<div class="floatleft">(https://i.imgur.com/VoMy9La.jpg)</div><strong>Name:</strong>Allie<br/><strong>Race and Occupation:</strong>Half-elf country girl troublemaker<br/><strong>Location &amp; Time:</strong>Country roads, trying to take someone home to the place they belong.  Mid-day.<br/><strong>Tagging:</strong>Open<br/><hr/>The noon-day sun shone through cottony clouds upon dew-glistening fields tufted with briars and sprinkled with blue chicory and white Anne's lace, all abloom and eager for bees and butterflies to brave the drying lands where days of rain had filled wells, swollen creeks to teeming with fish, and left the air fetid-smelling with the redolence of cattle and moldering hay.  Amid one of the glistening roads-- brown paint-trails in the rich green loam of the lands-- a cart sits idle, its symmetrical tracks marred by a left-wheel wobble and the deep-slopping hoof-drag of a tired mule's pace, angry at lugging the overladen cart of rain-heavy melons toward the village of Amberdale, where the cart's rear-wheels had bitten down hard into the soft mud at the gully and sunk itself, axel-deep, into the muck.  From atop the driver's seat, a few whisps of white hair like a half-hearted cobweb trail in the mid-day breeze over a nose like a misshapen yam, the rest shrouded by a hood and cloak so patched and threadbare that it appeared like fool's motley through thick fog.<br/><br/>"Whooda thoh da muckud be so thikenda midled darud ta swahl da weel updoda assle loida, jus bough brohda holeploddydingidid loighawuz singkin indasum kinda swom", he said in his phlegmy, growling voice.<br/><br/>Peering over the tatted-eared and half-toothless mule, the sparkle-glass eyes of a young woman Not From Round Here peered in sheer perplexity at the man's words, looking into the inscrutable darkness of his hood to find his eyes suddenly visible-- two piercing cow-eyes absent of malice, but bearing the deathly serious concern of an old fogey for whom a mired cart is, without doubt, the end-all-be-all of existence.  For a moment, Allie was agog and moved her bow-shaped mouth soundlessly, trying to form a reply to the old farmer as she looked over his knot-and-branch frame under its patchwork cloak, and was overcome with a mild sense of awe that his use of the common tongue could be at once so incomprehensible and menacing while his face was plaintive and, in a way, almost kind in its root-vegetable way.<br/><br/>"Why..." words wouldn't come, so she bought time by mopping her pale forehead with the back of her hand, thus managing to smear more of the wide swath of mud that was accumulating there and pasting itself to her sweat into her spun-gold hair just above the peak of her pointed, but human-sized, ear.  "... I... see."<br/><br/>There was a creak from the running board as a figure leaned forward from beside the farmer, wearing an equally enshrouding but far-less shabby cloak.  A woman, perhaps half the man's age, and thus only ancient, not antediluvian, spoke with toothless gums and lips that curled up and flapped when she enunciated.  "'e sez who'da though' tha muck'd be so thick in'd middl'a da road loik dis, ta swolla the whale up'd de assle loike dat.  Jus' bou' broke'a whole bludy fing it did, loike singkin inda some koinda swom'."<br/><br/>Hitching up her skirt again, now finding it soaked to the knees with mud having come untied mid effort that last try, Allie nodded.  "Of course, yes.  These roads must be very tricky."  The mule looked over its rump at her, and she struggled to realign herself on dry ground, finding the soft ground sucking one of her boots off.  Again.  "fucking hell," she whispered to herself as she crouched to fish it out and toss it into the grass with its mate.<br/><br/>"Happuns every bludy toime, it duhs.  Every bludy rain."  Her husband made a sound of agreement that might have been<em>Yes, surely my lovely wife,</em>but sounded more like "Uhhh yaaa burrrg"<br/><br/>Still thinking over the woman's explanation of the mud, Allie growled in anger like a puppy going at its brother's ear and set about lifting the stuck wheel with the makeshift lever she'd forced in with a rock as fulcrum.  It was finally braced on dry ground and very close to the wheel, and had only cost a couple of hours of mud-digging and replacement without a shovel or wheelbarrow to achieve.  She was wondering when the whale had come into the village, and how it had ended up in mud up to -its- asshole, because she'd never actually -seen- a whale and she wasn't sure where one's asshole would be because they were supposed to be very big.  "I think she said... it swam..." she grunted with exertion as she had to climb under the cart to position her lever for the best angle once more, then out again-- now painted head-to-toe with mud.  She wrapped her arms around the lever's end, the drying stuff actually... well... dirt now, and helping keep traction.  She wrapped her lefts over it, then braced one against the underside of the cart's running board, which produced an "oof me arse" from the old man at the exact moment that the cart creaked.<br/><br/>Her long legs were quivering with exertion as she flexed the pivoting axel higher on one end, scissoring it closer to the cart's body, and closed the lever like a vice to lift the wheel up a few more inches from the muck.  "Goooooooo!" she hissed, and the old driver called out some unintelligible series of sharp squawks at the mule, whose response was such a startled leap that it caused the animal to defecate impressively and loudly, then lurch forward a whole foot.  The lever popped free as the cart wheel left it, and Allie was left lying under it to watch the reach pass over her head until the cart moved on, and she was on her back, breasts heaving with her panting breath, looking up at the lovely clouds and sun.<br/><br/>"Oooooh ya did it lass," the slightly-less-ancient woman called back.  "We canna stop or well mire 'gain, but come t'market an we'll r'ward ya--" the cart's rattling proceeded, then softened, and Allie's returning breath took over the sound of the trundling wagonload and sloshing mule.  When she'd recovered, having abandoned herself for a moment to the cool comfort of the muddy road, she sat up, looking at the 'mud angel' she'd made-- only a couple feet away from a fresh pile of donkey droppings and measured below the feet and over the head-- missed by inches-- by two deep ruts where the wheels passed her by.<br/><br/>Raising her hands as if in meek celebration, she sucked air through her nose, then exhaled in relief.  "...yay!" she said very, very softly, as if there was someone to hear she wished not to disturb, and she drew herself up to stagger to the roadside and collect her soft boots, her bow, her quiver and her traveling rucksack.  She became aware, suddenly, that she was hungry and thirsty, and gathering her things reminded her that the road's mud might not be entirely... well... spring-clean.  So she sighed in resignation and began to survey the land to find a spring, or a nearby farm with a well she could use to clean up.<br/><br/>And then-- serendipity.  She spied a gift from the farmers, though perhaps not an intentional one... a single melon had rolled from their cart and landed, softly enough not to break, in a pile of wet earth where she'd had to dig out the wheel.  Squelching her way over, she picked it up... "my first loot," she said with a soft sigh of pride, and looked over the vaguely uneven orb with its fibrous green-beige husk.  "Lunch."