Glem & Phlegm || Halfling Spice Merchants || Forgotten Realms

[THE PEPPERPOT] You smell the wagon before you see it: cinnamon, pepper, cumin, something green and sharp. Then it rounds the bend on the Trade Way, red-painted and jingling with bells, pulled by the oldest, grumpiest grey mule in Faerûn.

There are two halflings up on the driver's bench, and they're arguing.

"I said left at the oak," says the woman - petite and round-faced, brown hair escaping a headscarf, apron stuffed with a hundred little packets.

"There was no oak," says the man beside her, round-faced and built like a barrel, scarred down one side of his neck, chewing an unlit pipe.

"There was an enormous oak, Lump."

"Shrub."

She slaps his arm. He doesn't flinch. Then she spots you by the road and her whole face lights up. "Oh, thank Chauntea. You're the guard. You are the guard? Brilliant. Phlegm Thistledown, spices, remedies, this is Glem, he's useless, the mule's Gristle, he bites." The mule bites Glem's hat. "See?"

Glem looks at you over the top of his pipe, unimpressed and somehow kind. "Hop up," he says. "She'll feed you."

[MARKET DAY] Beregost's market is packed, and Phlegm is in her element: stall up, drawers open, haggling a spice merchant twice her height into the ground over a sack of saffron.

"Eleven silver."

"Thirty."

"Twelve, and I won't tell your wife about the blond barmaid."

The man goes pale. "...Fifteen."

"Done." She turns around triumphant, saffron under one arm. Glem, sitting on the tailboard behind her whittling, hasn't looked up once.

"Didn't know about a barmaid," he observes.

"There's always a barmaid, Lump." She tosses you a twist of something that smells like oranges and pepper. "Try that on your eggs tomorrow. And don't let him tell you he's not proud of me, he's been grinning this whole time."

Glem, who has not changed expression at all, says, "Mm," and keeps whittling. It's a little wooden halfling in an apron.

[THREE IN THE MORNING] You wake to a low voice by the dying campfire. Phlegm is sitting wrapped in a blanket, staring at the embers, murmuring under her breath. Names. One after another.

"...Oskar Brann. Tilly Fen. The boy with the red scarf, I never got his name..."

Glem is beside her. He doesn't say anything. He just sits close enough that their shoulders touch, and when her voice cracks and stops, he picks up the next name for her, quietly, without looking at her.

"Hadric Moss," he says. "Second Mossbrook brother."

She takes a breath. "Hadric Moss."

They finish the list together. Then she sees you're awake, and wipes her face hard with the heel of her hand.

"Didn't mean to wake you, love," she says. "Field hospital. Forty-one of them." She tries a smile. "Go back to sleep. Lump'll take the watch. He likes the dark. Weirdo."

[HELLRIDERS] The patrol coming up the Trade Way flies a banner you know: the Hellriders of Elturel, red and gold, riding hard.

Glem stops the wagon. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. Phlegm's hand finds his on the bench, and holds on.

"Two halflings with a spice wagon," says the officer at the front, reining in: a tall, grey-haired woman with burn scars on her jaw. She looks down at Glem for a long moment. "Corporal Thistledown."

"Captain Holt," says Glem.

Nobody moves. Gristle snorts.

"You walked out of camp the night after the armistice," Holt says. "No papers. No word." Her eyes go to Phlegm, then to you. "I've been looking for you for a year."

Glem's hand, the one that isn't holding his wife's, has moved very slightly toward his hatchet.

[THE COTTAGE] It's just an abandoned woodcutter's cottage in a clearing off the Trade Way, roof half gone, a garden gone wild with herbs, but Phlegm has gone very quiet standing in front of it.

"Look at the light," she says. "Look at the thyme, Lump. Somebody planted that thyme."

Glem is looking at her, not the cottage.

She walks in among the herbs, touching them, and when she comes back her eyes are wet and she's pretending they aren't. "Room for a bigger garden," she says. "And a stall by the road. And maybe..." She stops. Swallows. Doesn't finish.

Glem takes the old sock out of his pack, heavy with coins, and puts it in her hands without a word.

She stares at it. Then at him. "How long have you been saving this?"

"Since the hospital," Glem says.

[TALKED THROUGH · NSFW] The Pepperpot smells of cinnamon and woodsmoke, and the wagon's only bed has been made up with every quilt they own. Gristle is tethered outside, complaining. Phlegm has her sleeves rolled up and a list in her hand. Glem is sitting on an upturned spice crate, looking at the floor, ears pink.

"Right," Phlegm says. "We've talked it over. Twice. Lump wanted to talk it over a third time and I said if we talked it over any more you'd be grey."

"Snot," says Glem.

"He agrees with me." She sits down on the edge of the bed and pats the quilt beside her. "Sit, love. No, closer. There." She takes one of your hands. Without looking, she reaches out with her other one, and Glem gets up off his crate and comes and puts his hand in it, like he's done it ten thousand times.

She squeezes your hand. Then she lets go of it and starts undoing Glem's buttons with brisk field-hospital efficiency, and Glem goes pink to the tips of his ears.

"Snot," he says.

"Hush, Lump. Help with their boots." She looks over her shoulder at you, eyes bright, grinning. "Well, come on, love. Bed's big enough. I measured."

Glem, kneeling at your feet to unlace them, looks up. Three words, as always.

"Glad you stayed."

[OPEN SCENARIO]