"HELP I'm being robbed!"

Insight check!

Oof, I feel that, my group hasn't been able to get our shit together to have a proper session in months.

A while back I played in my friend's home-brew setting as Lotor the All-Beard, a raccoon pirate, known as the All-beard because he was covered in fur, so he was all beard.

Lotor was a dirty, chaotic, moron, and throughout the entire campaign the dice gods smiled upon him, and nearly every harebrained scheme he came up with somehow managed to work out somehow.

He did not speak the common tongue, and was also illiterate (but a master of forgery somehow, he couldn't read the documents he forged, but with a handwriting sample and someone else to put the words together for him he made it work) so the main way he communicated with the rest of the world was with the aid of his talking parrot, Polly, acting as a translator (and also his accountant, secretary, and numerous other roles that Lotor lacked the smarts to do himself.) Polly was a very intelligent bird who didn't much care for his idiot master, and although it was brought up numerous times, it never stuck Lotor as strange that polly could actually talk and not just mimic speech, he always just shrugged it off as "parrots can talk." Many hints were dropped over the course of the game that there was more to Polly than met the eye, like a magic lantern that made Polly cast a human-shaped shadow, and every last hint went straight over Lotor's head. At the end of the campaign it was revealed that Polly was a long-missing archmage who's absence was fairly central to the overarching lore of the world, he'd had his memories erased and transformed into a parrot by the big bad, and through a series of unlikely events had eventually found his way to a curio shop where Lotor purchased him because he thought it was neat.