"Can you fix it? I don't want to tell my mum, cause she'd be mad at me playing in the river when just yesterday somethin got her friend Maemee's chickens and stuck her turnips full o feathers."

"I can help, though you'll need to keep an eye on it for a few days."

"I can do that! What're you doin down at the river anyhow, grown-ups hardly ever come down here."

"I was looking for strange things - I'd heard about something going after people's chickens and the like..."

"That was probly the same monster that got me."

Alistair stops looking around and walks down to join Xena.

"A monster got you? What are the other kids still doing in the river then?"

 "Some of em don't believe me and think I'm just being a wimp." he throws a rock at the water. "The rest think they can fight a monster, and it's not like I couldn't get away so probably it's not that scary anyway and they'll get away too if it comes after them."

Right after he says this, there is a loud splash and a scream from the river.

She breaks into a full on sprint towards the sound, moving her chakram to her hand.

There is something in the water.  It looks like a mass of tangled plants and driftwood, but it definitely seems to have grabbed one of the kids who was playing in the water and is trying to pull them under.  They're flailing wildly and trying to get away, but seem to be having little luck.  All of the other children have gotten out of the water, and are yelling and throwing wood and rocks at the creature, which seems to be drawing the wood into itself, though occasionally the rocks will manage to break off pieces of the creature and cause them to float away.  This doesn't seem to bother it.

She throws her chakram, first, even as she sprints towards the kid. Her chakram's perfectly angled to cut through a thin, load bearing point on the parts entangling the kid - and then her sword's in her hand, and she's moving to hack at the plants and pull the kid to safety.

The monster goes down easily enough, but as soon as she's got the kid out of the water, it begins to re-form, and rise up out of the water, something it hadn't done before.  One section of the creature, a long tangle of plants with a piece of wood on the end, rises up into the air and falls quickly towards Xena.

"Watch out! It reformed!" Alistair thinks desperately for something he could do to help in this fight, and settles on setting the main body of the monster on fire.

She retreats, a bit, yelling for the kids to keep getting away, and fends it off with her sword, analyzing its movements and darting or jumping around when needed.

The monster sinks into the water to put out the fire.  The attacking limb(?) continues to fall, but it is as easy to chop off the body as it was to free the boy, and now that she's watching, Xena can easily prevent the monster from taking back the pieces she chopped off.  When the monster rises back up from the water to strike out with another limb, it looks somewhat charred. 

Alistair lights the main body on fire again, and then closes his eyes and begins to concentrate, sometimes moving his hands around in ways that make little sense to someone watching.

She keeps fighting, fending it off from the shore - never going too far into the water - her sword's keen and she's good at this, she's already adapted to its movements -

It doesn't take her too much longer to chop it fully to bits.  It's dead before Alistair finishes whatever he's doing.

He opens his eyes, intending to check the location of the monster, before he puts the magic in place.  He notices that it's already been defeated, and sighs and closes his eyes again.  A few moments later, the river abruptly becomes still and calm again, any last blades of grass from the beast that were still twitching falling still with it.

"Think that's the end of it?" she calls to him.

"It should be! You got it before I could do what I meant to so I had to improvise a bit."

He walks towards her and lowers his voice.

"If I'd just released all the magic I was in the middle of using it would have released a ton of ambient magic at once and almost certainly gone off at once, I used it to still the water instead, but that didn't actually burn up all of it."

"Need something else to do with your magic then?" she asks, voice equally low.

"I was just gonna tie it off to the top of one of these trees, but if you have something else you need done that would be better."

"There was an injured kid, earlier, if your magic can do healing?"

"...Yeah, I can do healing, but it's complicated and tricky and is gonna take me a bit, unless it's something really minor, I've patched up enough of my own little scrapes and bruises to do that much quickly."