The two orcs stared at the paladin, his armor dented, bruising around his cheeks and traces of dried blood around his nostrils and a chipped sword lying at his feet. He stared at them with a furious, righteous hatred and likely would have leapt to try and strike them down if he hadn’t been so securely bound to the tree.
Scratching his head Kurzog looked to his fellow Orc (a widowed farmer named Gharzia he’d had a crush on since he was a boy but never got around to acting on before she was married to some Grunt) and asked “So… I’m not going to say this isn’t impressive or what not, but I feel like beating up a member of the alliance is the kind of thing that’s going to cause problems, especially since you appear to have taken him prisoner.”
“Not my handiwork; I found him on the edge of my property like this”
The paladin suddenly begin yelling at them, his words sharp and with a speed that mystified Kurzog, he sounded like a chittering squirrel that had gotten into an alchemist’s lab and drank something that made it move faster.
“Any idea what he’s saying?” Gharzia asked?
“Not a clue; if they would just learn some basic Orcish it would make all of this so much easier,” he muttered as he begin studying the ground. He may have been a peon but Kurzog had tracked enough lost pigs and chickens in his time that he had some some idea of how to look for clues as to what happened.
Which made this even more odd. Aside from the tracks that he and Gharzia had made getting out here, the only clue that anyone else had been here was the trodden grass near the base of the tree… but that could only mean…
Glancing over at his companion, he saw the paladin screaming himself hoarse as Gharzia tried to bring a water skin to his cracked lips “Ancestors sake you idiot it’s water, WA-T-ER, you can’t be out here in this heat wearing plate and not drink”. A few more attempts were made to squeeze the life giving fluid into his mouth but the result was just having it drain out of his screeching maw though it did make some silly burbling sounds at one point that left Kurzog stifling a giggle. He didn’t want to look to childlike around her after all.
“So… this is going to sound dumb” he said as the pieces came together in his head.
“Dumber then some fool refusing to drink water in this heat?”
“You tell me: I think he did this to himself.”
Swiveling her head around to fix him with a confused expression Gharzia could only stare in confusion first at Kurzog and then at the paladin and then back at him again. “…how?”
“Theres no tracks around here, the Centaur would never have let him keep his armor or weapon, the quillboar would have just killed him and none of the animals around here Could have tied him to a tree.”
Gharzia squinted her eyes as she tried to process why someone would tie themselves to a tree in what wasn’t even remotely disputed territory before a sudden worried look came over her “is… is this a sex thing? Eikre ~ancestors watch over him~ told me that some of the alliance races were into… disturbing things… like uh… knotwork.”
Kurzog struggled to think of how to respond to this; the situation was so bizarre and surreal and the idea that someone would tie themselves to a tree in the blazing heat seemed insane… but why the hell else would he be here like this?
The human screamed some more something about stormwind ~that was a word he recognized at least~ and orcs but any attempt to parse out what he meant was immutably ruined by the possibility that this might be some kind of human mating ritual, and his screams had been directed at both of them… and while He considered himself a forward thinking kind of orc that didn’t judge other people (some of his best friends were pandarens after all) he really wasn’t interested in making the beast with two backs with another male (to say nothing of how it would get weird if Gharzia was somehow involved.
Shaking his head he looked over at Gharzia and tried to offer a reassuring smile and said “Uhhh… we should probably go and find one of the Grunts. They’ll know what to do about this.”
Reaching down down Gharzia grabbed hold of one of his hands and simply begin walking as fast as she could from the human. This whole thing had been simply too bizarre for her and it was high time someone else dealt with it. Maybe she could call it a “quest” an get some youngsters to resolve the matter for her in return for some of her husbands old junk and a fistful of copper.