by Keith Ahrens
Not that I'd ever point that out. I may be somewhat uncouth, but I'm not suicidal.
Des clears his throat after a moment or two. “That Dullahan is a real psycho, eh? He’s the one behind all this, right? The real reason we're all here.”
Thorn breaks eye contact with Haynes with a longing regret and refocuses on the conversation. “Not so much a lunatic, just a Highborn who was never taught anything different. To them, anyone beneath their station is expendable and not as valuable as they are. It’s a real shame…. By all accounts, his father was a force of good and helped lead the Fey to this new land.”
“Well, his kid turned out to be real shit. At least his Council is on our side. I guess he managed to alienate them enough, and they got sick of him,” Haynes says, thinking out loud.
“His council was appointed by his father. They remember the old ways when we co-existed with the humans. They believe there are better ways to return to your world and leave Under the Hill behind.” Thorn answers.
“Why do the elves say ‘Under the Hill’? I’ve always wondered where that came from.” Des asks looking at Thorn.
“It’s an old expression, a euphemism actually. When the Fey were dying off in large numbers in your world, they began searching for a new place to live. Their scholars tapped into the largest source of magic left to them at the time… necromancy… magic of the dead. You must remember that magic can be used symbolically and sympathetically…. Most of the Fey believe that dying is just moving to a new world, so this made the most sense as a way to find a new place for us. Most of the earliest experiments took place at burial sites called ‘Barrows.’ The polite way to refer to a barrow is as someone’s ‘hill,’ instead of their grave. So, the common way of saying that someone died became ‘going under the hills.’ The phrase just carried over as sort of a macabre jest, I believe. The learned Fey are nothing if not proper,” she says this, as if reciting from a textbook.
“Oh, well, mystery solved, I guess. I’m still gonna call it Underhill,” I say with a grin.
Of course, this offends Thorn. “Idiot. You mock things you can barely comprehend!”
“Oh, I comprehend all right. I just think the Fey are making us pay for something we had nothing to do with. Not sorry if that and the whole kidnapping and forced to be in a slave army thing makes me respect the Fey culture just a little bit less!”
“All right kids. It’s getting real late. Let’s get some shut-eye. That damn horn seems to sound earlier every day,” Des says, drawing attention away from the building argument.
He and I trade glances for a second, and I know I’ve stumbled on a taboo subject for. For a minute, I wonder how that deep of a resentment will affect Thorn’s and Haynes’ budding relationship. Even though we argue a lot, I still want my friends to be happy for a change, even if it’s only for a little while.
12
Things begin to accelerate as we attempt to survive day-to-day, overshadowed by too many unknowns. A sense of urgency seems to be building as tempers get short and suspicion runs rampant. The more we are required to trust others, the more paranoid everyone else seems to become. Or maybe it’s just us.
We've been trying to develop a signal, a visual cue so we know who is 'in the know' and who we can rely on. We ultimately decided on a single blade of grass, freshly plucked every day and tied to the visor of one's helmet or the collar of a shirt. The grass is easy to find, even in the hard-pack dirt of the practice fields, and it remains inconspicuous. We see more grass blades each day as it starts to catch on.
Just a few nights before, it felt like this nightmare would never be over. Now, it seems that we are speeding headlong into a dark tunnel with nothing to light our way, unsure of the outcome, but we know it will be soon. What we can be certain of is that we must keep preparing as best we are able and hope the tunnel opens up into our freedom instead of dead-ending into a wall of living corpses or something just as nasty.
I find myself looking forward to seeing the flashing red tattoo with the arrow in it on my arm. It’s kind of like validation of all the intense training and hard work we've put ourselves through. I'm still not on par with the others, but I’m getting there. I’ve even pumped up a few of my stats and increased the skills I already have. I’m a respectable level 12 by this point:
Cell# K4644
Prisoner # 5925
Fighter
Name: Caleb Bastion
Race: Human
Class: Fighter
Level: 12
Attacks/Round: 3
Hit Points, Max: 136
Hit Points, Current: 136
Special Conditions: None
Strength: 16 (+3)
Constitution: 14 (+2)
Dexterity: 12 (+1)
Intelligence: 16 (+3)
Wisdom: 16 (+3)
Charisma: 12 (+1)
Saving Throws For:
Fortitude: +10 Reflexes: +4 Willpower: +7
Armor Class: (Base) 10+1
Bonus Armor Proficiencies: All Light (+1 Dex), Medium (+1 Dex), and Heavy (+1 Dex)
Armor Class Total: 24
Armor Equipped: Helmet +1 A/C, Breastplate +6, Greaves +2 (both legs), Pauldrons/Gauntlets +2 (both arms/shoulders), +2 Round Shield (Heavy, Wooden),
Ranged Weapon Proficiencies: (None Equipped) Firearms, Specialized
Melee Weapon Proficiencies: +11/+7/+2 (3) attacks/round, +3/+3/+3 Damage (Str)
Unarmed Combat: +14/+10/+5 (Level + Str.) /+3/+3/+3(Str.)
Weapon Group: Maces/Hammers, Specialized, Focused
Mace, Iron: +15/+11/+6 Attack, 1d8+5/1d8+5/1d8+5 Damage
Weapon Group: Shield, Specialized, Focused
Shield, Heavy: +15/+11/+6 Attack: 1d6+5/1d6+5/1d6+5 Damage
Misc. Weapon Proficiencies:
Spear: +14/+10/+5 Attack: 1d8+3/1d8+3/1d8+3 Damage
Dagger: +14/+11/+5 Attack: 1d4+3/1d4+3/1d4+3 Damage
Skills: Animal Handling 5, Profession (Medicine) 12, Driving 4, Swim 1, Sense Motive 6, Intimidate 5, Survival 6, Alertness 5, Toughness 5
Equipment Carried: None
Base Movement: 30 feet
Property of Lord Dullahan of Terram Caeruleum
One night, Thorn stops by to put some of us back together. For a change, I'm not the only one messed up. This time, I get off light with just a bad slash across the upper arm from a missed block. Des isn't so lucky. He broke his forearm when he tried to stop a Berserker’s hammer cold. It didn't work the way he wanted it to. Physics… laws that simply cannot be broken no matter where you are.
I don't shy away from taking a few cheap shots at him. After all, he was the one who taught me to use a shield to redirect a blow, not stop it dead. He isn't as amused as I am.
Anyway, Thorn brings her healing, a few insults, and… a few surprise gifts. When she pulls her satchel around, it seems more bulging than ever. She opens it and begins dropping items into a pile on a pallet. I stare, wide-eyed… things are definitely starting to look up. She unloads tools and equipment foreign to this Fey world, stuff I thought I'd never see again.
I get my duty belt back with some of my tools still on it. I'd been wearing it when I was dragged through the mirror. I just assumed it was gone for good. I smile as I go through the pouches and pockets. A small suture case, a pouch of sedatives and narcotics, trauma shears, bandaging material, and my portable radio. The radio is useless here, but I decide to hold onto it. It may come in handy if we make it back to our world, you know, the world with radio frequencies and electricity and hot food…
I heft the belt onto my waist, and it falls off right away. Guess I've lost more weight than I realized. Still, I feel better with the belt’s loaded mass sitting familiar on my hips, after I adjust the buckle, of course.
That’s not all she's brought, but it's what is the most significant to me. I'm kind of sentimental about my belt and gear; I’ve carried this stuff almost every day for years.
Now for some other important stuff, we begin to rifle throug
h: two .38 revolvers with six rounds in each cylinder; a .45 ACP Colt semi-auto with eight rounds, complete with a spare mag in its holster; and a black-powder revolver. I don't know a lot about black-powder pistols, but Jesse lights up like a 100-watt bulb when he sees it. The pistol is in an old canvas sack holding a large handful of bullets, primers, and a horn of powder.
Jesse has tears in his eyes as he turns it over in his hands and sees his initials engraved on the strike plate. He gets up and hugs Thorn. I honestly don't know who's more surprised.
Thorn can't or won't tell us where she got them, other than that her friend Osmanthus sent them. She says she's given out more 'items' to Colt, Olivia, the Berserkers, and a few other groups. She truly doesn't seem to understand what many of these things are (like my radio) and is almost dismissive of these ‘crude, heavy, iron tools.’ She tries, but her descriptions are vague and lacking useful detail. It’s not her fault, even in the modern world, most people refer to most handguns by their color, whether it’s a revolver or not. Her world has the versatility of magic; we've learned to simulate that with technology. She knows as much about guns as I know about magic.
Still, this is great news. Perhaps we've just gained an edge to even the odds a little.
Haynes claims the .45 before I can, and Jesse obviously isn't giving the black-powder revolver up, so that leaves Des and me with the other pistols. Both are a bit rusty and in desperate need of a cleaning, but that’s the beauty of a revolver—if the barrel is clear, it’ll never jam on you.
We take a few small sticks from the straw, bundle them together, and run scraps of rags through the barrels of each handgun. All, except Jesse's revolver, come up clean despite the surface rust. I guess he never got a chance to clean it before he lost it.
Des activates his character sheet. By this time, we've all seen each other’s stats, mainly to compare and sometimes for bragging rights, so this isn’t much of a surprise anymore.
“Damn boys. Slight problem here. The guns show up in our inventory.”
I pop mine open and see he is right. Under Weapons, I read:
Ranged Weapon Proficiencies: Firearms, Specialized
Weapon Group: Firearms, Specialized
.38 Revolver: +14/+10/+5 Attack, 2d6+2/2d6+2/2d6+2 Damage
The rest of my gear is listed in my ‘Equipment’ section as: Duty Belt, Trauma Pack (Morphine, Epinephrine, Hemostat x2, Scalpel, Various Bandages), Penlight, Two-Way Radio.
“All right, take ‘em off, and find a place to stow ‘em,” Haynes says, quickly thinking as he gives direct orders.
We wrap the guns and equipment in old rags and bury them in the shallow holes under our pallets. If these things are discovered, it would be a death sentence; the jailers have no sense of humor about things like this. The items disappear from our stat sheets as soon as they are off our person, so at least that works in our favor.
“I doubt it’ll make too much of a problem. Come game day, nobody’s gonna be checking through our inventory sheets. Y’all remember how hectic those days are,” Des says to us. Haynes nods in agreement. I take their word for it, having nothing to base it on.
Overall, having these modern weapons is making us feel a little better and more confident about our chances.
We've finally found a crack in the Highborn's plans. They picked us for our 'fighting abilities,' and now we have weapons they don't expect… to fight back against them. This could be a way to turn the tables on them. Their arrogance in their own superiority has led them to believe we could never revolt in any organized fashion. Now, if we can only survive this 'grand battle' of theirs.
For the next few days, we train a different way. We know from the others' experiences that the first few “rounds” of this battle will be pure magic attacks. They've designed these attacks to randomly thin our numbers. Our new training regimen is built around how we can survive these strikes. Haynes told us, upon his return from 'dinner,' that we will have a little offensive magic for each group but still no real defense from it. To combat that, we work on developing new tactics.
As best as we can tell from Thorn, magic is based on primal elements or combinations of them. A lightning bolt is just that, a bolt of lightning. Our goal is to ground it before it hits us. Again, like the square fighting stances, we take a page from the Spartans, or at least the Spartans we've all seen in movies.
Lightning travels like any other electricity, through the path of least resistance, just hotter and more violent. Using our shields, we kneel and form an overlapping umbrella of steel above us. This will help to catch the bolt of lightning and spread it around. At the same time, we touch the edge of one of the shields to a steel spear stuck deep into the ground. This allows the electricity to ground itself into the earth. The Gnolls have been working late into the nights, lining the inside of our shields with thick, dry leather. With luck, this will work as insulation because there sure ain’t a lot of rubber lying around this medieval-style dungeon. Of course, this is all guesswork, but the theory is sound, right?
Now, fireballs. These classics from every B-movie and D&D game are every bit as impressive as they sound. They are a combination of fire and air magic with some primal force thrown in. Primal force is just raw, unrefined magic, not shaped into any element. I'm told they can hit like a cannonball but explode once they reach their target. You know, to spread around the flames and destruction. Good times…
We figure the only counter to these is to hide behind our shields and hope the fire blows past us instead of wrapping inward around the edges. Thin plan here, I know, but there's not much more we can think of. It's not like we have 'Nomex'1 analog readily available.
Ice attacks are kind of the same but the complete opposite of the fireball. Instead of flames, the usual attack is razor-thin shards of ice. So, the plan, in this case, is to also duck behind our shield wall. Now that I think of it, most of our 'magical defenses' revolve around using our shields as, well, shields. Brilliant, I know.
Gas attacks are an entirely different ballgame. In a nutshell, we have no defense for these. The best a person can do is hold their breath and hope it passes before they need to breathe. And of course, hope it’s not a cloud of acid or something similar.
Again, it’s the best plans we have thus far, considering we are using the limited info we've got. We're working with a lot of guesses and stories from other survivors, so everything we do is based on incomplete facts interpreted by people with very little experience with battle magics, or any kind of magic at all. We can only plan for the worst and hope for the best.
Three days before the main event, the goblins start passing us some kind of “mystery meat” along with our MREs. Des says he's eaten everything from snake and rabbit to possum and alligator, and he can’t identify what it is. I choose not to even try it. I'm a bit of a picky eater anyway.
“Wait a second, why have they been going through all the trouble of getting the MREs if they could just feed us this?” I ask as the thought hits me.
“Well, my grandad used to say in his stories that a man should never eat food in the Fey Realm. His belief was though the food would fill your belly, you'd still die of starvation. He used to say that nothing here was real, not the gold, not the food, not the things you could see. He called it 'glamours' or some such,” Des explains, lost in a memory.
While we are debating the pros and cons of trying the meat, Jesse wakes up. He blinks his sleep-crusted eyes and sniffs the air. Then, to my surprise, he grabs a hunk of meat, takes a bite, and chews thoughtfully. Bloody juices run down his chin and into his tangled beard. He notices us staring, and swallows the chunk with a matter-of-fact look. “Eh, never feasted on horse, have ye? Tastes a bit off, but it’ll fill your gut.” He chews self-consciously as everyone continues to stare at him.
The rest of us decline to try the outer-charred, yet mostly raw, 'horse meat.’ We finish our cold breakfast and make our way to the arming room. I'm nodding greetings to most of the people we encounter in the ha
lls when a man with some bad facial scars falls into step with me. “Thank you,” he says in a raspy voice. “I owe you one.” I recognize the scars as burns and assume he must be one of the wounded survivors from the terrible sneak lightning attack.
I nod and say, “No need, we're all in this together.” He nods and slaps my shoulder, then fades into the crowd.
We've brought the rest of the horse meat with us, and Haynes presents it to the Gnolls. Nian and Thirax, with drool on their lips, rip into it with gusto. It’s been a long time since any of us have had any kind of fresh meat.
Yum. My stomach turns a little, and I'm glad I don't share a palate with the Gnolls. Of course, I'm pretty sure they'll eat any kind of meat, human included, but I try not to judge too much.
Still, I guess the Fey are trying to prepare us in their own way with better food. At least, what they think would be better. I follow this train of thought out loud, “I think this next battle is more meaningful than the past ones. It's sooner than expected, and they are giving us better food and some magic 'one-shot’ weapons.”
“Yeah, it's probably gonna be bad,” comments Haynes. “I just wish we knew what makes this time around different.”
“If I had to guess, I'd say there is more at stake. Maybe new players… or something greater to gain?” says Des.
“Maybe a third party is pulling some strings? Revving 'em up and setting them at each other like rabid dogs?” speculates Haynes.
“Hmm, that kind of feels right. But who and why?” Des asks.
“I don't think it really matters at this point, does it?” I say. “But now we need to get out there before the ogres begin to march.”
A general round of agreement is mumbled among us, and we all finish getting ready.
We make it out to the courtyard a little earlier than usual, taking turns as we inconspicuously add single blades of grass to our helmets. We pass a few other squads with subtle grass blades tied to their helms as well. Only eye contact is made, no nods of recognition, no secret handshakes, none of that shit. We know the guards are watching, so we keep our cool.