A Merry Band

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Dawn shook her head to clear it. Did that crystal just start glowing? She opened her eyes to take another look, but the crystal was gone. So was her bedroom. In fact, she wasn’t inside at all. “Hot damn, it worked!” She whispered excitedly.

The girl turned in a circle, taking in her surroundings. She was standing in the middle of nowhere, on a wide, smooth path. Tall grass and trees hovered on the edge of the sandy road she was on. Dawn looked up the path, then down it. Which way to go? She looked down, but didn’t see any footprints other than her own. Which way would Xander have gone?

Taking a chance, Dawn went left, toward what she figured was the rising sun. She was briefly worried about being by herself, but the day was pleasantly warm and bright, so she couldn’t stay in that state for long. Whistling off and on, she quickly put quite a bit of distance between herself and where she’d started from. She knew she was taking a chance, but she’d thought through this. Xander wouldn’t have just stayed in one place—he’d have looked for civilization, or people, or something. After all, it had been six days. Nobody could survive that long without supplies, and he’d disappeared without even a jacket. It never occurred to her that she’d put herself in this new dimension with very little more, in terms of emergency supplies.

By the time midday had passed, however, Dawn was beginning to think maybe she’d made a mistake. There had been no signs of other people at all, just an endless expanse of grass and forest, and sandy path in front of her. She was tired and thirsty, since she’d forgotten to pack a bottle of water. At least she had granola bars.

Tired and discouraged, she sat down on a fallen tree just off the road. Maybe a short rest would buoy her spirits and she’d make it to the next town. Once she’d found the people who had settled here, they’d help her find Xander, right?

Half an hour later, Dawn was woken by the sounds of voices nearby. She jumped up, startled. A group of people were walking down the path, passing her by! She grabbed up her pack and ran to the path, stopping before she ran into them. Their appearance drew her to a halt. These things were most definitely not human!

There were four of them, of different shapes and sizes. The one closest to her was huge, maybe nine feet tall, and built like a Mack truck. Next to it was a short, furry guy with horns. Off to the other side was a black demon with wings and a tail. Alongside it was another winged one, but it was a dark red. Oh boy, how did they get here? Wesley said that only humans could pass through the portals!

Just then the group stopped. She heard a loud, garbled mass of noises float around them, something that probably passed for a language here. Dawn started to back away when they turned toward her as a group.

···•••·•••·•••·•••···

“Marni, please, it wasn’t my fault!” Prall grumbled. After all, it *wasn’t* his fault that the last hold had withheld their payment. He wasn’t the one that upset the ifnan trough, or spoiled the grain, or seduced the elder’s daughter.

The f’lh snorted. “No, but you had to open your big mouth *again* and let the elders know just what you thought of their superstitious nonsense, didn’t you?”

The orth shrugged. “So f’lh can’t take criticism. That’s nothing new to me.”

Duens rolled his eyes. “Could you two stop bickering, for a minute even? No, we don’t have any money to speak of. No, we won’t be performing in Thanfrar in the near future. No, f’lh can’t handle criticism. None of that’s getting us to Baign, now is it?”

“Spoilsport,” Prall said, “Always have to be rational, don’t you?”

“Somebody has to be the rational one. Otherwise we wouldn’t get anywhere,” Duens replied.

“Stop,” Zhaen murmured.

“What?” Marni questioned.

“We’re being followed,” the dalhari said. The others listened.

“A human?” Prall asked. “Why would a human be following us?”

“Let’s fin out, shall we?” Duens said. They turned around, peering into the forest. Just a few feet away was a young human girl, trying to make herself invisible.

“Hi there,” Duens said calmly. “Why are you off the path?”

Dawn stared at the creature. It spoke English? She backed up another step, falling over the tree she’d been sleeping on. When she got her breath back, she found herself surrounded by the things from the road. Scrabbling around, she pulled out the dagger she had tucked in her jeans.

“Hey, we’re not going to do anything to you, ok?” Prall said, taking a step backwards. “We just wanted to know if you were alright.”

Zhaen studied the girl. She was dressed funny, and didn’t look like the humans that lived in the area, or in the nearby regions. She was too thin and gangly. “Where are you from?” She asked the girl.

Dawn looked from person to person. They certainly didn’t seem very dangerous, at least not like they were, just standing there looking at her. Huh. This was weird. Maybe they could help her find out where Xander was. “I’m from somewhere else. I need to find a friend of mine. That’s why I’m here.”

Duens looked at Marni and shrugged. “Where’s your family?” The kid was way too young to just be wandering out alone, and there wasn’t a hold for miles in any direction.

Dawn shrugged. “They didn’t want to look for him, so I came by myself.”

Prall’s jaw dropped. Her family just let her go off on her own? “And they let you?”

Dawn grinned. “Well…”

“Do they know you’re out here?” Marni asked her.

Dawn shook her head slowly. “Buffy wouldn’t have wanted me to come here. She’s a fuddy-duddy.”

The quartet looked at each other, not understanding what a ‘fuddy-duddy’ was, but guessing that it wasn’t too great, from the expression on Dawn’s face. “Where are you going?”

“The nearest city, so I can find someone to help me,” Dawn replied.

“Not much of a plan,” Zhaen remarked in dalhari to Duens. The other dalhari nodded.

“This is odd. She should be home,” Duens replied.

Marni snorted. “You should be home with your family, child. It’s not safe to be wandering around alone.”

Dawn got up and scowled at the furry orange thing. “You sound just like my sister, always ‘you can’t do this’ and ‘you’re too young to do that,’” Dawn fumed. “Meanwhile Xander’s stuck here, has been for days, and nobody’s bothering to find him! And now I get her and find out that there are a bunch of other things besides humans here, when Wesley said that demons couldn’t get into it. And you want to lecture me about where I should be?”

Marni and the others stared at the girl. She sounded really mad, but they weren’t completely sure why. Duens did figure out that she was here looking for a person named Xander, that she wasn’t expecting other species to be here, and someone named Wesley was involved. And that her sister nagged her. It wasn’t much to go on. “Um, you know, you might want to consider going home—for reinforcements. If you want to find your friend, having more people to look would help.”

Dawn frowned. “I can’t. At least, I’m pretty sure I can’t. You wouldn’t happen to know how to get back to my home dimension, would you?”

Prall frowned. Home dimension? Dimensions were something that witches talked about, but no one had ever actually gone to another one. There were a very few stories about people crossing over to their world, but they were more than a century old now and he wasn’t sure if they were true or not. “How did you get here?”

“I used this crystal thingie. That’s how Xander got here, too,” Dawn explained.

“Did you bring one of these crystals with you to take you back?” Duens asked slowly.

Dawn’s face fell. “No. Would that even work, though? They were designed to bring people here.”

Marni stepped closer to the girl. “So you sent yourself here, without a way back, to look for a friend who got sent here, with no way back?”

Ok, so it didn’t sound nearly as good as when she’d first thought it up in her bedroom. “Well, I…”

Zhaen saw the beginnings of tears in the girl’s eyes, and smelled the sadness and fear rolling off her. “We should help her,” She said in dalhari.

“No!” Marni shouted back in f’lh. “We need to get to Baign, not help out silly little human girls without any sense.”

Prall shook his head. “But if we leave her here, she’ll probably get into trouble.”

Duens agreed. “She won’t slow us down too much, and at the least we can leave her with the humans in Baign. There are a bunch of them there.” Zhaen nodded her agreement. Marni was outvoted.

“Um, not to interrupt or anything, but what are you guys saying?” Dawn asked.

Duens turned back to the girl. Speaking in the trade tongue she seemed to know, he said, “There are humans in Baign, the hold we’re traveling to. Why don’t you come with us? It’s safer to travel with other people on the road.” Particularly if you’re a child, He didn’t add.

Dawn looked at them. They seemed friendly enough, and she didn’t have many options. “Ok, thanks.”

“What’s your name?” Prall asked her.

“Dawn,” She replied.

“I’m Prall. That is Marni,” He said, pointing to the f’lh. “Those two are Duens and Zhaen.”

“Hi,” Dawn said, smiling. “Where’s Baign?”

“To the west,” Duens said, pointing.

“Oh. I just came from there,” Dawn said. “I guess I get to backtrack, huh?”

Zhaen nodded. At least the kid didn’t have a bad outlook on things, for the most part.

They’d been walking for about ten minutes when Dawn asked her first question. “So, what are you guys anyway?”

Duens looked at her. “What do you mean?”

Dawn smirked. “Like, what are you? I’m human, but I don’t think you are.”

“Oh. Zhaen and I are dalhari, Marni’s f’lh, and Prall’s orth,” Duens said.

“Ah, that really clears things up,” Dawn replied. “Why are you going to Baign?”

“We’re musicians,” Prall said.

“What kind?” Dawn asked.

“Apprentices,” Marni supplied.

“Oh. What’s a f’lh?” Dawn inquired.

Marni looked oddly at Dawn. Oh yeah, she wasn’t from around here. “I’m f’lh. We’re a species that lives here.”

“Are you all orange?”

“No, some f’lh are brown, red, yellow, black, and any color in between,” Marni replied. This was an unusual conversation.

“What about orth? Do you all look like giants?” Dawn asked Prall.

“Giants?” Prall asked.

“You know, really big and tall,” Dawn added.

Prall nodded. “Yes, we’re all really big and tall.”

“Even the girls?” Dawn said incredulously.

“Females are a bit smaller than males, but still bigger than a lot of humans, and certainly bigger than you,” Prall replied.

“What about dalhari?” Dawn asked Duens. “You’re sort of burgundy with dark gray hair, and Zhaen’s pitch black all over.”

“Dalhari can’t decide what color they should be, so they’re every color,” Marni said.

“Huh?” Dawn muttered.

Duens frowned at Marni. “What she means is that dalhari come in a wide range of colors, more than any other species.”

“Oh. So dalhari could be, say purple?” Dawn inquired.

Zhaen nodded.

“Or pink? Or maybe bright yellow?” Dawn continued.

Duens grinned. “Any color you can imagine, a dalhari’s probably been at some point or another.”

“That nasty green color of the dirt you get under your toenails?” Dawn asked impishly.

Zhaen grimaced. “That’s one I don’t think I’ve ever seen.”

“Ah, so dalhari aren’t every color under the rainbow, just the pretty ones,” Dawn concluded.

Duens rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that sounds right, Dawn.”

“Can you fly?” Dawn asked, looking pointedly at his wings.

“Yes, we can fly,” Duens replied.

“Can you pick things up with your tail?”

Zhaen simply demonstrated that one by snatching Marni’s walking staff with her tail and tossing it around.

“Cool! I wish I could do that,” Dawn said, her eyes wide. “Did those horns hurt when they grew in?”

Marni looked over at her, startled. She’d been distracted trying to get her staff back from Zhaen. “No. I was a baby when they started to grow, and later on they didn’t hurt at all.”

“They’re neat. Do they get any bigger?”

“Not much. They’re for protecting the skull, not fighting,” Marni said. This kid never shut up, did she?

“I bet you eat a lot,” Dawn said to Prall, who like Marni was caught off-guard by the new conversational topic.

“Um, compared to you? Yes,” Prall responded after a moment.

“I have granola bars if you want one,” Dawn said, digging one out of her pack. She handed it to him, and he peered at it suspiciously. After a moment, she snorted and pulled one out for herself. “Unwrap it like this, and then just eat it.”

Prall watched her eat the whole thing before he tried his. It was hard and chewy and sweet, much like a very stale dalhari grain cake. “You eat a lot of these?”

Dawn nodded. “Yup.”

“You must have powerful jaws for a human,” He said, swallowing the thing.

“Not to your liking, Prall?” Duens asked, watching the orth swallow the human’s food. Prall made a face and shrugged.

“It’s about as good as your grain cakes, Duens,” He remarked.

Dawn cocked an eyebrow. “Somehow, I don’t think that was a compliment. You don’t have to eat them, you know. So, what’s there to do in Baign? Do you think that Xander might have been there? Or still be there?”

Zhaen shared a glance with Marni. This could be a very long trip. Very long indeed.

···•••·•••·•••·•••···

The sun was nearly set when Duens called a halt to their progression. Dawn was more than pleased to stop; they hadn’t rested at all since she’d joined up with them and she was exhausted. Plus, a bunch of nasty little bugs had come out when it started to get dark and she was tired of swatting at them.

Prall watched her fend off the insects while Duens and Marni started a small fire. Looking around, he saw a short, scrubby n’kaj bush growing nearby. He plucked several fleshy leaves off the plant and handed them to her. “It keeps the bugs off, if you rub them on your skin.”

Dawn looked at the leaves suspiciously. She picked one up and tried it, dragging the thing up her arm. It left a trail of cool fluid that dried rapidly. She shrugged and used the leaves on all her exposed skin, noting that the bugs did in fact go away.

“You’ll want to keep some of those,” Prall said as she sat down next to the fire. “The insects here carry disease.”

Dawn nodded, shivering. That didn’t sound very good, and it didn’t look like there were many modern conveniences around her, such as hospitals and pharmacies. She watched as Duens added fuel to the fire. It wasn’t very big and she had to huddle quite close to run off the chill that had settled on her in the darkness.

Zhaen dug out a couple of cooking pans and some food they’d purchased in Thanfrar. It was mostly yimkia, since the starchy vegetable grew in abundance in the area and could be harvested year round. Marni poured out some water into one pan to heat up the dried meat for her, Prall and Dawn. It would have to soak for a long time before it was soft.

“What’s that?” Dawn asked, indicating the yimkia.

Duens looked down at the food. “Yimkia.”

“What does it taste like?”

Zhaen handed her a slice before dumping the rest into a cooking pan. She watched as Dawn bit into it.

“Kind of like a tough apple,” Dawn said around the bite of food. “Weird. How to you cook it?”

“You can dry it and eat it like that, or boil, bake, or fry it. Or eat it raw, of course,” Zhaen said.

“What are you doing to it now?” Dawn inquired.

“Boiling it, with a little spice,” Zhaen said.

“What kind of spice?” Dawn asked.

Zhaen handed her the container of spice. Dawn tipped a tiny amount into her hand, tasting it. “Man, that’s hot!” She said, reaching for the water that Duens had given her.

Marni laughed at her. “I don’t think she likes it, Zhaen.”

Dawn shook her head. “It’s fine, just hot. Wow.” She liked spicy food, but that was fiery!

Once the meal had been consumed, Dawn dug out her blankets and curled up next to the fire. She was tired and had a lot of stuff running around in her head. This little whim had turned out to be quite the adventure. She hoped Xander was having as much fun as she was.

The musicians were nice, if a bit…odd. She was used to hanging around with demons, since Spike had become something of an unofficial babysitter—before his disappearance. She missed him terribly, but knew that if he’d found greener pastures, it was better for him. Lusting after Buffy was bad for his health, and nobody else in the Scoobies liked him very much.

She wondered, though, if these people were really demons. After all, not everybody was one, right? Oz was a werewolf, but nobody called them demons, not exactly. Whatever they were, they were helping her out, so they were good in her book.

Marni watched Dawn drift off to sleep. “This could be a serious mistake, you know,” She said.

Duens looked at the sleeping kid. “Maybe, but we can’t just leave her out here.” Zhen nodded her agreement.

“We can’t,” She reiterated.

Marni grumbled. “Dalhari and their stupid values.”

Prall looked over at the disgruntled f’lh. “Might as well throw the orth in with the dalhari, because I wouldn’t have left her either. And I don’t really think you would have, Marni. She’s just a kid.”

“Who has very poor judgment!” Marni exclaimed.

“And you never used less-than-clear decision-making skills?” Duens asked her. “I didn’t think so. So maybe she’s got a flair for the dramatic. We can all relate to that. And besides, we’re all wandering here and there, without as much of a goal as she has. I don’t think we can comment too much.”

Marni snorted her disagreement. “We’ve got a purpose for being out here, Duens. We’re earning our places in our guilds, albeit the hard way.”

“And she is searching for a lost friend, something far nobler than trying to better one’s position, don’t you think?” Prall replied. Marni rolled her eyes but said nothing.

“But all that is irrelevant. She won’t slow us down, so why worry?” Zhaen said. “She’s keeping up rather well, and other than the constant barrage of questions, she’s not bad traveling company. At least she’s curious about her surroundings.”

“You just like children,” Marni huffed. All of them liked kids, but the dalhari had an almost reverent attitude toward them, particularly ones they saw as endangered.

“So?” Duens challenged. “What’s so wrong with that?”

“They’re annoying,” She replied.

“You like f’lh kids,” Prall reminded her.

“Yeah, because they’re quiet!” Marni exclaimed.

“Only when they think you’re going to get mad at them,” Duens said. “You scowl at them and they shut up, but it only works on f’lh youth. That’s why you don’t get along with other kinds of kids.”

“And she’s not exactly a kid anymore,” Zhaen pointed out. “She’s nearly breeding age for a human.”

“All the more reason for her to be with her family,” Marni huffed.

“Stop worrying so much about it, Marni. We’ll make Baign in good time,” Duens said, ending the conversation. They all needed rest if they were going to get to the hold tomorrow.

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