Hans bent over, his hands on his knees, wheezing. He tried repeatedly to ask Becky to explain, but his lungs refused to pause long enough for the words to leave his lips. While he fought for air, his eyes surveyed the field between Gomi and the treeline.

This wasn’t an attack. It was some kind of festival.

Children played tag, chasing each other through throngs of townspeople, most with cups or bottles in their hands. A group of tusks stacked wood for a bonfire while Galad and Uncle Ed stood in front of a spit with their arms crossed, watching a whole pig cook over a smaller fire. Closer to the town, he saw Mayor Charlie and his wife Galinda sitting on a blanket in the grass, talking with Roland and a few other townspeople.

The curious looks Hans got compounded as more of the crowd noticed his arrival. They were perplexed by the gasping Guild Master and his sweat-soaked clothes.

The Becks gave him the same look as everyone else. “You okay, boss?”

“Becky… What… is… this?”

“We missed most of the show but not all of it!”

The crowd parted, and a halfling flanked by two lizardmen approached. The halfling had gray curly hair, coiled so tightly that her hair surrounded her head like a Renaissance halo. She wore the expensive but practical clothes of a traveling merchant. A fine purple cotton shirt with a crisp collar was tucked into her dark brown riding pants, reinforced at the knees with finely stitched leather. The halfling may have been three feet tall, but only barely.

The lizardmen behind the halfling rivaled the size of Galad and Glinda, their bodies covered with scales of varying whites, browns, and tans. Two rows of spiky protrusions began at either eye and ran down their neck to connect somewhere Hans couldn’t see. Their eyes had the texture of wood grain that had been stained and polished to a shine, and their toothy mouths stretched outward beneath a rounded gecko nose.

They each wore leather pants with a sword on their hip but were shirtless and barefoot otherwise.

“You’re out of shape,” Mazo said, standing eye-level to the doubled over, wheezing guild master.

“Mazo?” He recognized the lizardmen as well. “Thuz and Izz? I don’t… I don’t understand.”

“Got your letter and thought we’d stop by,” Mazo said cheerfully. “We came in with the merchants, and you had the nerve to be out on a job instead of greeting us.”

Quest Abandoned: Protect Gomi.

Quest Complete: Learn the identities of the visiting adventurers as well as their intentions.

Olza came out of the forest behind Hans. She shared some of his surprise, but by the look on the alchemist’s face, she had deduced there was no danger far sooner than Hans.

“Guild Master Hans!” Gunther, Harry, Harriet, Chance, and Loddie swarmed him, all talking at once about all of the amazing things Mazo had shown him. “You missed all of the magic!”

For her part, Mazo shrugged. “The kids asked for a show, and I guess it kind of turned into a party,” the halfling said, looking around at festivities.

“I didn’t expect you to see me in person.”

The halfling shrugged. “I was curious, and I was only a few weeks away.”

Galad approached, wiping pork grease on his pants. A new problem became apparent to Hans, one he hadn’t expected to deal with for a long time, if ever.

Quest Failed: Grow the Gomi chapter without attracting outside attention.

Seeing the shock on Hans face, the tusk held up his hands. “It’s already worked out,” he said, reassuringly. “Galinda recognized Mazo from your stories. The two hit it off pretty quickly.”

Hans looked back to the halfling to see a giant smile covering most of her face.

“She bought out what we had left from last season and placed an order for more,” Galad continued, referring to the beer brewed and sold by the Tribe. “The kids won’t leave her alone.”

“I don’t mind,” Mazo said. “They all wanted to show me what they learned in class. You’ve got a sharp batch of pupils.”

The children beamed proudly from the praise. “Can you show us another spell Miss Mazo?” Loddie asked with more sweetness than Hans had ever seen from the girl before.

Before Hans could interrupt, Mazo replied, “Does anyone know what an earth elemental is?”

Every tiny head nodded.

“Okay, clear me a path to the woods, and I’ll show you one more.”

“Mazo, you don’t have–”

“Shush.”

The five children ran back into the crowd of townspeople, shouting that Mazo was going to demonstrate another ability. Though they weren’t as brash about it, the adults seemed just as excited to see more magic. They did as the children instructed, clearing a direct path to the treeline. With everyone safely out of the way, Mazo cracked her neck.

The halfling spoke several words in a language Hans didn’t know. As she did, she lifted both hands over her head, locking one hand into the other with a fist. When the last word left her lips, she smashed her hands down into the ground.

A wave of force flattened the grass outward in the shape of a cone followed by a boom like Hans was sitting inside a kickdrum. With the explosion of sound came a rupture in the earth, dirt and rock as wide as a horse–much larger than the halfling who cast the spell–rose from the ground and shot forward into the forest, felling several trees before dissipating completely.

The gathered crowd cheered and applauded as the last crashes of trees fell to quiet.

Terry the town guard appeared next to Hans to offer the Guild Master a mug of beer. “Glad I picked a fight with you instead of her,” he said. Hans couldn’t help but laugh.

***

The party continued into the night. The bonfire blazed, providing a welcome hedge against the chill of mountain air. Many of the townspeople had retired for the evening, taking all of the children but Quentin and Kane with them. Those that remained sat upwind of the bonfire smoke, talking amongst each other and swapping stories.

Mazo and her lizardmen escorts were the focus of everyone’s attention, naturally, but Mayor Charlie couldn’t resist including Hans.

“You were saying earlier you were an Apprentice when Hans was,” Charlie said to Mazo, “What was he like back then?”

“We don’t need to do that,” Hans injected.

Mazo gave Hans a wave but ignored him otherwise. “I’m sure I can think of something…”

“The story about the dock rats is a good one,” Thuz the lizardman said, his voice deep and scratchy.

“Please no,” Hans said.

Mazo smiled. “That is a good one. Okay, so we had been Irons for a few months, and we took a job at this fishing town. They had a big network of docks and warehouses, and a giant rat infestation had taken over one of them. They wanted us to clean them out before it could spread.”

Hans sat quietly, his face in his hands.

Izz the lizardman patted the Gomi Guild Master on the back comfortingly.

“Our party at the time was me, Hans, and a rogue named Gret. We had a Black Mage, but there was a disagreement over an inn room bill and… yeah, different story entirely. We usually wouldn’t have taken a job with only three of us, but it was rats. Newbie stuff.”

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Mazo described their target warehouse as a converted ship launch large enough for a war galleon. When their party saw it, it was subdivided into a few offices with three separate warehouse spaces for each, making it akin to multiple warehouses packed into one. One of the inner warehouses was unrented for several years, so the assumption was that the giant rats nested there and expanded outward to claim the entire structure.

According to Mazo, the most challenging part of a giant rat job was making sure you cleared the site completely. Pest control jobs were common enough that the Guild offered a sort of warranty. If the infestation came back within two months, the adventurer had to return to finish the job. If they didn’t, the Guild docked what they earned from the infestation job out of whatever reward money they earned next.

Being thorough was a good fit for their party, if Hans’ analytical habits weren’t apparent to the citizens of Gomi yet.

Ahead of the job, Hans pulled blueprints from the town archives and planned their path through the warehouse.

“Hans was always very meticulous,” Mazo said. “No matter what the job was, Hans spent at least a day in the library prepping for every possible scenario. Sometimes the longest part of a job was the Hans pre-dungeon meeting.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

The lizardmen groaned.

Olza glanced over at Izz and Thuz. “Did you adventure with Hans?”

Both shook their heads. Izz answered, “We were his students. He was… insistent about prepping.”

“Fanatically obsessed,” Thuz added.

“In his defense,” Mazo cut in, “It saved us more than a few times. By the time we were Silver, none of us would head out without the Hans prep session. For this trip, though… Hans wouldn’t stop talking about this monster museum he read about and insisted we visit together.”

The museum boasted an extensive collection of preserved and taxidermied monsters, many of them rarely seen by adventurers let alone the general public. According to the article Hans found about the museum, several of the specimens were thought to be extinct, making the museum the only place they could be seen, ever again. For someone like Hans, seeing the creatures in person that he had only read about was exciting.

“He kept saying how much of an advantage we would have,” Mazo said. “He thought seeing the stuffed monsters would make us better prepared for the real thing, but we all know Hans just wanted to visit the museum and didn’t want to go alone.”

“That’s not true!” Hans said, but no one around the bonfire did anything but laugh at his resistance.

“The day we get to town, he makes us go straight from dropping our gear at the inn to the monster museum. He was so worried it would close early, and we’d miss it, so we follow Hans through town while he tries to read a map. We get lost a few times but finally arrive at the museum.

“And it’s closed. Been closed for years, actually. A fish market took its place, so Hans is just on his knees in front of a pile of fish guts, completely heartbroken. One of the guys working the stalls says that locals hated the museum. Thought it was a tourist trap. Me and Gret, well, we gave Hans a really hard time about it.”

“Still are,” Hans added.

Mazo shushed the Guild Master and continued.

With the museum trip off the itinerary, they started the job early, but much of the warehouse interior stayed in shadow despite the clear, sunny sky. The subdivision was ramshackle at best, so the few windows the warehouse had offered little help. They used an oil lamp instead of a torch, on account of the inventory inside, but otherwise moved with the same care they would in a dungeon. Hans had already confirmed with the tenants that there was nothing explosive or hazardous stored inside, but they still didn’t want to catch the building on fire.

The adventure began as they expected, going room by room and area by area to eliminate the dog-sized rats. Hack. Slash. Stab. The usual for giant rat hunting.

“We were about a third of the way through, and we were starting to move into the darkest parts of the warehouse. Then Gret tells us to stop and listen. It was soft, but we heard it too.”

The sound Mazo described hearing that day was like chair legs dragging across a bar floor, a strained moan with the visceral undertone of nails on a chalkboard. The noise repeated as they ventured deeper into the warehouse but had no set cadence. The scraping could persist for almost a minute, not be heard for several more, and then return with one sharp burst before going quiet again. Sometimes, the thud of falling objects and furniture joined it as well.

Giant rats aren’t particularly stealthy once they’ve claimed a domain, so hearing odd noises in an infested warehouse is not unusual. The consistency of the sound made it strange, though, the same chair-drag groan every time they heard it.

They fought through the first warehouse section and pushed through the second. In the second section, the rats had chewed into crates of fine dishware, spilling plates and cups across the ground, most of them shattered into thousands of porcelain pieces. Fighting on top of the shards wasn’t particularly challenging, but it was slippery at times, for the adventurers and for the giant rats.

The dragging sound, though, was much louder, barely muffled by the next warehouse wall. They were closing in on the mystery.

“We get to the back of the second section, and we find how the rats got into the other warehouse areas,” Mazo said. “There was a hole in the wooden wall the size of a barn door, part chewed, part broken.” The halfling gestured that the door was big. Izz joined her since her arms weren’t nearly long enough to represent a barn door.

The hole in question connected the fine dishware section to the third and final area, the unrented portion of the warehouse where the adventurers believed the giant rats first nested.

“As we walk up to the hole, trying to decide if we go in that way or go around to use the main door, that sound comes again, and it’s loud. Whatever it was, it was big, like ‘is something dragging a broken horse carriage?’ big.”

The party, comprised of two humans and a halfling, didn’t have a party member with low light-vision, and since it was a building someone owned–and wanted to continue owning when the job was done–they couldn’t do the adventurer trick of tossing a torch ahead to see if there was any danger.

Hans was the most durable of the party, so he stepped through first to scout, with Mazo and Gret following close behind.

“Gret has one foot through the hole and the dragging comes so loud it hurts my ears. Then comes Hans, sprinting like his tail’s on fire, screaming in this high-pitched voice.”

“That’s not how it happened,” Hans said, interrupting.

Mazo ignored him and continued. “He’s yelling ‘Ogopogo! Ogopogo!’ He grabs Gret as he runs back into the dishware section and pulls me and him all the way back where we first came into the warehouse. The entire time he is just yelling, ‘Ogopogo! Ogopogo!’ Gret and I had no clue what that word meant.”

Though Hans argued that they should go get reinforcements, Mazo calmed him enough to learn that an ogopogo was a giant serpent. She hadn’t heard of it because it was native to a jungle region beyond the kingdom’s borders. The monster could grow up to 30 feet long and could spit venom so potent it melted through wood like acid. Small ogopogos were Bronze-ranked threats while the fully grown adults could push into Silver, depending on their size.

“Gret and I had never heard of an ogopogo, but Hans is the brains of the group so he gives us a rundown on how to fight this monster native to an area hundreds of miles away. He said it wasn’t as fast as it should have been, so he guessed it was sick or wounded already.”

Once Hans had collected himself, the party returned to the hole in the wall. They entered using breach tactics, Mazo ready with a lightning ability she stole from a type of electric lizard, Gret ready with his bow, and Hans with his sword and shield.

Their entry wasn’t quiet, and the rats swarmed in numbers far greater than the other sections. Gret switched to a rapier and joined Hans in poking and stabbing every brown blur in sight. Mazo had more luck. The rats, now starting to crawl on top of each other to get to the adventurers, bunched up nicely for a surge of magical electricity to arc through.

Hans scanned the room over and over, looking for the ogopogo in the darkness. After 30 dead rats or so, the screeching scrape noise filled the room and vibrated the floor. Unlike before, the sound didn’t rest. Whatever made the noise approached quickly.

“Remember, this thing could be Silver-ranked, and we’re Irons. I thought for sure Hans was seeing things, but hearing it move won me over to his panic. I have this ability to shoot barbs I got from a dire porcupine, so I dump my mana into the dark, spraying anything in the direction of the noise.”

A swarm of rats screeched and flooded out of the darkness into the light of their lamps, most of them half-dead from porcupine quills. The party cut them down with ease, but they didn’t hear the ogopogo anymore. No dragging, no friction of a giant snake thrashing from a wound.

“Hans goes, ‘I see it!’ and creeps ahead. We followed a few paces behind, ready to face an angry acid-spitting behemoth. I see Hans kick a green body at the edge of my lamplight. He pauses, then turns around, speedwalking to me and Gret, saying, ‘Yep. Job’s over. We can go.’”

Mazo wasn’t about to let a few rats or worse, an ogopogo, slip away. Despite Hans’ insistence that they leave, she moved forward and shined her lamp on the green corpse.

The body of an adult ogopogo lay on the ground. Portions of it look deflated, like whole pieces were removed from the inside without disturbing the skin outside. Oddly, the snake wasn’t bleeding. Gret lifted a flap of snakeskin with his rapier and pointed out that giant rats had been inside the snake. Any blood they saw was from them, not the snake.

Walking to the tailend of the ogopogo, Mazo saw that the bottom third of the snake was attached to a display stand as large as a garden shed and built from heavy wood. Beyond the display stand, the halfling could see a zig-zag of gouges in the floor where the display stand had traveled, pulled along by the rats nesting inside.

“There’s even a plaque on the display. It said who donated the ogopogo and when. Hans, our fearless party leader, was ready to call in the big swords over a stuffed animal.”

The townspeople around the bonfire broke into laughter.

“I technically wasn’t wrong,” Hans said, attempting to defend himself.

Thuz, speaking to everyone but Hans, said, “He makes this argument everytime Miss Mazo tells this story. It never works.”

“At least you kind of got to visit the museum after all?” Olza added, triggering a new wave of good natured laughter.

***

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.

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.