shart blog

Ansel crouched at the stained feet of a weather-worn building. The stench of the metropolis was foul to his tabaxi nose, but it was fouler still near the gutters into where the street cleaners routinely swept horse dung, chamber pot refuse, and other unmentionable excesses. His targets lay just around the corner.

He inclined his head toward his companions: a silver-tongued bard and a mercenary paladin, both of whom fastidiously did not bend their knees to the dirt as he did but had chosen to remain upright. They, too, were prepared for action.

"Hear you anything, Silvarron?" Ansel asked of the half-elven bard beside him.

There was the briefest pause. "They're in position," said he.

Ansel wasted not a moment. His eyes flashing in the dark, his wicked knife in hand, he darted round the corner and...

"Roll initiative," Nico said. Among the clatter of dice, he tallied up the rolls. "13… plus dex… done. Go ahead, Jason."

Ansel's knife flew true and buried itself into the shoulder of his nearest target. Before they could so much as twitch, he was a shadow among their number, his sword scoring a bloody stripe into the ragged garments of his first foe. He wrenched his knife free in a spray of blood and leapt back as running footsteps approached him from behind.

"Carella swings at the guy who Ansel just got." Drew rolled to hit. "Ooh, score. And I’ll burn a spell slot for Divine Smite."

While she rolled her dice to deal damage, Percy moved his figure into position on the map.

"I’m going to open up with Vicious Mockery," he declared.

Despite the soft, breathy quality of Silvarron's voice, his words rose clear and magically resonant over the din of battle.

"Since you've been busted by a tabaxi, would you guys say that 'the cat's out of the bag'?"

Ansel winced as one with his enemies. The problem with this bard, he thought ruefully, was that the thorns in his words were equally painful to both friend and foe. At a particularly dazed smuggler, Ansel seized the opportunity to smack the flat of his blade against her head and she went down.

Unfortunately, whether it was due to the shock of their surprise attack wearing off or Silvarron's terrible, terrible joke, the rest of the criminals were beginning to rally themselves. To Ansel’s count, they were still outnumbered two-to-one and he quickly found himself penned in against the smugglers’ wagon. He couldn’t defend and attack at once – time grew thick, slow, rendering his arms sluggish; an incoming dagger sped in a direct line for his throat, and he couldn’t run from it or parry it –

A blade erupted out of the torso of Ansel's assailant. Behind them loomed Silvarron's triumphant smile, gleaming mischievously in the dim alley-light.

"Is that a sword in your gut," Silvarron asked, "or are you just happy to see me?"

There was no bardly power behind his words but the infuriated groans that they induced in Ansel and Carella were still painfully real.

They dispatched the rest of the criminals as swiftly as possible, if only so that Silvarron wouldn’t have the time to come up with another bad joke and tempt Ansel and Carella into killing him themselves.

Nico tidied up the fallen pieces. "You tie up the survivors," he said, arranging the remaining figurines in a rough pile as a visual. "Ansel can start with his questions since he was next in the turn order."

"Where were you delivering your goods?" Ansel demanded of the oldest of their prisoners, a grizzled man who glared round at the party as if his eyes alone could kill. "What is your employer planning?"

"You'll never make us talk," he snarled.

"Hey, what about your character voice?"

Jason met Drew’s look of resigned annoyance with a grimace of his own. Today was their fifth session and, well, Percy was a good guy of course, a great hero and all, but nobody could deny that he had a talent for annoying authority figures. Teachers, praetors, gods, giants. It was second-nature for Percy to walk into a room of powerful people and somehow walk out with every one of them an enemy. By now, Jason was realizing that Nico, as their Dungeon Master, was definitely not exempt from the questionable privilege that was dealing with a terminally contrary Percy Jackson.

Nico, as if he’d made his peace with this fact, was unusually placid this time. "He just sounds like me. No big deal," he said while he reached into his stack of papers and slid a new reference sheet behind the DM screen.

"C’mon, what about the immersion? I’m not feeling very immersed here. You gotta add some authenticity to the scene."

Nico rolled his eyes. "Fine. Whatever."

He cleared his throat and continued more slowly, his vowels rounding down with the suddenly deep pitch of his voice.

"You'll never make us talk," he repeated.

Percy rattled his dice. "Looks like this is a job for a bard. Let’s see what +4 charisma can get us."

"Hold on. You're not next in the turn order yet."

Percy stopped. Across the table, Drew’s eyes snapped wide in alarm. Jason stared at Nico uncomprehendingly.

"But we've defeated all the enemies. We don’t need to worry about turns," Jason reasoned. Okay, so, he was a son of Jupiter. He’d been fighting monsters since he was a kid. He'd talked to gods. He'd taken down titans and giants with the fate of the world on the line. But now, watching the satisfaction spread slowly across Nico's face, an entirely new kind of dread trickled up Jason’s spine. "We're out of combat. Right?"

As a response, Nico made a roll behind his DM screen. His smile took on a wicked edge.

"Percy," Nico said silkily, "Roll a dexterity check for me."

Sensing his imminent doom, Percy began to plead, "Look, Nico, if this is about the character voices –"

"Don't worry about that." Nico's eyes were burning, fixed fully on where Percy was rattling his d20 with palpable nervousness. "I don't mind. Honest. Go on, roll to dodge."

Percy's dice hit the table. Drew gasped. Jason adjusted his glasses and gaped at the result sitting incriminatingly on the mat. Percy tilted his head all the way back in his chair and groaned.

"A natural 1. Bad luck," Nico said, the very picture of the cat who got the cream.

There was a grunt beside Ansel and a tearing noise – he spun around to find Sylvarron staring incredulously at the end of a rapier pierced straight through his abdomen. It retracted back into him with a wet sucking sound and the bard’s knees buckled.

"Sylvarron!" Carella shouted.

While she rushed for the interloper, Ansel ran for Sylvarron’s side. The bard raised an appeasing hand to keep him back.

"I can handle this," he gasped. His other hand he’d laid flat over the wound, pressed hard and trembling to where he was steadily losing blood. Even as they spoke, a faint glow emanated from him; his healing magic. "By the gods does it hurt, though. Oh, gods. Ow."

From the adjoining alleyways, more figures closed in on them with rapiers drawn. Behind Ansel, their prisoners began to yell and kick up a fuss.

"Everything was fine," Ansel moaned, drawing his sword again. "We must have incurred the wrath of a god for this to happen now. This job is in ruins."

"A god, huh?" Sylvarron muttered, "I hope that they’re hot at least."

Unbelievably, more enemies sprang from the shadows of the nearest alley and made a beeline for where Sylvarron was still convalescing on the filthy ground.

"Stop talking," Ansel said despairingly. "Please stop talking. There is undoubtedly a higher power listening to our every word and here you are demeaning them!"