The Kandron Affair - Part the Twelfth. - TheBeastlordJohnny

Hullo audience!

Well, I figured I’d best get you off your collective hooks that I put you all on at the end of Part the Eleventh… Enjoy! One warning though – this chapter is rather bloody towards the end.

Chapter 12 – Shayla, One Woman Wrecking Crew

“You promised WHAT?!” yelled Shayla upon my telling her and the remainder of the party of my little bargain with the lead go-go dancer/Malarite.

“I thought I could wank this gwoup no lower,” began Oberron, “but aftew THIS little escapade…” His voice trailed off into a slurred mass of incomprehensible muttering and disapproval.

There was to be no reasoning with these people. I tried to make them understand the circumstances surrounding my – our – predicament, but they were just to damned stubborn to notice them. Several times had I restrained myself from beating them over their collective heads with a large lump of rock, such was my frustration.

I sighed for the umpteenth time and told them, as nicely as possible given their constant denial, disapproval, or both towards my situation, that I’d only agreed to perform a small service for the lead Malarite/go-go dancer.

What this service was sounded, yes, it sounded ignominious, but not all that tough and I thought it a fair price – and, given the apparel of the Malarites/go-go dancers, should I refuse, a fate worse than anything I could possibly envisage would await me, and I have a very fertile imagination.

“You mean,” Darik said as he squared up to me, or rather, in his case, attempted to, “You agreed to send us all off, on an utterly pointless quest to find his potato?!” Darik was in a towering (for a dwarf) rage at me as he said this, and his fingers were itching at the handle of his axe. So I looked him squarely in the eye, and declared, “YES.”

“Oh,” was Darik’s less than enthusiastic response.

“Just one question,” Talyn asked the lead Malarite/go-go dancer. “What de feck is so feckin’ special aboyt that potato that differentiates it from other feckin’ ferret-molesting spuds?”

The lead Malarite/go-go dancer advanced on our foul-mouthed darthiir companion.

“Oh, you’ll know it when you see it,” he said, in an extremely questionable tone of voice. Talyn backed off sharpish.

And thus the Fearsome Fivesome set off on the Bold Quest to Find the Burlesque Potato.

Through wind, rain, snow, we quested, from the highest mountain to the lowest dungeon (everywhere from the top of Oberron’s head to the hole we’d ploughed under Brother Harriet’s hovel), from the place where the sun rises in the east (not, as Darik put it, “Shayla’s arse”, which explains why he always would squint when looking at her), to where it sets in the west (okay, as far west as was feasible under the circumstances), and we found nothing resembling any root vegetables whatsoever. Crushed, we returned unto the lead Malarite/go-go dancer, and asked him what he’d done with his potato when he last had it.

“I just tossed it into a sack with all the other potatoes,” was his reply. This was going to be a long day.

Unabashed, we asked the second-in-command Malarite/go-go dancer.

“I don’t know really. Potatoes are potatoes, aren’t they?” he said.

Indeed, none of the Malarites/go-go dancers had any idea as to what they had done with their leader’s potato. And it was then, as we were to return to confess our failure, covered with shame and embarrassment, Talyn had a flash of inspiration.

“Dat’s de ting!” he suddenly shouted out.

“Talyn, in Common we say ‘Eureka’,” I retorted.

“No, dat’s de ting! Arse-bummin’ potatoes are arse-bummin’ potatoes, aren’t they? I mean, every feckin’ potato looks just like every other feckin’ potato, don’t it?”

I am ashamed to say that this had previously not occurred to me.

“So, what we do, is we go to that spud sack in the corner and we just grab the most distinctively shaped one, and give it in to go-go dancer feck over there.”

And it was unanimous.

“We found your potato,” I said, holding aloft the piece of tuber that we felt was the most amusingly shaped. Let’s just say that, upon seeing it, Shayla blushed bright red, Darik snorted in amusement, Oberron grumbled, and Talyn thought it would be fun to put it against his forehead.

The lead Malarite/go-go dancer inspected the Freudian potato.

“This isn’t my potato. You tricked me!” he shouted out.

“Arsefeck,” swore Talyn softly.

“Right, that does it! Nobody crosses us and lives! Malarites… ATTACK!”

And with this, all the Malarites/go-go dancers closed in around us slowly, lurching towards us like a posse of posing pouch-clad zombies, their eyes shot through with bloodlust... or was it something else entirely? They were approaching from all sides, and there were hundreds of them, it seemed. There must be some way of taking all of them, I mused, and then I saw it.

A dam, blocking the upper part of the Shaengarne and reducing it to the trickle we had seen further downstream. It looked crumbly and old, and some of its supports looked like they would fall to bits if an ogre sneezed at them.

“You four hold them off,” I shouted back down at them as I shinned up one of the supports. “Kandron, what the feck are ye thinkin’?” Talyn commented from down below. “You’ll feckin’ wipe us all oyt!” he yelled.

“Just get out the path of the dam!” I yelled, eliciting the reply “Easier said than done!” from Shayla. This was a valid observation, for there was a cloud of Malarites/go-go dancers who, for some reason, had extracted long, sharp knives from Lolth only knows where (and She’s not speculating). However, thanks to Oberron’s Wighteous Swowd of Wighteousness and Darik’s axe (yes, he did fight with both ends – slashed with the blade and jabbed with the handle), and Shayla who was always there with a lightning bolt at the appropriate time, and of course, Talyn and his swearing, they managed to get their collective posteriors out of the depression and onto the higher ground.

“I hope you know what you’re doing!” Shayla snapped at me. “If my spell book gets soaked it’ll be your fault, you know!”

“Yes!” continued Oberron. “And I can’t swim in heavy awmouw. Take that, evil-doing WETCH!” This last bit was where he shoved his Freudian greatsword clean through the neck of an advancing Malarite/go-go dancer.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it all under control,” I replied. Famous last words.

With some effort and a convenient hardened-steel machete of Drow manufacture (serrated on one side for sawing through tough gristle and bone, and smooth on the other side for slashing skin and soft flesh), I was able to weaken the central support of the dam enough that a good, hefty kick sent it out of its socket. The dam bulged and warped worryingly, especially as I was seated on top of it. Figuring there was not much more integrity left in the construction, I attempted possibly the second most stupid thing I had ever done in my life (the most stupid being to tell an Overseer Handmaiden that her, erm, “marital skills”, were somewhat lacking. I suppose I only avoided painful and certain death by the time-honoured methods of bribery and running like a weasel suffering from diarrhoea.) But this ranked a close second. I attempted to run along the length of the dam and jump to safety, a task made all the more difficult by the oscillations and movements of it. I ran, and panic and fear made my heart thump in my chest as if it were going to burst out of my body. Just as the dam broke, I made a dive for safety…

“Kandron, no!” screamed Shayla across the battle. Many of the Malarites were being swept away by the rushing water; I only caught glimpses of them, for I was too busy flying through the air… in entirely the wrong direction.

My leap of faith had been at the exact moment when the dam broke under my feet, causing me to travel not in the planned direction, but at a 45-degree angle to this. Evidently on this course I would fall several feet short of the high ground…

It was Shayla who saved my life.

In a flash of inspiration, she cast a fireball into one of the unbroken segments of the dam, punching a hole in it just underneath myself and sending a torrent of water which sprayed up and pushed me that few elusive feet to such a point as where I could grip the rocky pathway… Laboriously I inched myself over the edge and to safety…

The five of us stood and watched the Shaengarne refill itself, brushing trees and rocks and Malarite go-go dancers out the way as if they were nothing. I felt something snake round my shoulders; looking down I found it was Shayla’s arm.

“So romantic,” she mused under her breath.

“Hmm,” I replied. “If you like watery mega-death, I suppose it is rather.” I removed her arm. “Come on people, let’s go.”

A few hours walk later, we came to the brow of a hill, and saw the main bridge across the Shaengarne. It was a rickety wooden edifice, which looked like it would collapse if more than two wagons were to go over it at once – indeed, there was evidence of repairs left, right and centre.

And a horde of orcs, bugbears, ogres, and similar goblinoid scum. Upon seeing them we dropped to the ground and surveyed the layout of the area. There were several hijacked caravans, upended, their crates were scattered over the ground, orcs and bugbears strutting round, some giving orders, some being given orders, and others building fortifications. And a team of ogres appeared to be in the process of deconstructing the bridge.

“Feck me,” remarked Talyn. “Scoundwels!” grumbled Oberron. “If they wemove that bwidge, the whole infwastwuctuwe of the wegion will gwind to a halt! They must be stopped!” With that, he made to get up, and I pulled him back down, hissing into his face, “Do you want us all killed, you overzealous buffoon?”

We watched, and waited for a few minutes, then Darik piped up.

“I’ve a plan.”

Lolth help us.

“Right. This is what we do,” Darik began. “Firstly, there’s no chance we’re going to keep that bridge intact, those ogres are ripping it up too quickly. So we might as well take as many of them bastards while we’re at it – hur hur hur… Sorry. Right. Kandron will be hiding in the supports under the bridge…”

The underside of the Shaengarne Bridge was even worse than the upper side. Rising damp and woodworm had infested the supports, several of the girders were cracked, and the bolts holding it all together were caked in rust. I had positioned myself under a small crack between the boards of the structure so I could have at least some view of what was taking place outside – and thus I would know when to kick in the weakened support near the riverbank, effectively stranding all those Orcs on the bridge. Shayla had got out her Levitation spell, and from my vantage point I could acquire an extremely interesting view of her. In all honesty, I didn’t expect her to wear silk stockings under her robe, but then again, it was ferociously cold up here, so every little would help.

Oberron and Talyn were, by the sounds of things, running across the bridge to attract the hordes towards them and Talyn was adding to it by simulating obscene acts with make-believe farmyard animals, and suggesting that said creatures were the orcs’ mothers.

“Yer mammy was a dire ferret, and yer da smelt like a Calimshite sewer!”

“Come on if yer tink yer hard enough, ye shitefeck cowards!”

“Yer clan chieftain looks like a Halfling princess! And he stinks!”

Enraged by these, the orcs all, as orcs are wont to do, charged at Talyn and the other two, who stayed for a few slashes, and then ran across the bridge towards the gap the ogres had already dismantled, the ors and bugbears in hot pursuit. When the last goblinoid was past my section, I drove my feet as hard as I could against the rotten support, sending a huge section of the bridge into the river. Darik, who was safe on the other side, threw the elf and the paladin a rope, with which they hauled themselves to safety.

Of course, this left me stranded on an artificial island in a torrential river with a small army of very angry orcs…

I extracted my weapons and clambered out from my hiding place. The orcs all had their backs to me, and were jeering at the party members on the other side. Noticing a pair of bugbears in front of me, I positioned my weapons just between their kidneys, and lunged both at once, twisted them, and ripped downwards, sending them crashing to the ground in a brownish-red mess of blood, flesh, bile, and faecal matter as I disembowelled them. This alerted the hordlings just ahead of them to my presence and the entire horde turned to face me. Yet, for some reason, they did not attack, but simply clashed their weapons on their shields.

I watched with care in case there was a trick, but from their ranks a young human lady, quite attractive, dressed in mage robes, and possibly of Kara-Turan descent, advanced.

“So, dark elf,” she began, spitting the words out as if they were toxic. “This is all your doing. The destruction of the Broken Tusk Clan, the demise of the werebadgers, the dam, this is your doing, is it not?”

“Well of course it is,” I replied.

“Don’t you take that smug tone with me!” she snapped. “It is lucky for you that I do not incinerate you where you stand. I could if I wanted to. But instead, I am impressed by your performances. I offer you a post within the Legion of the Chimaera.”

I thought this over for a few minutes. Indeed, it seemed like a dream come true – the promise of money, power, and quite possibly the chance for revenge on them – however, who they are remains for a later part of this tale. Yet it was not for me.

“No.”

“You cannot possibly say no!” the woman exploded. “It has everything you want! Money! Power! Sex! You have no choice but to accept!” She screamed into my face with this.

I advanced on her. “Listen up, scum. I need your job like Darik needs a full-length mirror. I refuse categorically to surrender and become part of any organisation which I have spat in the eye of so profusely. I refuse categorically to put myself under the command of you or anyone else. I am my own master, and that is how it will stay. GET ME?!” With this, I poked her in the chest and pushed her backwards into the horde, from which there was an angry mumbling, then the clatter of weapons on shields, the chant of “Kill, Kill, Kill”, and the mystical words as this mage began to cast some sort of spell at me. Instincitvely I twirled my weapons in the air and, with a scissor motion, sliced the unfortunate mage clean in two at her waist, her internal organs falling out of her broken body. An ogre came charging at me next, but he slipped on the bloodstain and slid into the river to a watery demise.

I advanced slowly, and the lead members of the horde did as well, and I crouched down low as they approached, and when I felt they were within striking distance, I leapt towards them and put one of my swords through each of the two front orcs’ throats. Enraged, the horde broke into a flat-out run, and it was all I could do to avoid being crushed by their sheer weight. I was forced backwards, and backwards inexorably, and although many fell to me, there seemed to be yet more and more of them. As the end of the line approached, I counted on a desperate, almost suicidal move – I ran straight at them, hoping to force my way through them, slashing at them indiscriminately as I went. Several were caught by surprise; one unfortunate orc shaman fell off the bridge and smashed his skull on the rocks in the river, his brain matter spreading like a dollop of glue. However, I was soon surrounded and blocked in, and the four orcs blocking me from all sides were using full-length shields, and as the remainder of the hordlings piled up against these ones, it transpired that I was to be crushed to death.

Not even the unreal fire rate of Talyn, and Shayla’s spell barrage from above could stop them from occurring. I paced around my two-foot-square prison, constantly praying Lolth for a miracle or something. And then it happened. The entire horde piled onto the back of the shield-bearing orcs, setting the crushing machine in motion, hoping to smear me across their shields.

It was at this precise moment that I leapt into the air upwards as high as I could. I just managed to clear their shields, bringing my legs up just in time, Underneath, the two packs of orcs slammed into each other, and so many cracking noises were heard as those daft hordlings who had put their heads down to power the setup broke their necks. I reached up with my arms and managed to grab Shayla’s calves thus as she levitated us to safety.

“Not bad,” I heard her say from above me.

“Heh,” I replied. “I almost got trampled to death.”

“Shall we do it then?”

“Suits me.”

And with that, Shayla unleashed a huge fireball straight into the last remnants of the orcish horde, which exploded outwards, and set the remainder of the bridge alight. The heat was tremendous, even from twenty feet in the air, and the smell of burning orc-flesh and their agonised screams and yelps was perversely satisfying to hear.

That’s all for now. Coming next – Dinner with Ulbrec.

The Kandron Affair - Part the Twelfth.

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