From the Mist of Hell: Chapter the III

You probably want to check out FTMOH 1 and 2 before you read this, otherwise, you will leave befuddled and enraged!

“Har, har, har!” one of the pirates screamed. “Har, har, har!”

He began dancing, knocking mugs and stools over with reckless abandon. The chants of his crewmates spurred on the drunken venture.

Mike and Andy winced at the appalling nature of these lawless dicks. Long had pirates been sweeping through this land like a virus, killing, kidnapping, and raping whoever they wanted. Finding close to 100 of them in one stop would normally be considered an unfortunate incident. But these 100 had a particular bone to pick with the dwarf and his wererabbit companion, thanks to their formerly alive third party member ruthlessly murdering their captain before their very eyes.

Andy lets the door to the tavern close and looked Mike in the eye. “I kind of still want that drink.”

“Outnumbered 50 to 1 with our best fighter dead.”

His reply coming almost immediately, Mike had recognized the level of desire for alcohol on Andy’s face, and knew that it would take more than 100 vengeful marauders to squelch it.

“They’re pirates,” Andy shrugged. “And they’ve been drinking. We’re going to be matching wits with whatever brains they have left after several dragon stomachs full of ale in them.”

“What do you going to be?” Mike demanded. “This decision has not been made.”

“Okay,” Andy replied, alcoholism taking over. “Wait outside.”

Without a pause, Andy proceeded inside the establishment and grabbed a seat at the bar. Noticing the bartender’s predicament, he reached over and poured himself a drink. The pirates all but ignored him.

“Shit,” Mike muttered. This town probably had a squad of guards keeping the streets safe, so he’d no doubt have to start searching for a barrel to sleep in for the night. Guards never took too kindly to wererabbits roaming the streets at night or at all.

As he turned around to begin the quest, he noticed a good deal more pirates coming up the road, heading straight for the tavern. “By the pubes of Zeus,” he said, frustrated.

With nowhere to hide, the crew noticed him almost immediately, and encircled him with curious stares and slow reaches for their weapons.

“Hello,” Mike started, hoping the growling and slobbering accompanying his voice wouldn’t put them off.

“Let’s gut the freak!” one of them yelled.

“No, let’s listen to what he has to say!” Mike responded, throwing his voice. The pirates all looked in the direction they believed the voice had come from and, for some reason, listened to it. A pirate near the front of the crowd gestured to Mike.

“Go on then, creature. Speak!”

Pirates are idiots, Mike thought. I should remember to kill some of them.

“My friends, forgive my appearance. I was once a dashing buccaneer like you. But, in the search for, um, booty, I found myself imprisoned in the Fell Wood and completely lost. Starving, I was grateful to find a dead rabbit beneath a tree, unaware that its death had been a direct result of the wererabbit infection. I tried explaining this to the pirate crew inside, but they cast me out as a freak! And now I must seek out other accomodations…”

Silence greeted the sob story. Then, one of the pirates took off his hat and hurled it to the ground in disgust.

“Sons of unholy hellfire! Ye saying they won’t let ye in the bar because they’re disgusted by ye?! We’re pirates! We’re always disgusting!”

A cheer went up from the crew and Mike smiled at his new support team. As he looked in the windows of the tavern, he could see Andy enjoying a mug of ale amidst the idiocy of the pirates around him and a thought entered his head. Maybe they could rid themselves of the pirate’s desires for their heads in one fell swoop.

“I say, gents,” Mike continued. “Maybe you’d like to aid me in getting even with the scurvy turncoats?!”

While Mike was making friends outside, Andy was about to realize his enemies were making themselves apparent. He felt a hand on his shoulder that felt like it spent ten months of the year on the ocean.

“Ye there, boy. What be your place of origin?”

Andy couldn’t even stomach a response to the horrid man.

“I ASSSSSSKED YE A QUESSSSSTION!” the pirate continued, increasing the size of his balls by a factor of 10.

One of the pirate’s friends strode over and placed his hands on the man’s shoulders. “Come now, leave the dwarf to his drink. He’s just trying to—”

The pirate flung his mate’s arms off of him and pointed accusingly at Andy. “He was with the she-bitch that tore off Cap’n Slaughterhouser’s head!”

The place went silent as a sheet of recognition was stretched over all pirates present. Andy now saw how dangerous alcoholism can be. Completely surrounded, his mind began to race with a possible escape route. He’d forgotten that Layla would not be around to skull-fuck their way out of another bar fight this time.

Throwing on a big smile, Andy suddenly jumped up on the table and began dancing, drinking heavily from his cup. In a circle he went, thrusting about merrily, until the pirates seemed to forget what they were even doing there. A chorus of claps came up, and, soon enough, the place was lively again, with Andy at the center of attention.

From outside, Mike eyed the situation peculiarly. Was this supposed to be some sort of sign? Andy always made sure, when necessary, to make his signs very obvious so that there was no confusion after the fact of when a key moment had been upon them. The pirates behind Mike drew their blades, laughing evilly.

“Just give the signal, matey,” one of them said. “We’ll follow yer lead.”

“Any… uh… second now…”

Andy stopped dancing, and the bar went up with applause and drunken rants. Several glass bottles hit the wall behind him out of celebration.

Uh oh. The combination of hard alcohol and heavy movement was not part of Andy’s usual “getting drunk” regiment. He felt the swelling and gurgling of unhappy booze begin in his lower stomach and travel up his rapidly opening throat.

The vomit came up with alarming velocity, hitting the first four rows of pirates and, as the sheer force propelled him around in a circle, managed to hit many more of them than necessary. Mike watched in disbelief from the window as the episode continued.

And then, as suddenly as it hard started, it was over. Andy wiped a hand across his mouth and looked around. The pirates were back to angry. He tried dancing again. It was met merely with dead silence and stares fueled with the fires of vengeance.

The whole thing would have been pretty bloody, too, if it hadn’t been for the CRASH of Mike and his pirates bursting through the glass windows of the tavern.

“Hi there,” Mike said. He was always jealous of Layla’s ability to say something threatening before the start of a fight. Unable to come up with a better comment, he let his powerful rabbit leg spring forward and kick a nearby enemy pirate in the head, separating his jaw from the rest of his skull. The pirates following Mike’s lead charged toward their brethren, whose confused terror caused one of the swashbucklers to wave his hands for mercy in the air.

“Whoa, whoa, what be yer thinkin’?” he asked. “These lubbers are the ones that sent Cap’n Slaughterhouser to his early, headless grave!”

The pirates turned back to Mike, inquisitively. One of them reached an epiphany. “Ye don’t sound like a pirate at all, actually…”

Mike decided that now was as good a time as any to shapeshift. The others, save Andy, looked on in horror as the wererabbit became an old man in a navy blue cloth cloak, with cold, ghostly eyes and white beard. Using the shocked silence to pull the hood up onto his head, Mike’s eyes became all that were visible of his previously all too-descriptive were-face.

“Who wants to see a magic trick?” he asked, much more satisfied with his snippy insult. Thrusting his arm forward, he sent a line of flames across the doorway to the bar. The pirates had gotten over their shock and rushed both Mike and Andy, who assumed combative positions to fend them off.

Until a small figure bursts through the wooden door and across the sea of flames Mike had created. The screams of several pirates unlucky enough to be in the flames path were drowned out by the screeching, raspy voice that called out from the middle of the room:

“I AM THE DEVIL AND THE DEVIL SAYS DIE!”

A shrill scream penetrated the air, and before anyone could blink, breath, or die, the world was full of daggers. Like a flock of seagulls descending on a muffin, the pirates fell, screaming, and blades, materializing from nowhere, met their targets with the most horrifying accuracy. Mike and Andy tried to offer their own attacks, but it was over so fast they became less than necessary.

By the end of it, all that were left were pieces. The figure sat down calmly in the middle of the bar, breathing heavily. Andy took a closer look at the pulsing, blue sections of it’s arm and upper chest, the most well-known after effects of--

“Spider poison,” Andy stated. He turned back to the bar and poured himself another drink. “Hey, Layla.”

“Eat glass,” she replied. "'Dagger scream' requires a few moments of recovery time, or I'd hit you."

Mike found a pirate still alive on the floor. He looked around shiftily and fired a small magic missile out of his hand and into the pirate’s head, exploding it.

“Ha! Got one!”

Layla ignored the achievement and stood up off the floor, looking around.

“Let’s search the area for gold.”

From the Mist of Hell: Chapter the Two

When we left our weary travelers, they were just about to be attacked in a dark room! Such a versatile world, D&D encompasses.

“Did eight infants just fall from the sky?” Andy asked. The noise had pretty much spooked the hell out of him, and knowing that a despicable elf with the body of a wire hanger and an old snake were his only allies, he was not anxious to engage in a physical battle.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Layla breathed… though she had heard everything. In the darkness, she alone had spotted the giant spiders dropping from above, and as she slowly, stealthily, drew her war hatchet from her side, a raging intensity began to grow within her, sprouting branches of hate and dismemberment.

Mike was, of course, clueless to the whole scene. He was stuck under a rock and wriggling his snake body wildly. “Damn it, somebody help me!”

“Well, whatever it was, it can’t be that big,” Andy announced, not even facing the same direction of the threat.

The swift turning of the three spiders’ attention to Andy’s position meant they found his voice the most delicious-sounding.

Although, Layla thought, his voice indicates a cavernous stomach. The spiders started a collective scurry toward Andy’s unprotected back. These spiders aren’t hungry. They’re looking for a place to lay their eggs.

“Okay, Layla, there’s no treasure in here, let’s free Mike and get a move on--”
Andy turned around. A red splash of spider blood whipped across his face as Layla’s hatchet found the arachnid skull at just the right second. After a moment, Andy grabbed his horn and blew into it without mercy, an action that was set upon more out of sheer confusion and surprise then need for aid.

"YOUR SPIDER FLESH WILL SCREAM AT THE SOUND OF MY SHRIEKS!"

Whatever lock kept Layla’s more wrathful character traits at bay had been hacked off with a shovel. She climbed expertly up the side of the wall and scrambled across the ceiling, almost as adept as her adversaries had. In one deft motion, she unsheathed her ankle rapier and landed on another spider’s back, filling its brain with the rusty blade.

“FUCK YOU!” she screamed in a fountain of blood, her insults not making a stop to pick up subtlety.

Andy remained somewhat shell-shocked regarding the events that unfolded in front of him. The third spider had taken a few steps back, recognizing the bizarre threat caused by the skinny elf, a puzzled look almost recognizable on its insectoid face.
Four more of the disgusting creatures scuttled out of nearby holes.

“Cut and run, crew!” Andy called, grabbing Mike out from under his rock.
But Layla didn’t respond. The spider had regained his confidence at the sight of his back up, and Layla, seeing his desire to attack and impregnate her, smiled, breathing heavily, and dropped her blade, almost pleased.

She leapt across the room in a single jump and landed on its face, clawing wildly and taking an enormous bite out of a part of the spider that seemed to be keeping him alive. The four others advanced without mercy and Layla fired a look across the chamber at Andy.

“I’M GETTING MY HATCHET BACK.”

Andy wasn’t entirely sure on the particulars that such an endeavor would entail, so, with Mike dangling from his right hand, he kicked down the tower’s weak wall and jumped, landing a short ways down on solid ground. From above, he couldn’t tell whether Layla’s screams were of pain or ecstasy. Probably both. Her feeble frame would not be capable of retaining much spider poison before she succumbed to it and the spiders had a suitable place to spawn some offspring.

“What is it? What’s GoINg OrrRNnNRnNnnNN?!”

Andy looked down. Mike was in the middle of transforming from a snake into his wererabbit form, a concerned look on whatever was supposed to be his face at the moment.

“Jesus,” Andy replied, looking away from the monstrosity. “I think… I think Layla’s dead.”

“I wAS JuST abouT TO heeelllrrllPPP!” Mike exclaimed.

“Will you just finished shapeshifting?!” Andy asked. “This is upsetting enough!”

“Maybe we should wait,” Mike suggested, finally reaching the wererabbit form he had been seeking, not that it was much more appealing to the eyes.

A nod from Andy suggested his agreement. They both knew that Layla’s personality issues more than warranted her a horrible death; however, they also were both aware of how much safer they were traveling with her.

The screams had continued, nonstop, since Andy had first heard them. Without a doubt, something awful was happening up there. Andy turned to Mike; his decision was made.

“We’ll give her an hour.”

15 hours later, Layla’s screams were still heard, with a noticeably hoarser tone. They had decided to call it quits after much debate regarding a 16th hour. Mike was getting hungry, and in all likelihood, the screams they were now hearing were simply the giant spiders inadvertently breathing through Layla’s exposed wind pipe and voice box as they fed.

“So how much gold do we have left?” Andy asked as he and Mike approached the town’s gates. It was not quite nightfall, and the torches were in the midst of being lit.

“I could really use a drink,” he added dreamily.

Mike rolled his eyes. This was usually the last phrase uttered before an evening of debaucherized retardation and bets on who in the bar was capable of murder. Sometimes this was followed by a murder.

Mike looked around. His train of thought had led him away for a moment, and Andy had taken that moment to both discover a tavern and knock several people over on his way to it.

“Can we make a party promise?” Mike asked, catching up with Andy in the tavern’s rustic entryway. “Let’s say we don’t get drunk enough to rip a housewife in half tonight.”

This was a thinly-veiled request regarding Andy’s raging alcoholism, and he was probably going to see right through it. But Mike was prepared to stand by his statement, and readied himself to be shielded from Andy’s most assuredly violent response.

But there was no response. Andy continued to stand in the doorway, looking in. His eyes were wide in surprise, which was a strange place for a man who traveled with a drooling, freakish wererabbit to find himself. Mike leaned in the doorway to see what had Andy so transfixed.

About a hundred pirates were singing, drinking, puking, and pillaging throughout the tavern. Though the behavior was hardly out of the ordinary for pirates, there was an even harsher tone to their tomfoolery than normal. Someone had already cut the bartender’s head off, and by the smell, the crew wasn’t even that drunk.

“These pirates lack the order brought on by a leader,” Andy mentioned, finally turning to look up at his companion. “As if maybe he was killed a few days back.”

Mike nodded. “By a shriveled elf with a dragon’s head, perhaps.”