Rooster invites Catty Batty, Bizzle, and new hires Slick, greataxe rogue, and Tatters, storm wizard, into his office. No bellowed priority numeral or color. No urgency, just whenever that hand of Three Dragon Ante finishes, that’s fine.
Slick and Tatters rummage through the comprehensive store of R&S magical items to find mission gear suited to their talents. Once the team is outfitted, Rooster introduces the contract.
It seems long-retired R&S operative Dagna Bet has acquired a blood emerald shard and, pursuant to certain terms, has agreed to surrender said shard to R&S for safekeeping against evil shard collector Craig the Insidious Lich & Co., LLC. Dagna doesn’t deliver, so the mission is to retrieve the shard from him at Bet Tower and courier it back to R&S.
It’s the perfect milk run to orient the new guys and ease recently reanimated Epi Glottis back into field work piloting the TURTLE. Rooster distributes the standard mission load of healing potions, plans B, and salvage bars. Batty, hazing the new guys, pretends to eat her salvage bar right away.
Epi Glottis drops the team off at Dagna’s address after an uneventful ride. What Epi Glottis lost to his dying experience with Birt the Insidious has since been back filled with passive aggression. He personally thanks Bizzle SOOOO much for helping to reunite his essence with his corpus ifonlyyoucouldhavepreventedmedyinginthefirstplacethatwouldbegreat.
Batty counts the levels of Bet Tower as it pierces the blue sky: one. Round hut, cone roof, this won’t take long. She knocks and opens the unlocked door. Batty and Slick hear a thrum of power that typically signals the beginning of some non-trivial endeavor. Preparing for the worst, Bizzle picks up Rocky V from the ground.
Impossibly detailed stained glass windows, depicting epic battles of wizards and dragons, line the short entry hall. Batty breezes into the tower, yelling for Dagna Bet. A burp answers her and she quickly finds the source, a tiny dragon-like creature, wings where its ale mug-grasping front legs would normally be, locked in a wooden cage drinking a mug of ale held with its tail.
The rest of the team catches up to Batty’s long stride. They gather around to gawk. With ale-impeded speech, the tiny drake introduces himself as JoJo. Batty, proponent of temperance in drakelings, offers to relieve JoJo of his ale, but this course of action is not agreeable. JoJo flicks his tail into a special tile and the building shakes and rumbles as though the tile activated an earthquake.
Batty reckons that was no earthquake, and JoJo confirms he made the hut into a proper tower, as Bizzle can see out the window once he stands back up and dusts himself off.
JoJo offers a suspiciously apt warning that teleportation won’t work within the tower and then falls fast asleep. Slick entertains visiting vengeance on JoJo in his sleep, but suddenly worries that maybe he is actually a powerful, ancient red dragon. She demurs.
Bizzle pushes to the front to lead the search for Dagna, now that this simple courier mission has gone pear-shaped. But Batty can’t walk as slowly as Bizzle so she scoots past him down a spiral staircase that appears to descend through several levels of the tower.
Unrestrained burglary is one way to quickly meet a homeowner, and it’s the preferred way of Batty and Slick. They launch, looking for Dagna while looting his cupboards, cabinets, chests, and loose valuables.
Batty opens a small chest hidden under a bed. Dagna is a fastidious labeler, and this is his “sekret funding” stash which includes some small coinage and a regular size mummified elf finger. Now it’s Batty’s.
Batty finds a room featuring a large crystal ball. Slick touches it and it speed dials Rooster. Rooster’s irritated image appears and tells Slick to get back to work securing the blood emerald shard from Dagna. Rooster hangs up. No one wants to steal a crystal ball that calls Rooster.
Tatters commandeers a staff, labeled as a staff of knocking, from the corner of a bedroom. It’s entirely possible Dagna could be found behind a locked door in the tower, one never knows.
Bizzle checks a large cabinet that does not contain Dagna, but does contain an irresistible red potion with a happy frog label. He must drink it. He drinks it. The red grung poison gives Bizzle hyper munchies and he is compelled to eat and drink continuously, starting with this room full of potions.
Tatters steps into the doorway just in time to briefly watch Bizzle drink a quenching potion of invisibility. Tatters checks his spell book but finds nothing to help. He hoists his shield, Personal Space, and explores down more stairs.
Batty and Slick find a boring old library. They notice a book featured prominently: Paper Drakes by Dagna Bet. They open the book and three pages fly out. The refolding papers become drakes who begin opening other books to drain off the ink. Weird. Batty and Slick leave before finding out what happens next, closing the library doors behind them as they explore down another level.
Tatters follows the twin pillagers down. Bizzle, finding himself alone and hungry, gathers up an armful of potions that will hopefully see him through. He also follows the group down the staircase, continuously quaffing potions.
Slick takes up dragon chess, or at least the ebony and ivory dragon chess pieces Dagna used to possess.
Batty finds another chest. This one is labeled “other sekret funding” and contains much bigger coinage. It also has three mummified elf fingers instead of just one and a mummified eyeball. Payday.
The sound of clanking fills level four. Intruder Alert! declares the construct emerging from a side room. “Other sekret funding” has been compromised!
The large iron golem reaches through a doorway and fires a net, trapping Batty. She tries to explain that she is looking for Dagna Bet, one treasure chest at a time, but the golem computes that she is a liar and triggers a backslap. The golem hoists netted Batty and heads for a balcony to throw her off. Motivated Batty tries again to explain the situation with more keywords this time, that they are onsite for an appointment to retrieve a blood emerald shard. The golem checks his calendar app and confirms the appointment. Batty is released and the golem withdraws to his station.
Slick, undeterred by the security golem encounter, helps herself to an especially attractive bowl, once she dumps out the colorful capsules.
Tatters explores ahead and finds an alchemy lab on the next level down. He checks a large cabinet that does not contain Dagna, but does contain an irresistible purple potion with a happy frog label. He must drink it. He drinks it. He resists the sudden urge to bathe.
Batty catches up to Tatters and he explains the close call with the irresistible potion. She checks a large cabinet that does not contain Dagna, but does contain an irresistible purple potion with a happy frog label. She must drink it. She drinks it. Monk Batty is immune to purple grung poison and resists the sudden urge to bathe.
Slick, next to enter the alchemy lab, finds herself compelled to drink a golden grung poison. She becomes charmed to Batty and won’t attack her under any circumstances.
Invisible Bizzle, lagging behind, has potioned himself enlarged, hill giant strong, blessed, water breathing and briefly gaseous. If one must be poisoned, this is the way to do it.
The team finally collects at the bottom of the spiral staircase that has led them through so many infernal levels of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Still no Dagna, unless that’s him as a statue in the center of this open room spanning the entire width of the tower. The statue holds a blue orb aloft. Batty can see that this statue of a gnome is actually a statue of a dwarf. Tatters trusts none of it and casts greater invisibility on himself.
Slick advances toward the statue for closer investigation and is suddenly gone, zapped away by a shell of energy centered on the orb.
Tatters’ mage hand swoops over to grasp the orb without getting zapped, but the orb does not come loose.
Bizzle skirts around the edge of the room to a trapdoor in the floor on the opposite side of the statue. He drinks a potion of vitality which fortunately cures him of the munchies and protects him from the inevitable tummy ache. As he approaches the trapdoor he can see a label, but the writing is completely unintelligible.
Slick reappears as suddenly as she left and rolls out of orb range. She walks around the edge of the room, avoiding the statue this time, and stands on the other side of the trapdoor from Bizzle where she can plainly read the common label: Knock. She knocks. No answer.
Tatters, familiar with the knock spell and carrying Dagna’s own staff of knocking, runs right by the statue in all his epiphanic excitement. Hey guys! I– *ZAP*, and Tatters is gone.
Batty, always willing to learn from the repeated mistakes of others, skirts around the statue to Bizzle, who is stomping on the trapdoor with all his hill giant strength.
Tatters reappears, mid-sentence, and runs up. –have this staff of knocking! Everyone get off the trapdoor!
Tatters knocks open the trapdoor which unfastens and swings up, revealing Dagna reclining in a chair by a fireplace below.
Dagna doesn’t know who these whippersnappers are, but the R&S guy has already come and gone with the shard. Craig the Insidious, or something like that, he thinks it was. Got paid and everything, Dagna says, showing off an empty bank bag. The authentic R&S couriers try to convince Dagna what a colossal dupe he is, but he is immune to criticism.
Dagna excuses himself briefly to call Rooster. He claims everything has been sorted out with R&S, not to worry. He insists on having back all his purloined possessions, unwinding the mission profitability. But it’s not a total loss; Dagna offers Bizzle a Compass of the Blood Emerald that may point to Craig, and the chance to recover all the lost shards.
Dagna offers some final advice: get out of his house!