How to Be an Adventurer- World of Gimmok

by Damien Hanson

  But, as they dug and sorted, the party found that there were things to be had. Here was a silver belt buckle, not strong but probably worth at least fifty gold pieces on the regular market. Over there, in the corner and under a scrap of mummified flesh, lay a dagger that seemed to be of expert make and design. Plus, there were a few gems that glistened as if covered in fluid, with irises in them that moved about. Gems that were eyes in all ways but those that should matter. The last find unnerved them all.

  Svein shivered and turned away from them, cursing. Yenrab grimaced, then picked them up and put them into his side pouch. He didn’t touch the buckle, though, looking at it with some deep thought written upon his face.

  Tracy came up to his side. She was a ze, now, well-breasted but with a beard in place and a bulge in hir trousers. “Hey, Yenrab, can I examine those eye gems?”

  Bern scowled. “Don’t do it, mate. You know she or, um, Tracy is going to do something stupid with them.”

  Tracy gave him a wink.

  “I can’t help but think there is something important here,” Yenrab intervened, quieting them both.

  “Guys, take a look at that silver belt buckle. Doesn’t that look familiar?” the barbarian asked.

  Tracy examined it with a thorough and reflective eye. He started to frown. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Think what?” asked Bern.

  “I think the hag ate Tim Burgh, Pete’s son,” said a somewhat solemn Tracy. Ze turned over the buckle and there were the initials T.B.

  Everyone stared at it in silence.

  Thoughts about what Tamara had said about young lovers filled everyone’s head for a brief, sad moment.

  “Guys, there is a lot of stuff here and more things to check out. And we don’t know for sure that he’s dead. Let’s keep going,” said Yenrab breaking the silence.

  “So much for romance,” commented Carric.

  “Hey, Tracy, can you figure out what is magical in this junk?” Bern asked with an upset look.

  “Hey, sorcerer, can you do this? Hey, sorcerer, can you do that?” the sorcerer groused, not immune to the tragedy before them. “I could try, but I actually don’t know the proper spells to do so.”

  “Guys, you shouldn’t overlook the power of a man with a lute and a harmonica. I’ve got the power. Like the crack of the whip, I snap attack. Front to back, in this thing called rap,” Carric grooved as he began to feel the beat.

  “Yeah, yeah. You don’t need to sing a song about it. Just get it done already,” Yenrab deflated the bard genially while trying to keep the party on focus.

  “Alright. Magic, magic, I detect the magic. Flowing about me in rhymes and reason, I find myself wondering what is the season as I cast M to the D, magic detection is what I be!” Carric bopped out in time.

  Each party member considered the spell’s rhyme and shrugged. It wasn’t regular for the region, for sure, but it wasn’t bad, and if it did its job, well, more power to it.

  Then the bard gazed about in an almost trance.

  “Gems and dagger. The gems seem to be scrying devices. We can use those to scout behind us. The dagger, well, it seems to be coupled with an offensive magic. I can’t exactly tell, but I think it is something to keep it a bit sharper and more accurate.”

  ***

  The chest wasn’t the be-all and end-all of what they had found. In adventures, it can be, and often is, but the room in which they had discovered the hag was far more interesting.

  Carric Smith looked about the cavernous place with eyes that gleamed like a cat’s in the moonlit night. But his never faded from that eerie spark of extra vision, and it was well creeping Svein Novogord right out.

  “Nyuh!” he snorted, moving away from the half-elf as he probed about with his powers.

  Using his enchanted eyes, he could see that there was something within a rough-hewn cube that was probably meant to be an oven. It was rusted and filthy, so it was hard to tell. But there was something in its bottom, where one would insert fuel. There lay an object that absolutely shone with power. It was almost blinding.

  He shaded his eyes through his fingers and tried to see the color of its aura. Magic is often fast and furious, so checking for its school or sphere didn’t make sense there. But here, with time in check, he felt comfortable doing so. There was a purple and amber hue that indicated smoke and fire. This is elemental magic. Something very strong and probably very useful.

  “There is something here so powerful that it hurts my eyes, guys,” the bard told them with a straight-faced grimace. “It might be an artifact. I’ve never seen one before so I can’t tell. But it damn well hurts to look straight on at it, and it definitely deals with heat and fire.”

  Bern Sandros licked his lips and gave the bard an eager look.

  “Mate, powerful magic right before we are destined to wreck the world? That, right there, is a lucky find.”

  “Or it is what causes the end,” Tracy tossed in with an uninterested voice. Hir face, however, did not look so uninterested. It looked a bit greedy.

  “Pah!” Yenrab exclaimed with enthusiasm, his monstrous timbre surprising the sorcerer, who flopped to his bony rear on the stone floor underneath them.

  “Ya know, Grandma had something in her cooking boulder that, well, cooked it. It was magic, and I don’t know how powerful it was, but I bet it was the same sort of hoodaly doodaly that this is?”

  Carric rolled his eyes. “Of course, it is. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use it for something else. Let’s take it.”

  The others looked at each other, and Yenrab threw up his ham hands into the air in frustration.

  “Yeah, I’ll do it,” he said as he ambled over to the oven-device.

  Reaching within, he pulled forth a red-glassed orb that swirled and smoked within. His hands never touched its surface, for it had been itself fitted into a cube of metallic rods, allowing it to be set onto most any surface without it rolling away. The magical device had a word engraved upon its round surface—Glafar.

  “So, what is that nonsense then,” Yenrab asked. “Should we check with the book and its ghost?”

  “Jerold Frey?” Carric responded, a bit amused. “We could, though I got the feeling that he used up a lot of energy in that last encounter. Anyways, it is obviously a command word. Set it down, Yenrab, and let me blow your mind.”

  “Glafar!” yelled Tracy Riley immediately, stealing away the bard’s thunder. The orb sprang to life and bathed them all in a warm and reddish light.

  “Hey!” the bard yelled at him. “That could have been dangerous!”

  “I have seen one of those before,” the sorcerer lit up. “And I couldn’t resist. That is a product of the Grand Sorcan!”

  ***

  Bern Sandros stared at the thing, a thought forming in his head, and then shook it off.

  “Guys, I heard some noises under the tarp earlier. Shut that thing off, and let’s figure out what is happening there.”

  Tracy spoke the command word again with haste, making sure to beat Carric to the punch, as the rest of them moved over to the side of the room that was covered in canvas. The rogue Bern searched its edges with haste, and then turned to the barbarian.

  “It looks clear to me,” he said with confidence.

  Yenrab paused.

  “Why didn’t you check that oven-block before?”

  “Mate, I didn’t think of it,” he responded, slapping his head with his hand.

  The half-orc scowled, but then he grabbed a hold of the massive canvas tarp, and yanked with all of his might. His muscles rippled as he hefted and threw the tremendous weight of it off and away, a corner of it flopping the assassin to the ground.

  “King Nemed and his men!” the human exclaimed, nursing his bruised side.

  “Oops,” said Yenrab back to him with a kind and gentle smile. “Sorry.”

  Large motes of dust blew about the room, throwing Svein and Tracy into a fit of sneezing, but otherwise there was no more danger. The rogue h
ad been correct in his evaluation.

  A jumbled mess of cages lay bared to their sight. And it was a gruesome vision to behold. Within two of them lay an elf and a human, naked, bound, and gagged. In a few others festered the corpses of unfortunate sentients in the same condition. And the rest simply held bones, their meat well stripped and used by the beast that had resided here.

  The prisoners blinked at the sudden intrusion of light.

  Svein gagged.

  “That beast—it was . . .”

  “Svein. I told you to knock that off. Yes, it was eating humanoids. Horrific and evil things tend to do that,” Tracy said with a yawn. “Seriously, do your parents not teach you that?”

  Svein turned a bit purple.

  “Svein, just let it be. Tracy does Tracy’s thing.” Carric smiled, his face engorged with diplomacy.

  Bern assessed the situation, picked the weaker of the two, and then reached through the bars and sliced his gag off with an easy swing of his dagger. Everyone else looked a bit surprised. He shrugged.

  “Rescuers! At last! Thanks be to the gods! And I see a lute! And some strange thing about your mouth!” the excited human babbled, thankful to be alive.

  “I call it a harmonica, though some know it as a mouth harp,” replied Carric to the starved, dumbfounded, and obvious bard they had just rescued. “It makes mouth magic.”

  Bern Sandros, assassin of Nemedia, felt his face light up as he realized what he suddenly had to do.

  “Hey!” Bern jibed with an elbow to Carric’s ribs. “You just became expendable!”

  Carric sighed.

  Yenrab chuckled, and then he bent the bars of the other cage so as to allow his hands and arms through. Grabbing the gag device, he tore it asunder, its debris breaking from the elf’s face. He spat the rest of it out of his mouth.

  “That”—he coughed, taking a bit of time to adjust to the dusty air—“was terrifying. But, hey, thank you for rescuing us, adventurers.”

  The man looked emaciated, with sallow-toned skin and large, pointed ears, well signifying that he was not a human. They all looked at him with curiosity.

  “You don’t need to stare, Nekoogyaw,” he continued in his accented but well-polished Nemedian common tongue. “I’m a wood elf, but a civilized one. I haven’t seen my tribe in a decade.”

  “What’s a Nekoogyaw?” puzzled Yenrab, confused.

  “No offense, big man. It simply means one who is not of my tribe.”

  They looked at each other and nodded. There really wasn’t anything else to be said or asked.

  “Please, please, tell me that you too are a bard!” Bern said with a laugh.

  Yenrab chuckled too. Carric gave him a sharp glare.

  The wood elf gave them a wide and long circumspective look and then announced himself.

  “I am a priest, actually, though not one you may know well of. I worship the god Tyr, noble be his name.”

  Bern watched the elf carefully as he talked to them. The elf was good, but not good enough. A lot of sentients had the same tells, and this “priest” was showing a few.

  That little liar, the rogue thought. Then Bern Sandros cocked his head and laughed.

  “Bull cocks also grow on trees,” Bern said with excitement. “I know this line. You’re a fraud. A huckster—”

  “—a truth ninja,” the man added with his own chuckle. “Yes. Like knows like, good sir. Though, from the look of you, I’d say that you may not be as bad as you think you are.”

  “Hey now! I rob, lie, and steal. But for a cause,” the assassin added. “My money goes to the poor and disenfranchised. Well, at some point. I haven’t actually gotten there yet.”

  “Well, it is a noble cause, I’m sure,” the prisoner said in a sarcastic tone. “There is no point in lying to a liar, so I will tell you it all straight. I am Wex of the God Mask.”

  They all looked at each other again, with no sign of comprehension or recognition lying within the pupils of any of them. Wex well recognized this and sighed.

  “Well, he is a god from another world, but also one of this world, and I need not hide myself for he is not an evil god, though he does dabble in deception and chaos. What I am is well-served by the outcomes.”

  Yenrab, Carric, and Svein all looked again over the comment. Bern Sandros, though, smirked.

  “And what,” asked Carric with a tremendous frown, “might those outcomes be?”

  “Why, good outcomes, of course!” answered the full-blooded wood elf in a way that made the bard frown even harder. “Mask doesn’t believe in anything else!”

  Yenrab smiled as he thought about it. Does it matter who the outcomes are supposed to be good for if they help the right people in the end?

  The bard, though, looked hard at the admitted huckster. That answer was both a feint and a dodge, and it was something to think about.

  Bern Sandros, though, was well pleased with the new man and moved onto to question the obvious bard.

  “Well, Mr. Minstrel, who might you be?” he asked with a grin.

  “I am Jenn Eric Enpeasea,” the human answered without pause. “Thank you for rescuing us, good sirs.”

  Bern looked at his companions. Carric stepped forward.

  “What is happening here?” the bard inquired.

  Jenn Eric looked confused.

  “At this moment or in this building?” he asked.

  “In this building,” Carric clarified, eager for details.

  “Something horrible. There were a young woman and man up above a week or two ago. I don’t know for I seem to have lost track of time in this place. We have been feasting on mold and brackish water,” Jenn Eric narrated, “and waiting for our tragic turn in that hag’s cauldron. Food. Real food. Do you have food to spare, good sirs? And something clear and fresh to drink with it.”

  “We’ll take care of you, Mr. Enpeasea. Bern, you wanna check out those locks?” Yenrab asked, his voice tinged with an authoritative tone.

  Bern eyed them critically for but a moment.

  “Those are nothing. I’ll have them both off in under ten seconds I expect.”

  As the rogue unpacked and unrolled his kit of various tetris-like rods and spikes, Yenrab nodded back at the bard just let out of the cage to continue.

  “They were assailed by a pack of shiny metallic skeletons. It was horrid. I saw it from afar and tried to rush in to help”

  “As did I,” Wex butted in. “The undead are no friend to my god. And, to be honest, the shine from those skeletons and the boy’s belt buckle made me think that, well, if things went bad and I was the last left standing, maybe I could glean a windfall from the aftermath.”

  Carric and Yenrab frowned. Bern, meanwhile, looked up from his task with eyes full of admiration.

  “Imagine the good that could be purchased with such an event,” he stated, his eyes gleaming. “You, Wex, you are a thinker.”

  “Thank you. You sound like a gentleman and a scholar,” Wex responded in kind. Carric watched them with growing suspicion. Two hucksters in the party was not something he was interested in having at all. He glanced at Yenrab, who smiled with joy at his newfound friends, and then the bard sighed.

  “What is your name, and wow, you already have the lock off?!” Wex was a bit surprised.

  “I am Bern, and yeah, I had the lock off almost as soon as Yenrab asked me to go to work. I just happen to know there are more dangerous things than traps involved here,” the assassin informed him. “But, hey, Wex, I like the cut of your jib. I think we might just become best friends.”

  Carric cast a distrustful eye to the duo. Yenrab continued to smile, not thinking through the possible consequences of such a team up.

  “The hag threw our gear into a crate over there. Gods, I need my mask. I lose so much when it isn’t with me,” the cleric, Wex, noted.

  “Gear up, elfling, with our party’s blessing. You too, Jenn Eric Enpeasea,” Yenrab commanded. They scrambled to the place, eager to be themselves again.
r />   “Well, don’t they have pep,” Tracy said with a whistle.

  “Alright, guys. A quick sup for our new friends and ourselves. And then let’s move on out of here. Also, someone grab that heat device,” Yenrab commanded, the tone fitting him well.

  “Not it!” everyone said, with Jenn Eric Enpeasea being the last to catch on.

  “Yeah, don’t worry guys; I’ve got it,” exclaimed the new bard with a wild and happy look upon his face. “Now bring on the yums!”

  Chapter 31: ICM*3+9

  How to be an Adventurer—The Perils of Magic

  Magic is an everyday boon to the well-faring adventurer. It is inherent to items of power, spells, and not a few tricks and traps. But, as can be ascertained from a myriad of arcane tomes, it should also be regarded with caution.

  Do not cross streams or match opposing schools of magic together into one combined entity. Do not over-rely upon a single spell or trick for protection during battle or encampment. Do not expect magic to be a permanent feature of your success. It can be dispelled, it can go haywire, and it can turn on you.

  Be ever vigilant, ever prepared, and ever on the lookout. Stay alert and stay alive.

  ***

  It was a picnic in a dungeon, and it was more pleasant that anyone suspected it would be. They were all still wary, of course, but they also quite enjoyed themselves. Food stuffs were pulled from Yenrab’s cavernous pack and distributed onto a cloth from which they all took turns feasting on such celebrated things as trail mix, salt jerky, and hard tack, watering the mess down with some cool and thin wine from a skin that they passed between them. They grunted and wolfed, with nary a word passing between them.

  When they finally finished, stifling various burps and belches while patting armored bellies with satisfaction, they stood up, looked at each other, and grinned. Sometimes, in some places, things are too good to even be spoken of.

  “Well, new guys,” Yenrab said, leaning against the wall, “I guess it’s time to talk about our future. We’re heading forward and we’re gonna make sure that the boy is not here. If we can’t find him, it is safe to assume he is dead. You all can head back to town, but you’ll have to do it on your own.”