Diary Entries 27

After the the Highland Games were over, I looked for work that would get me as far away as possible before I was challenged by Chan Lee again in a month. I managed to find a trade caravan leaving the city to travel to the SOTA region so I signed up as an escort. The client, a Lennox McDoogle, was transporting stone slabs and metal ores in Dimensional Carpet Bags divided among his three wagons, or "Each wagon has ten bags, each bag has 15 slabs and on each slab there is 20 units of ore," as he put it. We actually had a pretty uneventful trip until halfway to our destination.

We had just stopped for lunch, when we heard someone screaming for help. We rushed toward the screaming which appeared to be from two little girls stuck in a tree. They seemed to be under attack from a few wolves. We quickly scared the wolves away, and called for the girls to come down. After they came down, we managed to get a good look at them. One of them had long blonde hair with orange tips and wore a billowing white sleeveless top and maroon shorts, while the other girl had black pigtails and wore a white outfit, and the two of them were barefoot. Noticing that they were barefoot and that their feet looked squeaky clean, I was immediately on my guard and it was a good thing too as the two of them suddenly smirked and shouted.

"Now, Bell-chan!"

"Now, Ha-chan!"

Suddenly a vine with a monstrous pitcher plant attached and a vine with a equally monstrous titipiwitshik attached descended from the tree we had rescued the "little girls" from. I was afraid of this, we have been tricked by pixies.

The pixies are a race native to the continent of Talamh Aisling but almost nothing is known about them. What we do know is that they have the appearance of human children who are always barefoot (yet their feet remain squeaky clean), and are always accompanied by a familiar, and from some strange reason the familars of female pixies are terrifying while the males' are cute. Pixies love to play around and cause mischief. Basically they are super strong kids that are eternally young and immature who love to cause trouble.

Judging from the fact that these two were using the suffix -chan when calling the name of their monstrous pets, I would hazard a guess that these pixies originated from somewhere in the Sakura Kingdom. Of course, since no one knows where the pixies set up their communities, it is probably going to remain a guess.

"I'm Kazūra," said the blonde girl.

"And I'm Tio," said the dark haired girl.

"And we're members of the Hole Digger Gang," the two of them said together while posing. I am pretty sure I wasn't the only one of my group holding back my laughter.

Anyway, we carefully immobilized "Bell-chan" and "Ha-chan", before I rapped Kazūra and Tio on the head with Tear-jerker. You have to deal with pixies in a certain way, you see, like a parent, and not too lenient nor too harsh, otherwise... well... it's not pretty, even the hardest criminals will abstain from mistreating a troublemaking pixie.

We had traveled quite a bit further after dealing with those two, before another incident occurred. This time, the ground crumbled underneath us like a sinkhole and we fell. No sooner had we landed in the hole when we were attacked by a giant spider and a giant antlion. As we fought them, we heard giggling above us. I looked up and saw a girl with blueish purple hair in giant braids in a dark brown outfit and another girl with short pale hair wearing poofy white shorts with a red top; both of them were barefoot.

"Are you enjoying playing with Gumo-chan and Pit-chan," one of them asked.

"Let me guess, you are members of the Hole Digger Gang," I asked because this seemed way too coincidental.

"You're right, I'm Atora," said the pixie girl with braids.

"You can call me Torion," said the pixie girl with short pale hair.

"I was wondering if you would call off your familars."

"And why would we do that," asked Atora.

"It's simple really, we need to heal our horses that fell with us," I answered. This hole is pretty big, and as such, our wagons and horses fell with us. Luckily, the horses didn't suffer any fatal injuries, but we are going to have to spend at least a few hours tending to their legs and replacing the broken parts of the wagons, thank goodness McDoogle apparently always carries spare wagon parts and potions specifically designed to heal horses or it would take longer. Looks like my plea struck a chord, though.

"Wah! Atora, we forgot about Horse-chan! Quick we got to save them!" The pixies had their familars bring everyone and everything up. As we tended to each horse, the pixies would hug and plead the horse for forgiveness. The irritating part of this though was the fact that each horse acted like a soldier shrugging off an injury as just a scratch on front of loved ones in front of the pixies but suddenly looked pitiful when they moved on to apologise to the next horse. After the repairs were finished, and the pixies stopped bawling for the horses' forgiveness, we continued down the road with the pixies and their familars waving goodbye.

We had traveled on the road for quite some time when we heard a creaking noise from the forest from the side of the road. We immediately backed away as fast as we could, because a tree was crashing down on us. A giant orchid mantis with a pixie in a pink outfit with her pink hair with blonde tips riding it appeared.

"How dare you not fall into the trap that, I, the great Ranka, and my friend, Fureshia, have planned," said the pixie.

"Is Fureshia, your mantis," I asked.

"Are you blind? Fureshia is obviously the girl behind me..." she said as she turned around to look at the empty space behind her. She started looking around in a panic. "Fureshia! Where'd you go!?"

A muffled voice replied, "Over here. I was on the tree Hana-chan threw."

We all turned to look at the tree on road. On the fallen tree a rafflesia bloomed, within it was another pixie also with pink hair with blonde tips but left loose, wearing a white outfit with a very laid-back expression on her face. "I'm okay, Stinky-chan protected me.". Fureshia comforted a teary Ranka as we left quietly.

We were almost to our destination, Port Teach, when the ground gave way. We had fallen into another pitfall trap! Although it seems this time, that things were a little different as the hole was dug at a slant. To prevent us from climbing back up, our captors had placed some sort of adhesive material at the bottom. As we were struggling to get free, voices could be heard above us. "Senpai, I think we caught something!"

We looked up to see a male and female pixie (I figured that they were pixies just from the way this trip was going, turns out they were). The girl had green hair in pigtails and wore a yellow dress, while the boy had blonde hair and wore leather armor designed for speed with a red sash around his waist, and he was... eating cake!?

"You may know me as Sera, Vice Leader of the Hole Digger Gang," said the girl. She then pointed to the boy and said, "And this is our leader, Hachimitsu Senpai. Now that we have you in our clutches, prepare all of your valuables. Or else stay down there forever!"

Considering the fact that the girl seemed to be doing all the talking while he ate cake (very carefully I might add), I started to think that this 'Hachimitsu Senpai' preferred to eating sweets to fighting, so to test that, I gave my counteroffer, "If you let us go, I will buy you cake."

"Lowly human, you think you can bribe us..." Sera started to reply when Hachimitsu interrupted her with stars in his eyes and drool at the corner of his mouth, "A whole bunch of cake!? Deal!"

Sera looked like she had been wronged as she softly whined, "Hachimitsu Senpai..."

Hachimitsu looked at her with a face that reminded me of an eager dog for some reason and said, "Sera-chan, Usa-chan can't bring them up until you have Sticky-chan release them."

We were released from the sticky substance which, now that we could get a good look at it, turned out to be a sundew plant. We were then helped up and out of the pit by what I can only describe as the cutest giant rabbit I had ever seen.

"You guys wait here while Usa-chan and I get the others," he said as he ran off on the giant rabbit while singing about cake. A few very awkward hours later with Sera (who wore a defeated look on her face the entire time), we were joined by the previous pixies we had encountered on the road.

Together with the pixies, we soon entered Port Teach. The wannabe bandits dragged us to the most expensive bakery in town, The Imperial Biscuit. We ended paying for several tiered cakes for each pixie. Yep, the scariest thing in Talamh Aisling isn't the dragons, abominations, crazy people, or sea monsters, dear readers, it's pixies. No other species is as chaotic (or expensive) to deal with.