The dungeon was alive with energy, more than just Gina, that was a given, this was a feeling of excitement among the minions of the caverns, it was finally time for them to do what they were created for, to fight for their creator! The rules were simple. Don’t be seen. Don’t kill. Don’t do anything that couldn’t be explained by any other line of logic other than they were all living inside a man-eating magical dungeon filled with mythical wee folk of magic who were attempting to drive out the intruders and claim their rightful home.
Gina was delighted to see her team so excited to get to work, already they were plotting together and getting along just like every family she imagined did every day. She tried to participate in every conversation at the same time to make sure all the plots were going far enough without going to far.
“No Kawn, blowing their hair around isn’t far enough, summoning flesh eating fish into their stomachs is too far.”
“Yes Shale, we can put pointy rocks in their shoes, making those rocks look like angry miniature gnomes holding daggers is not sneaky enough”
“Maybe Sapana, instead of drowning them all in the pool, just make them not want to go into it, or make them regret it if they do, if you kill them they are too dead to regret anything”
“Adding too much salt to their food is a good step in the right direction Szef, but I am sure you can find things worse than Salt.”
“Pappi, I know you can summon bees, ants, squirrels, angry fuzzies, stinking weeds, poison weeds, stinking weeds and strangler vines, but too much at one time looks suspicious, maybe just one of those a day. We want these people to leave on their own, we don’t want a war on our hands. I know you want to finish the war they started, but they don’t know they started a war, we need them to keep not knowing.”
-
Bobert woke up the next day, feeling better about himself. He had always worked hard for the organization, was loyal and had earned the trust to be the accountant of their newest venture. It didn’t seem like much when they first offered it to him, a cave in the mountains that was two days travel from the nearest town and more than a week to the closest major city, he sat up and paused, thinking of all the luxuries he missed. He stood up and removed his nightshirt, those luxuries were a small cost compared to the boost to his reputation.
This was always a lucrative area, where the 3 roads met, but they could never find a good way to cover their activities. But with the bar here! The caravans came to them, it was a place for drivers to have some drinks while on duty without their owners ever finding out, and a tipsy driver was a talkative driver. The crew just had to sit back and relax while the intel came to them! No inside strings to be worried about, no guesswork on what shipments to cut… They weren’t even cutting more shipments than before, but now every cut was a critical hit for their crew. It was the peak of efficiency. Yes, this was going to be good for his career.
He slid on his plain daily wear and then put on his shoes with a soggy squish. He pulled his foot back out of his shoe to find his foot now stank like the dozens of minnows that were crammed into his shoe. Now this was the real tradeoff, when things are easy the crew loses their professionalism. It was pointless to get upset about this, they already had an internal investigation and were not able to find the prankster and turned up nothing. He walked barefoot out of the inn, through the bar and to the river, the nerves in his feet screaming at his brain for the unaccustomed hardness of a stone floor and then screamed louder as the stone became colder with the winter air as he approached the river. Why didn’t he put on a clean pair of socks to save his poor feet. He knelt down and started rinsing his socks out in the stream, ice pushing out from the shore trying to hide the flows beneath it’s glassy surface. He laid his socks out on a sunny rock and then started to rinse his shoes, an aggressively large splash of the river snatched one of them out of his grip and suddenly it was gone.
Bobert refused to move for several minutes, unbelieving, hoping that somehow the river would find his shoe to be distasteful and regurgitate it back into his cold arms. Reality kicked in and he swore “BURN it! BURN it ALL! His cursing didn’t make him feel better, his fingers only go more numb from the freezing water that held on to his skin tighter than he had been holding onto his shoe. He sat on the large, sun dried rock next to his shoes, holding his frozen toes in his frozen hands, wishing for a moment that the whole world would just freeze over. After deciding permanent winter would not be an improvement he gathered up his soaked socks and single shoe, gasping in pain as the cold made every step feel like it was on shards of glass. He was too distracted by his own gasping to hear the giggling coming from the direction of the river as the waterfall continued it’s unsympathetic flow.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
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Deep below the suffering above there was cheering, the wee folk watching the miserable intruder hobbling back into their home through what looked to be a small dark blue window. The window shifted back to the banks of the river as a shyly smiling Sapana slipped through the window and closed it behind, shimmering more than usual in the cold winter air flowing inside the cavern from the window. The window was one of the skills the Naiad had been working on, it was one of the many uses of Dimensional - Gateway. Looking through it was the easy part, so far only the wee folk could actually travel from one location to the other. It required two spaces to be equally defined and then a push of magic to connect those two places as if it was simply an open door or window, the more identical and clearly defined the two spaces, the more stable the connection was. Sapana stepped to the side among many congratulations and pats on the back as the gateway dispersed, leaving an empty stone frame on the wall.
Kawn stood up and gave a flourished bow. “Mischief has been prepared and is ready to be served, assuming you are ready?”
Sapana touched the stone frame and a window into the kitchen from behind some barrels. Kawn stepped through the frame, the image wavered a little but cleared up quickly.
If any of the members of the Silver’s Debole had stayed up the night before after their exhausting day long inquisition (aside from those that that had been guarding the entrance) they would have seen three small gray figures darting about the cavern, creating identical square frames all over the inn and bar. Fortunately for the wee folk the big folk were not the most aware folk, aside from the big folk at the entrance to the caverns, the wee folk stayed away from those folk.
Kawn slowly floated up the barrels in the corner of the kitchen. If all the dungeon minions were ranked on their sneaking skills Kawn would be on the bottom with Szef a close second, Szef was very aware of this shortcoming and so the movement was very slow to not attract attention. One of the thieves was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables and throwing them into a pot for a breakfast vegetable and sausage stew. The thieves always made their own breakfast, not trusting Faul or Uden around their meals unless Dan was present. The thief turned around a couple of times to drop vegetables from the counter onto the stove, but somehow failed to see the pale Sylph slowly rising up the outside of the crates and barrels.
The rest of the minions were watching from a new window that was set up higher in the kitchen, giving them a clear view of the achingly slow climb. Shale was arm-wrestling among themselves, every match a tie. Sapana was floating a ribbon of water around slender blue fingers. Szef was sitting crossed legs, watching the window very intently with a straight back. Pappi was hunched over, examining a crew of ants.
They were still doing this when Kawn finally made it to the top of the barrels and laid flat on top of it. While the thieves back was turned a square grid of lines pulled the air apart with a low hum, from the void a sock fell. – plop – It sank into the pot, the sound of the fall masked by the burbling of the boiling stew. Next the end of a leather belt, some shoelaces and a bunch of other almost random items. One of the items splashed a little louder than most, the thief looked up, startled, then immediately danced around the room hooting and slapping his legs.
Kawn drifted down, a little faster this time as it seemed like the thief was occupied with his morning exercises and probably wouldn’t notice the movement. Kawn returned to everyone’s joyful laughter of praise at his perfectly executed sabotage, took a bow and then enjoyed the show.
Pappi sent thoughts of praise towards an exceptionally large ant that was hanging out nearby, the ant moved its large, very sharp and possible mildly venomous mandibles in response.
-
Jeremy was on morning breakfast duty and was having a pleasant morning, that is until a swarm of biting ants found his legs and decided it was their breakfast time. As suddenly as they attacked they were gone, it took the thief a while to realize it as the pain in his legs didn’t go away for some time after the ants left. He eventually turned back to the pot, as painful as the ants were he didn’t want the misery that the other members of the crew would pile on if they had to leave on their missions without breakfast. He took a sip of the soup and almost choked on a button. Further investigation revealed his stock was stocked with an assortment of missing items. He looked around wildly for the culprit.
The ants were not a mistake, they were a distraction, but who had it out for him? “Nancy!” he hissed. He didn’t know how she did it, where she was or if she had conspirators, but it had to be her. Did she know of… his mind ran through a list of minor betrayals of the organization, most of it was simply underreporting hauls, items that were not one the invoice of a stolen shipment slipping into his personal stash. Were they cleaning out the drawers? Is this whole inn house an in-house operation!
This was not the time to deal with that. Someone had sent him a message and for his sake it was best that no one else found out about that message.
Jeremy sifted through the stew, removed all the objects and served breakfast with a smile. A very cold smile of frantic resolve nailed to his face.
-
The window in Gina’s room went out. The family was still laughing, the didn’t know who Nancy was, it didn’t matter who Nancy was, this was the most fun they had in… ever.