Empirical Gnollage: Installment 77 [https://squirrel.dogphilosophy.net/Installment077.png]
Despite some intellectual discomfort brought on by the thoughts of what had happened during the busy day, the relative lack of emotional distress made it easy for the fatigue to drag Al down to sleep.
He wasn't sure how long he'd slept when the bodily imperative to return the wine he'd rented at dinner woke him again. Grumbling at the insistence of nature's call, Al got out of bed as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the others. He made his way out into the hall, carefully closing the door again behind himself, and headed towards the privies.
He hadn't gotten far down the hall when the door of one of the other rooms opened, and an elderly bearded man leaned out to look up and down the hall. He saw Al, and seemed to carefully examine Al from his head to his feet. The man stroked his beard thoughtfully as Al drew closer, but before Al decided to speak up, the man gave a sort of noncommittal nod of tentative approval to himself, then withdrew and closed the door again.
That was weird, Al thought to himself, but hurried past the door and continued on his way.
Further ahead, on the opposite side of the hall, another door opened. An elvish person leaned out and looked in Al's direction. Al wasn't sure whether this was an elvish man or woman - only their head and shoulders were visible, and by humanish standards, elven men tended to appear feminine almost as much as dwarven women tended to seem masculine. Regardless, the elf watched with careful appraisal as Al passed. Al's polite "Uh...hello," as he went by seemed to startle them. They smirked and nodded back, watching as Al continued down the hallway.
Is there something on my back? Al wondered and twisted his neck around to look, to discover that there was in fact nothing on his back. At all. In his urgency, he'd forgotten to put any clothes on as he left. Al felt the blush of embarrassment on his face as the elf went back into their room and shut the door. Al walked faster.
All right, it's not like we haven't seen other people walking around in here with no clothes, just act like I'm doing it on purpose and maybe I can find a towel to borrow, he thought to himself. He looked away and tried to be nonchalant as yet another door opened ahead of him. A well-armored but helmetless and golden-haired-and-bearded dwarf emerged with clanking steps to stand directly in Al's path, scrutinizing him.
"Halt a moment. I would examine you," the dwarf announced sternly.
"Uh, sorry, no, I really need to do something right now," Al replied, quickly stepping around the dwarfish obstacle.
"I insist!" the dwarf demanded, turning smartly to face the direction Al was headed.
"Possibly on the way back, there's something I really need to take care of at the moment," Al insisted back, continuing on his way.
"Hmmm," he heard the dwarf mutter behind him, "...Vielleicht." This was followed by clanking footsteps again, and the closing of a door.
"Maybe" what? Are they even allowed to order other guests around like that here? Al wondered. He reached the turn that led down a side hall to the privies. He went quickly around the corner. Someone wearing long silvery-white hooded robes was standing in front of the nearest door. The shadow of the hood made the wearer's face indistinct, but Al thought there was a polite smile there. Al dismissed a thought of asking to borrow the robes.
The robed figure grasped the handle on the nearest privy door with slender, long-fingernailed hands, and beckoned Al to make use of it.
"Um, thank you," said Al quietly as he rushed inside, eager to get a least a few moments of privacy to take care of what he came for. The door was gently pushed shut behind him.
The privies were all of clean, polished stone. Holes drilled across the top of the door allowed in just enough light from the lamp-lit hallway for someone to be able to see what they were doing, and of course one large hole in the stone bench awaited use. The sound of water running somewhere below the toilet's opening explained why the privies never smelled bad, at least not for more than a few moments at a time. Al stepped closer to the hole, grateful to get at least a short break from people staring at him.
The cluster of glowing sickly green eyes that looked up from inside the hole at him almost made him involuntarily and indiscriminately do what he'd been about to do. The combined dim light from the holes in the door and the glowing patch of eyes allowed Al to just barely make out the opening of a wide mouth, resembling that of some giant shark-toothed frog. Al quickly stepped back, pushing the privy door open with his body as the burbling, croaking voice spoke. He couldn't understand any of it, but it sounded mocking and threatening, and was easily recognizable as the language he'd heard the demons in Wulfcynn Keep speaking. A slimy spiked tentacle reached up out of the toilet.
The robed figure still stood next to the door, watching Al curiously as he continued backing away.
"There's a demon in the privy!" Al shouted. "One of us should run for help! I don't know how long I can hold it off but if you hurry OOF!"
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His announcement was interrupted as he tripped backwards over something, sitting down hard on the cold tiles. He looked down to see the end of a long reptilian tail, clad in opalescent scales and stretching across the floor. His eyes followed it to where the other end disappeared under the robe, which was rising. A silvery-white reptilian head as large as Al's body extruded itself on a long neck from under the hood. A moment later, the creature had mostly filled the hallway.
Wet slapping sounds and the disturbing voice of the privy-demon distracted him from watching the transformation. A reptilian claw gently tapped his shoulder, then pointed with a talon the length of Al's arms at the slimy green tentacled shark-frog-topus thing squeezing itself out of the privy through the hole.
No time to question, only one of these things is threatening me at this moment so...
Al spoke the words and made the gestures to conjure the bolts of flaming magical energy, hurling them at the demon as it lunged out of the privy towards him.
"Get away from my toilet!" Al growled as he sat up in the dark.
Al looked around for a moment, breathing heavily in his confusion. A quiet sliding sound came from under his bed, and the bestial head of the monster that had been sleeping there was just barely visible to Al in the sliver of light coming in under the door from the hallway. Gruntle looked to Al and then quickly around the room. Seeing nothing, he began to sniff.
"Just another weird dream, it's alright," Al told the gnoll. "There's nothing here, I think."
Gruntle's eyes glowed amber in the dim light of the room as they regarded Al. Then the gnoll grunted once, and returned to his comfortable space under the bed. Al took stock of his situation in the meantime. He was still wearing the trousers and shirt he'd gone to bed in. He felt reasonably well rested, and guessed that it was probably early morning near sunrise. The urgency of the bladder, on the other hand, was real. Al rose from the bed.
"Got to use the privies. I'll be right back," he said quietly. The only answer was a snore from Wikwocket, so Al left the room quickly and retraced the path he'd dreamed about. He half-expected doors to open and people to stare at him, but the only sign of activity was a few members of the staff in the distance, making the usual preparations for the day. There was nobody in the hall with the privies. Al opened the first privy door, and cautiously leaned in to look down the deep hole of the toilet. After some paranoid staring to make sure the sparkles of reflected light from the flowing water down below were not eyes, Al huffed and stepped in to do his business.
"If you are down there, take this, you jerk," Al muttered at the toilet as he finally answered nature's call.
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Al found Stephen waiting patiently beside the door when he got back to the room.
"Good morning," he said to Al with a small bow, "I'd been informed one of you was up and about. On behalf of the magistrate of Hell's Bathtub, we thank you for your party's service and discretion."
He offered Al a leather scroll-case. Al accepted it.
"The details of the job are there, along with what information we have available that might help, and a permit to leave and return by the southern gate. It's been requested that you avoid tormenting Larry, the guard there, but this isn't a mandatory element of the job. I understand that it might be difficult for vampires and werewolves to resist the temptation," Stephen said, barely repressing a grin.
"Thanks, I'll let the others know and take a look at what you've given us," Al responded.
"If you perceive any problems with the terms of the job, contact me and I will mediate for you. Otherwise, we look forward to your successful completion."
Another member of the staff further down the hall waved, and Stephen sighed.
"I must go, there's always more work to be done," Stephen said, and with another small bow headed off to see what else he was needed for. Al opened the door and went back inside. He went back to his bed and commanded the candle on his nightstand to light itself. This revealed Bote sitting up on their bed.
"I presume you now have the details of our public job?" the dwarf asked, getting down from their bed.
"It looks that way," replied Al as he opened the scroll-case. Wikwocket snorted and sat up, fighting her way sleepily out from under the blanket.
"Are you opening treasure?" she yawned.
"Potential treasure, I guess," he answered.
The scroll-case contained several pieces of paper rolled up together, and one smaller piece of fine parchment, the latter of which held a finely-calligraphed statement that the four of them were allowed to leave and return, with a wax seal and signature of the magistrate. Al couldn't really tell what the name represented by the elaborately-swirled lettering actually was, but it was certainly distinctive. Al set the parchment aside and unrolled the papers. Three of them were copies of older maps showing the distribution of the remains of buildings on the site of the Lavatio, None of them were particularly well surveyed and the distances and sizes suggested by the maps all disagreed, but the broad details of the layout matched well enough. A large rectangular area at the approximate center of the mapped territory had been labeled Lavatio in a more modern script on the copies of the older maps. One of the three copies even indicated that there were steps heading down into the Lavatio on the eastern side. A fourth paper had a sketch of the area around Hell's Bathtub, showing the path south and down to the intersection where the road to the Lavatio split off. Given about two hours between the gate and the intersection, Al guessed it was probably a further hour of travel to their destination from there if the proportions on that map were accurate.
The last piece of paper was the actual quest.
"Oh, wow, this is a step up in formality and reward. A thorough description and multiple payments. Let's see...Hell's Bathtub thanks blah, blah, blah authorizes the.... Really? The gnoll party? I knew it."
Al sighed and scanned down the document.
"Okay, here we go. One hundred gold coins for agreeing to take the job, payable upon completion of at least one other goal. Fifty gold coins for documenting the layout, contents, and possible structural dangers of the Lavatio with up to a further one hundred at the discretion of the magistrate for especially useful information. One hundred and fifty gold coins for the elimination of any dangerous flora or fauna in or around the Lavatio with up to another two hundred at the discretion of the magistrate depending on the danger and thoroughness. After completion, a bonus..."
"What? A bonus of what?!" Wikwocket demanded when Al stopped to stare at the page.
"One...thousand...gold coins, if the survey crew sent by Hell's Bathtub after completion of this job is able to complete their first day of surveying the interior of the Lavatio without harm, excepting those caused by negligence of the survey crew or ordinary well-known natural pests of the area," Al read, with a crooked smile.
"I like that number," said the wide-eyed Wikwocket.
"...oh, and according to this, we agree not to take anything of value that belonged to the original site."
"Of course, not," Wikwocket agreed, "we're not looters. Especially not if they're paying us that much!"