You can hear them before you can see them. They're making no effort to be quiet, that's for certain.
"Come back here, so I can squish your thieving neck in my fist, you hoppy little freak!"
That's followed by the sound of rough laughter.
"Yeah, boss! Squeeze it til his buggy little eyes pop out of his froggy little head! That's a great idea!" says another in a high-pitched, whiny voice.
Crashing through the burned-out husk of the Cracked Mug inn come four rough-looking individuals.
The only female member of the squad is tall and thin, her head shaved at the sides and back, with the rest of her black hair falling down her back in a long braid. She wears mismatched bits of armor: leather for the most part, with bracers covering her forearms. She's holding a heavy mace in her right hand. She wears a look of towering irritation, her lips twitching like she's muttering something under her breath.
One of the men is huge, both in height and girth. Shaggy brown hair juts out from beneath a dented helm, and his chin is lost in a cloud of bushy beard. He wears a breastplate, but it too is dented and even rusty in spots, and his clothes beneath are stained and in poor condition. He carries a longsword that manages to look somehow small in his meaty fist.
The other two men walk close to one another. The smaller of the two has a hooked, beaklike nose on an acne-scarred face, lank dishwater-blonde hair hanging to his shoulders. He wears no armor, but you wonder if his spindly frame could even carry the weight. Like the big guy, his clothes were probably once perfectly serviceable, but they're not at all clean -- you can see food stains (at least, you hope they're food stains) darkening the front of his tunic. He's carrying a long knife casually in his right hand.
The larger of these two men is a noticeable contrast to the others. He stands straight, he carries himself with confidence, and he studies his surroundings with a quick, critical eye. He wears a chain shirt that isn't actually rusty, a longbow at his back, and a well-made longsword in his left hand. His skin is darker than the others, almost dark enough to be a native of Rhamia in the southeast of the continent. His dark hair is cut close to the scalp, and a well-trimmed beard shows a few signs of white.
It's this last individual that speaks when he sees the scene before them, and you realize he's the one that was threatening to squeeze Froak by the neck. "Well, now isn't this interesting. Who do we have here?" He stops in the doorway of the Cracked Mug, and the others fan out to either side, Big Guy to his left, Angry Woman to his right, and Skinny Guy staying close by. "Haven't seen your type around here before."
He sheathes his longsword, and leans against the blackened doorframe, arms crossed. "I see you've met our amphibious friend," he continues, nodding toward Froak with a cold smile. "He's been sneaking about and stealing from us, so you might want to keep an eye on your coin purses."
"But to the more interesting question," he says. "What brings you to this burned-out boil on the ass of the lake?" He looks around at each of the party members, but settles his gaze on Verrian, sheltering the frog-man as she is.
