Games We Play

(The following journal is from the viewpoint of Foley, a halfling thief, some years later.)

We debated whether or not we should have gone. From the shed, Shelly. The shed at the keep. Do I have to rehash things every time we get together? I and the others, bent on revenge against the pirate slavers who captured us, had followed the directions we found in the journal of the ship we were enslaved on to this island where the slaves were dropped off. Are we good, now? Yes? Thank you.

Though it wasn’t the smartest of ideas, and we were quite used to those, we decided to press on into the keep. Sully was still damp and upset from his time spent, head-first, in the shallow moat and the rest of us had scratches and bruises, even after Colwyn called upon powers to heal us. Hoar seems quite amiable toward keeping us fit, probably because we were doing her duty of vengeance. Or his. Whatever.

The first room we discovered inside the keep was a well-made set of doors, wood and metal with a lattice letting us peer inside. Though there were torches along the walls of the keep, which was not a comforting thought, there was none in the open courtyard beyond the doors. We could see trees and grass, some kind of orchard.

The door, for some reason, was trapped. It was trapped badly, fortunately, with nails peeking out of the wood, arranged up and down the edge of the doors. Should some brute try to bust the doors in, they would not only get a shoulder filled with old nails but with whatever tipped them, as well.

We bypassed the door for the time being, as I had not the tools to hammer the nails back into the door and not the skill to overcome the rusty padlock. Again troubling, the padlock was on our side.

The hallway went quite a ways, down the edge of the courtyard we couldn’t enter. We checked out a door near the hall’s far end and, in the usual process of my looking for traps, all the lichen on the wall beside me turned to stone. Now that I come to tell you kids, I think it was probably the intended purpose of the trap I found, though I found it the hard way. The trap wasn’t against us, I think, but what was inside the room. A trap against violent plants.

We did get inside the room which had nothing much more than stairs up and a rather large pile of dirty, sticky rags. The rags had a sickly-sweet scent to them and more than its share of flies.

While we debated whether to head upwards (these kinds of discussions go on far too often without a proper leader), Dane poked at the pile with an arrow. Then the pile attacked, throwing out a sticky something, something like a frog’s tongue, and then another, hitting Dane square in the chest and sticking to him.

Unpleasant surprises are usual in a hostile place, but this isn’t one I expected. As the seconds rolled by, we trying to hit it and it not moving from under the rags, more of these tendrils lashed out and attached itself to more of us, oozing out something that stung and burnt at the same time, as well as leaving an unsavory mark on my armor. Nosmo, between struggling against the thing and throwing magic missiles into it, must have known what the feeling was because he cried out that we could rub chalk on it. If any of you are in the middle of combat and remember that chalk is good against acid then you’re probably not panicking quite enough.

Eventually it was dead, almost us all stuck to the thing and we eventually discovered that it was a plant. See, a trap against violent plants would not have been a bad idea. Dane, scolded by the rest of us, was eager to make some good out of this so he went to get some of the stoneworking tools found back in the shed and he and some of the others hacked the thing apart to get at the gooey acidy center. Dane certainly had the Goddess of Luck on his side, for there were, in fact, many shiny items of precious metal, including a ring, and some gems worth quite their fair share. This was, of course, more money than we’ve seen since selling off precious pirate artifacts on the boat back to Baldur’s Gate.

Badly hurt (again, even with Colwyn’s assistance), we fled to the stonecutter’s shed, or the shed of holy symbols, and prepared to sleep. We did give the orc guards outside a decent burial, dumping them in the moat and jumping up and down on the bodies until they could not be seen. It was, at least, a better burial than they deserved.

That night, we all had nearly the same dream. Sully even drifted off to sleep during his watch; I suppose the collective power of so many consecrated holy symbols in one place gave them the power to do whatever it is they want to the people within. Minor henchmen of deities I did not particularly remember came and told me things I don’t clearly remember. This isn’t because I’m old but because that’s how the dream was. Maybe gods like to keep some mystery, or maybe I’m not devout enough to have that privilege. Whatever the case, at least the higher beings in my dream were halflings. Maybe they were in Sully’s dream, too, as that would explain his reluctance to talk, but he really didn’t like the gods anyway so it could have been anyone.

All of us learned something that night, depending on what we did. It was as though the gods were whispering instructions straight into our memories, letting us know things we were ready to hear. We all came out of it better than before. I decided about then I’d been too harsh on the gods, though I wasn’t ready to worship just one. After all, asking things from as many gods as possible keeps your options open.

We got the door to the orchard open the next day, or I should say night as we were doing all our sneaking around in as much darkness as we could afford. The torches along the halls were lit, either again or still we didn’t know, but there was still no light in the orchard beyond.

There was just enough light from the stars to see the path, the scraggly bushes and the black fruits on the trees. We debated for far too long about the significance of a locked and trapped orchard having black fruit on its unkempt trees, but fortunately down the path was something more interesting: a mausoleum.

The door wasn’t locked but it did make a hideously loud screeching noise. There was no light below, though, so I went off to grab some torches.

While I was away, Dane made some light, everyone saw giant ants, which were blinded, burnt and, in one case from Kumar, thrown at one another. I missed the excitement on my return, but it wasn’t excitement I was disappointed in missing. We opted not to go down until we finished taking a look around the corridors we would have left behind us.

We went all the way around past the plant room to a door that smelled faintly of manure. The stables? Yes, very good, the stables, complete with overturned card table and guys with bows shooting at us. In such an action, it’s always good to let the more physical people go first.

They weren’t carrying anything else impressive, though as Dane scanned the room for items of useful magic he sensed one in the hayloft. It’s clear the hay hasn’t been renewed for years, but there were plenty of places to hide. When the item started to move, he summoned a ball of heat and threw it up into the loft, which quickly caught on fire. If this boy was exiled from his tribe or group or whatever, now we knew why.

There was, in this stable, a large pair of doors leading out, covered by a field of magic. I had been cautious about it, in part because it could have been a trap and in part we didn’t see any large doors on the back of the keep, but now we had an urgent need to leave. Most of us, anyway. There was the sound of a woman in the loft which sent Nosmo up there like a shot to rescue the damsel in distress. It actually was a damsel in distress, and a naked damsel, too. Nosmo said, “She’s mine”, and started calling her Maria, even before he could usher her down the ladder and out of the room. The bag she was holding, though, was on fire and the boy had a few seconds to collect the goods (one of them was our precious magic item) and flee the burning room.

Outside, there was nothing but a blank wall, clearly an illusion. I took some of Dane’s chalk, the chalk from earlier, and marked where the door was so we might find it again. We closed the doors to help smoke out whomever else was inside and turned our attentions to the girl.

She wasn’t too attractive for a human, but at my height I have something of an angle where only some very attractive humans are interesting to look at. Sure, if you can look a woman in the eye then look /down/, that’s one thing, but a naked walking torso isn’t attractive. Dane gave her a cloak in exchange for her name, which was Diane and not Maria. Diane sounded like quite the twit, claiming to not know where she’s from (just “the castle”) or the name of the castle’s guard (having a standard of red and yellow checks with a white hawk on it). It was clear she could be rescued, from the island if not from herself, and possibly returned for a reward. Nosmo clearly wanted to be the one who was her hero-figure and I think we let him play this role. The poor boy was so desperate to be laid it was at the same time amusing and disturbing. I wanted nothing of it.

She also claimed there were more than twenty men here, herding slaves into a main courtyard before shipping them off elsewhere. She knew almost nothing of the orchard but knew more of a third courtyard, which she called “icky” and “filled with statues”. She also claimed to escape by seducing an orc. It turns out all this information was suspect, which is really too bad because if there were only twenty men in this entire compound then it would be an easy, if lessened, revenge.

We next discovered the “icky” courtyard, after walking clear around the side of the keep and through the holy stonecutter’s shed and down the small maze of hallways. It was huge, and open to the sky so it was hard to see how large. The stench of latrine was clear, though, and even some areas near our side of the courtyard had swampy, murky spots. It also had quite a few stone statues. Upon close examination of one, we found it was rather well detailed. Remarkably detailed, as well. Either the holy stonecutters here had tools that could show every pore and dimple on the various creatures’ skins, or there was something wrong. Even I, who was trained to be a security specialist in the cities, knew that overly lifelike statues meant get the six hundred and odd hells out of there quickly.

Colwyn cast a spell, at first, to see if anything nearby had unkind intents for us. Now this would have included myself. I admit that I would have cut the hamstrings of the first people who worked against us, and for all his skill I was eyeing Dane’s legs, but it was Maria who attacked us, arms turning into blades. She was evidently playing us for fools all along, or at least playing Nosmo for a fool and the rest of us came along for the ride.

I meant Diane. Right.

So instead of asking what she was doing, I think everyone else decided to make her bleed first and ask questions later. She did bleed, too, though swings of her sword-arms put Kumar under right quick.

What we got when she was dead was more of a gray, mostly featureless thing. We stuffed her — or it — into the dangerous statue-heavy courtyard and quickly went on our way. What’s worse is I don’t think Nosmo was disturbed that he was trying to sleep with it.