>>5983324>>5983231>>5983174>>5983165>>5983161These men are not here for peaceable purposes. They mean to intimidate Costella at best, and to attack one or both of you at worst. You know next to nothing about Carlos De Gori, except for his designs upon Costella, and that he is wealthy enough to offer a bride-dowry and stupidly belligerent enough to assemble a small crew of fellow fools to try to win back a lost lady love by force of arms. As such, a formidable form seems most appropriate, and the first such form that comes to mind is that of your pet chimera, Muffins; more specifically, his most fearsome, leonine aspect.
Your hair grows long and thick, splitting the thin band which you use to hold your ponytail in place as it spread out to encompass your neck and shoulders. You feel your skin ripple as fur follicles multiply and rapidly produce golden-brown hair in rolling waves across your body, like a sudden crop of wheat across barren earth. Beneath your skin, bones and muscles pop and crackle as they rearrange into something more muscular—albeit not quite so mighty as Muffins himself, who has grown larger than you have heard of true lions in the Southlands growing. It becomes rather cumbersome to stand on two legs rather than four, but you grip the wall to hold yourself up as you turn to face the forces of this ‘Carlos’: four burly-looking male, three humans and one with at least some orcish admixture by his underbite, thick brown, and the porcine lilt to his nose.
It the last one, the half-orc, who first notices you. He scents the air like an animal, seeming to notice the shift in your body by smell, and turns to face you with some startlement. He taps one of his fully-human companions with a quick knuckle-rap upon the shoulder, and this man, too, takes in your fierce, beastman-like appearance with evident shock. For your part, you notice both of them are armed—they have shortswords upon their belt, and the cheap leather armour of casual adventurers or corporate private guards. So, too, the other two men, who are still knocking upon other doors, ignorant of you: armed, armoured, ready for trouble.
“Hey, Herman! Jackson! What’s the hold-up, ey? I don’t hear you two knocking!”
This voice doesn’t come from any of the four you’ve spotted already, but from behind them. Emerging from a room he’d seemingly barged his way into comes a swarthy, handsome man, taller than the others. Even in his loose silk shirt and breeches, you can tell his body is more trained and better built than the others in an instant: it’s in his posture, his movement. He doesn’t wear armor, but he alone has drawn his sword: a proper longsword, ill-suited to the close confines of the inn’s narrow halls, but with a decorated handguard and a peculiar sheen when attest to it being both the weapon of an aristocratic family AND it having been enchanted in some fashion.
