Tunnel Rat

Grackle had been a fiend tender all of his life. He looked forward to when they were finished taking over this little shit hole of a Hollow, and he would become its new Fiend Master. Gangrene had promised that to him. All his hard work would finally pay off!

His father, Grickle had tended fiends for Wurchwitz Hollow, and so had his grandfather, Gunkel. Grickle had started teaching his oldest whelp his trade early in life, an old tradition since Fiend Tenders don't have a long life expectancy.

"Remember, they all look like monsters, but every fiend is different. They still have pieces of themselves from before. Those pieces fight with the animal that's taking over their mind. Some fiends get sneaky, some get bad tempers, and others just want more food. You need to take advantage of the differences to keep them in control. A heavy fiend prod only works so long, and the more you use it, the quicker a fiend figures out it only stings and doesn't really hurt them. Then either you put the fiend down hard and fast, or they put you down."

Grackle had learned fast. He'd helped his father with the training of the Hunting Fiend packs, and then the Battle Fiends. He had some new ideas on how to train up fiends, but his father was too set in his ways to listen. Grackle endured years of mucking out cages and watching his father grovel to the Fiend Master, never brave enough to offer a new idea.

But he'd certainly been correct about what happened when a fiend lost its fear of the prod. His father had stepped into Black Betty's cage one day, to clean a wound on her shoulder. She'd been hit with a goblin war axe and the sharp blade had left a cut that got infected. You never knew where a goblin or his axe had been, and both were usually filthy. BlackBetty was in a bad mood, and his father had used the prod to settle her down. But after shocking her for the third time, her eyes had narrowed to slits and she snarled. His father had hit her again and she tore his legs off and ate them.

Grackle had managed to lock her cage before she got out. Two good things happened after that: Grackle was promoted to full fiend tender, and BlackBetty seemed to have developed a better attitude.

A year later he took a huge risk and asked for an audience with General Gangrene. He'd used most of his savings to buy an appropriate gift for the General, a three-pound chunk of Livarot Munster. That bought him five minutes of the General's time. It was enough to put forth his theory of using younger subjects. It was the bits of personality that were left that gave the fiends their quirks and made them dangerous. Most fiends were soldiers who used too much battle cheese or cheese addicts that a tender found in an alley, passed out from too much cheddar. They made difficult fiends, already having bad habits and addictions. Grackle wanted to start with fresh minds, unburdened by the rigors of adulthood.

Gangrene had simply stared at him when he proposed a different type of test subject, and his eyes got small and mean. He giggled a little. "Turn children into fiends? And I thought I was a monster! Ha! I like it. I'll send over two brats to your kennels. See what you can make of them. If the experiment fails, I'll stuff cheese down your throat until you change, and you can join them. So don't fail me."

Gangrene had been true to his word. Rosie and Buttercup were delivered to him that day. Their parents had failed to gather their quota for the third time, and been sent to the lower caverns. Their two children would have gone to the whelp master for training, a slightly worse fate than what Grackle had in store for them. Rosie had been holding her doll, and Buttercup had shown him her hair ribbon. He'd fed them, and taken care of them for two weeks, getting to know them. Then he put them in large cages with a big plate of special cheese in front of each of them.

He heard them crying, and then the sobbing had turned into growls and snarling. Their training began the next day. Gangrene had been pleased with the results and now, two years later, they were all moving to a new hollow.

"Time to wake up girls. Grackle has a surprise for you. Look here, Buttercup. I got you a new ribbon for your hair. Blue ribbon, just like you love. There we go, I'll put it right behind your ear. How about you Rosie? Do you want a ribbon? No? Oh, your doll wants a ribbon! Sure, I can do that. I'll tie a ribbon on the doll, and tie the doll around your waist. You want both hands empty when the fighting starts. Good girls. Now eat your FrenzyCheese and I'll show you who to hunt and kill. Do me proud girls, and we'll have a new place to live and you'll make so many new friends."

"Look, alive people! Your break's over. The rats found their courage and are coming back for round two. Let's mop them up and see what sort of loot they have. I want to push hard, and clear this cavern so we can go loot the village and meet up with Spider Guild and get the party going. Same formation as before."

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The raid moved forward, shield wall upfront, spears behind, with rogues and archers on the flanks and the mages and clerics in the middle. The ratkin army looked bigger, and every one of them was in full armor now. Like the players, they had a shield wall upfront. Their next row was made of tall ratkin with halberds and hooked polearms. They seemed low on mages and the big Boss was nowhere to be seen. Everything looked good.

Leafrot was in a good vantage point to rain down arrows upon the ratkin. He'd found a ledge about ten feet up the cavern wall, and from there he could shoot down into the melee without hitting the fighters on his side. He'd recently gained the ability to zoom in on a target, giving him a much better chance to hit. He'd taken down two of the halberdiers with carefully aimed shots and was zooming in on a 3rd when he heard snarling from in front of him.

He looked up just in time to see a close-up of a monstrously huge creature with a blue bow on its head biting down on his face and then ripping his arms off before racing to her next victim. Buttercup spit out the yucky-tasting human and spied a half-elf who smelled better. She leaped thirty feet in the female mage's direction and closed the distance in another second. The startled player turned to cast a spell but was unable to finish it before Buttercup grabbed her by the head and swung her around until she broke.

Rosie was disappointed. The half-elf had been pretty and she had wanted to play with her. But she had stopped to play with two prey who had sparkly hands. She loved the look of sparkly hands, but they stopped sparkling if you took them off of the prey. She went and played with a funny fat man dressed all in blue instead. She had just grabbed him and was shaking him to make him make funny noises when the loud, scary noise hit her ears. Fiends have sensitive hearing, and the sound of a dwarven cannon from only a few dozen yards away was incredibly loud. Neither Buttercup nor Rosie had ever heard such a scary noise before! They turned and ran for the safety of their cages to get away from it. They left the middle of the raid in tatters, with a dozen players down or dying from the attack of two juvenile cheese fiends.

Minutes before...

"Hey, guys! Am I too late for the raid? I slept in some after tossing down a few beers last night. Know what I mean? Wow, awesome toons! Are you guys part of an all-dwarf guild or something?" Jester had logged in late but figured it was safe to run down to the raid. He'd seen the other group of players moving down the tunnel ahead of him and had run to catch up.

Two-Screws nodded at him. "Oh, I know what you mean about knocking a few back, but if it's going to make you late for something important, it's best to just keep drinking until morning."

Boom-Boom nodded in profound agreement. "That's the truth. No sense in sleeping when you can get a good rest just by sipping on a few more tankards. Fact is, I hardly use a bed for sleeping anymore if you know what I mean." He grinned broadly, and Narwhale laughed loudly and elbowed him in the ribs. "I'm going to remind you about that tonight."

Two-Screws handed Jester a tankard of beer. "Here you go, we were just having lunch, you might as well have a couple of beers with us since we're heading the same way. You mentioned a raid?"

Jester tasted the beer, then took two long swallows. He wondered how the hell beer could taste so good in this game. The stuff he and his roommates drank was crap compared to this. And strong, he could already feel a buzz coming on. "Yeah, the raid. Hitting the ratkin village hard and then looting it. Branigan has been putting it together and grabbing everyone he can. Guess you didn't get all the details?" Jester was impressed by whatever guild this was. They were pretty hardcore to all play dwarves. If it wasn't for their silly names, he might have thought they weren't players. But NPC dwarves have always been named things like Nordy Bluntnose, Ori Stoutoak, or Axebeard the Mighty. Anyone with a name like Two-Screws or BoomBoom had to be a player. He finished his beer and his new friends handed him another.

"So, why don't you fill us in about this raid, my new friend? We have a bit of travel to go, and I have a lot of beer to share."

Luckily, when Harry rejoined the group after stopping to harvest some interesting mushrooms in a side tunnel, Jester had already drunk three tankards of beer and didn't think twice about the large troll joining the group. He kept answering questions and they kept filling his tankard. A few hundred yards away from where the fighting was happening, he finally passed out, and Vary leaned him up against the wall.

Boom-Boom was juggling grenades with Narwhale as they walked down the tunnel. "I think our brother Milo might need some rescuing from these greedy humans."

Two-Screws rolled his eyes. "You just want an excuse to get into a fight!"

Narwhale watched as Two-Screws and Sledgemonkey deployed their rivet guns. "You look pretty anxious to cause some mayhem yourself."

Sledgemonkey laughed. "Yes, but we don't need an excuse to do it. Although I am fond of brother Milo and do feel we need to help him out. Doesn't hurt to make a good impression on potentially new trading partners."

"You newlyweds get the first shot. It's traditional, and I want to see how good of a shot a Scavenger is when the targets can move around."

Narwhale ran her hand down the barrel of her rocket launcher. "Challenge accepted!"

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