[color="#cc8899"]Dictated, not read

So, today began with a casual drink at the local pub. After an earthquake rather rudely interrupted my meal, I found myself in a shallow pit with a large quantity of deceased tall races, and a rather shady looking human. I asked the human to help me pile up corpses to aid us in climbing out of the pit, which he politely refused after explaining a distaste for touching dead human bodies. I politely explained to him that this was not acceptable - it took one of my best angry glares, but he finally saw things my way and began assisting me. After the human and I climbed out of the pit, we were accosted by a rather irate human claiming to be the owner of the former establishment. He suspected us to be the originators of the collapse, and demanded that we compensate him. After flatly denying any involvement, he tried a different approach - he offered us a sum of money to search for a man under his hire who had gone missing in the woods, with the promise that refusal would result in his summoning the town guardsmen. I ordered the human currently intimidated by me to attempt to track the missing man, and followed him into the nearby woods.

A short while later, the human came to the realization that he had followed the wrong trail - at this point, I determined that he'd be able to work more efficiently if he no longer feared me, and we came to an understanding regarding the monetary reward - I would walk away with 60% of it, he with 40%. He agreed, and from this point on our teamwork was no longer jeopardized by a power struggle.

After setting upon the correct trail, my ally and I came upon a mangled corpse of a man. How dead was he, we wondered? Dead enough that his heart was no longer beating. While he searched for any new leads on the trail, I examined the corpse, discovering two things -
1. A piece of paper with writing in the common language, which I stuffed into my pocket
2. A suspicious female elf wizard had been following us

Before I could stop to ponder this information, a low growl eminated from a nearby bush, and to our great chagrin discovered that it was inhabited by a large feline! My companion and the elf woman cowed behind me, at least until I sidestepped, remarking with astonishment that we had come upon a Dire Lion. The human and I each began retreating in opposite directions while the elf woman stared at the creature looking out at us from the bushes.

I scattered coltrops on the ground in front of me in anticipation of the beast's assault, and it watched with the calm and patience of a deadly serpent. The elf woman blasted it with a ray of some kind, and it roared in fury. The human continued to retreat away from the lion.

I drew my sharpened spoon from its sheath and began walking to the other side of the coltrops I had scattered about, when the beast leapt forth from the bushes and began it's assault! It's fury was terrifying, its leap formidable ----
until it collapsed mid leap, impaling its paws on a few of the coltrops. The elf woman must have weakened it with the earlier blast.

She followed with another ray, the beast giving a half-hearted roar as it further collapsed under its own weight. The human and I began striking it while it lay near-helplessly, collapsing each time it attempted to stand, falling back into the coltrops that it had landed in after the failed charge. I buried my sharpened spoon into his flank after a few choice blows, while the beast meekly pawed at the human, wounding him despite being a mere shell of its former strength. The elf woman proceeded to loose 2 crossbow bolts into it from accross the coltrops. After embedding my spoon sword into his hide, I drew my butcher knife and began hacking away, most of my blows glancing off his thick hide and bony protrusions.

Having grown weary of the tedious process of wearing down the beast's life with slash after slash, I moved in for the kill, standing near the neck and chopping down fiercely. My first attempt glanced harmlessly off of the beast's hide, but the second fell true, carving out its throat, a fatal wound that would leave the creature bleeding and suffocating as it struggled to breath.

However, my fellow combatants and I were to discover that the battle was not yet over - 3 flesh covered gray constructs climbed forth from inside the Dire Lion's throat and began to flee. I landed a solid hit on the nearest of the 3, with the elf woman loosing a bolt into another. They took off into opposite directions, 1 south, 1 southeast, and 1 northeast. I chased the one that i had wounded, which was fleeing to the southeast, attempting several times to grab it. The elf woman did the same with the southernmost creature. we caught hold of them at about the same time, with the northmost one escaping. While I ripped the wings off the one that I had captured, preventing an escape, the elf woman was bitten by her captive, collapsing to the ground. Her former captive fled. I then ripped the head off of my captive, placing it in my backpack, and went to check on the elf woman. She appeared to be asleep and in no immediate danger, so I moved to the corpse of the Dire Lion and began skinning it. The creature's hide was massive and heavy, so I took only about 3/4 of it. The elf woman awoke and began collecting meat from the corpse for future use.[/COLOR]