“Side passage leading east,” Harriet murmured. “The tunnel goes up pretty sharply and sorta splits, not into two tunnels but into two elevations. East side, stream, running faster; west side, a ledge that rises.”
“Wait, wait, I just want to make sure I got this right,” Cassandra said with a transparently fake air of casual inquiry. “One of your friends is upset about some other game a bunch of the kids in your class are playing. And the game has always-evil goblins just like here, but they have big hooked noses and they handle all of the banking, and they’re part of a big conspiracy to hide or control all the gold?”
“Yes, mom.” Harriet rolled her eyes. “The ledge has a bridge going east, or coming from the east, and the ledge makes a westwards turn towards where the bridge goes while the water keeps going a ways past that until it goes around a bend.”
“And there’s an animal horn that was sounded as part of rallying the troops for a rebellion, on a year that’s got nothing going for it other than being linked to a pogrom, whose sound is described as annoying. Which is definitely not a shofar, despite being the exact same shape as one.”
“Yes, mom. There’s a lookout at the bridge, on the west side of the bridge. It’s not exactly stealthy, so I spotted it without a problem. I don’t know what it’s waiting for or why it’s there, but the torchlight’s going to be super obvious if we go that way; we should either douse the light or put an arrow into it.”
“And the main plot is basically about how after literally centuries of being at best second-class citizens, they decide to do something about it and get brutally and violently crushed, while the only sympathetic members of their race say shit about how oh well violence doesn’t solve anything, you know, and anyway there are good Germans so the Nazis can’t be all bad?”
“Mom, I get it! Can we please focus on the killing that we need to do and less on some dumb game I didn’t play and don’t care about?”
“I think,” Jason said softly, “your mother’s less concerned about the game, and more concerned about how Sarah feels about your other classmates making a bunch of noise about how they’re playing that game.”
“Also I’m honestly having trouble believing that something that brazen even exists,” Cassandra muttered angrily. “Was it literally made by alt-right Youtube chuds in alliance with gamergaters?”
“Something something, Mark Twain, but I repeat myself? Probably,” allowed Harriet. “I mean, what was the thing you kept saying to dad? Irony is dead, satire—”
“—has become reality, and edginess has become a greased slide into the abyss, why do I say anything around you?” Cassandra was smiling thinly despite her exasperated tone and choice of words.
“Because I’m invisible whenever I’m reading a book, which I do a lot because you’d rather spend two hundred bucks a week on books than buy me a game console, and also you have no filter. Now can I please kill the sentry and we go see what’s up the east side?”
“Not that I have any fuckin’ idea what you’re talking about,” Trio interjected, “but why the east side?”
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“The crack with the light was on the west,” Harriet said. “Plus, the west side has three paths going into there, and the east has two, and one’s up while the other’s down. So the east side’s probably a loop.”
“I wouldn’t want to take a walk up that ledge,” the former miner muttered. “It’s shit, absolute shit blasted shale, probably all go collapsing into the water if any of us walk on it, excepting maybe the girl here.”
“Do it,” Cassandra said.
Harriet tried to hide her surprise, failing completely. “No cross-examination, not gonna insist on taking a look yourself?”
“With a negative Stealth score?” The troublemaker’s mother snorted. After a moment, her face softened, and she added in a quieter tone, “I trust your judgment on this, honey. You’ve grown into a viciously insightful mischief gremlin, and I couldn’t be prouder.”
“Hear, hear,” Jason said with a broad smile. “Now go get ‘em, tiger.”
“God, mom, you sound like dad,” Harriet whined. “But um, thanks.”
She slipped away with rather less deftness than she’d managed climbing the treacherous side passage to the cave, possibly because she was distracted, but a few moments later there was the quiet twang of a bowshot—
Rolling Attack (Shortbow) | 1d20+7 | 1d6+5
7 damage KILLS Goblin
—and the thudding splash of a body hitting the water.
“Done,” Harriet spoke out of the shadows not long afterwards. “And they don’t seem to have noticed, and the body’s all the way under the water so they’re not gonna notice.”
“Up the east passage, then?”
“Yeah.” Harriet smirked. “But I’m going first, not mister Clanksalot McDad here.” She made a knuckles-cracking gesture, which turned out to be soundless, and pouted. “No sense of drama! Alright, whatever. Time to kill more things. Nice zero-complication no-angst killing of everything we run into.”
“Tempting fate,” Cassandra muttered, glowering narrow-eyed at her advancing back as the Ranger scrambled up the bad footing of the stone passageway.
“Complications,” Harriet’s voice called softly a minute later. “Sorry mom, but hey, I found the guards! And um. It’s a bit… this is madness over there.”
Drawing a semicircle in the dust with her heel, she started sketching out a battle map… and marked off where, right next to a pit, two guardsmen were shackled and playing cards with a human and a half-elf in the light of a campfire.
“One hobgoblin,” Harriet said, marking out the creature’s position at the southern corner of the area, as far away from the fire as he could be. “Two humans with the guards, the guards don’t have any weapons on hand and they’re shackled by the legs but their hands are free. And two goblins up at the north side, doing fuck-knows-what.”
“Five targets,” Cassandra muttered. “And we’re bad enough at stealth that we can’t guarantee all of us being in range. Alright. Ideas? Trio, Harriet.”
“Ignore ‘em,” Trio said bluntly. “They’ll wrestle the two to try not to die, me and the big guy square up against the hobgoblin while you two take the little fucks, we clean up in order.”
“Snipe the goblins in the north.” Harriet shrugged when the others glanced over at her. “What? The two god-y guys won’t notice, they’re playing cards. And the hobgoblin, I mean, I guess he might, but if he doesn’t, it’s four against three.”
“I say we negotiate!” Three sets of eyes snapped over to Jason, staring blankly. “What? I’m sure we can come to an agreement. Maybe we can fix whatever problem is making this whole thing go sour!”
“I love you, dear,” Cassandra said fondly. “Now, here’s what we’re going to do.”
Four sets of heads nodded in agreement when she was done explaining, and they grabbed their gear and extinguished the torch.
“Alright, girlie.” Trio grinned into the darkness at where he—wrongly, not that it mattered—thought Harriet was. “Go make some trouble.”