Quest Failed: Keep the guild hall clean.

A downpour burst from a light gray sky, right in the midst of kids’ class. Hans and five children ran into the guild hall for shelter. In the brief chaos of fleeing cold raindrops, he overlooked a potential consequence.

The children tracked mud and water from the training yard onto the guild hall floors. Somewhere between the training yard and the guild hall, Harry and Chance dipped their hands in a puddle, dripping brown slop into the benches and tables. Quentin, one of the most responsible children Hans had ever known, sat on a bench, bouncing his heel off the floorboards to shake mud off of his boots.

Somehow, there was even mud on the ceiling.

Children defy physics.

Hans grabbed a few towels from his upstairs apartment and tried to wipe up what he could. The war had already been lost, but he could contain the damages. Maybe.

New Quest: Clean the guild hall.

“What do we do now?” Harriet asked. The tiny blonde child had begun yell-talking recently. Hans worried Becky was having too much of an influence on this town.

Out the window, the rain hadn’t slowed. “I think that’s it for class today,” Hans answered. “Even if it stopped, the training yard will be a mess.”

“Awwwwww.”

“Sorry. Maybe it’ll clear for tomorrow.”

Quentin raised his hand.

“Yes, Quentin?”

“Can you tell us a story? Maybe the one about the pee elemental?”

“The what now?”

“The pee elemental. Galinda was talking about it.” Every child giggled.

“It was about peeing on an elemental, not an elemental made from pee.” They giggled even more. “How about a different story?”

“Yes!”

Hans thought for a minute. “I’ve been thinking about an old friend of mine. Her name is Theneesa. Today, she’s the Diamond-ranked Guild Master of the Mikata chapter, but I’ve known her since she was a Junior member.” For the youngest ones, Hans reiterated that Junior was the kids rank that came before Apprentice. Everyone in the class that day was a Junior member.

“What class is she?” Loddie asked.

“She was a White Mage for a while, but I don’t know if that’s still accurate.”

Early in Theneesa’s training, she showed an affinity for white magic, a broad category of defensive and support spells. White Mages healed the injured and provided protections and buffs during battle. As she progressed through Silver, Theneesa began to look for ways to contribute more in battle. She didn’t have the raw power of a Black Mage, so going on the offensive with lightning bolts and ice arrows was not her forte and probably would never be.

However, White Mages had a different kind of strength: They were well-practiced in maintaining a consistent output of mana over a long period of time. The best protection spells were active spells, meaning they required ongoing concentration to maintain. After a battle, the challenge was similar: Everyone needed to be healed, and pausing to rest when wounds were open could put a party at risk.

“Theneesa learned to cast with a sword or spear in her hand. By Gold, she could cast support magic without interruption and fight on the frontline.”

The children knew enough about magic to know that was impressive.

“She was Silver in this story, so not quite the Diamond she is now. Theneesa is a few inches taller than me. Stronger. She uses a tower shield, a spear, and platemail blended with chainmail.”

Harry raised his hand. “What’s a tower shield?”

“It’s a large rectangular shield,” Hans said, tracing an invisible rectangle around his body. “They are big and heavy, but they cover a lot of surface area. That’s really good if your enemy uses a lot of arrows.”

Theneesa and her party of Silvers took a job to investigate disappearances in a particular district of Hoseki. Locals reported five people missing over three days, and one woman claimed to have seen her boyfriend dragged into the sewer by a “hairy shadow.” Hiding in sewers was a popular monster hobby, which made the attacks unsurprising but no less tragic. Normally, the problem was no more than giant rats and the occasional lost goblin.

In most cases, sewer runs were for Irons and Bronzes. For this job, the woman who lost her boyfriend was wealthy, and the Guild upgraded the rank requirement to “provide a special level of service” to one of Hoseki’s elite. Theneesa’s party leader was a savvy Bard, so as soon as this wealthy woman entered the guild hall, her eyes red with tears, he worked his way over to the job board. He claimed the job before the quest manager could pin it up.

A big payday, an easy job, and a connection to a wealthy benefactor–This was an ideal scenario for a profit-minded adventurer. Competition to claim it would have been fierce, but the Bard had finished his signature before anyone else knew the job existed.

The group of Silvers made for the sewers right away, starting where the woman witnessed the attack.

“Does anyone know what’s in sewers?”

“Poop!” Chance yelled.

“Okay. I deserved that. I meant how they’re built. They’re caves made from brick, essentially, so kind of like a dungeon. And it's dark, wet, and… smelly.”

The children giggled again.

Whatever the monster was, it lacked the intelligence to cover its trail. After less than an hour, they found handprints and fingernail scratches in the wall. Bits of clothing here. The shreds of a boot over there. And down the middle: a long muddy path painted over cobblestone bricks from dragging food back to its den, over and over.

Winding through the sewers by torchlight, they found a narrow fissure in the side of the brick tunnel, like something had ripped bricks from mortar with its bare hands. The party’s dwarven ranger took a look with his low-light vision and said that the crack led to a round dirt room. Much of it was clawed out by hand, but one side of the room looked like a partially finished sewer tunnel. The party guessed it had been abandoned and walled off, a common practice in cities as large and as old as Hoseki.

The dwarf believed he saw a humanoid figure moving within. Its size and proportions didn’t match a human’s, and its form was blurred by long, hanging shadows. His low-light vision couldn’t tell him more without a closer look.

Without talking, the Bard signaled for the party to take formation. The dwarf Ranger went through first, followed by Theneesa, who had to leave her shield on the other side of the fissure because it wouldn’t fit, taking only her spear. Then the Bard, and finally the party’s Black Mage went through.

The beast’s first instinct was to flee, splashing through its muddy den to the far wall. Only then did it seem to realize it had nowhere to go. The sole way in was the entrance the adventurers used and now stood in front of.

The party mistook the creature’s attempt to flee as a sign that it was weak.

It wasn’t.

A moment later, the figure of a man with gorilla shoulders charged the party. Long matted red hair draped from its body into dreadlocks two feet long. The combination of features made it look like a bodybuilder melting like candle wax, imposing and otherworldly. Sewage ran down its hair as it tackled the dwarf.

Stolen story; please report.

The beast howled in pain, and so did the dwarf. In another swift motion, the monster leapt away from the party.

Hans paused to check on his audience. The children stared wide-eyed, barely blinking as their imaginations put them in the story.

“The monster had bit between the dwarf’s armor, into his neck,” Hans said. “The injury was serious, but the dwarf kept saying that he wounded it in return, holding up his bloody sword to prove it.”

When the monster lunged, it had impaled itself along the way.

The Bard began to strum his lute, using music notes for incantations like wizard’s used words. A wall of golden force crossed the room between the party and the beast, and the wall advanced toward the beast as the tempo of the song increased.

The wall, with its brilliant light, made the sewer den as bright as midday.

The party caught a glimpse of the sword wound dealt by the ranger, but then it was gone. The red hair of the creature twisted like thousands of snakes curling around the wound, filling and then covering it. With its missing piece of abdomen repaired, it howled again, revealing a mouth of teeth jutting in every direction, like a board a child covered with nails to learn how to use a hammer. Its green eyes drooped like runny eggs and flared with rage.

The bard and the black mage used spells to keep the creature at a distance while Theneesa healed the ranger, but the fight wasn’t going well. The monster punched through the golden wall in two strikes, shattering the magic barrier with its sheer force of will. The beast staggered again as a sharp blade of air shot from the bard’s lute strings.

The spell carved a vertical slice down its shoulder, cutting so deep that part of the monster’s body separated and leaned to the side. A mortal injury for most living things, the beast’s red hair went to work and the body reformed.

“Fall back!” the Bard yelled.

Retreating from the den was a dangerous proposition because of the narrow exit. The Bard dragged the dwarven Ranger to the fissure, while Theneesa stood with the wizard to hold off the monster.

They failed.

The red beast shoulder checked the Bard and the Ranger against the edge of the fissure before they could slip through. A spear pierced its thigh. A glowing blue stone punched through its ribs.

And it healed again.

“What should the party do in this situation?” Hans asked the kids.

“Run!” Harriot said.

“Okay, good, but how do you run from something faster than you?”

The children thought harder.

“Kill it!” Chance yelled.

“They tried that. It’s not working.”

“Stop it from following you?” Quentin guessed.

“Very good, Quentin.”

Hans didn’t expect the children to guess how the party achieved that, so he resumed the story.

Theneesa and the Black Mage did their best to delay the monster, but the party barely survived every blurred pounce and charge. They needed to escape, or this would be their last job. Each member of the party knew this intuitively. No words were spoken, and the party began to get one member out of the room at a time.

They were battered and mauled for the effort but eventually moved every member but Theneesa to the other side.

Since the monster felt pain, Theneesa had given up on killing it, focusing instead on slowing it. Her spear thrusts were like cobra strikes, in and out in sharp bites. The monster would regenerate after each one, but pain bought the party time.

One spear thrust went through its stomach, and it grabbed the spear with both hands, yanking it back out of itself, the red locks of hair closing the hole immediately.

Theneesa had an idea. Instead of a quick attack and retreat like she had been doing, she rammed the spear through the monster’s chest, burying the shaft halfway through the mass of wet, howling hair.

“Then she healed it,” Hans said.

The children gasped.

The monster’s body healed around the spear. The beast grabbed the shaft and started to yank it loose, stopping to shriek in pain. Enraged, it ran toward Theneesa, its teeth bared. The spear in its chest tipped forward, catching in the mud. The sudden stop elicited another howl as the beast bounced against the force and fell to the side.

That was all the time Theneesa needed to get through the fissure.

The beast attempted to pursue, but everytime it hurled itself at the opening in the wall, the spear caught on the sides. Growing angrier and angrier, howling with pain from each attempt, the monster threw itself at the hole again and again. The party heard the hollow knock of the spear slamming into brick as they retreated, the beast in the sewer not intelligent enough to thread the spear through the crack to escape.

“They came back to the Guild in rough shape,” Hans said. “Myself and a few other Golds went down to clean up. Sure enough, it was still banging against the sewer wall with Theneesa’s spear stuck in its chest.”

“How’d you kill it?” Quentin asked.

“One of the Golds was a Black Mage, and a pretty good one. He incinerated it with a fireball. That thing was so hot, the mud Theneesa had fought in was baked dry. Not much left of the monster, either.”

“So you never found out what it was?” Quentin asked.

“I got a look before it was put down. It was a ‘meddybemps howler,’” Hans said. When he saw that the children were only more confused, he added, “It’s like a swamp yeti.”

Several miles upriver, a giant serpent nest had hatched a fresh clutch, driving monsters and animals alike to look for new hunting grounds. The howler ended up in the sewers, as improbable as that might have been.

“Alright. Looks like the rain is slowing down. You can stay as long as you like, but we’re over class time. Don’t want to worry anyone waiting for you.”

When the last child went through the door, Hans took in the mud and dirt splattered over every surface of the guild hall. He sighed and went to get a mop and some rags.

Quest Complete: Clean the guild hall.

New Quest: Implement a new shoe policy to keep muddy footwear at the door.

***

A steady, unending drizzle lingered for the following day. Hans waited at the guild hall to let children know class was canceled, but no one came. Even Quentin knew to stay home on account of the weather.

With no classes to teach and Theneesa’s recent letter on his mind, he fetched his incomplete manuscript. The Mikata Guild Master had said his methods worked, and she wanted more. Hans was reluctant at first, his resentment toward the Adventurers’ Guild discouraging him from putting that much effort into helping the Guild grow, especially when they already rejected the effort, resoundingly.

But that wasn’t fair to Theneesa. She had never been unkind to Hans, and he knew how hard she took it when a member of her chapter fell on a job. She had the same goal as him: Get more adventurers home safely.

I bet she’d be interested in training dungeon tactics.

Hans’ dungeon corridor experiments were going well. He wasn’t content with a few of the drills, and several of them he scrapped outright when what seemed brilliant in his mind fell apart in actual practice.

The first step to learning dungeon corridor tactics, from Hans’ perspective, was to hone the student’s awareness of their space, with nearly every skill that followed hinging on that first one. Essentially, they had to keep track of where the walls were at all times, otherwise they might attempt a technique at the wrong moment.

To start, he had students take the drills they did in the yard and had them drill in the corridor instead. Same drills, but now they had to pay closer attention to their positioning and the path of their sword swing. Unlike other beginner drills, Hans encouraged the students to improvise if the “best” answer for an attack was impossible because of the walls. If they improvised when the “best” answer was perfectly possible, Hans stopped them to review the mistake.

Next, he put one student on offense and the other on defense. If the student on offense moved, the defender was responsible for adjusting, and they weren’t allowed to force their partner to do the same. Essentially, one student stalked the other around the corridor as they drilled strikes, parries, and shield work. The chasing student would try to circle the other into a wall throughout the drill to force their partner to adapt.

Then they switched.

Some of the concepts were too advanced for children, Hans realized. His more elaborate drills required more focus and presence of mind than one could reasonably expect from an eight year-old, which is to say they failed spectacularly.

In some cases, those same drills could still be useful for training adults, but none of the adults in town had taken him up on an adult combat class. For now, those drills would live in his notebook.

Hans finished detailing his last exercise for training students to recover their footing if they were downed in a dungeon and began a small paragraph on how parrying skills were critical for creating the space one needed to stand during a fight. He encouraged instructors to incorporate grappling techniques into dungeon training as well. If an adventurer was disarmed or pinned to the ground, they needed techniques for freeing themselves.

Quest Complete: Design drills to practice specific dungeon corridor skills.

The front door of the guild hall burst open.

“Hey Boss! I’m home!” Becky the druid stomped in, her leather and furs soaked from the rain. Before Hans could reply, she was behind him, reading over his shoulder. “I like your doodles.”

“They’re not– I mean, welcome back Becky.”

“No sign of the evil cry babies. We looked real hard.” When Becky said “we,” she was referring to herself and her warthog familiar, Becki.

Quest Complete: Learn the results of Becky’s squonk search.

“Did find these again, though. You and Olza are still interested in them, right?”

Becky set a bushel of the unidentified purple flowers on the table, and Hans noticed that many of them still had clumps of dirt on their roots.

Dirt…

Hans looked down at the mud caked on Becky’s boots.

Quest Failed: Implement a new shoe policy to keep muddy footwear at the door.

***

Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

Progress from Gold-ranked to Diamond-ranked.

Mend the rift with Devon.

Complete the manuscript for "The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers."

Pick up the guild provisions from the caravan after next.

Identify the unknown purple flower from Olza.

Prepare a booklist for Mayor Charlie.

Grow the Gomi chapter without attracting outside attention.

Prepare for winter, and don’t forget the beer.

Brainstorm ideas for safe approaches to training on uneven terrain.

Design a winter curriculum.

Acquire winter adventuring gear.