by Ryan Rimmel
Dungeons and Noobs
Noobtown Book Four
Ryan Rimmel
Copyright © 2020 Ryan Rimmel
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 9781234567890
ISBN-10: 1477123456
Cover design by: Alexandre Rito
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309
Printed in the United States of America
Dedicated to my loving wife, Sarah
Once again into the breech!
Thanks to my friends and fellow adventurers who helped take this book from an idea to a novel. Special thanks to my early readers Ben H. and Jason K.
Thanks to Alexandre Rito @ Podium for the great cover!
Finally, thanks to the rest of the Podium crew, Victoria, Emily and Johnathan McClain, Chapter 29 is just for you, buddy!
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: A visit by Badgelor
Chapter 2: Maximized
Chapter 3: Preparation B
Chapter 4: The Toy Maker
Chapter 5: Whistle While You Work
Chapter 6: The Fanciest of Footwork
Chapter 7: Personal Growth
Chapter 8: An Encounter in a Kitchen
Chapter 9: An Errant Mage
Chapter 10: Windfall Dockside
Chapter 11: Training Day
Chapter 12: Jim’s ‘Problem’
Chapter 13: Mayoring Problems
Chapter 14: Zentarim Academy
Chapter 15: Calm Before the Storm
Chapter 16: The Parade
Chapter 17: Fateful Meeting
Chapter 18: Badgers Night
Chapter 19: An Evening to Remember
Chapter 20: One Final Stop
Chapter 21: An Odd Morning
Chapter 22: For Wind and Windfall
Chapter 23: The March to Dungeon
Chapter 24: The Phoenix Moon Beckons
Chapter 25: Inside the Dungeon
Chapter 26: A Magical Stroll
Chapter 27: Drungeons and Drak’ish
Chapter 28: Aftermath
Chapter 29: For Johnathan
Chapter 30: Deep Thoughts by Sir Dalton
Chapter 31: The Dark Altar
Chapter 32: Falling Into the Unknown
Chapter 33: Burning Cavern
Chapter 34: The Path to the Dungeon Core
Chapter 35: Underground Pumas
Chapter 36: Badgelor’s Two Best Friends
Chapter 37: Skills and Powers
Chapter 38: And Then There Were Two
Chapter 39: …Beyond the Pale
Chapter 40: Tomb Raider
Chapter 41: An Obvious Betrayal
Chapter 42: Return of the King
Chapter 43: Past the Dungeon Core
Chapter 44: The Vengeance of an Angry Godling
Chapter 45: Collapsing Star
Chapter 46: the Final Battle
Chapter 47: Burning and Useless
Chapter 48: Epilogue
Chapter 1: A visit by Badgelor
'Twas the eve before Grebthar Day, all through the village
Only a badger was stirring; he was ready to pillage!
The windows were bolted and locked up with care,
Knowing that Badgelor would surely be there.
The kids were in bed, all snug as a bug,
While that crafty badger moved in like a thug!
And Mama with her broom, and I with my club,
Were all settled in to protect our house, Bub.
When out in the yard, there came such a din,
It was that wily badger, knocking over our bin.
Over to the door, I looked through the glass,
And saw a great badger, ready to kick ass
The Phoenix Moon showing on Ordinal below,
Gave the look of midafternoon; it was night, though.
When, what did I spot arrayed before me,
But an angry badger, working quick, like a bee,
How that badger could waddle, right out of folklore,
I knew in a moment, it must be Badgelor.
Much louder than rats, he crawled through our walls,
Which caused him to trip and land on his balls.
"Oh, fecker that hurt; that was bees without honey!
I’m giving these idiots presents and not asking for money!
Grebthar, ya git, your obituary be written in piss!
Let’s get back to the pub, once I leave the gifts with the miss!”
As Badgelor continued to scream and to swear,
Removing shards of my home from his balls with great care,
Seriously, it was so noisy and loud,
If he didn’t stop soon, it would draw quite a crowd.
Then, he began twerking, heard all through the house,
“Damn, something is broken!” cried my terrified spouse.
As I drew back my club, and got ready to smash,
Badgelor fell through the wall, landing with a great crash.
He was in his War Form, massively furious,
but the pack on his back made me just a bit curious.
Toys flew out of the bag, which he had on his hump,
“Touch them,” he said, “And you’ll pull back a stump.”
His eyes -- how they glowed! His teeth, oh, how sharp!
As he peed on our curtains, I wished for a tarp!
His vicious little mouth was drawn up like a dagger,
He went straight to our icebox and ate with a swagger.
The leg of a turkey he held tight in his jaw,
And a cherry pie ready, held in his left paw.
He ate, and he ate, until he had a full belly;
All he left of our food was a jar of grape jelly.
He was dusty and gooey, a right jolly old mess,
I yelled at him some, but he couldn’t care less.
A blink of his eye and a squirt of his glands,
He marked my house with one of his brands.
He swore to my face, then got straight down to work,
leaving each kid a toy, while calling me a big jerk.
And tracing his finger across his flat neck,
“Say what you saw here, and I’ll send you to heck.”
Then he sprang through the wall, to Grebthar gave a whistle,
“Their food, it all sucked! It was nothing but gristle.”
As I looked through my home and its badger-filled plight,
I heard him scream “Feck all y’all, blighters.” off into the night.
“Did that really happen, Mr. Badgelor?” asked Voan, as Badgelor finished the most sacred of all Grebthar Day rituals.
“Of course, it did,” answered Grace, coming back into the room. “Badgelor sneaks into everyone’s houses to leave kids presents.”
“I thought it was really Mom and Dad,” said EveSophia conspiratorially.
“You think that your parents sneak around the whole town and leave presents for everyone?” groaned Grace, rolling her eyes. Badgelor seemed to have waited for her to use the restroom before he began his story. “The town is too big, first off. Second off, when they run into Badgelor, he’s going to be upset with them.”
“Badgelor’s not allowed in my house, since he got in a fight with Kappa,” said EveSophia sadly.
The girls giggled and got back to the important part of the holiday, trying to figure out what toys they wanted. That just left me with one simple question.
“How were they able to understand Badgelor?” I asked. “Seriously, he’s talking in Badger. All they heard are grunts and growls.”
“It’s The Eve Before Grebthar Day,” said SueLeeta, half-distracted. Her latest campaign was less successful than she would have liked, and more plotting was in order. “I’m pretty sure everyone in here can recite it from memory. Everyone except you, of course.”
“It doesn’t seem that appropriate for children,” I said after a moment. “There was lots of swearing.”
“Swearing?” chuckled SueLeeta, finally turning to face me. I watched her long braid of auburn hair settle between her shoulder blades. “In a children’s poem? You might need to talk to Fenris about your Badger speech. You are apparently getting rusty.”
“What was the last bit again?” I asked. “Just the last line?”
“I heard him proclaim ‘To all a good eve’,” answered Fenris, a huge smile on his normally dour face. Of everyone in the entire village, I was under the personal opinion that Fenris enjoyed the holiday the most. “I’ve never heard it recited better. It was like the actual Badgelor was here, spreading the good news that Grebthar had been reincarnated again to fight the Dark Overlord.”
“And Badgelor was respectful to Grebthar?” I continued.
“Of course! It is well-known how respectful and honorable Grebthar’s companion, Badgelor, was,” smiled Fenris. “He was a stalwart defender of all that was noble and true. Your Badgelor seems cut from the same cloth. Mind you, I think that supreme loyalty just might be a trait of all War Badgers.”
I nodded at this. War Badger was a dialect of Badger that was particularly difficult to understand, and Badgelor himself had a challenging accent on top of it. In plain speak, Fenris didn’t understand any single sentence of what Badgelor was saying. Of course, the fact that he thought he did caused Badgelor no end of consternation.
Sitting at the mayor’s table, I was surrounded by my closest friends on Ordinal. SueLeeta and Fenris were politely chatting as the Golden Badger continued to fill up for the start of the celebration. Badgelor was sitting on the table in his throne, which was not a child’s high chair, being fed by the delighted children.
Zorlando and Sir Dalton were sitting at a nearby table, surrounded by Sir Dalton’s wards. The women were alternating between looking doe-eyed at him and shooting daggers at SueLeeta. Her efforts at dating Sir Dalton went well while they were at the castle, and I use the term “dating” loosely. Unfortunately, things had soured once they returned to Windfall.
SueLeeta had decided to be my wingwoman by keeping Sir Dalton away from Jarra the Healer. Regrettably, it seemed that SueLeeta had set her sights on a second man where her seductive skills had run into a roadblock. In Sir Dalton’s case, said roadblock came in the form of ten young women, all eager to prevent themselves from attaining an evil stepmother.
“Freaking clam jammers,” grumbled SueLeeta, the prospective evil stepmother. Her brow furrowed as she downed another Narwal ale. OttoSherman was attempting to both console her and make eyes with at least four other patrons in the bar. It went without saying that OttoSherman wasn’t being too particular on who those patrons were. While SueLeeta only valued high quality, grade A beefcake, OttoSherman wasn’t very selective as long as his partner was of age. He didn’t care about gender, shape, or pretty much anything else. OttoSherman took his role as the town’s resident floozy quite seriously.
Zorlando and Sir Dalton got on together like a house on fire. They had apparently known each other in Narwal, but now Zorlando was rapidly becoming best friends with Sir Dalton. Both men liked to talk about themselves, and Zorlando was just as inclined to blow smoke up Sir Dalton’s ass as to tell a story about himself. Zorlando was in the middle of one of these stories, when I caught him winking at Ashe with my Perception skill. Thankfully for the Mercenary Captain, Sir Dalton had not been looking. Ashe giggled, something I rarely saw my maid do.
“It can’t be opened,” said Bashara, sitting to my right. She was a slip of a girl with a scar on her right cheek. My eyes still tried to gloss over the blemish, even though I was now certain that it was there. Bashara was a Wizard who specialized in emotional manipulation or mental magic. She had been trying to control me for some time. However, I had powered through her efforts and been rewarded with a perk that made mind control next to impossible against me.
Never again would someone find me an easy target for mind control magic. Thank goodness for that. Bashara’s efforts had gone on entirely too long. It was only the powers of her magic that prevented me from understanding what was happening at the time. Shart had explained it to me succinctly enough. If you noticed every successful Stealth attempt around you, then you’d know to look for someone sneaking up on you by checking your prompts. That meant that her emotional magic, which was really mind control magic, had always misdirected me toward anything else as an explanation. It didn’t matter how implausible such an explanation might be. I had been beyond agitated, as soon as I realized what had been going on.
“I thought you said it wouldn’t be a problem,” I countered, glancing over at her. “We need to get into that dungeon before someone else does. Now, you are making it sound like it’s going to be a problem.”
“Look, the gate is magically warded and there is absolutely no way to open it before the rise of the Phoenix Moon during the holiday,” said the Wizard. “I didn’t come out here expecting to have to pick an arcane lock. I need to get some specialized equipment that your little town can’t provide.”
“Can we make it?” I asked, but she was already shaking her head.
“I already checked with Mar. You don’t have an Enchanter of nearly the skill level required,” she answered, flicking a piece of lint off her shoulder.
If Mar, my town clerk, couldn’t find it, then it didn’t exist locally. “Blots?”
“Your town Merchant can find one for me, but it’s going to be a few weeks before it would get here,” she frowned. “There is a war going on, you know.”
The current war was a great battle between the Kingdom of HarCharles and the Kingdom of TimSimons. The fighting was pressing ever closer to Windfall’s massive fortress wall. Thankfully, Windfall was in a pocket valley with only one functional way in and out. Thus far, we had been spared any real trouble from the war, other than the massive influx of refugees. Right now, we were simply not of any strategic value to either side.
I was waiting for the day when an envoy of either king would come calling, but, as of yet, neither had.
“So Grebthar Day proper is in seven days,” I said, thinking about the holiday. Everything going on now was, in essence, either celebrating our victory over the goblins three days ago, or preparing to celebrate Ordinal’s holiday. It didn’t hurt that I’d declared today an official day of celebration. More than a few people had gone overboard.
I’d spent the last couple of days chasing after possible renegade trolls or goblins. By the end of the second day, I’d more or less called off the pursuit. We hadn’t found a single goblin in more than a day, except for a few Wargs. Since we presently had a treaty of sorts with them, we let them go.
The genetically altered wolves lacked the numbers to cause us any real harm. I was content to leave the Wargs in the northern part of the valley, until they felt like negotiating. I idly wondered how much longer it would take them to figure out their predicament. They had killed off all of the goblins, but only the goblins could make the alchemical compounds required to make more Wargs.
That just left the trolls. They were the reason I was drinking ale in gulps rather than sips. The trolls had
occupied the Eastern Gate Fortress and spilled out into Falcon Crest, our neighbor to the east. The Eastern Gate Fortress was built on a smaller scale than the Western Gate Fortress, but it was still an impressive fortification. At least it would have been, if not for the damage, which was quite extensive. The problem was that there were a number of trolls there, too many for easy solutions. I’d need my army to clear them out, but, with the activity on our western border, I wasn’t sure about committing the forces required to do so.
Jarra the Healer plopped down on my left side, doing her level best to ignore Bashara. “Mayor, I have news on your request.”
“How secretive,” smiled Bashara, attempting to goad Jarra. Jarra doubled down on ignoring the Wizard.
“With the information and ingredients we discovered in the warren, I’m pretty sure I can replicate the potion,” said Jarra, earning a huge smile from me. My happiness was very short lived, as Jarra added, “Eventually.”
“Eventually?” I asked.
“It's quite complicated. The goblins’ lab was greatly damaged by the Wargs,” answered Jarra the Healer sadly. “Whatever unique goblin potions they had in reserve were mostly destroyed. I think I found their recipe for the green smoke, but some of the ingredients they were using are. . . challenging to acquire.”
“I remember that stuff. It is foul,” stated Bashara.
“Do I want to know what those ingredients are?” I asked.
“One is gathered by plucking an infected hair from the rear end of a larger goblin,” answered Jarra.
“That might be a problem,” I said. We’d just pretty much eliminated the entire population of goblins in the valley. Goblins tended to grow larger as they aged, and the big ones had been primary targets.
“Well, it might not be as serious an issue as you’d think,” stated Jarra the Healer confidently. “Unlike some who can only operate with the best equipment, I can make substitutions in a potion with my Alchemy skill.”
Bashara rolled her eyes. “There is a difference between replacing goblin anal secretions and performing complicated arcane magic.”