangled turd! This tree is walking away, and this-'
"HOW IS THAT TREE MOVING?" I yelled.

The tree turned around. It was a small tree to start with. Comparing to the grand oaks that stood like giants under the moon, it was a small sapling. The branches had an hourglass shape to them, going in near the middle. The wood seemed mix and match, and it was no taller than me. On the other side was a middle aged woman wearing a long, purple robe and a standard mage's hat.

"Sorry to disappoint you," she replied, rubbing her eye from lack of sleep. "I'm a merchant, not a tree."
She simply wore a large camping bag with all her very numerous magic staffs tied to a rack on the front. They looked like strong good quality staffs too. I asked her if she would sell one, but was disapointed with the answer.

"Nope," she replied. "Generals only. These things cost an absolute fortune."

"They do look quite good. What brand made them?" I asked, as everyone seemed to walk on without me.

"Vie," she replied. Before I could say anything, Meda, who was hanging back with Scalia, dragged me off.

"YOU'RE VIVIAN OF THE OLYMIC TORCH?" I exclaimed, as she sighed and took a shortcut off the path. Vivian Lune was the best staffcrafter in the world. While staffcraft is normally left to elves and mermaids, she picked up the knife at the age of twenty-five and used her fusion curse to make wonderful, durable staffs. Only few people other than the Generals of the province owned one, as they could last a good fifty years, and any powders or enchantments that she adds are so tightly bound that they are impossible to dismantle from the wood.