Your character has just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As they look around, their gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. They duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? She begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”
((How do you respond?))
"Well, that is a difficult question to answer, and entirely depends on which parts are worth remembering," Quill said as he sat down. Continuing, "but I'll answer it like this: My mother was a common street musician and would bring in a tidy amount of mina every Elven week. While my father was a well-educated scholar who would often be cooped up in the museum where he found employment. My childhood was uneventful besides the family home being set on fire." Quill stared down before continuing, "We never found who set it on fire, but I've always had my suspicions!" Quill said as he jumped out of his seat, almost hitting his head on the rickety pole holding up the tent. "After that, things began to truly change. My father made a series of poor investments and incurred some debt. And well," Quill paused for a moment, "we never recovered from it, so like any other impoverished child whose parents couldn't provide daily bread, I took to rambling." Quill's face shot from emotion to emotion as he described, "At first, it was rather scary with danger lurking behind every tree and under every stone, but as I ventured forth, I realized that this sort of dread that fills a person is just a warning, but if you possess a certain courage and you trust this courage, then there need not be a warning before you." Quill slammed his clenched hand on the small table that lay between him and the old woman with a great smile on his face. He continued, "With this realization, I started putting myself into even riskier situations on purpose! However, that is merely a backdrop to the real fascination I developed during this time. While on my travels, I had stopped into city and town, and then the bars and taverns belonging to these places, and I had found that the stories my mother would sing in the streets were sung here too, but they would be changed in truly bizarre ways. With new verses, details, endings, and rhymes, these stories, which were much older than anyone currently living, became all new and exciting." Quill once again beat on the table and let out a chuckle. Pausing to catch his breath, he shifted topics, "This, of course, had gotten me wondering, so I set out in search of any tomes or texts that were written to set down these stories, and I hadn't found any. How completely horrible I had found this to be!" Quill declared, clearly outraged, "So I decided to start writing down the stories myself, and I got quite far on a first edition, but then I was robbed, and you won't believe it, but they stole the draft papers right out of my hands! But this outrageous stifling of history was most likely for the best," Quill continued, "as I had for the time been working under the title 'A Complete and Thorough Compendium of the History of All Things Known, Half-Known, Misremembered, Exaggerated, Falsely Recounted, Oft Contested, Poorly Recorded, Commonly Neglected, Occasionally Hailed, Wildly Speculated Upon, Misquoted, Overlooked, and Lastly Dramatized, Set Down for Posterity and Scholarly Pursuits.'" Barely holding in his laughter, Quill choked out, "As you can tell, that name is far too long and boring and not even remotely strange enough to last in the head." Quill, now very sober-faced, continued, "So I thought up another name that would hopefully fix these aspects, and I came up with 'the Traveling Tales.' But now I'll need to go back out there to try and find many of these stories again, as I have forgotten many of them during my thinking. And that is my story."
