>>5802526>>5802019>>5801932>>5801929>>5801921The Neme were more civil than you would have given them credit for, base don your first interaction with them—or, at least, based on Nemenmo herself, and how it ended. They did not seem to have any great abundance of food among them, but they shared what they had with you and with your companions, producing simple brown clay bowls for your father and friend, and for Terzo as well, and even for Muffins. They seemed to regard your furry (and scaley) three-headed friend with especially wariness and with almost a sacred respect, bowing their heads and scurrying away when he growled or belated, and producing a cup for each of the three mouths he hosted.
“Where did you get this… Manticore?” Nemenmo asked you.
“Chimera,” you corrected her. “A TRUE, and NATURAL chimera.”
You felt entitled to boast a little.
“But where?” she pressed.
You frowned. ‘I bought him at a fair,’ didn’t quite have the ring of an auspicious origin about it, and so instead you slipped the subject on the hairless genasi-girl.
“We are not here to discuss ME, or my companions, but YOU and YOURS. I see here that you’re not ignorant of the Laws of Hospitality… So where was your honour as a fey, earlier?”
She cast her eyes down at that, and looked upset at your accusations… Though perhaps not at you.
“You are right,” she said. “The ancestral spirits are disappointed with me, but… I feared for Nament. I.. I did not think you would triumph.”
“Well,” you sniffed, tilting your head haughtily and looking down your nose at her, with no small smugness, “what do you think of me now?”
“I’m impressed,” she said.
You felt your cheeks flush a little at how earnestly she said it, and how intently she regarded you, and cleared your throat to hide a crack in your adolescent voice.
“Well, they were only goblins,” you muttered, and then a question arose. “What is your people’s relationship to them?”
Nemenmo scowled, as if she wished to spit terrible fire upon them, condemning them with furious invective or worse… But then her expression broke into a sigh. She shrugged.
“They are as we are,” she said. “We all make our lives in the wastelands… We from the deserts to the south and east, they from elsewhere. They are filthy and rude creatures, barbaric and without manners or magic…”
She trailed off, and you recalled Terzo’s words and filled in the rest.
“You all live as bandits, raiders, and thieves,” you said. “The goblins AND you.”
“We are TRUE thieves!” she protested, standing up. “We have HONOUR! We sneak in, and we take, but nothing a person might need to live—and we do so without bloodshed, except to defend ourselves! We do not KILL as the goblins do. We never take or sell SLAVES! We are Bonum Chaoticum! Children of FREEDOM!”
