Angela looked from goblin to goblin to pick a target as she whirled her sling overhead. Then she loosed the bullet; her target fell, this one releasing a short inarticulate noise as gray brain matter spattered onto the bright red skin of its shoulder. Its left leg instantly went limp, falling over sideways as it lifted its right arm reflexively towards its head for a moment; then it was still.
Several other goblins turned, peering in her direction with torch-blinded eyes. One pointed, shouting. “Ambush! More that way!”
Her third sling bullet took that one in the chest. It fell forward, a smaller bloody hole visible in its back. Two wet war dogs emerged from the pond, barking fiercely as they shook themselves; then bolted forward, both lunging at a red-skinned goblin with a dented and chipped short sword. Angela loosed a fourth sling bullet. It went wild, hitting the cave wall to the left with an audible crack, leaving a divot behind in the stone.
“That’s right,” Angela shouted, feeling inspired. She tried to deepen her voice a little. “We’ve got them trapped now, don’t let them run away!” Behind her, the cart clattered noisily as the goats emerged from the tunnel. “Raaaaaaagh!” she yelled as she loosed a fifth bullet from her sling. With a loud ping, it knocked the helmet off of one of the goblins near the tunnel, startling it without causing any serious injury.
“Dwarves! Dwarves!”
“Run away!”
“To the upper tunnel! The enemy diversion is no more! All the way to the surface!” This last shout came from a particularly large goblin, one wearing metal armor and carrying a bearded axe in two hands. He was wearing a heavy silver necklace and a pair of bright brass bracers and waving in the direction of the fallen adventurers with an air of command.
Angela nodded to herself, loosing a sling bullet at the leader. “At him!” she yelled, hoping the war dogs would follow the lead of her sling bullet. The goblin leader staggered from the impact, his ill-fitting breastplate halfway caved in, but was still standing on his feet when the war dogs jumped on him. One dog jumped straight into the goblin’s axe with a sickening yelp; the other savaged the goblin leader’s throat.
The goblins were in full retreat, panicked shouts echoing through the cave system and increasingly fading with distance. Uncertain of her bouyancy or the true depth of the water, Angela carefully walked around the edge of the pond, tucking her sling back into her belt. The wounded war dog was still alive and mobile, limping toward her as blood dripped from its midsection; with a muttered incantation that was half prayer and half panic, Angela placed her hand on the dog’s head. The vicious wound in the dog’s gut glowed with holy light, re-sealing itself in front of her eyes. The dog whined as it sprang to its feet, licking Angela’s face repeatedly.
“Okay, okay!” Angela said, pushing the dog away. “Sit.” She shook her head. “I’m going to rename you Lazarus,” she said, then looked over at the fallen adventurers. “Shit,” she said, jogging over to the fallen bodies. The torchbearer, the one she’d seen fall – he was still alive, orange cloak gently rising and falling. Probably not for long. “Ohmigod,” she said, taking a breath to focus her concentration before putting her hand on his forehead. A chanted prayer later, and his eyes fluttered open.
Angela went from body to body. There was a human girl in a pool of blood next to an extinguished torch. No pulse. An elf, one hand still wrapped around a two-handed sword too large to be of any use to a goblin, a loop of intestine lying next to him. But he still had a pulse. She laid her hand on the elf, chanting out her last healing spell and watching in wonder as the loop of intestine was sucked back inside the elf.
There was a decapitated dwarf. Definitely dead. A third human. No pulse. A halfling. A weak pulse. Angela prayed and chanted, holding her hand on the halfling’s forehead, but no holy light had come. “God, please,” Angela said. “You gave me three healing spells, let me save three of the kids.”
In the absence of any healing holy light, she turned the halfling over gently. Swabbing cloth, brandy. Clean the wounds. She muttered prayers under her breath as she unrolled a long strip of clean cloth, bandaging the cut in the halfling’s leg and then wrapping cloth around the lump in the halfling’s head. There wasn’t much she could do for blunt trauma except hope there wasn’t too much internal bleeding. Maybe try to drain the swelling if it got too bad?
“Hey,” said a tired voice. The elf boy had crawled over. He had a handful of berries. “Chloe had magic healing berries. Maybe these will help, if you can get him to eat them.”
Angela nodded, taking the berries. “Maybe,” she said. She pulled open the halfling’s mouth, poured the berries in, and then clamped the halfling’s mouth shut, trying to help him chew and swallow. The halfling coughed, spitting out mashed berries, and groaned, eyes fluttering open briefly before shutting again.
Unsure of the efficacy of the alleged magic healing berries and unwilling to undo her bandaging work to check, Angela decided to place the halfling in the cart under a blanket (at least she knew that was clean), along with the chief’s jewelry and armor and a small locked chest that looked promisingly like loot. Halfway around the pond, there were straw beds and a collection of detritus, signs that this was the goblins’ permanent home; although they were of questionable cleanliness, she helped the surviving elf and human into a pair of straw beds. They didn’t have any open wounds; they should be fine, she told herself.
Angela spent an hour shifting rocks to block the tunnel the goblins had fled through, then moved several of the straw beds next to it. She would rest there, along with the dogs; and then re-evaluate her patients. It took several mugs of stout and three hours of sitting vigil next to the snoring dogs before she felt her nerves had settled enough for her to try to go to sleep.
With party mates Aiden, Dylan, and Jacob, Angela has defeated 52 goblins, including one goblin chief (805 XP; 201 each). With party mates Aiden, Dylan, and Jacob, Angela has recovered 2230 silver pennies in value of treasure from the goblins (2230 XP; 557 XP each). For defeating 52 hit dice of enemies, Angela has also earned 520 bonus warrior XP. For casting spells in furtherance of a divine ethos of rescue, Angela has earned 200 bonus priest XP. Angela had an idea that saved the party (300 bonus XP). Angela has earned 10% bonus fighter XP for exceptional attributes.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Status:
Current hp:
6
Armor class:
5
XP (fighter):
1165/2000
XP (cleric):
830/1500
Spells memorized:
(None)
----------------------------------------
Jacob stirred in his sleep, consciousness slowly returning.
With party mates Angela, Dylan, and Jacob, Jacob has defeated 52 goblins, including one goblin chief (805 XP; 201 each). With party mates Aiden, Dylan, and Jacob, Jacob has recovered 2230 silver pennies in value of treasure from the goblins (2230 XP; 557 XP each). For defeating 52 hit dice of enemies, Jacob has also earned 520 bonus warrior XP.
Status:
Hit points:
3/3
Armor class:
8
XP (fighter):
1358/2000
Jacob sat up with a start, blinking his eyes against the darkness as he sat up. What a strange dream, he thought to himself. He’d been flung into a role-playing game, got cheated out of full starting hit points, got clobbered by low-level foes for a paltry sum of XP, lost his party and joined a new one, then went down into a dark cave where he got clobbered by low-level foes again, except after getting clobbered, somehow he’d “defeated” them and gained roughly ten times as much experience. And who was Angela?
“What does it mean?” Jacob asked himself, then shook his head. “I think it means I spend too much time on tabletop games.”
A candle flared to life, the dim light illuminating an unfamiliar face framed by flowing gray locks that transitioned smoothly into a similarly flowing gray beard. A large dog stood to either side of her. The one on the left sniffed at him curiously. “Good morning,” the person said in a feminine voice. “I’m Angela. What’s your name?”
Looking down, Jacob could see the suggestion of a figure similar to a very compact female powerlifter. He swallowed nervously, feeling rough straw underneath himself and noticing a stalactite overhead. “I’m Jacob,” he said.
“Oh! You’re the grandson of, um, Julie? Or maybe Linda? You look so much like Linda’s brother John,” Angela said, brushing a stray lock of hair out of her face as she continued talking at a mile a minute, not affording Jacob any conversational openings. “Other than the hair, anyway. I used to, um, I hung out with Julie and Linda a lot in college.” Angela thought that sounded a lot better than saying she was the ex-wife of Julie’s ex-boyfriend George.
“Oh, um,” Jacob paused awkwardly, looking away. “Julie is my biological grandmother. And … what the fuck.” Looking down had shown Jacob two things. First, his left arm showed a weird imprinted pattern from where he’d slept on top of it. Second, the pattern matched the mail hauberk he was wearing, which was not the same pattern as the aluminum mail shirt that Uncle John had bought him for his sixteenth birthday.
Angela nodded sagely, intuiting the source of Jacob’s distress. “Yeah, you’re not in a dream,” she said. “You’re not in the world you used to know and you got your ass kicked by goblins. Fortunately, I was able to scare them off and heal you and a couple of the others. Unfortunately, not all of the others.”
“Shit. Wait, those were goblins? But I thought the goblins had green skin, and those had red skin,” Jacob said. “Were they, like, fire goblins or something?” Goblins had green skin in all the fantasy art he was used to, anyway.
Angela paused. “I remember goblins having skin ranging from yellow to various oranges to deep red. At least, that’s how they were described in my games back in college. And I’m pretty sure those were goblins.”
“Huh,” Jacob said. “Aiden said he ran into some green-skinned goblins earlier. Said that they killed my friends Ava and Elijah, and that they fled to this mountain.”
“Shit. If there’s a second tribe of goblins in this mountain, we need to be really careful about how we try to get out of here,” Angela said. “You didn’t find any green goblins in here, did you?”
Jacob shook his head.
“I’ll go wake the others. We could try going out the way you guys came in, but the red goblins left that way,” Angela said. “I was going to leave that blocked and try to go out another way. I’ve found two other passages out of this cavern that might lead up, but if there are green goblins somewhere under the same mountain, that’s probably higher-risk.”
“We’re not really deep in the mountain,” Jacob said. “We did take one fork to get here that I noticed, but we didn’t see anywhere that dozens of goblins could camp out. If they went that way, they probably went all the way up to the surface.”
“Okay,” Angela said. “Important question: Is it day or night right now? You’ve slept for, uh, I think about twelve hours.”
“Should be daylight or close to it, then,” Jacob said. “We reached the outside of the cave a little before sunset, and it felt like it was summer weather.”
Angela nodded. “Then we should move quickly. Goblins are mostly nocturnal. We might be able to slip by without a fight during the daytime, and we want to avoid fights whenever we can. Our first priority is getting to a safe place, preferably a town.” She paused, shaking her head. “What you did was damn foolish. You should have waited for morning before you went in to a suspected goblin cave looking for trouble, you would have had a better chance of catching them asleep and off-guard.” As she talked, she pulled another candle out of her pocket, lighting it and handing it to Jacob. “I imagine you probably need to visit the little boys’ room. Don’t trip and fall and break your neck. I’ll go wake the others.”