PROLOGUE
Rooster calls you into his office where an even smaller figure stands upon his desk. “Let me introduce you to Opunt Honeydew”, states Rooster.
“Please, call me Opie” replies the small figure with a small bow. Clearly the figure is a fairy, although what kind you do not quite know.
“Mr. Honeydew’s village is in the woods just beyond the Obsidian Pass, and his village is currently being harassed by a nearby Sorcerer, he’s hoping we can help him out.”
The fairy becomes quite animated and begins shouting while flitting about “The sorcerer has assembled a great engine of destruction and it seeks to destroy us all! You must help us!”
“Mr Honeydew has offered R&S rights to a unique ‘passageway’ that he and his fellow Fairies guard in their grove. R&S is very interested in securing access to this passage, and will compensate you all quite fairly if you can find a way to stop the sorcerer. What say you?”
“Guaranteed destruction! I’m in!” shouts Beard.
LOGUE
On any given day, there is an excellent chance that hanging around the warren playing cards will get you killed.
Bizzle, Nanny, and Beard report to Rooster’s office. There is a tiny figure on his desk who introduces himself as Opunt Honeydew, fairy of Moonwreathe village in the obsidian pass forest. Opunt, please call him Opie, has a job for R&S.
It seems an itinerant sorcerer has plans for the fairy forest for certain reasons that Opunt certainly knows about but seems reluctant to disclose with any certainty. The plans in question unfortunately require destruction of Moonwreathe by means of a nearly-complete, mysterious siege engine assembling at the mouth of the obsidian pass.
R&S’s responsibility, in exchange for desirable access to the obsidian pass on Moonwreathe’s border, is to stop the siege engine and prevent destruction of Moonwreathe. Beard locks on to the phrase “siege engine”. Rooster, perceiving the short-term motivational opportunity at the likely expense of long term regional safety, assures Beard that the siege engine qualifies as lootable spoil.
Opie summons today’s whimsical mode of transport with a loud whistle. Three dozen fairies fly out of Rooster’s desk drawer, ready to skim the team over the treetops to their line of departure. Because deployment of the siege engine is imminent, Rooster and Opie haven’t made time to contrive a clever acronym or pun for the fairy ferry so Bizzle spends the brief and terrifying time aloft, his 40 pounds of unsmashed internal organs at the mercy of two dozen tiny little grasps, trying to come up with one. He has all the words, but they disappointedly spell only nonsense: Load-bearing Ultralight Fairy Transport Hovering And Navigating Service Association
Moonwreathe nestles in dense forest at the foot of a mountain range where a naturally formed obsidian cleft hosts the obsidian pass. The fairies deposit the R&S team a short walk to where locally-crafted (make Sword Coast great again) hewn rock fortifications have been constructed around the mouth of the pass.
Nanny leads the team on a sneak to the edge of the forest on the right side of the formidable (for gnomes) four foot high barriers. Two alert henchmen occupy an arcane cannon emplacement atop the wall. Another pair of alert henchmen at the center entrance watch the path up to the pass. Clockwork myrmidons and even more henchmen patrol behind the barriers. At the mouth of the pass sits a bladed-looking contraption, likely the siege engine or a part thereof. Nanny hears the thunderous, ponderous footfalls of inevitability stomping down the pass like an enormous timer counting down the seconds to mission failure.
The henchmen are too alert, and the clearing between forest and barriers is too conspicuous, to risk dashing across. Control of that cannon, whatever it does, would sure be nice. What’s needed is a diversion, and no one has to tell Beard twice. He cycles through several possible dread elemental forms before settling on earth elemental. Earth Beard gesticulates vigorously at Bizzle and drops into the ground.
Moments later, Earth Beard terrifyingly steps out of the obsidian cleft onto the barrier behind the two cannoneers. He slams one before melding back into the mountainside. Nanny sends an arrow to Beard’s slammed victim who somehow compartmentalizes the fact he’s become the sole recipient of sudden, unsolicited injury and admirably concentrates on his duty.
The cannoneers unleash undisciplined spats of blue and white energy into the forest toward the arrow’s origin. Three clockworkers converge on the forest edge, defensively spewing fire and grease to discourage further incursions. The watchful henchmen retreat behind the barriers, content to let the arcane cannon and clockworkers confront the threat.
Earth Beard glides through the earth into the fresh grease and falls prone. This gives the grease-spewing clockworker a few rotations of his seldom-used satisfaction gear, but that’s poor consolation to the new widow of a cannoneer when large Earth Beard regains his feet, somehow scales the four foot barrier, and slams the henchman out of the cannon emplacement to his death. Between Earth Beard’s looming presence and an arrow from Nanny, the other cannoneer quits his post, improperly relieved.
Henchmen, safely distanced from Earth Beard, send over all their crossbow bolts. The clockworkers beat Earth Beard with picks. Earth Beard acknowledges the felicitousness of the picks, natural enemy of earth.
Bizzle dashes for the nearest clockworker and surges a scimitar attack while Nanny sneaks in an arrow that severely dents the construct. Not to be outdone by an arrow, Earth Beard dents his own clockworker with some slamming. The henchmen continue crossbowing Earth Beard while Bizzle works on two clockworkers. The third clockworker cuts Nanny off from the assault.
Bizzle makes it up to the cannon and puzzles over how to operate it. Absent any progress, he drops back down outside the barrier for cover against the crossbowing henchmen. Nanny jumps aside when her tormentor sweeps fire across her path. Earth Beard continues smashing the clockworkers. If they could understand his terran invectives, the last thing one would hear would be to, Die insignificant fool, before exploding all over the precious arcane cannon.
Earth Beard shuffles the grease off his feet and drops back into the ground. Nanny switches to her swords and goes on the offensive against the clockworkers. Bizzle returns to the cannon, but a couple of henchmen contend for the equipment. Bizzle reaches awkwardly across a gap in the wall to hit one of them, loses balance, and falls on the cushioning corpse of Earth Beard’s earlier victim.
Earth Beard glides beneath the compound and reemerges behind the crossbowing henchmen on the opposite side, sending them running with motivational slams.
Nanny takes advantage of a prone clockworker and sneaks some excellent hits on him but then finds herself the stunned target of the reenabled arcane cannon. Bizzle kills one of the replacement cannoneers, but the stun is done and Nanny’s fate is sealed tight, tight like the envelope of a controversial plan to salvage deceased operatives.
The clockworkers have the advantage on Nanny and pick her to an unconscious pulp. Nanny’s spirit struggles to find consciousness again but the unrelenting clockworkers do not relent and continue picking her pulp long after she is dead.
Bizzle tries to shove the last cannoneer off the barrier, but Bizzle’s diminutive size and a lifetime of skipped leg days fail him. It’s no problem for giant Earth Beard who plucks the cannoneer up and tosses him over his rocky shoulder along with a cutting terran insult.
Bizzle, momentarily freed from distraction, finally and perfectly groks the operation of the arcane cannon. All he needs is someone to help aim, someone without giant boulder hands, someone like Nanny.
When Nanny doesn’t answer Bizzle’s impatient calls, Beard spots her pulpy torso heap.
Why laying down on job, Nanny? Earth Beard’s question goes unanswered because even dead Nanny doesn’t understand terran.
Bizzle drops down from the barrier and rushes to Nanny with a bracing second wind, interrupting the clockworkers’ unescaped pickaxing loop. He fights them off, poorly with only one scimitar, while he digs around in his bag of holding for the controversial last resort, Plan B.
Earth Beard comes to Bizzle’s rescue and slams one of the clockworkers to death. The other somehow botches an easy hit on Bizzle and explodes his gears all over.
Bizzle brushes the gears off his salvage bar and jams the whole thing into his gob. He opens Plan B, skims the directions for pictures, and applies Plan B directly to Nanny’s forehead.
Bizzle surges to loot Nanny’s corpse for healing potions, her regrettably-unused salvage bar, her greycoat, and her Plan B. Shadow Nanny looks on disapprovingly, if silently.
Earth Beard returns to knocking around henchmen in the compound. Bizzle convinces Shadow Nanny to drag her corpse up to help him operate the arcane cannon.
The thunderous footfalls that have been the background soundtrack for the entire assault suddenly sound much less like they are in a tunnel. A large salt golem emerges next to the bladed siege engine.
Earth Beard, generally uncomfortable with allowing salt golems access to siege-style weapons, begins smashing the assembly, a specialty of his. Salt golem takes offense at the infringement and comes around the assembly to slam Earth Beard. The slam battle of two large things begins.
Shadow Nanny and Bizzle get the hang of firing the arcane cannon and, with Nanny aiming and Bizzle firing, work out how to increase damage and firing rate, chipping away the salt golem and sometimes stunning it. Shadow Nanny offers Bizzle a high-five and Bizzle falls for it as his filthy hand passes right through her shadow hand.
Earth Beard knocks the salt golem around pretty well, but the salt golem is fresh to the battle. A particularly vicious slam knocks the earth right out of Earth Beard, leaving him just plain old Beard again.
Beard backs away and launches his signature giant wasp fleet to surround the salt golem and deprive it of the siege engine. A pair of henchmen rush Beard. He defends himself with burning hands, but they overwhelm and knock him out. Beard’s giant wasps return to regular size wasps in the absence of his concentration and fly away to become heroes of their own stories, yet puzzled as to why the rest of the world sometimes suddenly changes sizes like that.
The unstunned salt golem joins to the siege engine, becoming juggernaut. Juggernaut restores the salt golem’s health and begins its bladed, inexorable march toward Moonwreathe.
Abandoning the arcane cannon, Bizzle slays a henchman to get to Beard, now unconscious in the path of the juggernaut, and feeds him a potion of healing. Beard eats his salvage bar and steps out of the juggernaut’s path.
Shadow Nanny uses her new shadow strength drain attack on a henchman. It’s not quite worth having to drag her own corpse around for eternity, but still pretty satisfying. Too bad the weakened henchman has the tenacity to fight back.
Bizzle resorts to beating on the siege engine with his scimitars. Evil scimitar Sinistra longs to decapitate someone good, and this time it turns out to be Shadow Nanny’s corpse. Beard watches closely, fascinated to learn whether Shadow Nanny’s head also pops off. It does not. Shadow Nanny jams her severed corpse head into her corpse abdomen for corpse safekeeping.
Beard reaches into his proverbial bag of tricks and, grabbing some loose obsidian, smashes his staff down to erupt earth around the salt golem siege engine, halting its progress. The detained siege golem pivots to fight Bizzle with an annihilating swath.
Beard calls in lightning on the metallic siege golem, exploding it into shards of salt. The shards blind the henchman Shadow Nanny has been draining. Bizzle ducks.
Shadow Nanny, already admitted through death’s door and given a tour of death’s humble abode, is now knocking on death’s basement door. Beard, barely able to take his eyes off the vacated siege engine, offhandedly throws a little lightning on the blind henchman, making him a footnote: the last casualty of the battle for obsidian pass.
Beard, now back in Earth Beard form, equips the salt golem’s vacated siege engine attachment. Bizzle lashes the arcane cannon to the top of the Earth Beard siege engine.
While Beard and Bizzle fool around with the appropriated siege equipment, the conflagration started by the flame-spewing clockwork myrmidons spreads through Moonwreathe forest. Since it would technically be counted a mission failure to allow Moonwreathe and the entire forest to burn down after going to all that trouble to save it, Arcane Cannon Bladed Siege Engine Earth Beard eats Shadow Nanny’s salvaged salvage bar and does some kind of water elemental thing to put the fire out, why not.
Shadow Nanny offers Bizzle a celebratory high five, but this time he just smiles at her.
EPILOGUE
There is solemn and contentious discussion of Nanny’s last will and testament, vis-a-vis her ham power of attorney and other considerations.
When Nanny returns to the Warren, her lifeless corpse and life-ful shadow are handed over to the “corps” and Rooster retrieves Nanny’s “final payment” regarding Resurrection vs. Burial vs. Option 3. Rooster considers the newfound siege engine and cannon returned by the team, he then looks at Nanny’s current holdings line in the master ledger, and realizes that she has more than enough funds to afford any of the options available to an employee who has just suffered death “in good standing”, i.e. they died and accomplished the mission.
Without much fanfare, Rooster calls over a witness and opens the “final payment” to see what wishes Nanny expressed in her LLWT (Likely Last Will and Testament) and/or how she would like her holdings dispersed…..