The Kandron Affair - Part the Sixteenth.

Hullo comrades!

This takes it up from where Part the Fifteenth left off. We finally get to see whether the little incident which was setting itself up at the end of Part the Fifteenth will be what I expect you expected or whether it will be completely innocent. Oh, and there is in this chapter an action which I under NO circumstances would condone at all.

Chapter 16 – Splinter Groups

“Morning, team,” I said rather worryingly cheerily, considering it was another dismal Uktar day and we were squatting in what Darik had termed “The Cave of Wonders” for some reason to do with its rather… symbolic… shape. I was feeling unusually lively thanks to the ministrations of Shayla the previous eve, and in an awfully better shape than I was then as well.

“Feck me Kandron,” Talyn said. “Dat’s de first toime we’ve ever seen you remarkably positive towards anything.” His voice was wavering in disbelief. “Ye’ll be smiling at people next!”

Oberron, of course, regarded this sudden change in demeanour as “a mewe confidence twick.” This was expected.

Shayla said nothing, but merely smiled knowingly at this.


Further down the cave we came to a bell-shaped opening which featured a small tunnel leading off to one side and a largish door with a closed grille in it. The air was fetid and smelt of various goblinoid bodily fluids. Wands of Cloudkill had nothing on the atmosphere in this hole, not even the ones that Malavon used to make from the armpits of duergar (amongst other things).

“I wonder what’s down this tunnel?” Darik queried and headed off towards it. “It’s just my size, hurhurhur… Wanna come spelunking with me?” Our dwarven comrade gave a salacious grin at this towards Oberron, who went virulently red and muttered something involving the word “smite”, and went off down there anyhow.

And so Darik and Oberron vanished into the crevice while Shayla, Talyn, and myself approached the door, giving it a knock.

“Password?!” grated an androgynous orcish voice from behind the grille.

“What de feck’s a feckin’ paaasweeerd?” mocked Talyn.

“WRONG!” yelped the asexual orc.

Yawn. I knocked again. “Password?!” it grated.

“Erm… A?”

“WRONG!”

“Aardvark?”

“WRONG!”

“Abbot?”

“WRONG!”

“Abdomen?”

“WRONG!”

“Ablative?”

“WRONG!”

“Erm, Kandron…” whispered Shayla. “Try ‘Xvim’, it’s conveniently written on this rock just to the right of the doorway.” This was the case.

“Erm…” I began. “Is it, Xvim?”

“Correct,” said the androgynous orc. “You may enter,” and he swung open the door to reveal that he was in fact a she. “Ah HAH!” she grated, and extracted a large two-handed axe. “You’re that drow who bumped off the Broken Tusk Clan! We’ve been looking for you for days! Guthma will be SO pleased when I scrag you! AAARRGGHHH!” And she attacked.

This was not a particularly tough battle. I dodged her huge axe swing which would have split my skull if it had hit, and stabbed both my blades through her gut, leaving her to slowly bleed to death.

At this point an absolutely colossal orcish male came barrelling down the tunnel in a towering rage brandishing an axe which would have normally taken three to lift. He screamed into my face, a scream of despair and grief and rage as he noticed the prone body of the female orc. “YOU KILLED MY WIFE!!!” he screamed.

I prepared to dodge his axe blow, but was caught off guard when he dropped his axe, grabbed me bodily off the ground and lifted me to his waist height (after all, he was at least seven feet tall) in such a way that I had my back to him.

“VERY WELL THEN!” he boomed. “YOU WILL REPLACE HER!!!!”

It was then I guessed his intent as he forced me face first against the wall of the cave and began his assault. Shayla and Talyn were too dumbstruck to do anything.

Thankfully, however, my adamantite-toe-capped boots were in a convenient location and free to move. By some incredible stroke of fortune I managed to bring up my feet to his groin, which was dangerously exposed after having dropped his trousers, and push them back hard and fast. The adamantite toe caps connected sharply with two spherical objects that should not be connected with sharply, and I felt them pop like over-ripe grapes. The colossal orcish champion screamed in such pain it made stalactites fall from the cave’s roof, and as it reached a fever pitch it cut out suddenly as he began clawing at his throat as well as his testicles. Most likely he had torn a vocal chord or two with his pained yells.

I retrieved my weapons and decapitated him in a businesslike and cold and calculated manner, before allowing Shayla and Talyn to retrieve their jaws whence they had dropped and put their eyes back in. “There,” I snarled at the deceased orcish champion. “How was it for you?”

“Feck me with a wankwalrus!” Talyn cussed. “I t’ought ye were arsefecked!”

“I almost was arsefecked!” I shouted back at them. “I didn’t notice you coming to my rescue,” I snarled at them. I gave a noise of disgust as I noticed the back of my trousers were ripped, revealing my habits of “going commando”. Shayla giggled at this, prompting me to turn on her. “WHAT is so FUNNY?!” I hissed into her face. “I almost ended up with internal haemorrhaging thanks to that huge orc, and you find it COMICAL?!” I was mainly angry with myself for having allowed myself to seem ineffectual in comparison to a stupid orc, especially as he’d put a hole in the back of my trousers via his depredations. I wanted to spill some blood, to slash, to bring down the full force of my rage onto anyone and everyone because I was ashamed of how a stupid bloody orc had almost bested me. “I’m going off down here. Don’t follow,” I spat at them, leaving them stunned as to my reaction.


I like being alone. I am a great advocate of one’s own company. I see it this way – with nobody else, there’s nobody clucking about anything irrelevant like forgiveness or honour, only one person to keep track of (oneself), and one can order the contents of one’s mind without any interruptions, chiming in or similar beshitments. It also helps to dissipate one’s ire rather, I find. And this was certainly no exception. My eyes were bloodshot and mind roiling. Finding amusement in my misfortune, who did they think they were? Only Lolth Herself is allowed to do that, I thought, and my thoughts were then summarily interrupted by a chittering.

In my wanderings it transpired I had wandered into a hiveload of woolly spiders, and they hadn’t taken at all kindly to this. Indeed, they seemed to want to gnaw my legs off, wrap me up and then store me in the same manner as they had two other goblins that had got too close for comfort – that is, encased in silk and spit and hung upside down from the roof.

I drew my weapons, the gunmetal-grey “Heart” and “Mind” of Kandron H. Devore, and positioned myself at the entrance to the tunnel so that only one could reach me at once. As was usual with spider attacks, one of the lead spiders turned its back to me and shot a mass of webbing at me, which I thought I had ducked but had failed to do so and so my entire lower body was covered in sticky, filthy strands of spider silk. Unable to move more than a foot from my current location, I awaited their attack.

The first spider scuttled towards me and lost six of its legs to a pair of vicious scything strokes, its greenish-grey blood dribbling to the dust floor. The second and third scuttled around it to attack from the sides. The one on my left died to a stabbing attack through the head.

However, the third one I somehow missed, most likely as I was partially stuck to the floor, and it leapt at me and sunk its mandibles straight through my armour and into my bicep. I felt an all-too-familiar numbness invade my right arm as it injected its venom and I bit my lip with the pain. I somehow struggled it off, but somehow the knowledge that blood had been drawn spurred it on and it leapt again, missing but the force of its impact re-opening the wound in my collarbone while the longsword in my ineffectual right arm scraped its thorax. My shortsword in my left hand could not quite reach to stab it properly, and only clipped one of its legs. Poetic justice, I thought to myself. Lolth’s after my soul, it seems.

The spider wandered backwards a bit and then ran bodily into me, trying to sink its mandibles into my upper thigh, yet such an attack was deflected by my armour-plated trousers, and with the last of the force left in my right arm, I slashed downwards and by a stroke of fortune, decapitated the eight-legged freak. So at least the immediate danger had passed.

There was only one problem now. I was stuck pretty much helpless to the floor by wiry webbing, and half a pint or so of woolly spider venom was coursing through my veins. Furthermore, I was bleeding from my collarbone, just to add to the general state I was in.

Paralysis swept through my body as the woolly spider’s venom spread, and I felt myself go limp against the webbing and slump forwards, my swords clattering to the ground. Olaria, I’m sorry, I failed, ran through my mind, and then all went black, and the last thing my mind recorded was a kiss of steel as the flats of my weapons contacted my palms.


I have no idea what saved me on that occasion at all. By rights I should have died where I fell. Yet somehow the half-pint of spider venom that had been sprayed into my bloodstream had very little discernable effect. What I did know, though, was that my hands were gripping the hilts of my weapons, even though I had not put them there.

The next thing I knew was that Shayla and Talyn were kneeling beside me and that I was not dead.

“Oh, bloody hell,” I muttered as I sat up on the stony floor, and then pushed myself to a standing position. “What’s happened now?”

Shayla’s red eyes lit up. “Kandron, you’re not dead!” she said in seeming joy.

“Of course I’m not dead!” I spat at them both. “Do you think I would let myself be killed by a stupid bloody spider?”

“Ye were almost arsefecked by dat dere huge great orc,” Talyn pointed out.

“DON’T mention that or I’ll snip off your nose,” I snarled at him.

“Arroight, then,” Talyn replied. “I’m obviously not feckin’ wanted roynd here. I’ll go and feckin’ foind Darik and that stupid weasel-featured paladin.” And with that, our darthiir friend departed.

I looked around. Emptiness. “Just us two again,” Shayla remarked. I merely cast a 1,000-yard glare round the cavern. There was an awkward silence.

I broke it. “Erm, I wanted to thank you for what you did for me last night, you shouldn’t have really,” I said in a hurry. Being Drow was not conducive to the thought processes concerned with “forgiveness” and “restitution” and things of that nature.

Shayla smiled rather. “Oh, well would you rather have bled to death?” she asked me in a mock-serious tone. For it was she who had applied bandages to the various injuries I had taken outside the Fortress.

I thought about this. “No,” I replied.

Shayla and I regarded each other for a moment.

“Can I ask you something?” she said. “About you, it’s a bit personal…”

I thought about these words for a moment. “Lolth almighty, Shayla, you don’t believe that little myth do you? Everyone, well, that is to say, everyone with any sense, knows that the length of one’s outstretched index finger and thumb is in no way proportional to, erm, how much of a man, one is!”

Shayla found this amusing and smiled rather coyly towards me. “No, erm, not at all! It was about… erm, how to put this… I don’t understand you at all, Kandron. So driven, constantly haunted by a fear of failure and humiliation… why? What’s it all for?”

I considered this idea for a few moments. “I have my reasons,” I simply told her. “You see, Shayla,” I continued, heading off down the tunnel. “Sooner or later, it will all pull together, yes, including why I signed up back in Luskan even though I knew I would have to suffer such indefensible individuals like Oberron.” I wanted to tell her more, of the conspiracy, the retribution, as I had already begun to, but… something inexplicable stopped me. “Come on,” I said, motioning her to follow. “Speaking of Oberron, where’s he got to?”


The tunnels twisted and turned deep into the earth, and there were orcs planted here and there, none of which were much of a threat. But no sign of Darik, Talyn, or Oberron.

“Shouldn’t we keep track of where we’re going?” Shayla asked me as I took side-roads left, right, and centre.

“Of course not,” I reassured her. “I’ve a perfect memory for routes,” I blithely assumed, blundering down a right-hand turn, before realising something was amiss. “Hold on, we’ve been here before…” I noted.

“Oh, you fool!” half-yelled Shayla. “We’re lost!”

I glared at her. “No we are not lost,” I said firmly. “We’re here. The only problem is, is that I’m not sure where ‘here’ is in relation to other places…”

And so we moved forwards across the next junction, and noticed that the tunnel seemed to slope upwards at this point. I smiled; I had inadvertently found the way out of this pit.

And then we turned the corner. There was a sharp smell of sulphur in the air, which I speculated was most likely Darik attempting to light farts. I stalked round the corner – and came face to face with a barghest. It regarded me, its gimlet eyes filled with hatred and bile.

It was then I got the biggest shock of my life.

“HELLS BELOW!!!” yelped Shayla. “UNCLE YQUOG!!” she screamed, and ran to embrace the demon.

“Ewqjidsaklfndsjfm’arhg!” went Yquog. Shayla told me later that this was Abyssal for, “Well blow me I’ve not seen you in years!” And Yquog returned her embrace.

I sank to the floor, head in hands with the shock of taking all this in. I knew Shayla had demonic blood in her, but I never expected to meet her family.


Okay, that’s it for now. Coming next part – Kandron reveals something he really ought not to. (Not like that you dirty minded individuals!)

eyyyyyyy, an update!

Great!


So, some of the background story coming forth? Interesting...

eyyyyyyy, an update!

Great!


So, some of the background story coming forth? Interesting...

Well of course. The plot in IWDII is so bereft of intrigue and the player characters have no real history it seems so I thought, whyever not, let's invent something. And let's face it, would Kandron really do anything mildly benevolent towards anyone else unless there was something in it for him??

Thank you for commentary though.