Downtown Druid

Once he was done following through with the odd compulsion he felt, surprisingly, revitalized. As if the planting he’d done had been restorative for him somehow. That didn’t seem right, but whatever his new abilities were, he didn’t know all the rules yet, and that meant all he could do was roll with it until the pieces all came into place. Or ask someone, but he was still of the mind that he needed to play things as close to the chest as possible.

He’d decided, in the midst of his gardening, that taking the long way through kobold territory was his best option for reaching Clan Stonedust territory. There was a chance he could slink through the center of the Pit without getting noticed. He was as nondescript as they came. Average height, nothing that really made him stand out, but Elves… particularly Elfland Kings had a way of noticing every peculiar thing about anyone that wasn’t an elf. The exact type of pointed his ears were, the gray shade of his skin, the shape of his skull, they were freaks about that kind of thing. He’d bet his life that he could slip through a group of Orcs, Kobolds, or Dwarves, but with the elven obsession with people’s physical characteristics, it was just too great of a risk.

He checked his gear, he still had his two shivs and the rest of his typical kit. Aside from that, he searched around until he located a long, slender metal rod. He wasn’t sure of what its original purpose was, but he’d found it a useful method for searching for traps, or checking for instability when moving through some of the deeper tunnels in the Pit. He also grabbed a few small slender pieces of scrap metal that he’d managed to shave down over time into serviceable lockpicks.

It would be easier, of course, to simply trigger any traps he found at a distance, and then move through the space without a care, but that was a surefire way to piss off the kobolds. They didn’t mind someone disarming their traps, that made them see you as an equal. To outright destroy them though? That was an affront that they would find completely unacceptable. Dantes would obviously destroy them if he had no choice, but since they were some of his closest neighbors, and a force in their own right within the Pit, he saw no reason to antagonize them.

He moved to slip out through the crack that led to his cave, and heard Jacopo moving quietly behind him. Once he was through he turned to look at the large brown rat.

“Are you coming with me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The rat cleaned its whiskers thoughtfully. “I want to.”

“Why do you want to? It’s not that I mind the company, I’m just surprised.” He wouldn’t have wanted Tel’s help for this particular journey, but Jacopo? He likely knew the tunnels as well if not better than Dantes did, not to mention he may help him notice traps he might not see otherwise. He wasn’t so naive as to be unaware of the risks he was undertaking and the rat had been nothing, but savvy since he first started speaking to him.The thought made Dantes smirk, he imagined Tel would be a bit offended that he’d prefer a rat’s help to his, but in some ways Dantes was closer to a rat anyway.

“Not sure. Just want to.”

Dantes nodded. “You’re welcome to. I’m headed through kobold territory.”

“Kobold?”

“Big lizards that walk on two legs. Taller than a dwarf, a bit shorter than me.”

Jacopo nodded exactly as someone new to the gesture might. “Yes. Very dangerous. Lost Father to one of their traps.”

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“Well, hopefully we can avoid that fate for ourselves.”

Jacopo twitched his whiskers in what Dantes assumed was a approximation of a shrug. “We shall see.”

With those encouraging words they began moving through the tunnels, chambers, and rooms that made up the outer edges of the Pit. Dantes had a solid grasp of everything to expect in them, as he’d traveled through many of them before. It would take nearly an hour before they reached the edges of Kobold territory and would need to slow down. Jacopo kept up easily at first, but began to tire the further they went. At one point, when Dantes was forced to reevaluate his path when a tunnel he’d gone through in the past was blocked, Jacopo leapt onto his jacket and settled into a pocket, peeking his head out to continue observing what was happening as they moved.

Eventually Dantes found himself in less familiar territory. He pulled out the thin metal rod and began tapping the floor in front of him, while also keeping a lookout for any areas where the dust and dirt had been disturbed. It didn’t take long for him to hear a hollow sound when tapping what appeared to be a broken part of the path ahead. He very gingerly slipped around it and to the other side. Pitfalls were a basic trap, but difficult to set up in the Pit. The stone was so hard that digging them out yourself would be nearly impossible, finding an area that already had a hole and covering it up was another story of course.

He went to keep moving, when Jacopo yelled.

“Stop!”

Dantes froze. Jacopo crawled out from his jacket and onto his shoulder where he gently tilted his head to show a thin wire suspended directly in front of him. He followed the wire with his eyes and saw that it led to to the wall, and then to a large stone directly above him. Had he triggered the trap, the rock would’ve crushed him. He let out a breath, and ducked under the wire. The pitfall had seemed a bit obvious. It had been the easily avoidable trap meant to cause someone to drop their guard. Very clever.

He kept moving forward, continuing to test the ground with the metal rod, but moving more slowly and patiently overall. He managed to find and gently disarm a shrapnel trap, a spear launcher, and kept Jacopo from wandering into a stick trap that would’ve rendered him unable to move, taking the piece of moldy bread from the center of it and giving it to him to allow him his prize without a sacrifice.

They moved further and further in, and began to see signs of the kobolds. Three toed footprints, shed skins, even some old bones that Dantes were almost certain had belonged to a halfling. He’d heard rumors that the Kobolds never wanted for meat. He wondered if they actively hunted other races, or if this had merely been a scavenging opportunity. He felt that he would’ve heard if the former was the case, at least that was what he told himself as they continued moving.

Eventually they reached a stone door. In the front of it was an opening for a key. Before he even took out his lockpicks, he and Jacopo scanned the entire area for any possible traps it was linked to, but found nothing. Dantes pulled out his tools and squatted in front of the lock. He got to work, but found that the lock was more complex than he’d expected. That coupled with the lack of practice with locks he’d had in the last five years, led to a number of quiet creative curses as he worked. At one point he came incredibly close, but lost it at the last moment. There was a tumbler toward the front of the lock that he kept fumbling. He ran a hand up his face and through his hair.

“Jacopo?”

“Yes?” he answered, removing a small crumb from his whisker quickly.

“Can you put your hand into this, and push right,” he tapped on the tumbler with his pick, “here?”

“Yes.” He crawled out from Dantes’ pocket and into the inside of jacket until he was hanging halfway out of his sleeve. Then he reached out and placed his paw on the tumbler.

Dantes went to work around him and, with a click that sounded like music to him, the door was unlocked. He slid it slowly open to see three Kobolds standing just beyond it, all looking at him with spears raised.

He froze, and Jacopo fled back into his jacket. He was certain he could take one of them, maybe even two, but not three of them. They were all armed with stone tipped spears, not to mention teeth and claws. He hadn’t realized he’d made it far enough into their territory to encounter this many of them. They hadn’t stabbed him right away, that was good, meant he may be able to talk his way out of the situation.

All of these thoughts occurred in an instant, and at the end of that instant, the kobolds clapped.

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