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It starts with the Director. She enters the cafeteria and heads to Johann, to talk about the voidfish and how frequently Johann has been feeding them. It’s not an unusual conversation for the pair; she’s been approaching him a lot lately about making sure the voidfish is well-fed, practically to the point where she’s asking for enough to sustain two of them. Well, not that there would be two of them, but she seems even more concerned about it than usual. Still, that isn’t actually what’s unusual about the whole scene.
If you counted up the number of instances that anyone at the Bureau of Balance has seen the Director out of her formal robes, you might not even make it to the second hand. And it’s not that she’s not wearing a formal outfit. The Director is wearing her usual intricately embroidered blue and white jacket and holding her ever present white oak staff. It’s, well, it’s her pants.
Or, more specifically, Johann’s pants.
All of Johann’s clothing is very much bard’s garb, fancy feathered caps, vests and billowy sleeves, loud colors abounding. And pants. Poofy, swishy, take-up-twice-as-much-space-as-the-bard-themselves pantaloons. He’s never been one to follow the unwritten practical dress code at the BoB. Which is fine, as Johann is a bard, and they’re an eccentric type. Johann does, however, have a particular pair of pants, with vertical stripes that alternate eye-watering lemon yellow, shocking cobalt blue, and vibrant fuchsia and managing to be so wide and poofy that it gives the appearance of a floating skirt. These pants are so absurd, so dramatic, so unrelentingly bright that it’s whispered through the Bureau that this garment is more effective at blinding than Sunburst.
These are exactly the pants that the Director is wearing as she strides across the room with a loud and unmistakable swishswishswishswishswish, the noise grabbing everyone’s attention as she passes and the pants holding it long after she’s gone. By the time she’s reached Johann, the whole of the cafeteria has fallen silent.
The Director, however, takes no notice, immediately talking to Johann about his latest piece and when he expects that he might have another composition prepared.
Johann, for his part, is the most stunned of everyone present. He makes a truly valiant effort to hold the conversation, to whine about feeding all of his life’s work to the voidfish when a bard’s goal is to share their work with as much of the world as they can reach, to create a legacy lasting long after they’re gone. But he is also understandably distracted, alternating between looking in the Director in the eyes to plead his case and unabashedly staring at the pants she’s wearing.
He attempts to raise the question a few times -why is she wearing his pants?- but the Director redirects the conversation every time, even blatantly ignoring the one time he’s able to stammer out most of the question. She ignores everything unusual about this conversation in fact, from the silence to the half-finished questions to the staring to the palpable puzzlement that fills the room.
Afterwards, she bids him goodbye and turns to depart. Those closest to her would later swear that she had seen the wide-eyed looks and befuddlement and cracked the smallest of satisfied smiles before returning the way she came, leaving the echoes of swishswishswish in her wake.
Questions abound the moment the door swings closed. When did she steal them? How did she steal them? Why did she steal them? Did she know what power she was wielding? Did she intend to return them? Was this some kind of practical joke? If so, were they participants or targets? What do they do next?
Carey is next, which really shouldn’t surprise anyone, honestly. The Dragonborn rogue is likely the only one capable of getting anything at all out of the Director’s office unnoticed, and, if Carey is being entirely honest, it’s almost too easy, as though the Director was fully expecting and in fact wanted someone to steal the maddening garment from her.
The cobalt clashes horribly with Carey’s electric blue scales. She could probably fit her entire body in one of the legs. And she most certainly has disadvantage on any and all stealth checks while wearing the noisiest pants in the planar system.
Carey talks to Johann for a solid fifteen minutes about bard-related activities, as her brother is a bard and, according to Carey, nowhere near as cool as her. She’s also training the entire time, the frantic swishing of the pants periodically interrupting the conversation as she flies across the small area and obstacles she’s practicing on. Johann looks dismayed the entire time.
After that, well, the game is on.
Surprisingly, it’s Brian who manages to filch the pants from Carey. Or perhaps not surprisingly, as he got just a little bit of help from Bryan to do so.
The combination of the spider tabard and the pants is peculiar. And Brian has to keep his sunglasses on inside so as not to be blinded by his own outfit. It’s a perplexing and astonishingly good look.
“Haello, darling!” Brian calls to Johann in the hanger, where the latter is talking to Avi.
(Avi later sheepishly tells everyone that Johann had taken one look and groaned, “Not again,” when he saw Brian.)
Brian ignores Johann’s by now half-hearted attempts to point out that Brian is wearing the pilfered pants and instead starts discussing his wedding plans. “And ve vill be getting married in a caeve, you know, and oh, here are your invitations!” Brian presents the web-patterned purple invitations to both Johann and Avi before bidding them adieu with a “Bye bye now, my dears!” and swishswish-ing off.
There’s a day where Johann, a heavy silver coin for the fantasy gachapon in his pocket, goes to the office of Leon the artificer. Everything seems normal, even better than normal. Leon seems strangely glad to see him, though the fact that Johann just saw Taako, Magnus, and Merle leaving might have more to do with that than Johann himself.
And then Leon steps out from behind his desk. Johann looks between the infamous yellow, blue, and red pants and Leon’s blithe expression and lets out a sigh longer than the one he’d given after he’d met the Reclaimers for the first time.
Leon insists on giving him the whole spiel about the fantasy gachapon and fate and magic items again. Johann mostly sulks through that, half wondering if he should just give up and try to come back with his coin another day. Leon can’t hold onto the pants forever, can he?
Johann doesn’t normally go to the icosagon. He doesn’t really have need to practice fighting or spells since most of his time goes into composing for the resident voidfish.
And he’s already regretting this trip. “Hey, Johann!” Killian calls from high in the rafters. It seems like she’d been having a race with Carey, though, naturally, Carey had been up there long before Killian was a third of the way up.
Killian lets go of the rafter and uses the feather duster to slow her descent back to the ground. She probably doesn’t need to, considering how much drag resistance the pants provide, acting like a tacky makeshift parachute. Killian talks about how it’s great they’ve finally managed to reclaim and destroy a Grand Relic. And how surprised she was by Taako, Magnus, and Merle and how they’d actually done it. And how she’d tried to kill them at first by animating a giant grinder. Having met them, Johann finds both points to be completely understandable.
To exactly no one’s surprise, Taako is the first of the new Reclaimers to steal the notorious bard pants. Also to exactly no one’s surprise, he manages to turn wearing the garment into a look. And again, again, to no one’s surprise, he’s far and away the most dramatic about it.
Johann is in the library, seeking a peaceful, quiet respite away from the rest of the Bureau. He doesn’t get it. Taako greets him not by whispering or even shouting, but by sticking his leg high in the air and slamming it into the bookshelf, blue, fuchsia, and yellow fabric covering the tomes that Johann had been perusing.
“Hey, bard man! My dude!” Taako says loudly, like they aren’t in a library. “So, uh, listen, listen, about the, um, the uh, the… kitchen, sure kitchen…” Taako continues prattling onward, something about does Johann know about employee access to the kitchen or if there are any kind of anti-magic, uh, anti-transmutation magic wards, on it, for no particular reason whatsoever, my dude. Johann is functionally trapped between a rock and a hard place, or a bookshelf and Taako, thinking it can’t get any worse.
Of course it does.
Taako casually takes out a spoon and sticks it into his pocket. Er, Johann’s pocket, being as these are Johann’s pants. And then, unblinking, not breaking eye contact with the bard for a moment, Taako removes the spoon from his pocket, heaping with chocolate pudding, and sticks it in his mouth.
“Johann! My buddy, my good, good friend!” Magnus claps an arm around Johann. Johann hears the distinctive sound of pantaloons deflating as he’s dragged into a side hug. “So, listen. I’ve been thinking.”
“Yeah? That’s a first.” Johann says, while trying to extricate himself.
“Johann, this is serious.” And Magnus does sound serious. Which is in direct contrast with the pants, but maybe he’s going for the whole two birds, one stone approach. He could probably pull off that particular athletics roll, come to think of it.
Johann sighs. “Fine. What do you want?”
“I need you to sign my petition to get the Director to let me have a dog on the moon.” Magnus holds up the piece of parchment with his other hand. Johann looks and sees exactly one signature: Magnus’s. “Johann, please. I need someone else to sign.”
“Why not ask literally anyone else?”
“Taako said no since he has to live with me, and Merle just asked me if I thought I could actually take care of a dog. I can take care of a dog. I can take care of every dog.”
In the end, Johann does sign the paper, knowing it won’t matter one bit to the Director, and Magnus happily walks off, one side of the poofy pants still indented from impact.
There comes a day when Johann hears the telltale crunch of Pringles being eaten behind him. Johann turns. He’s not even surprised at this point.
“Hey, uh, Johann. You, uh, want some dank potions?” Robbie offers, pockets clanking full of glass bottles.
“…No.”
“Cool.” And Robbie stumbles away, tripping over drooping fabric.
It is, at least, the shortest conversation that someone has had with him while wearing the purloined pantaloons.
When Merle approaches Johann, he’s still shaking Pringles crumbs out of the pants. “Hey, John! No, wait, Johann!” He calls exuberantly, beaming.
“Hello, Merle.” Johann says sullenly. He’s really, really beginning to hate the sight of those pants.
“You know, we never talk. Can we talk, one healer to another?”
“Uh, I don’t do too much healing these days. Like, I write music, and I feed the voidfish. So it’s not like-” Johann tries to explain to avoid both conversation and pants as Merle steps closer, heedless of personal space and the fact that his radius is much expanded at present.
“But you know. You know that it’s not easy! You know that it’s just not as easy as, say, swinging an axe or levitating the crab or whatever.”
“You wasted all your spell slots on Zone of Truth, old man!” Magnus yells from across the room where he’s carving what Johann can probably guess is a duck, given how much he seems to carve them.
Merle turns away from Johann with a huff, the pants slapping into the bard with a whap as he does. “Well maybe you shouldn’t have tried to jump off a train!”
“We had to; it was gonna crash!”
“I meant the first time! With the hand monster!”
At least the argument gives Johann an opportunity to sneak away unnoticed.
“Davenport!” Johann turns to see the gnome, wondering if he’s being summoned to go speak to the Director again. Nothing so straightforward. Oh no. Somehow, some way, Davenport has come into possession of the traveling bard pants. And the gnome most certainly knows the rules of the game.
Davenport’s tone is serious, his back straight, and his hands clasped behind his back, as if he is having a polite, formal conversation with an employee as he repeats his own name, but there’s a glint in his eyes and a twitch to his tail that Johann would almost term mischievous, as though Davenport is very much accustomed to participating in ongoing prank wars and easily outdoing everyone else in the process.
He bids Johann goodbye with a wave and a cheery “Davenport!” before walking off. Johann spends the next five minutes standing there contemplating what just happened.
No one knows how the voidfish got the pants from Davenport. Had Davenport placed them in the tank to be redacted from memory? Could the voidfish move beyond the confines of their tank? It’s unclear.
What is clear, however, is a pair of pants, floating like a jellyfish in the voidfish’s tank, a few tendrils strung through the waist of the pants and coming out through the ankles. The voidfish is humming contentedly when Johann comes in before lighting up brilliantly when they see him and singing loudly and happily. Johann stops and takes in the sight of the voidfish with the oft-stolen garment. And then he turns around and walks right back out again.
Apparently, Angus was goaded by Taako into stealing the pants from the voidfish. Some kind of lesson in the practical uses of Mage Hand. Hopefully Taako or Magnus or someone at least helped him to wash and dry them.
“Hello, sir!” Angus greets him cheerfully and practically drowning in fabric. He sees Johann glance down and sigh, and for a moment Angus’s smile wavers and he bunches his hands into the fabric, causing it to crinkle loudly. “So, uh, I was going to ask you this anyway, but do you think… do you think you might be able to teach me violin?”
“I mean… I guess? Uh, aren’t you… isn’t Taako teaching you how to be a wizard?”
At that Angus shrugs. “Yeah. Picking a single class seems limiting at best. Plus, you’re the best violinist ever, and I’m the world’s greatest detective, so it seemed like a good fit. And it’s not like Merle will teach me Zone of Truth.”
“That’s… you know what, that’s fair.” Johann shrugs. “Yeah, I’ll teach you, Angus. It’ll be nice to do something that matters and might actually outlast me.”
“You could perhaps say it’s your leg-acy, sir.” Angus says with a straight face, and Johann almost regrets agreeing to teach the boy.
Noelle is a nice girl. And undead. And a robot without legs. Those three things should preclude her from being a part of the whole pants escapade.
Johann really should have known better. He absolutely, positively, unequivocally should have known better. This is the Bureau of Balance, and no one does anything by halves, least of all the robot girl with a cannon for an arm.
The Regulator talks about how happy she is to have something worthwhile to do after her life was cut short by the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet and to really be a part of the organization, with no one treating her differently just because she’s, well, different. It’s one of the few times Johann walks away from one of these pants-mandated conversations feeling better for it.
Garfield’s true form is inscrutable, unclear if cat or fantasy president or demon or some combination of all three. Johann can still see him wearing the pants. Garfield isn’t even a member of the Bureau. This is distinctly unfair.
“Hey, Johann!” Avi greets him cheerfully while Johann is tuning his violin, to practice a new composition. He’d like to play it a few times before it’s lost to the world.
“Oh, hey, A- not you too.”
Avi continues to play the game with an apologetic smile on his face as he tilts his head and feigns confusion. “Not me what?”
Johann lets out an exceptionally long sigh. He is a bard after all; he can play up the drama if he wants after the literal dozens of times this has happened already. “Fine. This is fine. This is absolutely fine.”
Avi is his friend, so at least he’s not a massive dick about the conversation, which is why it goes on for as long as it does, far longer than any of the other conversations that Johann had been actively trying to escape from. It is, however, more than a little irksome to be having this conversation with his friend while Avi is wearing Johann’s perpetually pilfered pants and completely ignoring that fact.
“Can’t you do something?” Johann starts the conversation with the question, flopping into the reasonably comfortable, reasonably firm chair that sits across from Brad Bradson’s desk.
“I’m sorry, about what?” Brad looks at Johann, mildly confused. No one has ever actually taken the Bureau’s other bard up on his HR office hours before. He’s lucky if they even show up to actually scheduled meetings.
“I mean, have you really not noticed?” Johann gestures down to his pants.
“Your… pants?” Brad looks between Johann and today’s choice of pants, one leg bright scarlet and one deep violet. “I’m not sure why this is a matter of concern. The Bureau doesn’t have a formal dress code; your pants are perfectly acceptable attire. Has someone objected to your pants?”
“Uh, yeah, I object to my pants. Being worn by everyone else.”
Brad blinks, looking confused. “Excuse me? Is this… has someone been making inappropriate comments regarding, ah, getting into your pants? That is a serious matter, and-”
“No.” Johann says emphatically. “The Director stole one pair of pants and now it’s a game for everyone to, uh, steal them from someone else and then talk to me while wearing them. I heard Carey and Magnus call it the test of initiation part two.”
“That sounds… unpleasant.”
Johann sighs, long, slow, and frustrated. “I just… look, okay, I barely even mind at this point. Even Avi doing it yesterday though was kinda, kinda the tipping point. I’d just like some kind of acknowledgement from them so it’s a funny joke for me too, not just them.” Johann spends a few minutes grumbling while Brad listens, occasionally offering advice or input.
“You know, if it is a game to everyone… you could change the rules.”
“Huh, yeah, right.” Johann says, standing up to depart. “Uh, hey, thanks, man.”
Brad stands as well. “Please, allow me to walk you out.”
Swishswishswishswishswishswishswishswish.
The pants are stolen again the very next day. And Johann makes it a point to speak to every single member of the Bureau while wearing the plane’s most obnoxious bard pants.