"Aw man, bandits again?"

He eyes the two directly in front of him. They seem… not that tough, actually. And there's something about their outfits…

"Hey, is this getup, like, standard for bandits around here? Like striped jail clothes?"

He gestures with the zappy sword.

One of them squints at him (probably, anyway, it's hard to tell through the mask). 

"Hold on...blond hair, musical instrument, little red moglin friend...you're Elan! Drakath has promised a rich reward for whoever can take you down and bring him the Black Dragon Box!" 

"Oh, the slug prince guy? Well, joke's on him, I don't even have the Black Dragon Box!"

Beat.

"… how much of a reward could he have even given you, if you have to bandit people?"

"Well—but—" he splutters.

"...times are hard, alright?" mumbles one of the bushes. 

"We don't even get dental," says another. 

"SHUT UP!" The spokesbandit pulls himself together. "Drakath said the box was the big score! Once we get it, we'll be living like royalty! Now hand it over!"

"...but he just said he doesn't have it?"

"He was lying, stupid!" 

Hmm. Elan could:

1. Tell the truth about where he thinks the box is. Probably a bad idea, because they might beat Elan to the sneevil fort.
2. Lie and say he found the box already and put it where Lady Celestia wanted it to be safe. This is risky because there's a lot he doesn't know, so he might accidentally make it obvious he's lying.
3. Show them the contents of his bag. This seems like it would lead to them taking the contents of his bag.

"Okay, well, I'm only coming this way in the first place because I'm looking for the box! If I had it already then I wouldn't be here. Also, I'm sorry about the dental, that sucks. Do you at least have good toothbrushes?"

"You know, I think he might be telling the truth," says The Other Visible Bandit.

The spokesbandit hesitates. "...it doesn't matter. We'll get a reward for taking him down anyway, right? Plus we can, you know, take his gold."

"Yeah! Let's kill him and take his gold!"

"Yeah!"

"Get 'em, boys!" 

Okay, well, he tried.

These guys probably aren't as good as Drakath, since he's in charge of them, but there's a lot more of them to worry about. Also, this terrain is annoying.

"How much money do you guys expect me to have on me, anyway?"

Not that he himself has counted his pay yet, but he'd be surprised if it brought him over a hundred gold.

The bandits don't seem interested in in-fight banter, sadly. They're more interested in trying to kill him, or at least knock him out, as fast as possible. 

Luckily, the terrain is hampering them as well: there's only really room for one of them to come at Elan and Twilly from each end of the path, otherwise they get in each other's way too much. The ones hiding in the bushes attempt to provide ranged support, but Elan is moving fast enough that they realise they're in more danger of hitting their own allies and stop. 

He is very definitely still in the low-level starter zone. None of these guys individually is even as much of a challenge as Drakath was. 

Twilly can't really stand back-to-back with Elan, but he can for sure stand facing the other way and whack bandits in the shins with his stick so they don't sneak up on Elan from behind! 

Oh good, he was hoping Twilly would protect him from getting flanked.

The first time he disarms one of them, he tries talking again.

"Guys, I'm sorry, but you guys really aren't a serious threat. And you don't even seem super evil! Like, the last big bad guy I had to deal with killed his own best ninja just so he could run away. And you just seem like you want money. Do you wanna just pretend that you never saw me or something?"

Some of them kind of want to do that, seeing how easily he just disarmed their friend! The one who was loudest about wanting to start a fight is more reluctant, but with his club lost in a bush somewhere and his friends running away, he reluctantly backs off. 

The bandits flee into the woods whence they came. The path is clear again. 

"Okay, cool, I'll pretend I never saw you too!"

He sighs once the last one is gone.

"I need to figure out a better plan for dealing with guys like these. Like, none of them are that strong on their own, but if there was enough room for them to surround us, they totally could have gotten in a lucky shot. I guess I could… not bother with not hurting them too bad? But that feels wrong."

He'll have to think about that more later, he guesses.

"Do you think we're close enough to the bridge that we should keep going?"

"If those nasty bandits blocked the road to get people to comes through here, then maybes this path will go back to the main road soon! Twillies thinks I sees it bend in the right direction up ahead. And then it shouldn't be much further to the bridge!" 

"Okay. Man, I wish I knew the spell Sending! Then I could tell Rolith that the blocked road is a bandit trap. But maybe we scared them off good enough that it'll be fixed before they get back…"

Since Twilly said that they should be pretty close, Elan starts along the path again.

"Say, what do you know about those guys? All I know is what the ex-prince guy said when he fought me."

"Sorry, Twillies doesn't know very much about bandits, or about Drakath other than what everybody knows. ...I guess you might not know the things everybody knows." 

"Well, what I know is his dad was named Slugwrath, which, why, and King Alteon is the king now. I don't really know anything else about either of them except that Drakath thinks that he should be king instead."

"I guess Drakath thinks that because normally the son of the old king is the next king? But King Slugwrath was a really really bad king, so some of his knights overthrowed him. King Alteon—um, I guess he was Sir Alteon then—was their leader, and after they overthrowed Slugwrath they crowned Alteon king instead. So he's been king ever since! Everybody says he's a lots better king than Slugwrath." 

"That makes sense! What kinda king things did the both of them do?"

Heh, king things. He repeats it under his breath a couple times.

"King Slugwrath made the taxes really really high so people was starving, and he sended his knights out to beat people up when they couldn't pay! But King Alteon stopped all that! He made the taxes lower again, and he told all the knights to protect people like they's supposed to." 

"That definitely sounds like bad and then good king things!"

Elan doesn't really know a lot about politics, but "tax people until they're starving, then beat them up for not paying the taxes" is really obviously bad and not hard to improve on.

"I wonder if Drakath wants to do all that stuff too, or if he just thinks he should get to be king because his dad was king."

The path winds its way back to the main road again at a crossroads, where...there's another set of fallen trees blocking the road back towards Oaklore. Looks like the bandits were diverting travellers from both directions into their ambush.

Luckily, Elan and Twilly are going the opposite way, east towards Falconreach. (The south branch of the crossroads is un-signposted, and might be another little forest path like the one they just came from.)

"Here we ares! It isn't far to the bridge from here!" 

Elan looks back at the trees for a moment.

"Okay, cool. I wonder what hydras like to eat? Maybe I could trick it with an illusion of that. Oh, I forgot to tell you this earlier, but I think that mana potions don't actually work on me. I didn't tell the sneevils that because I didn't want them to get mad at me for wasting the potion."

"They doesn't work? Why not?" 

"I dunno! They don't hurt or anything, but they also don't give me spell slots back."