This city, um Carol, or Merrill, or whatever it is, is not prepared for this fight. Most of their grunts are just that, and not good for much more than slowing down swords aimed at me.
One of their guys actually volunteered to help us, and that can only mean he has the smarts of a rock, but as long as he can soak up the same damage as a rock it will all work out. His name is—wait, I know this one—Dearthen, yeah, Dearthen the Earthen.
I can see I’m going to have to take up poetry or something just so I can learn enough rhyming words to help me remember all these stupid human names. Let’s see, so far I have:
- Ili the Silly (it took me ages to remember to spell it correctly)
- Erson the Person
- Dearthen the Earthen
- Malakar (as soon as I found out Ili didn’t know about his shape-shifting thing he became adequately amusing I didn’t need help to remember his name)
- Obegard (which I still don’t have a good way to remember, but after I had him stuffed in my magic big bag recently I found a little bit of cloth with “Obegard, The Spire” written on it. It looked like it hadn’t been edged properly and had fallen off whatever it had been sewn on. Anyway, anytime I can’t remember his name I can at least pull the tag out and look at it.)
Our first assignment is to run up the hill at the back of the town to hit some giants playing catapult on the walls. Apart from having to burn potions of invisibility it wasn’t much of a challenge.
Dearthen fights strangely. He keeps calling out things during the fight like “Scraping dog poop!” and then he’ll, like, sweep his hammer along the ground and hit someone in the heels so they fall over. And the weirdest part is that he moves his mouth all funny so it looks like he’s saying something else. I swear it’s even stranger than Ili who sounds like she’s having sex instead of fighting.
Then we have to defend some position in the streets.
All I can say is Hire A Dwarf. The so-called barricades we were supposed to defend provided no protection at all, and in fact I think the only ones they penalised were us.
What can I say? Northrog, worgs, bugbears—not much problem there, even when a spellcaster poked his head out. But giants in full battle armour? I think not.
Fortunately about now the city’s elven wizard appeared, fried most of the stuff in sight, and spelled us away to safety. For now.
Oh yeah, haven’t mentioned him before, have I? Strangely enough all my goody two-shoes “companions” seem to have no problem with an elf being around, even though the whole bunch of them are known as necromancers (elves that is, not my companions—my companions aren’t known as necromancers. That I’m aware of). Not that I really care, so long as he isn’t eying my fresh corpse (or trying to work out how to make me a fresh corpse that he can eye), but given how easily they get their loincloths in a lump it was pretty surprising to see them just accept him without even asking questions.
Almost disappointing really, because it’s amusing to watch their righteous indignation. Not that they don’t give me plenty of other things to laugh about, but the righteous indignation is one of the better ones, particularly as it’s generally followed by some sort of rationalisation of why it’s okay this time. I swear they could probably be rich if they just accepted everything and did something profitable with the time and energy they spend inventing excuses of convenience. In fact, here’s a way for them to make some money—spend an evening making up a whole bunch of rationalisations, bind them into books, and sell them to other righteously indignants. As long as they keep a copy for themselves they’ll have list handy they can consult whenever the need arises so they don’t have to agonise over it every time.
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