(Okay. This is shamelessly a piece of the second book in the Dark Lord/Dwarf trilogy, and obviously the version that ends up on www.patreon.com/thatjeffmach is going to be a little more fleshed out.
I still think this is fun. I have a lot to say about Adventurers.)
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Adventurers are a special breed.
It takes a certain something to not want to live a boring, comfortable life. For one thing, it takes the opportunity to live a boring, comfortable life, which relatively few people have. Many Adventurers have tragic backstories; then again, who doesn’t?
It takes a great deal of bravery to hear of a great Evil to fight and a great Treasure to win, and to decide to attempt both tasks at great personal risk.
Or stupidity and arrogance. Those would work equally well, and look the same.
In the years to come, Sam would wish life had made his choices more difficult. He would have liked to feel more guilty. He would have liked to have had to fight for it.
“Treasure that feeling,” Alice suggested. Sam looked at her with his head cocked to one side, in their now-familiar gesture of, ‘All right, that’s insane, but you’re going to win this argument, so can we not have the argument?’
“No,” said Sam. “There was nothing fundamentally wrong with those people that we know about.”
“Other than them wanting to kill us and take our things.”
“They thought they had good reason!”
“They thought we had really, really nice things.”
Sam sighed.
For the first several months of the discussion, this is where the subject of Bards would come up. Usually the phrase “Every Bard in the Land…” would push itself out of Sam’s mouth as if it had no connection to his neocortex’s memories of previous pitiful defeats in the realm of logic and observable reality.
(Not that Alice was always right. Not that Alice was usually right. There wasn’t usually a right. This is why Alice’s usual dining companions were librae until Sam came along. This would have been awkward had there been a single moment during which Sam and Alice might have suffered the embarrassment of worry about some sort of hitherto unknown soul-connection leading to romantic bonding between two incredibly different beings of incredibly different backgrounds, species, philosophies, ages, levels of ability to summon demons, and personal devotion to either chastity or Dionysus.
(Although, strangely, one thing Sam and Alice DID share was a mutual devotion to ‘either chastity or Dionysus’; but as the Greek Gods had power in this world without the inconvenience of Greeks, there was no-one to declare Destiny, and therefore, that was one Dionysion Shock the World was just going to have to lack.)
“To be fair, ‘Dark Lord’ and ‘Treasure Horde’ are perfect rhymes, said the guard at the door. Alice shot her a glance which would, and had, turned other people to stone, “What the Hell are you doing here?” she asked.
“Don’t you need a door guard?”
“No!”
The door guard walked over to the table, picked up an orange, juggled it against itself, put it into a rucksack…paused, put her hands together fist to palm, bowed to the Dark Lord, and walked out.
“I can’t tell if your discipline is lax beyond belief or functional beyond the point of probability,” said Sam.
“I really, really hope never to find out,” Alice replied.
Sam stared glumly at his plate.
“You’re never going to find any of their stuff, Sam,” Alice said. “It was THE TUNNEL”
(This was not its name in Dwavish, or even its translated name, which is ‘death at death’s pace’. This was simply THE TUNNEL to most Dwarves, as those were the large Human-tongue**).
It was invented by Bok (“Bok is the famous Dwarf who invented The Tunnel”.) Through a process which was perfectly interesting but not at all unusual for a determined Dwarf, Bok pointed out that there had not been an attack on their tunnels in her lifetime. It was pointed out that Dwarves live three hundred years and she was twenty. She said that there had been an attack fifty years ago, and that was way too soon for her comfort. Through various Ways and Means, she was permitted to build a great long tunnel whose roof looked rather like it would cave in and crush anyone who ventured too far inside.
It was labelled “THE TUNNEL” in big, very sloppy letters on the outside.
There was a volunteer guard (it became quite an interesting and pleasant job for many a Dwarven Bard) who’d let you know that if you went in a few feet, a bunch of little rocks would fall on your head, enough to hurt He’d talk about how they were maintained every day by a bunch of Dwarves determined to prove other races were stupid.
It became quite a tourist trap and made a bunch of entrepreneurial Dwarves quite rich and was instrumental in the creation of a middle-class, and not one goddamn idiot fool band of armed idiots had EVER RUN INTO IT SCREAMING in the entire history of ever because, of course, it fell on their heads, and dead they all were, dead as hell, and there was one very, very shocked Guard and some tourists who were going to get their drinks bought for them on this story for the rest of their lives.
“Well, there were bound to be some idiots who eventually tried that,” said Sam. “I don’t think there could possibly be a clearer lesson than that.”
“Mm, Alice nodded, stabbing at something large and sanguinary she’d just sliced on her plate.
There was noise outside.
The Guard came in. She was snickering.
“There’s a bunch of merchants outside,” she said. “They’d like permission to open a series of shops right outside where The Tunnel used to be.”
The noise was definitely rising towards “clamor”. It was the sound of enterprising people who knew they had a chance of getting very rich.
Alice looked at Sam. Sam looked at Alice.
“Wine cellar?” she said. Sam nodded. It was, after all, almost eleven am.
** There are theories that the World is created by an Author who speaks English and so ‘Human’ is English. If you continue to quibble with pointless metaphysics, we have absolutely no shame about any of this. None. So don’t mess about, all right?
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