Chapter Text
Strap on your fantasy seatbelts
And brace your asses for…
… The Adventure Zone.
~~~~
In the world of Faerun — which can be written with or without the little squiggle over the u depending on how fancy you feel like being, or how cooperate writing programs are — things happen. Like, all the time. Sometimes they’re good things, and people end up happy, and lives are saved, and people go on to do inspirational things like working on the caravan circuits, or carving furniture out of wood, or starting families in dwarven beach communities. Sometimes they’re bad things, and people end up lonely, and people die, and people go on to do things like forget family and loved ones, or end up trapped in prisons of their own making.
Here's the good news. When bad things happen in Faerun, sometimes there are people you can hire to try and turn them into good things instead. These people are commonly called adventurers, and they commonly travel in groups of at least 5 people — wizards, sorcerers, fighters, rogues, paladins, and clerics. Sometimes these groups are shining beacons of goodness, love, justice, and hope. Sometimes these groups are made up of people you wouldn’t bring home to meet your mother, but they come highly recommended and you don't exactly have any other choice. Most adventuring groups are somewhere in between.
Craigslist doesn't exist in Faerun, if you don't count the parchment nailed to trees by a little gnome named Craig, which most people don't. Because of this, when something bad happens, you can’t really choose who you’re going to hire. You hire whoever happens to be there. For that reason, adventurers are constantly travelling, and in this particular tavern in this particular town, there’s only one possibility for the surly dwarf in the corner who’s looking to hire some help.
There are only three of them. That’s the first oddity. Adventuring groups rarely have fewer than five people in them.
One of them is a human fighter called Magnus Burnsides. He looks exactly like you might expect a human fighter to look. Of the three, he’s the one who could most accurately be called ‘good’, and he’s perhaps a touch more reckless than ‘good’ usually finds ideal. But his heart is in the right place, and some would say that’s what matters.
The second one is an elven wizard called Taako. He looks exactly like you might expect an elven wizard to look, right down to the pointed wizard’s hat. Some have described him as unnaturally beautiful, and he walks like an elf who knows this about himself. His heart is very rarely in the right place. You can usually find him wherever the danger isn’t.
The third is a dwarven cleric called Merle Highchurch. He does not look exactly like you might expect a dwarven cleric to look. He’s a religious healer, but he's by no means delicate; he carries a warhammer on his back, and looks like someone who knows how to use it to fuck your shit up. An observant bystander who knows what to look for might see the religious tome hanging at his waist, but in this particular tavern, it really doesn’t matter. No one would mess with him regardless.
The three men — or the Tres Horny Boys (THB), as Taako called them once several months before and then never called them again — do not look like they’re friends. That’s not uncommon, in adventuring groups. Circumstance brought them together, and surprisingly effective teamwork kept them working together, but under ordinary circumstances you wouldn't find them at the same parties. Gundren Rockseeker, the surly dwarf in the corner who’s looking to hire some help, thinks he might have preferred a larger adventuring group who have worked together long enough to develop lasting bonds with each other, but you really couldn’t pick who to hire when it came to adventurers. They were here, they looked competent, and — as an added and extremely desirable benefit — Merle Highchurch was family. An old cousin, someone Gundren has never been close to, but someone he knows he can trust.
They're going to have to do.
~~~~
Over drinks, Gundren Rockseeker tells the three adventurers that he has a job for them. “The last job you’ll ever need to take,” he says. He quickly explains this is because they’ll be rich, not because they’re going to die, and if Merle didn’t know he was family, he might have considered this quick clarification to be extremely suspicious.
He wants an audition, Gundren Rockseeker explains, to see if they’re the right people for the job. The audition will involve escorting a supply wagon from Neverwinter to Fandolin.
As far as lucrative jobs go, this is not what any of the adventurers expected, especially since Fandolin is an old mining town that has long since exhausted its magical ores and fallen into disrepair. But Merle can vouch for Gundren. And even if he couldn’t, he says, something about the job stinks to him, and he needs to know what Gundren’s doing just in case Gundren needs a very sharp and heavy boot up the ass.
That’s why, the next day, Merle, Magnus, and Taako are in a supply wagon slowly lumbering through the forest towards Fandolin.
Gundren Rockseeker and his hired bodyguard, Barry Bluejeans, went on ahead that morning, leaving the three adventurers on their own. The supply wagon contains general store goods, food, construction materials, parcels of light leather armour, and some tiny powder kegs, and no clues whatsoever as to what Gundren's intentions actually are. There’s a small leather package belonging to Gundren, as well as a tiny ugly bulldog called Ruby. Magnus bonds with the dog immediately, even though — or perhaps because — all Ruby does during the journey is sleep.
For the first half of the day, the journey is unbelievably boring, and that doesn’t change until around lunchtime. It’s only thanks to Magnus sitting conscientiously up front with the oxen that he notices anything strange, and he squints through the sunshine to make out two dead horses lying in the middle of the road.
“Seems fine,” he mutters to himself. It actually seems the opposite of fine, but it never hurts to be optimistic, right? He brings the wagon to a stop, and motions silently into the back towards Taako and Merle. A small group of goblins appear near the dead horses, and in particular, Magnus notices that two of them have weapons drawn and are making a beeline straight for the wagon. He motions a little faster.
Merle sees the danger around Magnus’s hip. "Ah, shit," he says, and he calls forth a Sacred Flame in his hand, then sends it shooting toward the two goblins. It hits one full in the chest, charring wrinkled goblin flesh in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, a sight terrifying enough to make the other goblin stop dead in its tracks.
“Hit the one in the brush!” Magnus calls to Taako, pointing into the woods.
"What one in the brush!?" Taako instead casts a frigid beam of blue-white light towards the goblin still on fire from Merle’s attack. The goblin flash-freezes, topples to the ground, and shatters.
“That’s not the one in the brush,” Magnus grumbles. He shakes his head. “What do you guys think, should I attack the — you know what, I’m gonna do it.” He leaps off the wagon and comes down on the second goblin a good fifteen feet away with his battleaxe, cutting the goblin in half with a good clean swipe in the direction which, if you had your choice, you would probably least like to be cut in half, and certainly is the least survivable possible halving. As a result, the goblin is dead. The goblin is very, very dead.
The third goblin out in the brush, the one Magnus sees and Taako hasn't, pops out onto the road with a high-pitched nasally battle cry. “Yeah, guys!” it roars. “Get ‘em — oh no, no, god no —”
The goblin takes an arrow out of the quiver on its back, lights it on fire, and shoots it at Taako, standing tallest on the front of the wagon. It misses, and twangs into the canvas of the wagon covering instead, lighting the fabric on fire. With that, the goblin turns tail and runs back into the brush.
“Fire!” announces Taako, pointing at the arrow. “Fire in the canvas!”
The fire isn’t bad yet, but historically, canvas is a very burnable material. You wouldn't usually want to leave a burning arrow in canvas. In spite of this, Merle leaves the fire to Taako and Magnus to deal with; he jumps down from the wagon, runs after the goblin into the brush, and hurls his axe into the woods.
“Argh!”
Despite the distance and the trees in between, the axe connects. Merle waits, just in case the goblin gives away another sign of its location, but he doesn’t hear anything from the goblin. At all. Ever again.
Back at the wagon, Taako points at the small fire on the canvas, casts a quick and easy prestidigitation spell, and a small puff of wind blows the fire completely out. Thus, the danger passes, and it is left up to individual interpretation how much of a danger there really was in the first place.
When Taako searches the goblin’s corpses, he finds a small pile of gold coins. Magnus offers to hold on to them, an idea Taako flatly rejects. Merle posits that as the religious member of the group, it really makes the most sense for him to hold onto the gold.
“I do feel like the cleric and I did most of the work there,” Magnus points out, grinning.
“Alright,” says Taako, in a tone that says quite plainly he could argue, and has argued that point very often in the past, but he has much better things to be doing right now. “Here’s what I suggest. We each take six, and we put the rest into a pool that we’ll split later.”
“Every time one of us dies, we’ll add five more into it,” Magnus adds. “Last one standing gets it all.”
“Excellent,” Taako agrees.
With that decided, Magnus goes to examine the dead horses in the road, looking for any sign that they belong to Gundren Rockseeker and Barry Bluejeans. All he can determine, though is that the horses have clear mortal arrow holes leaking blood, a fact obvious to anyone with eyes.
“They’re definitely dead,” Magnus tells the others.
“Aw,” says Merle as he recovers his hand axe from the goblin’s head. “You mean they’re not asleep?”
They’re not, in fact, asleep. They’re also not cold, though, Taako notes, indicating they were killed only hours ago. While Magnus confirms that for himself, Taako notices an empty map container near one of the horses, and he recognises it as a container Gundren definitely had on him back at the tavern in Neverwinter. It’s uncapped and empty.
“I told you,” says Merle. “I told you Gundren was trying to pull something. I told you there’s something else going on here.”
“Was Gundren killed here too?” Magnus wonders aloud.
Taako shakes his head. “Nope,” he says. “There’s no Gundren-shaped pool of blood on the ground. Look there, though, it looks like they got dragged into the brush.”
Magnus raises his hand. “Wait,” he says. “I’m not an intelligent man, but we’ve got a cart packed to the brim with goods sitting here. Should we just be wandering off, away from that cart?”
“I’ll tell you what,” says Taako. “Magnus, you stay with the cart —”
“Great idea, seeing as I’m our only fighter.”
“— and with my superior perception, I’ll go investigate the brush.”
“Splitting up the party is the leading cause of death,” Magnus says flatly. “It’s like head and heart disease. Why don’t we just hide the cart?”
Taako purses his lips. “Sounds like quite the production. No, I like my plan.”
“I’m overruling your plan.”
Against Taako’s objections, the trio take the wagon and the oxen a little distance down the road and park them in the brush, camouflaging the cart with leaves and branches, until Magnus is satisfied that it’s fully secured. Then they all head into the brush to try and find where Gundren Rockseeker and Barry Bluejeans have gone.
~~~~
Merle, Magnus, and Taako follow the drag marks deeper and deeper into the woods. They have a surprisingly easy time of it with Gundren’s large form leaving such strong impressions in the loam, and it’s not long before they reach the mouth of a cave with a wide, shallow stream flowing out of it.
Along the stream into the cave, they can see a path. For Magnus, that path blends into darkness about twenty feet in. For Taako and Merle, darkness doesn’t present much of an obstacle.
“A little help, please,” says Magnus.
Merle casts a small light spell on Magnus’s axe. “Better?” he asks.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“It’ll only go out if I clap my hands. Or if I stop believing in my powers.”
“Cool,” says Magnus. “That’s cool.”
They walk into the cave, Magnus leading the way with his brightly lit axe. Not too far in, the path branches off to the right, and as they approach the fork they can hear metal clanking from down the forking path, almost like a chain being lifted off the rocky ground.
Magus heads toward the sound without much thought, trying to move quietly in case there’s something sentient to spook. Taako, very much on team ‘Taako’s good out here’, stays right where he is at the fork, and Merle, in contrast to Magnus’s efforts, calls out: “You fool! Wait for us!”
“Shh!” Magnus hisses back.
The sound of Merle’s shout bounces around the walls and echoes down the path. Apart from a group of bats spooked out into the open, they don’t hear any response from wherever the metal chains are.
“Now they definitely know we’re here,” Taako murmurs with an edge of exasperation. “Excellent.” He chooses to stay on team ‘hangout’, and continues not to move from his spot.
Magnus, now conscious that he might have lost whatever element of surprise he had, does not stray as far from his companions as he would have otherwise. He’s foolhardy, he likes to think, but he’s not stupid. He waves his axe around, hoping to cast some light down the path, and he sees stalagmites — otherwise known as 'big pointy rock things' - built into the earth, as well as big metal rods connected to chains connected to three wolves.
“Kill the light, kill the light, kill the light,” Magnus hisses over his shoulder.
There doesn't seem to be any point, though. Merle’s shout would definitely have woken them up, and the wolves don’t seem aggressive or violent. They aren’t even growling.
Magnus calmly and confidently moves closer to them. The closer he gets, the more agitated the wolves seem, and then two of them begin snarling. He stops. In the back of the small cavern the wolves are chained in, he notices an indentation leading upwards, something like a natural chimney leading up past the ceiling of the cavern. The space is otherwise very tight and cramped. There are only the wolves, and the crevasse in the back.
“I’m still chilling out here, if anyone’s curious,” comes Taako’s voice, echoing down only mildly quieter than Merle’s earlier shout.
Magnus moves back to rejoin them both at the fork. “So there’s some wolves down there, doesn’t seem like it’s worth it, let’s keep going,” he says.
“Excellent. I trust your judgement.”
The trio continue down into the cave. Darkness surrounds them completely as the natural light from the cave’s entrance dissipates. They walk in a small circle of light cast by Magnus’s axe.
As they move down the cave alongside the stream, they approach a natural rock bridge high above them. There’s a figure on that bridge, its dim outline silhouetted by the light of Magnus’s axe, and while Magnus can barely see it, Taako confidently calls out to it.
“Hello, friend!” he says in Elvish.
He receives a questioning grunt in response, which is perhaps not a surprise, as creatures that live in caves traditionally don’t speak Elvish.
Taako inhales to try again, and Magnus hits him on the shoulder. “No!” he hisses. “Shut the fuck up.” Taako utterly ignores him and tries again in the language of the goblins, which, to Taako’s knowledge, is just called Goblin.
“Hello, friend!”
“Who’s there?”
“Hail and well met!”
“I, I… you don’t sound like anybody I know.”
“We’re just exploring! We’ve taken a wrong turn.”
“Yeah, you have! I would actually heartily recommend you turn around, this is not a great place… for tourism.”
“Where have we found ourselves?”
The goblin does not immediately answer, and Taako entertains himself by imagining the looks of awe and respect that are undoubtedly on Magnus and Merle’s faces at the surprising fact that Taako knows his obscure languages.
“Come a bit closer!” the goblin calls, clearly at a loss for how to handle the bizarre situation. “Show yourself!.”
“Come closer?”
“Come closer to the overpass.”
Taako thinks for a bit, then he says: “I will warn you, we’re very dangerous, although we mean you no harm. I would not suggest launching an attack on us.”
“Well, uh, how dangerous are you? How dangerous are we talking.”
“Level… level 1. We're level 1 dangerous.”
If Merle could understand Goblin, he might have said something along the lines of, ask the goblin we cut in half back there how dangerous we are! And Taako, longsufferingly exasperated, would have replied, I was trying to build a rapport here, and really it’s probably a very good thing that Merle can’t understand Goblin and the whole awkward situation was averted, although it’s debatable how much of an improvement the answer 'Level 1' is.
“Do you have gold in here?” Taako asks, because he can’t think of anything else to ask, and because he’s happy to champion bold moves when something expensive and shiny is at stake. Once he says it, however, it occurs to him it might be a bit too bold, and so he continues: “Sorry, I — where are we?”
“You’re in our hideout! You know, you’re making me extremely uncomfortable. I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing. We’re looking for new recruits, but — seeing you is definitely part of the interview process!”
“My name is Taako. A friend of ours was taken, and his horses were killed.”
“Oooooh.”
“We’re searching for our friend.”
“Oh, shit. Yeah, we did that. HEY GUYS! SOMEONE’S HERE! GUYS! IT’S THE GUYS FROM THE HORSE THING!”
You don’t need to understand Goblin in order to understand that someone done fucked up, and you’re about to be attacked by a horde of tiny goblins.
“Use mage hand!” Magnus cries out. “Use mage hand and push him off! Push him off the thing with your mage hand!”
No one rushes to the goblin’s aid, either up on the rock bridge or down on the adventurers’ level. They do hear, however, extremely loud banging noises, and more voices that only Taako can understand (’Really?’ ‘You heard him!’), and then even more banging.
Magnus moves to the passage opening where the voices are coming from, shield raised, ready to swing his axe into anyone who comes down it. Merle adds to Magnus’s shield with a holy spell that increases the chances of attacks on Magnus missing completely. The goblin on the overpass bridge sees Merle do this, decides that attacking the heavily shielded fighter is a fool's errand, and attacks Merle instead with an arrow from his shortbow.
The arrow finds its mark, slashing Merle’s shoulder. While Merle hisses in pain and rotates his shoulder to make sure he still has full range of movement, Taako casts a Ray of Frost right at the goblin above them, sending it stumbling back and almost falling off the edge of the bridge.
They hear a noise down the passage Magnus is guarding, a noise like something has just come crashing down, and then the telltale sound of rushing water.
Magnus’s very first thought goes to the wolves, and whether their small cavern is high enough that they won’t drown. His very next thought is that the stream beside them has swelled up and the current has gotten much faster.
“Tits,” he mutters under his breath, and moves back to join the others. He draws the shortbow he looted from one of the dead goblins in the woods and looses an arrow that pierces the goblin above them right in the chest.
“Wow,” the goblin gurgles in Goblin, “you guys weren’t kidding.”
Then he falls off the rocky bridge, limply, into the rushing stream.
“Kudos all around!” says Magnus. “High five!”
No one high fives him. The goblin may be dead, there may no longer be any monsters, but the sound of rushing water doesn’t stop, and all three adventurers turn to stare upriver.
"So," says Magnus, "let's, uh, delay those high fives until we're on higher ground."
Merle tries to scale the rocky, craggy surface up ten feet to reach the rocky bridge overhead. It does not work; the moisture makes the rock slippery, Merle’s injured shoulder gives out, and he lands hard on his ass.
“Taako, hurry, we’ve got to do this,” Magnus says, rushing forward to help Merle to his feet.
“You look damaged,” Taako remarks calmly to Merle. “If you have some sort of way of healing yourself, be sure to explore that, you know, because you’re injured.” He looks up at the overpass, and announces to the others as if he's the host of a popular talk show: “I will now attempt the same climb that felled my friend Merle. I have no athletic ability. Here we go!”
Before the others can object, or even have time to process what Taako said, Taako scurries easily up the craggy surface and flips onto the overpass without any difficulty.
It’s uncommon to find a competent wizard who is also well-versed in, as Taako calls it, ‘sweet flips’; however, Taako never fancied himself an ordinary wizard. Everything he does, he does with style. “First-timer’s luck, huh?” he calls down with a smile.
The rock sways a little underneath him, but holds fast. Barely a moment later, a huge wave of water washes down into the cavern with immense speed and strength, taking both Magnus and Merle off their feet. It sweeps them down past the other side of the overpass, and back down the cave tunnel. Taako, safe on his rocky perch, watches all of this unfold with no small degree of amusement; he hasn’t worked with Magnus and Merle for long, but it’s been long enough for him to know that a little thing like a tidal wave won’t kill them. When the water finally recedes, he calls down: “I’m fine! Don’t worry about me!”
Merle’s voice echoes weakly back. “You okay, Taako?”
“I'm fiiiine! Don’t worry about Taako!”
Down the cavern in the other direction, Taako hears more voices talking in fast Goblin.
“Did we get ‘em?”
“No!” Taako calls back. Then, very quickly: “Wait, let me try again — yes!”
“Which one is it? Make up your mind!”
“No, we definitely got them!”
“Oh thank god. Should we come down there, or…? Is it cool? Do their drowned bodies look kind of cool?”
Taako has to take a moment to stop himself laughing. “I — I, uh, I got too horny from the killing, and I…”
“Oh no, not again, not again. We’re — we’re actually gonna stay up here, thanks, man.”
Taako smothers more snickering. “Yeah, don’t come in here!” he calls after them. “It’s private!”
He hears the goblins shuffling away, waits until he can’t hear them anymore, and then gives up trying to stifle his laughter. It echoes around the dripping rock walls, signalling clearly to Magnus and Merle that the coast is finally clear.