>>5799606>19The tissues swelled and stretched, bubbled and burst froth from both ends—the arm’s base and the stump beneath the shoulder. The goblin’s already-massive eyes widened as he gawped, and then began to scream. You leapt back, screaming as well on instinct, and your father leapt froward to guard you… But the goblin did not charge. Rather, as the limb knitted itself together and ripples of muscle contractions accompanied wrapping amorphous flesh across his body and beneath his baggy, patchwork clothes, the goblin hopped about madly, sprinting this way and that. You feared he would simply bolt after his companions for a moment, and that you would never see him again for all your wasted effort… But no. He was too confused and alarmed for that, totally disoriented, flailing about in the fashion which Pearce attributed to a freshly-decapitated chicken.
Eventually, the little guy wore himself out, coming to a halt not far from you. He bent over, grabbing his knee with one hand while he flexed the other—newly alive, once more his. The unpredictable after-effects of <Monstrous Regeneration> began to subside, leaving him alive, and whole. He honestly looked healthier than the other goblins you'd seen, even his scabrous face cleared up of the sun-damaged to his complexion, leaving him smoothly freckled.
He shuddered with the passing sensations and then—only then—looked again at you. You recognized the question in his wolfish eyes: why?
You pointed at Pearce.
“You owe me,” you told him. “How do I fix this?”
The answer came, to your surprise, in an impromptu lesson in herbalism. The wasteland goblin—Yok-Brot, you learned he was called-proved capable of speaking fairly erudite Common… Albeit rather colourful.
“Yeah, Qio-Khy—that’s our poisoner,--she makes this brew from the guts and shit of this one scorpion. Cracks ‘em open like nuts, slurps it out—gross as FUCK—and spits it real quick-like into this pot. Then she uses this stone dildo-looking thing—”
“A pestle,” you surmised.
“—yeah, this rocky pisser-looking thing and mashes it around. But hey, it’s an injectable, right? And we ain’t always cautious, accidents happen, people get cuts on their hands. You know. Gotta’ know how to treat it. Weirdest shit: a lot of common grasses and herbs , wrapped ‘round and tied off, suck it right out of you.”
“Pearce closed his wound,” you noted worriedly.
“Well,” Yok-Brot said with a smirk, “open a new one, near where it was.”
You were sure you’d paled, because Yok-Brot snorted, and drew a blade.
>1"Yeah," you said with narrowed eyes, "I don't think so."
You still had no bead on this... Individual. He was a bandit, no doubt, and probably a slaver, and he and his people had tried to kill you and POISONED Muffins and Pearce. No way were you letting him near either with a blade.
