The young sorceress's sleep was fitful, and she spent the first hour or so of the night tossing and turning. A coy smile and shy request had been all it took to get a guard or two back home to show her a bit of self defense, but she'd never been in a real fight before. Her 'sparing partners' had been more interested in spending an hour or two with a pretty girl than teaching her any real skills, but she'd scraped together what knowledge she could. She might not be much of a fighter, but her natural agility at least made her a bit harder to hit. While the guards had been merely poking her with wooden practice swords or taking a swat at her pert rear with the flat of their blades, the bandits would be holding real steal and would not be happy once the ruse was exposed. She lay in the darkness, quietly fretting until she finally drifted off to sleep.<br/><br/><hr/><br/>The next morning she felt strangely calm, as if she'd exhausted her internal reserves of fear the night before. She dressed carefully, leaving anything that may rouse suspicion behind in the guest house, in a simple peasant blouse, knee-length skirt of rough-spun cotton, pouched belt, and sturdy traveling boots. With a critical  glance at the simple ensemble, she tugged down the neckline to expose a few more inches of creamy white skin; if she couldn't distract them with her words, maybe she could at least get them to gawk for a bit.<br/><br/>Out in the yard, she'd enlisted the others' help to position the Oleg's wagon in plan view of the gate and piled it full of their gear, using a few strategically placed trade goods from the traders' depleted stock to make it look as if the wagon was flush with bounty. One of her spears was carefully slipped between the stacks of goods, looking like nothing more than the handle of some simple tool or another.<br/><br/>It wasn't long before Lydia signaled the bandits' approach. Oriana pulled a scroll from one of the piles and cast the spell scribes upon it, smiling slightly to herself as she felt the invisible arcane force envelope her and vanish. After stowing the spent scroll in one of the piles she went about fussing with the 'goods,' her back to the gate. Glancing off the the side, she whistles a few short notes and watches as a small, rusty brown shadow shifts and moves along the far wall before dashing over to the tables near the fire pit and slipping beneath the one closest to the cart.<br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide</div><div class="spoiler_body">Ori's casting her Mage Armor scroll on herself and then directing Tsoni to hide somewhere (http://elliquiy.com/forums/dicebot.php?r=45958) and wait for her signal, which she does fairly well (http://elliquiy.com/forums/dicebot.php?r=45957).<br/></div></div>