The Huffleys

A father-and-son pair of hunters — the bowman Payton Huffley and his teenage son Preston — trapped for months in the Grey Vale Cave before the party reached them. Cornered on the ledges near the aqua-regia acid pool, they survived by drinking the toxic "yellow water" in desperation, their condition badly worn by the cave's environment and the ever-present threat of the Queen Grabbler above. Jaxley (rescued earlier) first named them — "the Huffleys, the father and the son, hunters together" — and pointed the party deeper to find them.

(Father's name rendered "Payton" / "Peyton Hufflepuff" on his own IOU; our Session 25 transcript also mis-voices him as "Kain" — an audio artifact, not the former PC of that name. See Canon Questions.)

Session 23

• Flagged by Jaxley as survivors still trapped deeper in the cave — "the Huffleys, the father and the son" — alongside a scholar (the wall-licker, later Otto).

Session 25

• Found at last by the acid pool, filling vessels with the toxic aqua regia beside the corpse of the woodling child Dodo (de-handed by the Queen).
• Magra trades them clean water; Jex gives them 10 real arrows ("10 will last me weeks"). Payton, a bowman, swears to put two of them into the Queen Grabbler if the party is ever mad enough to fight her.
• The party still declines the suicide of fighting the Queen and leaves the Huffleys where they are.

Session 27

• Encountered again during the cave downtime. Payton displays an uncanny, grim "death-hearing" — diagnosing Otto's offscreen death by the sound of his last breaths ("Was your friend mid-40s, male, lung cancer? The wheezes as they died were not the wheezes of a healthy lung").
• He gives Thalia a postage IOU and a distress note (a "help, the Grappler Cave" letter, signed "Peyton Hufflepuff") to carry out of the cave — another delivery for the party's oath-bound courier.