Lucas was frog marched back to the scene of the crime where he found the medieval version of a paddy wagon parked in front of the tavern. The Captain looked at him briefly, but didn’t even bother talking to him.

He just nodded to the wagon, where Lucas’s pockets were emptied, and his belt was taken. Sadly, that included his pouches and his knife.

He didn’t complain, though. The last thing he wanted them to do was go through all that right here and confirm that he was the guy he was looking for. Instead, he looked around his cage, and he saw that he was in there with three other guys that all kinda looked like him. It wasn’t a flattering picture.

They all had his general height and build. Even in the dark he could see that the guards had gotten pretty close to the mark despite the fact that guy was a little too tall, and this one was a little too fat to be him. The fact that all of them were wearing manacles only made that resemblance stronger.

The four of them sat there quietly, and didn’t do much more than exchange looks until the wagon started to trundle down the street. Anyone could guess that they were heading toward the castle, and looking at the wooden-barred wagon, he could see there were only a couple guards accompanying.

For a moment, he reached for the wire in the sole of his boot that he was pretty sure he could use to pick the manacles, but because there was no way he could do the door too without a dagger or something equally as sturdy, he forced himself to stop. Be cool, man, he cautioned himself.

That was the fear of what was happening, trying to get him to do something stupid. He couldn’t believe that tonight had played out like this when he was all but in the clear, but now that it had, he had to bide his time and wait for the proper moment. Like everything in life, good things came to those who kept their shit together.

In the end, he decided that the four of them were all different versions of him. There was real Lucas, homeless Lucas, shifty Lucas, and hardcore Lucas. The first three were self-explanatory, but the last one had been named because, unlike the three of them, he looked like he knew how to kick some ass. Whoever had locked them up had taken away his shield and his sword, but between his breastplate and his dented helmet, he looked like he’d seen some shit.

The only one to do much talking was Shifty. He tried to ask his fellow prisoners if they knew what the hell was going on, but Lucas just ignored them. Any answer he gave might tip them off that this was all his fault, and he wasn’t in the mood for another beat down.

Sadly, that was just what was waiting for them at the castle. The guard captain arrived only after his men had been given a few minutes to question them about the events at the Chimera’s Chalice, but Lucas insisted he’d been dragged out of the Drunken Donkey and had never set foot in a place half so fancy as the Chalice. Still, through it all, he rolled with the punches, and after it was done, and he was lying exhausted on the ground.

“One of you is involved with some very serious business,” the captain said with such haughtiness that Lucas had trouble keeping a straight face. “According to our sources, the culprit has invented a whole new sort of dread alchemy. Worse, not only are you poisoning our fair city with it but you have not paid your rightful taxes on this awful product! Speak up, admit your guilt, and we might be able to skip the confessor and dispense with justice directly.”

Hardcore Lucas had been knocked out cold during the tenderizing phase of the interrogation, so all he did was lay there, but the other three Lucases declared their innocence and begged for leniency. Lucas thought he did a pretty good job with that part; he’d lied to the cops plenty before, but when the guards brought out his satchel, his heart sank. Suddenly he was sure he was screwed.

At least, he was sure that he was until they pointed to the wrong guy. “He had this on him, sir,” the tall one said, looking to curry favor. “Or… well, it might have been that one.”

For a moment, Lucas dared not breathe as the guard pointed out the man on either side of him. The captain looked at the man with annoyance.

“You couldn’t have told me this earlier?” he asked as he looked through the pouch and came up with the tiny flask of blue that Lucas carried in case he needed to demonstrate his product to a new connect. “Very well. Take these two to our resident confessor and see who admits what first. Put these other two in the dungeon until we see if we get what we need from their friends.”

As they dragged Shifty and Homeless through the courtyard, they left Lucas and Hardcore there waiting for their turn. He couldn’t help but feel a little bad. They didn’t do anything wrong.

Well - if they looked like that they’d done plenty wrong in this life, he corrected himself, but they hadn’t been brewing any potions. That was for sure. Still, he wasn’t about to stick his neck out for them.

“Tonight’s your lucky night, gutter scum,” the Guard Captain said. “When one of those mutts confesses, you might get off with a few weeks of hard labor instead of spending a date with the confessor or the headman. Is that not merciful?”

The sheer entitlement and arrogance radiating off this man turned Lucas’s stomach, but he swallowed it down and forced himself to smile a bloody smile as he said, “Yes, my lord, thank you for the mercy you show to a poor peasant like me.”

That was enough to make the foul, well-coiffed man smile. It was also enough for Lucas to put his name on a list right there below Brog. He didn’t know how yet, but he was going to make both men pay.

After all, if their pet torturer had to work through two people, he probably had the rest of the night to come up with a plan. That was more than enough time when he was properly motivated, and right now, he was motivated as fuck.

The guard captain wandered off once his men returned, and Lucas was content to let them carry as much as drag him through the courtyard and toward the castle’s dungeon while his ribs ached and poorly bandaged right hand dripped blood. He could use the break.

Since his only choices of entertainment while he was dragged across the courtyard were the back of his eyelids, or whatever was on the ground beneath him, he chose to look at the well-trodden dirt and overgrown stone walls they passed by. Even here, he was surprised to see ingredients he could use if only he could make his way back to his hideout.

Thornroot (raw): Intelligence +3, dexterity -2

Red Creaper (raw): Poison 2, weak catalyst (alters the alignment of the lowest attribute in the current mixture.)

When they opened the door and revealed a set of stone steps that led deeper into the earth, the volume of Shifty’s screams increased, and Lucas found out real quick that the castle’s dungeon and its chamber of horrors were connected by one hall and that they were practically neighbors.

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That door swinging wide was his cue. When it was fully open, he started struggling in their mailed grip once more. He wasn’t trying to escape, though. Even on his best day, he knew that wasn’t happening.

It was to look good for the other inmates. He knew how this worked better than most, and whoever it was he found down there, the last thing he wanted was to be locked in a room with someone that thought he was a little bitch.

“You know if you let me take you on one at a time, you wouldn’t have a chance, right?” he asked, flailing and squirming as he suddenly showed a little spine for the first time since the Chalice. “You don’t have to treat every occasion as an excuse for a gang—”

The only answer that the lead guard had for that was to bounce Lucas’s head off the wall hard enough to make him see stars before tossing him down and sending him tumbling down the narrow, winding staircase into the tiny cellblock below.

His manacles jangled and clattered with every bounce, making the whole thing sound worse than it really was. He might not be the best at throwing a punch, but he took one just fine and tucked and rolled with it the whole way down.

The torch-lit room consisted of only three cells, which wouldn’t have even qualified as a county lockup where he came from. Even so, by the time he was unsteadily rising to his feet, the two guards were already picking him back up.

“If I want to hear your opinion on anything, I’ll just drag you down to the confessor to see what you have to say between screams,” the taller guard threatened, “Until then, keep your mouth shut if you want to keep your teeth until we decide to take your head.”

“Yeah,” the other guard chimed in. “Hard to eat a last meal with nothing but broken teeth!”

Rather than focus on those grisly threats, he focused on what it was he could do here as he took the room in at a glance. Of the three cells, the one directly in front of him was empty, the one on his left held a single noble, and the one on his right was crammed half-full with several toughs.

No, he realized as his eyes adjusted to the dark. There weren’t several. There were only two. It was just that one of them was almost as big as Oogen. The crowded cell contained a dwarf happily smoking away on a pipe in the corner, and a giant of a man who had to have at least a little orc blood in him, based on the green tint to his skin.

The only way they got that dude down here was with magic, Lucas thought to himself. It would have taken ten guards to wrestle him down otherwise, and in this confined space, that was pretty much impossible.

There was no shame in it, of course. He’d been hit by a sleep spell before. It was harder to resist than any taser he’d ever been zapped with in his former life.

He didn’t say any of that, though. Instead, he just looked at the guard who was inches from beating him to death, smiled a bloody smile, and said, “Thank you very much, officer. I’m so pleased you got me my own room. That’s extremely thoughtful of you. Please deliver my thanks to his majesty for—”

This earned him another punch to the face that he expertly flinched from. It didn’t have much force behind it, though, because the guard was laughing. “You don’t have the coin for such comfort, knave. But look on the bright side; this is your chance to meet new people. Maybe you’ll finally make some friends as low as you!”

As he spoke, the second guard fetched the big bronze key from its peg at the bottom of the stairs and unlocked the already crowded cell; seconds later, Hardcore was forced inside, and then Lucas was shoved in on top of him.

That was fine. He might have begged for the pristine briar patch over yonder, but this was exactly where he wanted to end up.

Alone, he was trapped with only a single option tucked into his left boot, and the only place that would lead to was a relatively painless death.

While that was better than a date with the torturer, or inquisitor, or whatever it was they’d called the dude causing all the screaming, Lucas had a couple douche bags to kill, a fortune to make, and a pretty orc-blooded barmaid to apologize to. The only way he was going to make that happen was with a minor miracle.

Since he’d already used up all his bad luck today, he might as well cash those chips in because together with other people, well, they might be able to figure something out. In his book, a long shot was better than no shot at all.

As the four of them struggled to separate and make room in the corners of the cramped cell, the guards walked back up out of the cells and headed back up the stairs to the courtyard, laughing the whole way. “We drag any more scum out of the city's gutters today, and we’re going to need to hire more executioners for the weekend,” the short guard complained.

“That’s fine,” the tall guard answered. “The people love it when we put on a good show. Reminds them who’s in charge.”

Once they were gone and the door slammed shut, silence dominated for those first few uneasy seconds as the strangers regarded each other in the dim light of a single torch. Lucas was obviously at the bottom of the pecking order to start, but he was fine with that. He had his ways.

He had to work hard to intentionally suppress his smile when the dwarf took a long puff on his pipe and asked, “So, what are ye in for?”

Pipeweed (mid-grade): Euphoria 4, poison 3, strength 1, intelligence -1. Less effective when smoked.

“Well, that’s a long ass story,” Lucas said, leaning back against the wall to try to get comfortable as best he could as he studied his new roommates and the construction of his cell. “Let’s just say business was too good, and eventually, I was making so much money that the crown wanted its cut.”

The dwarf laughed at that. “Aye, I know just how that goes. Truly.”

As they spoke, Lucas studied their cage. The cell was a crude thing with rusting bands of iron riveted together rather than the clean steel bars he was used to.

There was no way the bit of wire that he’d stabbed into his boot would work on the thick door lock, but he worked it free just the same to get started on his manacles. Just because the door didn’t look especially escapable didn’t mean it wouldn’t be breakable if he could get Bruce Banner over there to play ball.

There were more than a few reagents, too, Lucas noted, though most of them were somewhere between useless and dangerous. Mold flourished in the corners, and beneath the sodden hay, they lined their cell floor, and roots peeked through the cracks in the ceiling.

Black Mold (raw): Poison 3, pain resistance 2, dexterity -1

Green Slime (raw): Poison 2, strength -1, dexterity -1

Widower’s Root (raw): Strength 2, endurance 1, poison 1

Everyone nodded along as he protested the unjustness of his arrest, and he quickly found out the gist of everyone’s stories. They were all small-time criminals who hadn’t really done anything worthy of a public execution, either. However, because of the rising crime here in Lordanin, the Prince had apparently decided to look like a big man, and he was going to make an example out of them.

That was almost certainly Lucas’s fault, ultimately, but he wasn’t about to point that out. Not when it was just the right time to play a trump card that should be able to get their attention.

“I… I’m not from around here,” Lucas said eventually, trying to up the stakes. “In fact, not long ago, I was a dead man, if you can believe it.”

“You’re a dead man now, lad,” the dwarf said. Everyone laughed at that, even Lucas.

“Yeah, for sure, but like, actually dead. Like I died and went to the afterlife dead. Like this isn’t even my real body dead,” he said, enjoying the shock.