Rooster interrupts the R&S domino finals, “Bizzle, Nanny, Nut, Stitches, Strings, let me talk to you. Any of you know who Ignatius Barto is?”
Nut might. “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! No …”
Strings knows that Don Ignatius Barto is leader of the Barto crime family.
Rooster continues: Margo Barto, Don Barto’s daughter, was abducted for ransom by the Bonnie Shoats gang. Don Barto hired a prominent R&S competitor, Blackwater, to make the ransom, but Blackwater lost both Margo and the ransom in the botched exchange at the Cob Roller tavern in Hogsfoot, a very tough borough. As a result, Don Barto has issued discrete prospective contracts to several security firms to recover Margo, but only one will collect the lucrative payout. Margo may be identified by her surpassing beauty punctuated by a warted wart on her nose.
Rooster wants this win so the operatives are offered a double portion if successful. He summons Quint who enters with rumpled, tubular contraptions that work as stilts to make the short folk appear more or less human. These rumpled stiltskins incorporate the additional feature of one mechanically-assisted super jump, after which the mechanism must undergo a complicated reset [once per day].
The team has a quick huddle and settles on a plan to pretend to hire the Bonnie Shoats for security and then work out from that where Margo might be found.
Hogsfoot is a harbor town so the team arrives on the A.R.R.M.P.T., the Armored Rapid Response Marine Personnel Transport. Right off the docks the team meets a woman who knows the Cob Roller tavern. She directs them to just follow the stench, and that’s really impressive criticism from a woman beating fish. Nut inquires as to the availability of ham locally and that question makes Fish Beater really go to pieces. This is a fish town. Stitches gives her a parting hairy eyeball.
Setting out for the Cob Roller tavern, Strings asks a young lady why she is leashed to a house. “Why should I be allowed in the house?” is not one of the few acceptable answers to that question, but it seems too early in the mission to escalate to a violent encounter with a slave owner.
The party easily finds its way to the Cob Roller tavern. As expected, this is a real hive of scum and villainy. The barkeep serves either swill or, Stitches’s favorite, uther. Accounts vary on how much cat product uther contains, but it is chunky and smells of lamp oil.
Nanny befriends a cat she names Goat. The serving wench offers to cook Goat up, but Nanny declines, instead purchasing the animal raw and living.
It seems that the real business of the tavern is done in a sunken side room where Bizzle moseys in, hoping to get connected with the Bonnie Shoats. There he finds a fellow with red pants and his bodyguard. Underworld-appropriate nods are exchanged, in accordance with social contract. For the purposes of parity, Bizzle takes the role of muscle and summons the boss from upstairs. Nut picks up that cue, “I got it from here, Bob,” and, out of sight of Red Pants, casts disguise self to lengthen his arms. Nanny uses her telepathic helm to eavesdrop on the thoughts of Red Pants who is concerned that the party is associated with “the dogs”. Strings enters playing Nut’s improvised entrance theme song on the lute:
♫ “He has the longest arms and that’s why he’s the boss.” ♫
Stitches has acquired extra uther and brings it in.
By now Nanny knows that Red Pants is growing concerned at the quantity and quality of short-armed weirdos crowding into his barroom, but his concern truly escalates when Nut strolls to the head of the table and introduces his squirrel Munk as Harry Squirreldini, the boss. The first thing Red Pants needs to know, explains Nut, is that Squirreldini hates gnolls.
That does it for Red Pants; he’s ready to leave. He offers his room to the party. Nanny tries to steer the situation back to the plan, inquiring of the Bonnie Shoats. Well of course Ioun Bob Red Pants knows the Bonnie Shoats! He’s a lieutenant in said organization as clearly indicated by his red pants, duh!
Bizzle proposes that Ioun would make a good hostage. Ioun agrees in principle but feels generally unwilling to play that part. His bodyguard, Brock, tries unsuccessfully to hit Stitches with a warhammer. Stitches tries unsuccessfully to hit Brock right back. Nut uses an advanced wizard technique to fireball the entire room but only damage Brock. For that imposition, Ioun punts Munk into the wall then fails spectacularly to acrobatically escape his captors, face-planting into the table.
Brock is subdued with extreme prejudice and stuffed into a bag of holding. Strings sleeps Ioun out while Nanny disguises his red pants and catches everyone up on the telepathic intel. Bizzle secures his limbs with mithril banding. Strings haggles with the barkeep for a fair price to repair the scorched bar.
It’s late afternoon when the party emerges from the Cob Roller with Ioun. When he won’t shut up about negotiating his release, Stitches hits him with her hammer. They make for the boat but the sun is setting and Ioun assures them they’ll be very sorry soon so Nanny finds a nearby safe house through a broken wall and down a concealed stairwell where Ioun can be interrogated without the opportunity for being discovered.
Inside the safe house, Nut finds a dagger. Unfortunately the dagger is held at his throat by a thief, Winky Bob. Nanny converses with Winky Bob in thieves’ cant to assure him everyone’s all real friendly here no matter what this looks like, but the sight of Ioun makes him unhappy. He explains that Ioun, like all the Bonnie Shoats, is a wereboar moments away from lunacy.
Further questioning reveals, mostly through Nanny’s telepathic exploration, that the Barto ransom deal fell through because the Bonnie Shoats doublecrossed Blackwater. Margo is being held in a Bonnie Shoats hideout down by the docks.
Bizzle reckons teleporting to the docks beats walking through wereboar-infested streets, but underestimates Ioun’s willingness to be teleported. The teleport resolves on a different boat and without Ioun. The fate of Winky Bob versus Ioun Bob Red Pants will remain a mystery.
Nut takes to the sky to scout around for this supposed hideout. Bizzle and Nanny start going door-to-door around the harbor, finding people cowering behind locked doors not harboring secret hideouts. Empathetic Nanny gives her cat to a man who stabs her with a pitchfork. He’s thankful.
A wereboar finds the party and knocks Nanny down. The wereboar is quickly subdued by Nanny, Stitches, and Strings. Bizzle deploys his stiltskin to jump to the roof and runs, leaping over the narrow streets, toward where airborne Nut scorching-rays and blights the gathering wereboars. Stitches climbs to the roof and uses her dwarven thrower to remotely hammer the wereboars.
A basso rumble of big trouble can be heard by all.
Nut rejoins the party and gets a big heal from Stitches. Several wereboars block their path but Strings’ hypnotic pattern occupies a few of them and Nut’s wall of fire discourages the rest, allowing the party to divide and conquer the wereboars attempting to surround them in the street.
Bizzle identifies from his position on the rooftops where the wereboars are pouring from their hideout. A rumbling super mega awesome wereboar boss emerges from the hideout extensively damaging it. Because of that damage, Bizzle can see a bound lady inside. He leaps onto the hideout’s roof which the wereboar boss demolishes beneath him. Bizzle, positively identifying Margo’s warty wart, helm-teleports with her to the boat. The wereboar boss screams in angry confusion.
The rest of the party continues street fighting the abundantly emerging wereboars. Nut messages Bizzle for a sitrep and receives a report that the package is in the boat but under attack so the party begins to pull back toward the boat. The rampaging wereboar boss is crashing through buildings on his way as well.
A wereboar jumps into the boat and tusks Margo unconscious. Bizzle pours a healing potion into Margo and goes to work on the wereboar with his scimitars. Strings shows up and scares off the wereboar with some dissonant whispers. Nut covers the retreat, scheming some final dramatic wizardry while everyone else collects aboard.
Stitches activates her stiltskins to jump from the rooftops into the boat but one malfunctions sending her hammer over teakettle some distance up the edge of the harbor and crashing through the roof of an alarmed citizen. Nut flies over to help her. Bizzle backs the boat away from the wereboar boss just crashing up to the water’s edge.
The super mega awesome wereboar boss rips apart a large section of railing and hucks it at the boat. Strings uses some choice cutting words to discourage his accuracy and the railing falls far short. Nut summons the boat over for pickup and boards with Stitches. Strings pilots the boat out of the harbor.
As they depart, the super awesome wereboar boss reverts into the man Nanny identifies as Sloan, the principal of the Bonnie Shoats as she learned from Ioun through telepathic snooping. Sloan smiles unnervingly, as though he hasn’t lost at all. Bizzle, surveying the damage to Sloan’s town, tosses him a silver which he catches one-handed. His hand smokes a little.
Back in civilization, Don Ignatious Barto is reunited with his daughter. A week later, it is reported that Barto was murdered by wereboar.