I nodded, and felt a slight shiver as the mirror in my shoulder bag recorded the quest.
"Good luck, lad. The rock badger are a feeble folk, but they make their homes in the crags." The badger man whirled to face the other people in the square to resume his pitch. Before he could even open his mouth, two pixies swooped down and dumped a bucket of red paint over him and his cart. They had tied green rags over their tiny faces like old west bandits.
"Stop the torment of innocent animals for quest gains!" shouted one. "Stop the rape of Elysium woods!"
As they flew away, we noticed that most of the people on the street were ignoring the spectacle. The badger man had wiped the paint of his face and was beginning to separate the badger pelts into damp and dry piles.
"Excuse me, what was that about?" Susie asked him.
"Stinkin' PATA," grumbled the badger man, then noticed our confusion. "Pixies Against Tormenting Animals. They're all worked into a lather now that Epic City is starting to grow toward the edge of the woods. They're tree spirits, y'see. It cuts into their action. It's not like they can't get a new forest just as easy somewhere else in Ether."
"Wait, so the badgers don't just re-spawn after they're killed?" I asked. Typically, enemies in these games would reappear shortly after being killed so that other questers could kill them.
"Re-spawn?" he said, aghast. "If they re-spawned, how could we exterminate them? What a waste of time that'd be."
He had finished rearranging his pile at that point, so he returned to recruit from the crowd again.
"Well, I'd best quit woolgathering. Life ain't all quests and jib-jabbering for us NPCs, ya know."
