Introduction: what the heck is this?

Over on the "social media" site reddit.com, somebody started up a section called "worldprompts", as a sort of "mutual inspiration" group for people working on fictional settings for tabletop role-playing games or novels or whatever other imaginary places people might be working on.

The concept is that someone posts a largely context-free "prompt", which might be a word, or phrase, or a line of dialog, or a question, and participants who feel inspired by it post some sort of explanation or example of how the "prompt" fits into that author's setting. It turns out to be a pretty productive approach to filling out details in a fictional setting.

It has at least been helpful for me. As I wanted to get some experience assembling an ebook, I decided to pull together the relevant snippets that I contributed here, and only then realized just how much I had come up with so far. This is a collection of contributions that I'm considering "canonical" to some degree. I expect later versions of this will probably have entries from outside of /r/worldprompts as well.

A number of the entries are purely expository, but as I've done this more I've increasingly preferred to demonstrate the concept from the "prompt" with character dialogue, a short scene, or even a short (usually very short i.e. 1-2 pages worth) story, so you'll find a mix of approaches in here.

I have reached a point where I feel like I've developed a fairly substantial internally-consistent framework of what my own fictional world is like, at least in the part of it that I'm starting things off in (The young, small, fairytale-esque Kingdom of Riparialand and its down-on-its-luck neighbor, the Republic of Sabbatalia) and am now particularly interested in finding places where I've mistakenly set up elements that are confusing or contradictory, or conversely elements that might seem particularly interesting and deserving of more immediate further development. For that reason, I'm publishing this online under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 license (informal plain-text summary: everyone is welcome to copy and redistribute and even make their own derivative works from it, as long as you give me credit for the original and you allow others to do the same with your own derivatives under the same terms. If you're Peter Jackson and you want to make a $100,000,000 blockbuster movie trilogy out of this or something and need proprietary licensing, you'll have to contact me to negotiate, however.)

As of this version of the text, you can find this (and me) on http://dicedork.dogphilosophy.net

The heading for each entry is the text of the "prompt" someone else submitted that inspired my responses here. Where relevant, subheadings describing the location and characters involved in the scene have been added as well.

These entries are in no particular order other than one or two occasions where I've made sure that an entry that relates to another has been placed so that the chronologically-earlier one appears somewhere before the later one, and they have very little connection with each other besides a couple of recurring characters and mostly being set in the same couple of geographic area, so you should be able to enjoy them (I hope) in pretty much whatever order you want.

Thanks for reading!

Ivan "Epicanis" Privaci, dork.

Version 20150618

"I am the pool of blood, spilled by time and drunk by earth."

(An unnamed aspirant to the cult of Charity speaking to a cult-member, in an undisclosed location somewhere in the Kingdom of Riparialand)

"The answer is 'soil'. It's the discarded life spilled over time back into the earth, which in turn renews regrowth."

"That...is correct. So quick to answer, how did you come to this conclusion so readily?"

"It seemed appropriate. I am here because I am Called to serve Charity, and in the same way that small sacrifices of life to the earth come back around to return favors to the living in the form of healthy food crops and strong forests, I see small acts of charitable sacrifice as coming back around to grow strong, healthy societies. It seemed like an obvious analogy to me."

"You are welcome here, then, aspirant, but you will still need to pass the initiation to join us. You understand you will need to give up all of your possessions, yes?"

"Already done, except for this simple robe, and the contents of this small bag, which I felt compelled to bring here to donate to the cause for some reason."

"Money?"

"No."

He opened the bag.

They both stared at the contents - a blatant omen of strange and interesting things destined for the near future for the cult of Charity.

"What do I do if the Rattlebag knocks at my door?"

(Various places in and around the Kingdom of Riparialand)

Well, hypothetically, it could depend on whether the knocker is an AUTHENTIC rattlebag or just someone pretending to be one in hopes of more lucrative returns on their begging. In practice, though, either way if a silent beggar comes to your door and silently greets you by rattling an open bag of miscellaneous small possessions, you should invite him or her inside to share a meal, or at least offer them some generous but reasonable gift to put in their bag.

The authentic rattlebags are devotees of a mystery-cult of Charity, all taking specific forms of poverty and silence vows. They are permitted only possessions that are freely given, and may only speak during specific times and places.

All being Called to the service of Charity, they are all formal members of the Church professions. Although most are simple priests, they do have missionaries, paladins, consecrators, and archivists among them.

Although it's reasonably obvious that their purpose is to promote charitable attitudes and habits, their exact rules and goals are mysterious by design. The most prosaic explanation for this might be that if they weren't "mysterious", everyone would be able to easily tell who they were and know to pretend to be generous when they're around while continuing to be petty jerks the rest of the time, which would obviously undercut their intentions.

It's widely held that those witnessed being kind and helpful to others are often rewarded in some form or another (sometimes blatantly obvious, such as the rattlebag turning out to have some skill or ability to solve some vexing problem that their kindly benefactors have, sometimes just as vague "luckiness" or fortuitous coincidences), and those who mistreat them are said to suffer calamities.

Although ordinary beggars sometimes use this approach to try to maximize their handouts, they aren't usually known to be cursed or otherwise harmed so long as they're "legitimate" beggars, but there are a few gruesome stories about miscreants trying to use this ruse for thefts and assassinations and such. If the stories are even half-true, one can understand why few people attempt it.

"What lives in the well past Halterhouse Hill?"

(A well on a hill around the Northeast border of the village of Venison Heights, Kingdom of Riparialand)

(Scenario reference: "In Soviet Dungeon, Food Eats YOU")

Nobody's been able to find out yet. They didn't care at first, since the water tasted cleaner, and then the well looked so fresh and smooth after all the moss and muck disappeared from the sides. They should have started asking then, but no, they had to wait until whatever it is ate the bucket when they lowered it...

"Babydoctor"

(A team of Troubleslayers - equivalent to an "adventuring party" for Infernal peoples - in some undisclosed location in the Infernal settlements beneath the surface world)

In a chilly, unfashionable corner of the Infernal lands underground, a group of Troubleslayers was having a setback. A goblin, an imp, and their hobgoblin servant did their best to steady another goblin who seemed to be suffering a weakness and unnatural purple color. As they hurried along the labyrinthine hallways of the unnoteworthy settlement, the healthy goblin was uttering curses and threats in the usual emotionless matter-of-fact way that goblins do. He spoke in the standard Infernal, of course, but what he was saying was this:

"This is not the proper time to die. You had best not be thinking of doing so. If you claim your death now, not only will The Opposer let your spirit rot, but I shall myself drag your spirit back from beyond the Gates and force what is left of you to watch as I give your precious possessions to whatever useless loser replaces you before I seal your spirit into a half-empty bottle of rotted grubjuice and fling it into the most neglected reclamation pit I can find for your feeble spirit to fade away within...", and various such things.

The goblin between them opened her eyes, and smirked a little. The team cleric had always been skilled at keeping up morale. Eyes open and focussed now, she saw the name written on the door they were stepping up to:"Neetkeem Miyzh". This was the name they had paid the group of gremlins for, though it wasn't what they had actually called her. What they had said was that if anyone could cure the poison before it was too late, it was "the Babydoctor". They knocked, and were ushered into the small dwelling by a well-armed hobgoblin. The room appeared to be some kind of surgery. There was a large stone operating table, with the appropriate channels for draining blood. They were slightly startled to see an apparently human infant, sitting on a blanket on this table. It wasn't so much surprising that "the babydoctor" would be experimenting on human babies, but just that they weren't very easy to obtain, especially as healthy and unharmed as this one appeared to be.

"We must see Neetkeem Miyzh. We have money."

They were much more startled when the infant told them: "I am Neetkeem Miyzh."

It seems Miyzh had made a pact. She would be granted substantial power, if she could prevent 10000 unworthy deaths of individual agents of The Opposer without ever claiming a death of her own. She was permitted to displace others from living bodies in the meantime, provided she was strong enough to drive the current occupant's spirit out. They could see now that the baby had already begun to take on the normal dark grey skin, enlarged ears and pupils, and hairlessness of goblinkind. Babies' spirits barely exist and put up no fight, and this body would last a good long time.

"Our sorceror has been poisoned."

"Yes. Purpurotoxin, it would seem. How much will you pay?"

They dumped a small pile of gold and silver coins onto the table.

"That will do," nodded Neetkeem Miyzh, oversized infant head bobbling slightly. "Put her across the table, I will need to do some...painful cutting. "

The horrible toothless grin would likely have sent a typical surfaceworlder fleeing in anguished horror, but the troubleslayers felt comforted, and knew their sorceror would have another chance at death after all.

"What is the significance of the number 66?"

(A visitor to the Stag-In-Stupor, the inn and tavern in the village of Venison Heights, Kingdom of Riparialand)

(Scenario Reference: "Stubbed Toe Apocalypse")

As the traveller stepped up to the swinging doors of the Stag-in-Stupor, the patrons inside started up a chant.

"66! 66! 66! 66! 66!"

He pushed through the doors, then stopped short. Still chanting, the entire population of the tavern was staring expectantly in his direction. Confused, he turned to see if someone was behind him.

"Wha-"

Whatever he was about to say was cut off by the doors swinging back and hitting him painfully in the face, knocking him down on his butt. The crowd exploded with drunken laughter. As he angrily got back up, probing his face to make sure nothing was broken or bleeding, he saw several customers throwing copper coins into a small pile on the bar, and the matronly barkeep already heading towards him with a mug of beer.

"On the house, congratulations on surviving the initiation!", she laughed, as several revelers clapped. As he sat down, he heard the footsteps of another customer footstep coming to the door. Now on the other side of this strange hazing ritual, he turned to watch as the chant started up.

"67! 67! 67! 67!"

He later learned that for the last week or so, it seems like almost nobody could enter the Stag-in-Stupor without suffering some sort of unexpected, painful mishap, although nobody has actually been injured beyond one or two mild bruises. Apparently not a dangerous situation, the regulars had turned it into a game.

"Tell me of Seig Grunson"

(Sieg Grunson, of the dwarven city-state of Dunkelangsam, on the border of the Kingdom of Riparialand)

Seig Grunson is a dwarven notary.

Usually, being a notary wouldn't be a particularly interesting thing, unless you happen to be in particular need of a professional witness for legal documents and contracts and need the special little stamp that says "yup, I saw these people show up in my office and these are the documents they handed me to mark with my special little stamp while they were here".

Seig Grunson, however, is the nephew of Seigrid Grunson, who oversaw (and dutifully notarized) the treaty/trade pact between Dunkelangsam and the Kingdom of Riparialand two generations ago. She passed the secrets of her tradecraft on to her nephew when she retired.

As a Consecrator, Seig has approached the craft of notarization with laudable dwarvish pragmatic obsessiveness, and has not only certain Celestial Authorities(*) helpful to the task of authenticating documents, but has developed both alchemical and secular-legal methods for preserving and verifying documents and a variety of material objects and, so it is rumored, verbal oaths.

His services aren't exactly cheap, but you're not likely to find better anywhere in the currently-well-known territories.

(*) In strange fictional worlds, the fictional people who live there often commit the sacrilege of calling these "cleric spells", as though they were magic incantations to make gods do things. Surely if they even have real gods, they'll all be divinely and/or infernally punished for such disrespect sooner or later.

"Why is the Barrel the pride of the People's Navy?"

(The down-on-its-luck Republic of Sabbatalia, to the East of the Kingdom of Riparialand)

The decaying but once-proud Republic of Sabbatalia has for several generations had a problem of healthy young citizens with useful modern skills quietly emigrating for the still-growing neighboring Kingdom of Riparialand or even more mysterious further lands, never to return. ("And good riddance, if they came back they'd just bring those awful new ways of thinking from Away and destroy our traditional way of life!")

The president of Sabbatalia, facing some growing unrest, decided a distraction was in order, and ordered that the "navy" (composed, at the time, of privately-owned fishing boats in various states of disrepair) should have a proper warship to defend the Republic from the scourge of evil plots From Away. Unfortunately, there weren't very many competent shipwrights left.

The president of Sabbatalia summarily awarded the building contract to a fellow politically-allied merchant buddy of his. This buddy had no shipwright experience, but insisted he could handle it...and he found an old cooper who was willing to take on the job for a promise of payment when it was completed.

Large tracts of forest were clearcut, and wide iron bands forged, and after heroic effort (and substantial loans to the president's merchant friend, who immediately signed the money over to his cat to prevent anyone from getting his consulting fees back from him), the RSS Barrel was actually launched. It is literally a gargantuan barrel, floating on its side, with decks installed within. It quite impressively survives storms and rough seas, as it is nearly airtight when all of the hatches are sealed, and the president of Sabbatalia made great public spectacle of "his" accomplishment in getting it built.

Of course, it's still sitting in the harbor at Sandport, as the cooper refuses to keep working on it until the merchant actually pays for the work and materials. The merchant, meanwhile, insists he cannot pay as he is penniless (unlike his cat) and swears that as soon as he can get another batch of loans and private investments the ship will actually be completed, many jobless sailors hired to sail it, and more, bigger ships will follow. He promises.

Just another typical year for the Republic of Sabbatalia.

"The Bleed"

("Henry the Healer" and "Harley the Bard", Village of Venison Heights, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"It's been a week and it still won't heal. Can you help me, doc?"

The doctor, apothecary, and veterinarian, generally known to the village as simply "Henry the Healer", examined the blood-soaked bandages, and then the small cut on the farmhand's arm. It was just a nick, about half an inch long and apparently barely breaking the skin, but still oozing a slow but continuous flow of blood.

"You got this while you were harvesting barley?" asked Henry, taking a protective swig of medicine from his flask.

"Yeah, I barely nicked myself with the sickle, but it doesn't get better. It doesn't even hurt much, but it looks pretty nasty. What's wrong with me?"

Henry took another swig - couldn't be too careful when dealing with things like this, after all.

"Nothing too harmful. You just got a case of The Bleed. If you take good care of yourself and stay healthy, it'll probably go away on its own in a few months."

"MONTHS? Haven't you got some kind of medicine for this?"

"Of course, " Henry replied, taking another sip of the medicine purely for demonstration purposes, " I'm just saying it's probably not life-threatening or anything. You just picked up a bad little earth-spirit from the dust. Once it satisfies this spiritual temper-tantrum that's causing your problem it'll leave on its own. I got some medicine that'll clear it up in a day or so, but it'll cost you two gold-pieces."

"Oh." Working as a farm-laborer wasn't exactly a wealthy profession.

"Tell you what, " Henry relented, "give me what you can afford now. They let you keep some of the barley as part of your pay, right? Bring me a bushel of that when you have it, too. Deal?"

"Deal!" answered the relieved farmhand, who counted out a few copper and silver coins, while Henry extracted an empty glass flask from a desk drawer full of them, then leaned over and opened the petcock on his medicinal distillation apparatus, filling the flask. He closed the petcock and took a large sip from the flask, just to make sure the medicine was good. Then he topped it off, corked it, and handed it to his patient.

"As soon as you get home, drink about a third of that. Then sip a little every hour or whenever you wake up until it's gone. The good spirit in the flask will drive out the bad spirit that's causing the bleed." He took another sip from his own flask just to show the procedure to his patient.

"Thanks, doc!", the grateful farmhand said, and left.

"NEXT!"

Henry took another sip from his flask, as a prophylactic to protect himself from whatever the next patient may have.

Harley the Bard stumbled staggeringly in and slumped into a chair. "Hey, doc, you gotta help me, I got that bleed thing!" he exclaimed, unsteadily waving a finger in front of Henry's face. Henry sighed.

"Harley, that looks like an ordinary cut to me, and not even a bad one."

"No, no, I'm tellin' ya, it's bleedin' and (hic) everything, and it ain't stoppin'! Been going for minut(hic) hours, I think!"

"Medicine's two gold-pieces, Harley. Wouldn't the cider over at the Stag-in-Stupor treat your problem just as well for less money?" Henry sipped from his flask, just in case there was some sort of brain-eating spirit affecting Harley that might try to infect him.

"No, I definitelely need somethin' stronger thish time." Harley awkwardly fished around inside his shirt, pulled out a coin-pouch, and with great concentration counted out two gold coins, one at a time. Henry shrugged, pulled another flask out of the drawer, filled it, tested it, topped it off, and corked it.

"Here you go. Go easy on it, Harley, I'm pretty sure any bad spirit on you is half-gone already."

"Thanksh, doc, yer a pal!" enthused Harley, taking the flask, standing up, and falling flat on the floor. "Ooops. Tripped. Heh."

"Don't hurt yourself, Harley. Close the front door on the way out." Henry watched to make sure Harley didn't break anything - bones or furniture - as he made his way back to the front door with a series of diagonal lurches. He found the door-handle on the third try, opened it, and supporting his weight on the door, swung himself outside.

"Thanksh again, doc! Yer a lifeshaver!" he shouted, then leaned back and pulled the door shut. A loud thud as the door shut announced to Henry that Harley had fallen on his back upon letting go of the handle. Henry sighed again, and checked one last time to make sure the medicine was still okay.

Meanwhile, Harley stood up, dusted himself off, and carefully stowed the flask in his coinpouch. He then dropped the pouch back under his shirt, and, his goal accomplished, strode purposefully back into the village.

"Why do dragons love tea?"

(No particular place, applies worldwide - if there were any dragons around)

There are actually three reasons for this which synergistically combined to make tea so surprisingly appealing to dragons.

Dragons are the sorts of sorcerous beasts that are nourished by magic, including alchemical essences. Tea is, fundamentally, a simple (though crude) alchemical product, concentrating desirable essences from their source material.

Secondly, dragons had remarkably refined senses, and were said to enjoy distinguishing subtleties of color, scent, flavor, and texture among the vast variations available in ingredients, water-chemistry, and processing methods that occur in all the ranges of kinds of tea available. This is also why they were often connoisseurs of other things like wine, or particular foods, or artwork.

Finally, dragons live a very long time, and between very long naps most of them explored ways of finding mental stimulation. For many, subjugation, conquest, solitary exploration, and so forth were preferred, but for a sizable minority of them, they gravitated towards gregariousness and social engagement, and those that did seemed to find the cultural rituals and convivial environments in which tea-drinking typically takes place to be delightfully amusing, and of course these are the only sorts of dragons that regular folks were ever likely to meet for more than a brief, terrifying, flame-broiled moment, making tea-drinking a habit they were known for even though only a few of them were known to indulge in it.

Or at least, so the Elven historian Felix Mycelius wrote.

"Inverted Conjuring"

(Andrew the Kind, a Paladin for Karosh in Sewerdeep, and an unnamed devil manifest somewhere down in the Infernal realms)

Andrew the Kind, respected Paladin, sat in the temple library reading a particularly uplifting poem on the subject of enduring faithfulness, when he began to hear the nagging voice.

"HELP! SAVE ME! I NEED YOU, ANDREW THE KIND! HELP! SAVE ME! I NEED YOU, ANDREW THE KIND!"

Andrew looked up. There appeared to be nobody else in the library, but the voice, echoing, persisted.

"HELP! SAVE ME! I NEED YOU, ANDREW THE KIND! HELP! SAVE ME! I NEED YOU, ANDREW THE KIND!"

It was inane. Repetitive. Annoying...and at the same time irresistably compelling. It seemed as though the floor disappeared. Andrew fell...

Or felt as though he did. His chair had vanished, and instead of the wooden floor of the library, he fell back onto a floor of polished black stone. He was at the center of an unnaturally-shaped ring of white light on the floor. It hurt his eyes to look at, but reminded him of a pentagram somehow turned inside-out. He could still hear the voice, now more clearly, a strange accent now plainly detectable as it finished awkwardly pronouncing the last stanza of "I NEED YOU, ANDREW THE KIND". Standing before him on the other side of the circle was the voice's apparent owner. It was...

"VILE DEVIL!" shouted Andrew, rising smoothly to his feet, drawing his sword, and charging. It watched him calmly as a flash of light and numbing shock hurled him back as he reached the edge of the glowing ward on the floor.

"What do you want of me, foul creature?" Andrew snarled defiantly, examining the fiend. It looked much as he'd always imagined a devil would - tall, red and black, claws and fangs, horns on its almost human-like skull. It wore a red robe, covered with what Andrew assumed were mystical symbols of some sort. It held a book in its left talon.

It replied to Andrew with the awkward hesitation of someone speaking a language they are not yet familiar with. "I REQUIRE THE SERVICE OF YOUR POWERS. I WILL RELEASE YOU WHEN YOU HAVE DONE MY BIDDING."

Its voice was almost irresistably persuasive. Andrew knew there was some sorcerous influence at work. He didn't feel he could simply deny the compulsion indefinitely, so he tried a different approach.

"Well...what's in it for me? You don't expect me to simply give in and do whatever you want, do you?"

The devil snapped the book shut and held it up. "OF COURSE NOT. MY RESEARCH SUGGESTS THESE THINGS ARE MUCH MORE DIFFICULT IF THERE IS NOT FAIR EXCHANGE." Now Andrew could see the cover. It was written not in the Infernal script, but in an old but still legible style of ordinary common. It said:

"Spells of Summoning Theory and Practice Gaius Galactinus 2nd Edition"

"WHEN YOUR PEOPLE GO TO THE HOLY PLACES", the devil continued, "AND ARE MIRACULOUSLY CURED OF AILMENTS, WHAT DO THEY GIVE IN RETURN?"

"What? Uh...well, uh, at the temple of Karosh the suggested donation is a piece of gold for the curing of a common disease or poison, five for the miraculous curing of dire injury..." Andrew stopped himself for fear that he was somehow revealing sensitive information, as absurd as it seemed.

"THEN I SHALL GIVE YOU SIX PIECES OF GOLD, AND A BONUS FOR YOUR TRAVELS TO MEET ME HERE." It held out its right hand, pulling back the sleeve of its robe. A lumpy grey gouge ran from its forearm to its knuckles, glistening slightly from oozing ichor. Its right hand was shriveled and pale white, and white spots spread from there up past its elbow.

"You want me to heal you?"

"YES. I KNOW YOU HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO DO THIS. OUR KIND DOESN'T HEAL IN THE SAME WAY THAT YOU CHAYDCHUZHOUM DO. WE HAVE OTHER MEANS, BUT IF I VISIT ONE OF OUR DOCTORS AND REVEAL MY INDISPOSITION, IT COULD MEAN TROUBLE."

In his mind, Andrew went over the oath he'd taken. Comfort the hurt. Cure the sick. Heal the injured...nowhere in there was there an "unless it's a devil" clause. In fact, the oath was pretty clear about showing mercy even to criminals and sinners.

"I...guess I could probably do that..."

"THEN THIS PACT IS SEALED." intoned the devil, sending a shiver down Andrew's scalp. The circle flashed red, then disappeared. The devil stepped forward and held out its arm. Andrew, slightly dazed, gently placed his hands over the wound and with a mumbled prayer, compelled the infection to leave the arm, and the wound to close over smoothly. The devil hissed quietly.

"That hurts more than I expected" it said, its voice no longer seeming to boom out and echo in Andrew's head. It rubbed its arm, now a healthy red color.

"Hold out your hand", it told Andrew, then reached into its robe and pulled out a leathery pouch. One by one, the devil counted out six golden coins and gave them to Andrew, followed by a small ruby which felt warm to the touch, and seemed to hum slightly.

The devil nodded. "This pact is concluded. YOU ARE DISMISSED."

As he was overwhelmed by a dizzying sensation as though he were rising rapidly, he heard the fading voice of the devil say "I'll call you again when next I need you."

"What? NO! DON'T oof CALL...me..." Andrew was interrupted mid-way by the shock of suddenly feeling himself fall back down into his chair at the library.

A librarian leaned around from behind a bookshelf.

"SHHH!"

"Don't look at me! I'm a monster!"

(A vindictive Missionary and the Pritchard family, undisclosed location)

"How am I supposed to know you're a monster if I don't look?"

"RAAAARRRRR...Because...because, if you look at me I'll, uh, I'll bite your leg off! RARRRR!", replied a very young voice.

"You'll bite my leg off, will you?", asked the voice of the monster's father.

"Yeah, and I'll steal your shoes, and, and drink your blood!"

"Why would you steal his shoes?", the monster's mother chimed in.

"Because, um, monsters don't have shoes and their feet hurt."

The monster's parents smiled and rolled their eyes at each other. "Kids..."

None of them saw the face that had been peeking through the window as it smirked and withdrew.

Later, the face's owner wrote:

"Eliza Pritchard: ideations of being a 'monster'. Possible apostatic tendencies. Active watchfulness advised.
Signed, Missionary Elias Proctor"

"That'll teach the little brat to steal apples out of my tree", he thought.

"Where does the ogre saying "never anger the cook" come from?"

This is the ogre equivalent of not "killing the goose that laid the golden eggs".

In response to the creation of Dwarves from within the Celestial Bureaucracy to delve down into the Infernal lands underground, the Infernal Bureaucracy created the Ogres (perhaps by blending orcish and giant stock) to roam around above ground to harass the people there. They have been something of a disappointment, because although they're large and fearsome in a fight, they are also lazy. Wandering as individuals or small groups, they tend more often to make a living extorting from isolated villages and other populations rather than gathering together to crush surface-worlders.

Ogres are not especially smart, but they do have a reasonable sense of how much they can extort before their unwilling hosts decide to risk trying to do away with the ogres, which regardless of whether the ogres destroy the villagers or the villagers kill or drive off the ogres means an end to the easy lifestyle.

Ogres have little use for gold and jewels except as ornamentation, but they DO have prodigious appetites, so food is the main thing they extort from their victims. While their intimidating bulk tends to discourage retaliation in the form of physical violence, the village's cook could easily poison the food, and if pushed too far might risk the possibility that he'll also be forced to eat some, if it means poisoning the ogres as well.

"We can not hold them much longer!"

(The Mayor - who happens to be an old retired Adventurer-paladin from the early days of the founding of the kingdom of Riparialand - of and in the village of Fireonion, Kingdom of Riparialand)

They had spotted the old Paladin across the hall, and strained against that which kept them from him. The hall filled with the cacophany of their frustration, and the servants were tiring. It was inevitable. There was no point in prolonging it.

The old Paladin kneeled. He prayed, for a brief moment, giving thanks for the life he'd been allowed to have up to this point. Then, still kneeling, he looked up.

"I am ready. Let them come."

His face remained emotionless as the resigned servants released the bonds, and slavering, baying fangs shot across the hall, propelled by clawed feet scraping across the stone floor, focussed right for his throat.

He'd hoped when this moment came it would at least end with dignity, that he would not fall easily, that no unbefitting sound would come from him as it happened...but it was not to be. The bestial mass didn't even slow down as it reached him and sprang, knocking him to the floor. He cried out:

"AAAAHHHHHH NO NO NOT THE FACE STOP LICKING MY FACE! HA HA HA HA!"

The servants looked around the room, embarassed, and waited. It took a few minutes, but finally the Paladin sat back up and reluctantly extracted himself from the puppies' attentions. As he stood, they danced happily around him, barking eagerly. "DA! DA! DA!" they seemed to be barking.

"I really should start teaching them manners, but their enthusiasm is so pleasant. It's contagious, I think."

"My lord, aren't you a bit old for this sort of behavior?"

"Nonsense. In fact, I feel younger now than I have in years. My word, it really does sound like they're saying 'da' now, doesn't it?"

"Yes, my lord. The food that the apothecary's been formulating seems to work."

"It is safe for them, isn't it?" asked the Paladin, with a concerned look down at the writhing mass of animalistic glee around his feet.

"It would seem so, the apothecary has been eating it himself. It does appear to have cured his stutter."

"Remarkable."

"The Wizard of Wessex"

(Professor Fletcher, University of Salamander, Kingdom of Riparialand)

 "Wessex Hall" at the University of Salamander is actually an isolated circular stone building with a domed stone roof, just large enough to contain a mid-sized auditorium.

Its construction was financed by a bequest from the late Baron Frederick Wessex. Disappointed one season when on safari hunting Goosebears and not finding any sign of them, he reasoned that it would be convenient if there were some way to magically induce a Goosebear, or any other hunted subject, for that matter, to appear on command. He set about arranging to sponsor the development of a Summoning program at the University, which included a dedicated building for the conduct of sorcerous summoning research and development. Sadly, he was savaged to death by a rutting dire-squirrel the following year and didn't live to see its completion, but they did name the building in his honor.

Wessex Hall and the Summoning program at University of Salamander are entirely run by the sole surviving faculty member with substantial summoning experience, Professor Gerald Fletcher.

Professor Fletcher has been working hard to develop and refine a systematized summoning-wizardry method compatible with the generalized wizardry system taught by the rest of the University's various sorcerous studies departments. He has been researching and experimenting on this project for several decades now, and is still alive. Despite being somewhat wrinkled, bald, and grey-bearded, in addition to being a bit scarred here and there, if one sees him walking around the campus it is obvious he is still in an athletic condition. Wiry-muscled and precise in his movements, he routinely wears a form of the standard scholarly wizarding-uniform robes, but heavy from modifications such as strategically-placed plates of metal and patches of chainmail. His wizarding-staff is unusually long and topped not by the traditional smooth knob, gem, or exotic symbol, but rather what appears to be a boar-spear head, which aside from a few alchemical embellishments is precisely what it is - when testing a new summoning-circle design, it is useful to have a backup method for keeping unhappy subjects at a safe distance until they can be banished back from where they came.

It is quite likely that this is the most dangerous course of study that University of Salamander offers - aspiring students are actually required to swear binding oaths that the University will be held innocent in any harm that may come to them as a result of participation - and although Wessex Hall has space for at least 50 observers in the elevated seats around the center, there are usually no more than two or three students present for the lectures presented by the Wizard of Wessex.

"She's a Bit... Taller Than I Was Expecting..."

("Grizzly" H. Weeweefeet, halfling bowyer, Village of Venison Heights, Kingdom of Riparialand)

Griselda "Grizzly" H. Weeweefeet is the tallest halfling you are ever likely to meet.

From a young age, Grizzly had a fondness for two things - woodworking, and meat. She learned to make bows in order to help hunters bring in more meat. She practiced diligently, and once she was old enough, she left her clan's apple-and-pear orchard and moved into the center of the nearby village of Venison Heights to set up shop as a bowyer, where she and her work soon gained a good reputation.

There is, of course, one problem - halflings, while taller than their relatives, gnomes and pixies, they are still quite a bit shorter than most adult humanity, who make up a firm majority of the population and by extension, of the local hunters. Testing and adjusting human-scale bows presented difficulties.

Grizzly's solution was to learn to walk on stilts. She designs and builds them for herself, then parades around town on them 7 feet tall, and wears them for archery so as to have a proper human-height perspective on their performance.

She has also designed a light but bulky camoflage suit that she sometimes wears, in case she wants to go hunting herself.

If you find yourself in Venison Heights looking for a bowyer when you are suddenly stopped by a walking sapling, look closely into the foliage for Grizzly's cheerful face before panicking.

If you want to know why everyone calls her "Grizzly" for short, buy her a venison steak and watch her eat it.

"Rumor has it that there's a new beverage developing in the east. It's supposedly better than tea and coffee, but you'd never guess what the special ingredient is."

(Grindle O. Garish and Cilia S. Garish, Grindle's workshop/home, Village of Venison Heights, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"Arrr, the bottle of it I brought with me to trade fer me boots ought ta be warmed up by now, now hand 'em over and let me be tryin' 'em on!"

Grindle O. Garish, cordwainer of Venison Heights, rolled his eyes at his visiting cousin. "Come on, Cilia, will you talk like a normal person? Here are the boots I made you."

"Arrr, I be a sailor, so I be talkin' like a sailor!" she replied, unnecessarily squinting one eye to make up for not having an eyepatch as she took the boots and tried them on. They fit perfectly.

"We get sailors coming upriver all the time, and I've never met one yet that talked like that."

"It be not my fault they not be tryin' hard enough!" She grinned and, wearing her new boots, stepped over to the stove where a large glass bottle was sitting in a pot of hot water. She grabbed a couple of mugs from the shelf and brought it all to the table, pulled the cork in the bottle out with her teeth, and poured out portions for them both.

"So...", asked Grindle, eyeing the translucent brown liquid, "what exactly do they make this new Sabbatalian Tea out of?"

"It be mostly cheap tea-leaves", grinned Cilia, taking a sip, "with just a bit o' swamp-myrtle to give it bit of buzz, not that ye can really tell, but I'll not be tellin' ye the special ingredient until after ye be tastin' it!"

Grindle held up the mug and sniffed. It smelled like tea. He cautiously took a sip.

The flavor was very much like tea. Almost exactly like tea, in fact, but definitely enhanced, somehow more flavorful. Almost savory. Pleased, he took a larger swallow.

"It's actually pretty good, I can see why people like it! I didn't think they had anything special over there in Sabbatalia to make tea with, though. What exactly is the 'special ingredient'?" He lifted the cup to drink again.

"It be a cup or two o' seawater from the docks at Sandport."

Sabbatalian Tea sprayed across the room from the mask of horrified disgust displayed by Grindle's face. Cilia roared with laughter, falling out of her chair.

"Don't be such a landlubber, they boils it!"

"Liquid Diamond"

("Harry Hands" conversing with an unnamed alchemist, Nebulia, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"Why?", asked Harold "Hands" Jackson of the apparently crazed back-alley alchemist holding the glass jar of viscous clear liquid.

"What do you mean 'why'? It's obvious! Perfect for smuggling and fencing! Nobody looking for stolen diamonds is going to bother with a jar of liquid! And this way, you can actually combine a bunch of diamonds into bigger diamonds, or separate a big one into smaller ones! It's just like being able to melt down stolen gold into ingots or cast it into new shapes!"

"But...you've removed the hardness from diamonds! Hardness is what makes diamonds so valuable in the first place! Otherwise, a piece of cut glass would be just as valueable!"

The alchemist grumbled. "I'll figure out how to get the hardness back in eventually."

"MetaDeath"

(A philosophical discussion, somewhere in the town of Salamander, Kingdom of Riparialand)

It's well known that loss of life is not the end of a person. This is obvious - it's quite clear that The Great God may sometimes grant a new life to one who has died, if sufficient sacrifice is made, and of course The Opposer's foul necromancers can drag unwilling spirits of the dead back and force them into a lifeless shell, and neither would be possible if the person's existence ended with their bodily death.

This being the case, then, of what purpose is life, and is there a true death?

Life's function is actually to nurture and sustain mortal spirits. A mortal spirit with life is able to grow, strengthen, and change itself through its experiences. Once life is lost, the spirit will slowly erode away. It begins with the loss of minor, unimportant memories that aren't strongly attached to who the spirit is, then more relevant memories and minor skills, and so on until all that's left is the barest core of who that person was in life. Even that may slowly be worn away by time, over an eternity. When all the memories, morals, and urges have dissolved away, then the spirit reaches the death-after-death: the "MetaDeath".

This is why the spirit will nearly always make its way to the gates of death, and pass through in search of its appointed afterlife where relevant immortals can help preserve a spirit against this inevitability. This explains, too, the nature of ghosts - spirits of the formerly-living who evade the gates of Death because of some compulsion. Ghosts of the freshly-dead may often still retain their distinct personalities that they had while alive, and still be able to converse and reason, while truly ancient ghosts have little left of themselves but the core drive that compelled them to remain haunting the Near Dreamlands. A vengeful ancient ghost will eventually lose their memories of who it was they needed revenge upon and why, and will lash out at any available victim, for example.

This is also why time is such an important factor if one wants to return a dead compatriot to life, and why attempting to have people from ancient times resurrected is generally a waste of time - a several-millenia-old legendary warrior-poet might very well return to life remembering how to swing a sword expertly and recite a few favorite poems and not, for example, how to dress and feed herself, or what proper toiletry etiquette is like.

"OblivionPortal"

("William" and "Bert" - both alchemists, town of Begorrah, Republic of Sabbatalia)

"It's some sort of dragon-magic portal thing!", Exclaimed William, barely coherent in his excitement. "I haven't completely figured it out yet, but I can make it work for a few minutes at a time now! If I can achieve full understanding of it, it could put Begorrah back on the map and make us the pride of the Republic of Sabbatalia again!"

"Does it have anything to do with the Book Of The True Word Of The Great God that Begorrah gave away a decade ago?", asked Bert.

"No, but..."

"Then the Conclave Elders will dismiss it. Those petty tyrants probably don't even CARE if another True Book ever comes back to town, as long as nothing else is ever successful, either. Where did you even find out about a thing like that?"

William looked carefully to make sure the windows were closed.

"Remember when I said I was going on sacred hermitage to the mountain for a couple of months?" William's voice dropped to a whisper. "I really bribed a fishing-boat to drop me off at the border of Riparialand! I hiked it all the way up to that University of theirs," his voice was almost inaudible now,"... and made a sacrifice to Secrets. She showed me this journal from a crazy Punishment-era chronicler who had found this pattern carved into the wall of what used to be some dragon's cave! As soon as I made a copy I came right back and have been working on it since!"

"Fool!", hissed Bert, "if the town finds out you've been Away you'll be a pariah!"

"They'll never know. Look, this thing is incredible! Watch!"

William stepped next to the symbol-crowded markings on the floor, held out his hands, closed his eyes, and strained. Within a few seconds, a noise like an intake of breath echoing in reverse burst through the room. This space within the circle was now the uniform smooth blackish color of nothing.

"Where does it go?"

"Not sure yet, " panted William, trying to catch his breath, "but some kind of place of grim dark black oblivion or something. Any part of anything I stick through the center disappears." He gestured towards a nearby broomhandle with the upper two feet or so cleanly sheared off, as example.

"What can you do with it?"

"Well, right now I'm just using it to dispose of garbage and dump my chamberpot."

-----

The sound of a vigorous exhalation echoing in reverse bounced for a moment around the chamber. A circle of grim dark black oblivion rippled into existence near the far edge of the ceiling. It remained for several minutes. A collection of rotting filth dropped out of it onto the chamber floor. Then, the circle vanished, echoing away.

A rumble began, rising until the floor shook. An absolutely livid coil of patterned black-and-gold scales, each the size of a man's hand, lifted a fiery-eyed head to glare at the mess. A snort of flame vaporized the insulting refuse, but the angry rumble continued.

Someone had obviously copied her portal, but had misplaced their end of it, so only material objects could go through, and even then only in one direction.

She lifted the chronomantic motor she'd been given as tribute by the dwarves so long ago. Millenia had passed since then, and it was still accurately turned by the passage of time. It had barely moved since the LAST time the interloping portal had awakened her. Little more time to wait now, though.

If the disrespectful fool with the portal hadn't died before she was ready to return, she WOULD hunt them down and ...make them apologize appropriately.

Scales jingled slightly in time with the deep, breathy chuckle that followed the thought.

"The Devouring Mist"

(Nowhere in particular)

Normally, the Southern Lesser Cavern Jelly is a relatively benign nuisance, only harmful on prolonged contact and generally only a problem to delvers, miners, and Adventurers should they manage to get into the food rations.

On rare occasions some signal in their environment stimulates spawning, and the individual roughly-grape-sized cavern-jellies seek each other out, merging into quivering masses of slime that may be larger than a full-grown hog. After natural recombination of their essences is complete, the mass sends up a man-high stalk, atop which there forms a fruiting-body. A still-unknown signal in the environment then eventually signals the fruiting-body to burst open - we can be confident that it is some environmental signal as multiple spawning-mounds' fruiting-bodies in separate parts of one location are known to do this within seconds of each other. The vast bluish clouds of spores released will drift on the faintest air-currents, sometimes for many days in dry environments.

Upon landing on organic matter, the spores germinate and begin digesting their substrate. Normally they do best on rotting, dead matter, but an unwary wanderer who gets some in their eyes may easily be blinded, or eventually killed if their health is poor to begin with. Heroic measures will be needed if any substantial amount is inhaled, as the unfortunate victim may be painfully devoured from their lungs outward.

If you find yourself near mists that smell of pepper and rainwashed air, cover your face and get away! Also, be sure to inspect your rations regularly for at least five days afterwards.

"SkySilk"

(Nowhere in particular)

Oh, yes, very fine material for weatherproof cloaks, jackets, hoods, and hats. It has a bit of a drawback, though.

"Skysilk" is made by the young of the Giant Storm Spider, who weave massive "balloons" of light, sturdy silk whenever a thunderstorm approaches. Somehow, the silk interacts with both the wind and the lightning, and the young spiders are carried into the sky and dispersed all along the track of the storm, spreading their population much further than they'd reach if they had to walk, and thinning them out so they don't get overcrowded and eat each other.

Being in a thunderstorm and being pelted with falling spiders along with hail is a horrifying prospect, but the Giant Storm Spider's venom isn't exceptionally dangerous, though it is pretty painful, and the little jolts of lightning that accompany the bites can cause minor uncomfortable burns. Most people who wear skysilk do so because it repels water, but the fact that storm spiders have an instinct to avoid touching masses of skysilk in order to avoid tangling up with each other means they'll stay off of skysilk wearers as well.

The real problem with skysilk is that it retains enough arachnal essense long after being discarded by its spinner that it still attracts all manner of other kinds of spiders, who seem curious to investigate it.

Under no circumstances should you wear skysilk in the deserts, or all they'll find of you is a bundle of silk, a pile of bones, and some fat, happy rattlespiders.

"Are the Living GrassLands really as bad as they say?"

(A family friend visiting an unnamed noble's castle in East Nebulia, answering a young person's question, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"Bad"? Who says they're bad? It beats the heck out of Dead GrassLands, with all the dust and locusts and constant danger of choking grassfires.

Well of course there are worms and bugs and mice! That's part of what makes them living! It's all interconnected, and all the little lives interacting together are what make the whole thing healthy. There's probably a good political metaphor there. Where do you think the fine mutton and venison from last night's feast came from?

No, not "the butcher", BEFORE that! They come from the grasslands! Yeah, the Borbory-book fables make it sound like deer make a living prancing around in the forest, but they don't, really, they mostly live in the grasslands where they can run. All the trees in the way make it hard to run very fast if the wolves show up.

Yeah, sure, there are snakes. Yup, spiders and scorpions, too. Oh, yeah, wasps, those are out there, and bees, and biting flies and mosquitoes. It's really not that big of a deal, it's not like they're all waiting in one big mass of fangs and stingers, following people around looking for a chance to ambush 'em! Ha! You sound like my cousin all those years ago when he was a just a kid, and his father sent him to go out with the fishing-fleet the first time. He'd heard about sharks and stingrays and venom-squids and hunter-jellyfish and scuttlecrabs. He was screamin' and cryin' all the way down the river to the ocean, figuring that when he got there every single one of them was going to be crowded around the boat waiting for a chance to leap up and eat him if he got near the railings.

He's been a sailor for fifteen years now, last I heard he was going to be boatswain on the flagship for this year's Ambassador's expedition.

What do you mean "filthy"? There's nothing particularly dirty about it, the ground doesn't leap up and attack you when you walk on it, it's just regular ground! What, have you been locked up in the castle your whole life or something?

OH! Sorry, young lord. I didn't recognize you. Sneaking around in disguise again, eh? I don't think your father really realizes what "protecting" you all these years is doing. One of these days we'll have to figure out a way to smuggle you out into the rest of the world so you can get some real experience.

Don't tell him I said that, and I won't tell him what you were wearing when you heard me say it - deal?

"Gigglemorph"

(Councilor Lina at the Emperor's Lament, Nebulia, Kingdom of Riparialand)

It was a slow but jovial night at the Emperor's Lament. The newcomer sat down at a table and asked the server for brandy. At the far end of the bar, the barkeep seemed to be animatedly telling some sort of story to a strikingly elegant but stern-looking woman holding a glass of wine. A few others at the bar were already chuckling at whatever the wildly-gesturing barkeep was saying, but the woman just stared at him, stone-faced.

The barkeep's voice rose to a crescendo as he mimed taking some object from behind his ear: "...SPECULUM! And the healer goes - 'Oh, no! Some ass took my stylus!' "

The rest of the bar erupted in laughter. The woman's face twitched...and she broke down in laughter herself. "HA HA HA HA HAR HAR HARRIBBITRIBBITRIBBIT!"

The "woman" was now a giant frog, apparently. It carefully set its wineglass down, fumbled in the coinpurse at its side with its awkward frog "hands", and set a goldpiece down on the bar, still ribbitting gently to itself, then clumsily took up the wineglass again and tried to work out how to drink out of it without lips.

As the newcomer stared, the server brought his brandy. "I guess you hadn't heard about Lina before." she said.

"No. What...who is she?"

"Oh, she's on one of the king's advisory councils."

"No, I mean..."

"I know, I'm just having fun with you, " said the server kindly, patting him on the shoulder. "Apparently, it's some sort of curse."

"How did it happen?"

"Well, I heard it was something like this..."

-----

Distracted, Lina had taken a wrong turn, and was now frantically running through the maze made of the various back-alleys in this neighborhood of Nebulia, desperately trying to spot a familiar landmark. The meeting of the Advisory Council on Public Order was due to start in a few minutes, and of course they couldn't begin without Lina being present! She turned to look down a side-path and stumbled over something, and as she caught her balance and turned to see what it was, she saw she'd tripped over a halfling, dressed in a gaudy jester's outfit. A little shrine of some sort was on the ground in front of him. The halfing said nothing, but grinning gleefully and pretended to take an object from his pocket, which he proceeded to pretend to peel and bite into while tossing the imaginary peel on the ground. He took a step in that direction, and with acrobatic exaggeration fell flat on his back. He looked expectantly at the incredulous Lina, who stared for a moment, then exploded in irritation.

"Someone like me has no time to laugh at stupid jokes!" she shouted, kicking over the little shrine and stomping angrily off in the other direction.

-----

"...so now every time someone makes her laugh, she turns into something else for a while."

"Can't someone lift the curse? Or maybe she could find the halfling and apologize?"

"She says she doesn't have time."

"How long has she been like that?"

"A little over 4 years." the server leaned over, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "I think she kind of likes it."

"The Keening Wastes"

(Somewhere out in the desert wastelands to the Northwest of the Kingdom of Riparialand)

Those with a sufficiently strong desire to improve themselves, even at substantial personal risk, will sometimes attempt to reach the Keening Wastes, a wide, barren, lumpy patch of sandblasted stone which appear to be the worn-down remains of ancient mountains, several days' lonely travel through the deserts to the northwest.

If one survives the journey, the first thing one learns is that the name is misleading. The Keening Wastes make no sound at all. The local geography blunts even the most intense desert sandstorms to a barely discernable breeze, and the unusual time-worn shape of the stone hills and pits swallows sounds and echoes rather than reflecting them.

In the center of this patch of land is the smoothly-eroded remains of an ancient caldera. A series of wide lumps can be spotted which appear to be all that is left of stairs that some long-lost visitor carved down the side, leading down deep into the center. Around that spot, the sides of the caldera provide complete shade from the daylight sun, and the ambient temperature stays comfortable, if somewhat tepid, at all times. A determined seeker of enlightenment may find this silent, darkened, still spot an ideal place to meditate upon some topic, if the sensory deprivation doesn't drive them insane.

A successful period of meditation upon some topic, and subsequent survival of the return journey by a sojourner to the Keening Wastes inevitably impresses people they know with how the experience has improved them. They return with much sharper focus, and a stronger enthusiasm for their topic of meditation.

In a word, they become more keen.

"dreamdragon"

(Undisclosed location, the Dreamlands and/or the Kingdom of Riparialand)

Something was wrong.

"Have some slaw. Slaw's good for you.", said his mother, holding out a bowl of sauce-lubricated vegetable-shards. They jiggled slightly. "It's slaw. Bowl of slaw?"

Suddenly, he realized what was wrong. He was naked. His mother hadn't noticed yet, but since she was standing right there in front of him, she was bound to realize it any second and that would be VERY embarassing. "Slaw's good for building muscle." she said, stirring the bowl's contents with the spoon. Then he remembered - the exams! If he didn't pass today's exam he'd lose his last chance and have to become a beggar! He ran, out through the front door and down the street, fighting against the strong wind that kept pushing back. "I'll never get anywhere in this wind!" he shouted to himself, and he jumped into the well to escape it.

As he fell into the water at the bottom of the well, he slid under. He looked down, and saw all the coins people must have been throwing in. He was standing on them. There was a strange feeling of falling sideways. With a jarring suddenness, he realized that he wasn't underwater, and was aware that he was dreaming.

He stood at the edge of a pile of gold coins topped by a pile of silver coins. No...not silver coins. Scales. An eye the size of the dreamer's own head opened slowly at one end of the "pile". It regarded him for a long, tense moment, and then the silver mass stretched itself out lazily, revealing itself as a shining serpentine dragon, who proceeded to extract an hourglass from somewhere within the pile of coins. It daintily held this in its talons in front of one eye. The hourglass, looking absurdly tiny by comparison, seemed to have almost but not quite run out. The dragon carefully replaced the hourglass and yawned, showing off a mouth full of far too many sharp-looking teeth as long as an average human's forearm.

"Are....are you real? I'm dreaming, right?", he managed to whisper. The dragon's glittering head turned to face him.

"YESSssss" it rumbled breathily.

An odd impulse made him reach out towards it. "Can I....touch you?"

"CAN I...TASTE YOU?" asked the dragon in return. It's head moved slowly towards him, its mouth opening wider, wider. His feet had sunk into the heavy gold coins. He couldn't get away. The dragon's mouth was above him, wide open, slowly coming down obviously intent to grab him and swallow him. Gusts of hot breath came in bursts...was it laughing at him? He tried to close his eyes, but couldn't...a drop of the dragon's saliva landed on his cheek, scalding him and...

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

He flung off the covers and frantically tried to crawl backwards over the headboard before realizing where he was. He sat up, panting.

Something warm seemed to drip down his cheek. There was nothing there when he reached up to feel it, but the odd red mark took several days to disappear.

"Slipskin"

(Rumple S. Garish and "Harry Hands", somewhere in Nebulia, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"Rumple S. Garish: Bespoke Tailor", read the sign hanging in front of the little house. Harold "Hands" Jackson bent down and crabwalked sideways through the undersized door.

"A customer!" exclaimed a two-and-a-half-foot-high pincushion, which turned out to be a rather heavily overdressed gnome wearing a tall pointy hat stuck full of pins and needles and other bits of sewing paraphernalia.

"Yeah, uh, they told me to ask you for a..." Harold lowered his voice, "a 'slipskin'."

"What are ya bein' so quiet for, you don't like my name?" laughed the jovial gnome, pulling a long measuring-tape from somewhere under his shirt like a conjurer doing the "endless string of hankerchiefs" trick. "How big of a thing do you need to pocket?"

"Uh, about THIS long and about THIS wide, kinda shaped like THIS", gestured Harold, as the little tailor held up the tape-measure to compare. "That's your name? I always thought they were called that because you could hide stuff by "slipping it next to your skin" where a pat-down wouldn't find it?"

"That, too - hold out your arms - it kinda worked out when they let my uncle, Morgo D. Garish, the seer, give me my middle name one day when he was awake. Guess he knew what I'd be doing for a living, eh?", chatted Rumple as he expertly ran around and, once or twice, over Harold, taking measurements.

"Okay, step back outside and stand all the way up.", instructed Rumple. He followed Harold back out through the front door and expertly eyed Harold's build for a few seconds. "Turn around." Harold spun a little awkwardly. Rumple nodded.

"Okay, I can give you at least two places where you'll have room to stow your cargo. Maybe three. I can have it done in two days, come back then with eight gold pieces and a loaf of bread and it's yours."

"A loaf of bread?"

"Yeah, my pixie cousin, Fleegle G. Garish, is coming to visit in a few days and I need a guest room."

"Not sure what I'm starting here but....Write the backstory of these creatures from /r/hybridanimals."

(The Frozen Forest, somewhere North into the mountains above the Kingdom of Riparialand)

 Millenia later, nobody seems to know who they were, but long, long ago, there appears to have been an Alchemist with a "thing" for bears, somewhere far up north where the frozen forest is now. That sorceror's "owlbears" have been a dangerous nuisance in many lands, along with the thankfully eradicated menace of pigeonbears harassing cityfolk...and The Great God help you if you ever run into a nesting goosebear!

As the approaching glacier made their territory colder, the sorceror switched from birds to rather fuzzier creatures to combine with bears, in hopes of creating a breed that would thrive in the coming winters.

So far, the fox-sized "pabbit" is the only one known to still be around. Don't let their small stature fool you - those jaws crush bone as easily as ice, their dense, hair-covered hides can resist the fangs of snow-vipers, and they've been known to gnaw open ice-ant mounds and feast on the larvae inside, happily ignoring the bites of the ice-ant soldiers trying to deter them.

They're just one of the reasons nobody sane ever tries to explore the frozen forest.

"What is Bone-Fire?"

(A couple of anonymous, quite-possibly-doomed fools, near the small town of Stabbiton, somewhere East of the city of Sewerdeep)

Did you actually see bone-fire, or is this one of those "asking for a friend" or "I saw it in a book somewhere" kinds of things?

What do you mean "both?". Oh, crap. Okay, show me where you saw it and I'll explain on the way.

Bone-fire is a faint, pale, sickly-green glow that remains emanating from residual sorcerous vitality infused into dead remains by a necromancer, before the dead spirit is dragged back from beyond the gates of death and locked up in them. Without some sort of artificial animating force, the necromancer just has a lump of remains acting as a nasty prison for the dead spirit. Of course, sometimes that's all they want, to torture the dead soul for secrets or perverse, cruel amusement.

(shudder)

Sorry. They say being undead is a horrific experience, but somehow the idea of not even being able to move while it's happening makes me feel very claustrophobic.

Even after an undead being has been defeated by enough physical destruction or magic to release or drive out the dead spirit inside, that artificial necromantic vitality can continue hanging around the remains for a while. They say many necromancers have an uncanny sense of the disposition of necromantic influence they've imparted, and sometimes they come back to reform the dead bits and drag the spirit back to re-inhabit yet again, because it's easier than making a new undead servant from scratch.

Ha ha! Yes, obviously you wouldn't want to touch it, get any on you and you might as well deliver the necromancer an envelope containing your hair and fingernails and your name written on the front with your own blood! Ha, it'd be sort of funny if someone was stupid enough to...

...what? Oh, you didn't...

OH GREAT GOD, put that down! WHY did you pick that up?!

Hurry! Back to town, go straight to the temple and tell them what happened! They should be able to...

...what was that?

RUN, YOU FOOL! RUN!!

"Why is there a lump of clay on display in the Royal Archives?"

(In the palace, Nebulia, Kingdom of Riparialand)

 That is the treaty/trade-pact that his majesty King Nodde, father of the current king and founder of the kingdom of Riparialand, made with the dwarven city-state of Dunkelangsam, in the mountain range at Riparialand's western border. It contains the tokens representing the terms agreed upon. There's a nearly-identical lump of clay mounted on a shelf in the Dunkelangsam senate.

The symbols pressed into the outside of the clay are a summary, but aren't the important part - the actual pact is made up of the tokens concealed inside the clay. To maintain the pact requires trust - to actually verify the terms requires literally "breaking the pact" to get to the tokens inside.

Vileblades

(Ganschlecht Miefmann, Marcus the Louse, and Harry Hands, Nebulia, Kingdom of Riparialand)

Ganschlecht Miefmann had not had a happy childhood in Dunkelangsam. The other children had constantly made fun of his height, which had made him quite obviously different from the rest of them. "Headbanger!" "Ogre!" "Tragsäule!"

Dwarven children are pretty much like human children in that regard. Ganschlecht had vowed that someday he'd get back at his tormentors, and as soon as he'd reached adulthood, he'd left the dwarven city-state and moved to Nebulia, where they had mostly humans and his freakishly tall 5-foot stature didn't stand out. Now his goal was to build himself as fearsome a reputation as he could. He'd joined the Chaotic party, and managed to get accepted into the Bad. Being officially Chaotic Bad seemed like a good start.

Right now, he was running quietly through the dark alleys of Nebulia's shadiest district, clutching tight to the bag containing his prizes. The rest of the Chaotic Bads would be in awe when he showed them. BOTH Vileblades!

One of his informants had told him that Marcus the Louse had somehow gotten his hands on Vileblades. Sure, all sorts of surprising things seemed to find their way to Marcus to be sold, but the Vileblades were legendary. Shining black daggers, imbued with such potent alchemical corruption that they were permanently venomous to the living and corrosive to the inanimate. It was said that the effect was so insidiously persistent that anyone who survived being struck by them would slowly go mad as the corruption ate their senses. The ancient reputation of the Vileblades even suggested that over time, the blood of one who wielded them would become innately poisonous itself, sickening and slaying anyone or anything that touched it. Even immaterial spirits were supposed to fear them, the destructive influence exuded by the blades reaching beyond the waking world into the Dreamlands itself!

Ganschlecht smirked as he thought about how quickly his reputation had become intimidating. He'd shown up at Marcus' current shop, strode up to the table, and demanded to be given both Vileblades, and he'd pay 100 pieces of gold for them. He'd given the table a mighty thump with his fist to emphasize that he'd not pay a single coin more, and would not leave empty-handed either. Marcus had been a little stunned - "100 pieces of gold? For two?", he'd said in a shocked tone. Ganschlecht had slapped the hundred coins on the table and demanded that Marcus swear before the idol of Norquss, god of Oaths, Contracts, and Business Deals, that he kept in the shop that he was selling two Vileblades to him for those coins. Marcus had hesitated, understandably - the Vileblades were worth far more than that! - but he'd given in and sworn! HA! Using lawfulness against the lawful was such fun. That meant Marcus couldn't try any trickery or fraud against him, and couldn't claim he'd been somehow cheated.

Ganschlecht smiled as he remembered Marcus' facial expression, that "what the heck just happened?" look of confusion, as he'd gone into his storeroom and returned with the bag with the two objects hidden inside, and handed them over. So satisfying.

Ganschlecht reached the cellar door where the local Bad's headquarters was hidden. He knocked on them.

"What do you want?" came a voice from within.

" 'Love and mercy.'", smirked Ganschlecht. It was, he admitted, a great password, nobody would expect the BADS to have a password like that. They let him in, and he descended the steps to the hideout. He strode to the middle of the room and held the bag aloft.

"The Vileblades are mine!" he announced.

"So?" asked Orville, the anti-Paladin. Ganschlecht was annoyed.

"I said I have both Vileblades! Bought them fairly and everything! The Daggers of Darkness? The Blades of Corruption? Haven't you heard of them? LOOK!" he shouted, reaching into the bag for them.

A look of confused horror bloomed upon his face as he pulled out the objects from the bag and looked at them.

"What kind of infernal wormdung is this?!"

---

Harold "Hands" Jackson opened the door and stepped into the hidden shop of Marcus the Louse.

"Hey, Harry, what can I do for you?", Marcus asked cheerily - Harry Hands was a regular customer.

"My next job is taking me somewhere that I don't think I'm going to be able to sneak a weapon into, but depending on how things go there could be a pretty serious fight. You got anything really hard to recognize as a weapon that I could use as one?"

"Sure do! Check these out!" Marcus went into the storeroom and came back with a box. It contained glass bottles in many different styles and sizes.

"I assume you don't mean to suggest I should hit people over the head with bottles. I, uh, know from experience that doesn't really work."

"Nope. Here, I suppose I can spare a small one for a demonstration for a good customer such as yourself." said Marcus, as he extracted a small, clear bottle of the sort one might find perfume in. Inside was a clear, slightly bluish liquid.

"Observe, apparently a perfectly ordinary bottle of perfume, right? But when I do this..." Marcus shook the bottle energetically for a second, pulled the top off of the bottle, and motioned as though to throw the liquid at Harry, but instead of splashing across the room, it erupted and immediately hardened into a keen-edged crystalline stilletto. Marcus stabbed a few gouges into the wooden table to prove the clear blade's strength and sharpness.

"It's an odorless watery liquid in the bottle, and if you pour it out it looks harmless and evaporates quickly, but if you activate it by shaking it hard before you open it, you get a long crystal like this that stabs better than broken glass and cuts at least as well as a moderately sharp iron knife. It starts melting after about an hour, so you've got to use it for whatever you need it for pretty quickly. On the other hand, it gets rid of the evidence that way. I've got everything from these little stiletto-sized things that I can give you for a silver piece, on up to a couple of large winebottles that'll give you something that'd serve as a greatsword that'll cost you three gold."

"That cheap?"

"Yeah, apparently the ingredients aren't particularly expensive or hard to find, it's just the secret process is complicated and apparently kind of unintuitive, alchemically-speaking."

"That's amazing! I knew if anybody had something I could use, it'd be you. I'll take a shortsword-sized and a dagger-sized....uh, what do you call these things?"

"Vialblades!"

"Why is it considered bad luck to extinguish a fire, without singing a song first?"

(Some dwarf answering a question, nowhere in particular, Kingdom of Riparialand)

Because then it will remember you fondly and come back again when you need it.

A cousin of mine that works in the mineralogical library in Dunkelangsam tells me his grandfather was an actual adventurer. Supposedly one day he made a snide comment about a forge's fire being useless before angrily dousing it with a chamberpot. A week later he'd been sent to scout the frozen forest to investigate rumors of a lost city there. The search-party found him frozen solid just inside the forest a month later in front of an unlit campfire, still holding the stubby, gouged remains of his flint and striker. No fire would come for him anymore, see?

Actually singing is probably unnecessary especially if you've got a bad voice, but I try to be polite to fires, at least.

"I am very proud of the ghosts that haunt me."

(Unnamed goblin necromancer and spirits of dead surface-worlders, Undisclosed Location, somewhere down in the Infernal realms)

Yes, I am, and I'm sure The Opposer is surely proud of me, too.

I convinced each one myself, as they approached the gates of Death, before the gatekeeper even had a chance to speak with them. Every one of them knew it was wrong, but I tempted them all to step back away, to pledge their spirits to me in exchange for promises. Revenge, unfinished tasks, I promised them all it would be done.

Cease your complaints, spirits! I fulfill my sworn promises - I must! Such is the nature of oaths! You! Did I not have your tormentor dragged down here just last week and fed to gremlins inch by inch until he finally expired? I granted your revenge, if you hadn't wanted him killed, you should have said so! And you, did I not send my minions to gather in your family's harvest in the night? That the grains were devoured by mice the following week is no concern of mine!

SILENCE! All of you! I am compelled to keep my promises, but if you vex me further your service to me shall be to feed yourselves to gibbering nightmares for my amusement!

That's better. Serve me well and perhaps I shall even allow you to shamble about in your former bodies for a while. Now go! All of you, back to your cells. Except you, sorceror. I finally have a service for you.

Tell me a secret, sorceror...

"What grows on top of the plateaus in Rainland?"

(Unnamed participants in a discussion in the town of Salamander, about region further North beyond the Frozen Forest from the Kingdom of Riparialand)

"There are no records of anyone going that far north in millenia - since before The Punishment. Now, you'd have to cross through the unexplored frozen forest to the north, or a much longer detour around the also-unexplored desert wastelands on either side.

Still, one of the ancient journals in the library at University of Salamander claims that there atop the continually storm-shrouded plateus of the Rainlands, at certain times of year, you might find Glass and Sapphire Dragonwafers."

"Dragon-what?"

"Wafers, you know, like those sweet, thin cakes the vendors sell at the festivals. Dragonwafers are supposed to be a type of flower, found only in very exotic locations. They're magical plants with petals that unbelievably concentrate the alchemical essences of their surroundings. According to the Elven manual 'De Rey Botanica', The clear petals of Glass Dragonwafer concentrate essences of purification, clarity, waters, clear vision, and light. Supposedly a competent alchemist could make a whole warehouse full of curative potions, vision-enhancing potions, bottles of light, so-called 'bottomless' decanters of water, and who knows what else from a few fresh Glass Dragonwafer petals. Sapphire Dragonwafer concentrates essences of storm and sky, and similarly could be used to make bottled lightning, flight potions, canned winds, preparations that supply breath underwater or underground, and any manner of related products."

"How come I never heard of it before? You'd think alchemists would always be looking for some of that!"

"Well, not only are they rare and only show up in exotic, hard-to-reach places, the petals start losing their potency quite quickly once they're picked or removed from their native environment. Might as well ask for a piece of the sun for making fire-earth."

"Okay, but why are they called 'Dragonwafers'?"

"Supposedly back when the dragons were still around, they really liked to eat the petals. How a house-sized monster of fangs and claws would pluck petals off of something the size of a daisy I have no idea."

The Firewatcher's Daughter

(A Fire-priestess and her daughter Frieda, Tower of the Temple of Fush, During the War of the Elements, Nebulia, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"Mom, I'm bored."

"Frieda, you said you wanted to come on watch with me tonight."

"Yeah, but that's because War of the Elements starts tonight, I thought we'd be doing something fun, like aiming the rockets or maybe I could ride the lookout kite. I didn't think we'd just be sitting up here looking around."

"That's what 'watch' means, Frieda. It's important that we not let sneaking Karoshites douse the fire, and they will if we don't watch out for them. Go watch to the West, in case they're trying to circle around us. Winkle P. Garish has the lookout kite, you're too big for it anyway and there'll be time for fireworks later."

Frieda sighed theatrically, walked back around the sacred fire to the other side, and leaned over the edge of the tower. Down below, she could see the work of the Lamplighters in progress - little beacons at the street corners lighting up as they were blessed by priests of Gleam, the recently re-manifest god of light in its aspect as aids to civilized sight. A small god, sure, but the efforts of Gleam's new cult were definitely drawing positive attention. Frieda liked the lamps. She thought of them as friendly little fire-puppies. They were one of the two major sources of light visible on this overcast night. She looked out towards the West at the other - a massive sorcerous ball of flame hovering over Salamander, providing dawn-like light despite being several days' travel away. Maintaining the "second sun" during the War of the Elements was a tradition at the University of Salamander and a chance for the wizards and alchemists there to show off.

The War of the Elements had been a tradition now for nearly twenty years. Starting the night before the longest day, and ending with the dawn of the day after, the two temples fought. It was a friendly rivalry, of course - both Karosh (God of Water in its aspect as the source of cleanliness, health, sustenance, soothing coolness, and so on) and Fush (God of Fire in its aspect as source of light, warmth, and purification, the cooking of food, useful transformation of metals, etc.) were both good gods, and both representing prominent and important parts of the Kingdom of Riparialand. Fush was quite influential in Salamander, whose population thrived on the side of the kingdom's active volcano, and Karosh was dominant here in river-spanning Nebulia. As with most years, the less prominent Shree (goddess of air in its aspect as cooling winds, driver of weather, drier of clothes, lifter of birds and kites, and life-sustaining breath) and Ok (goddess of Earth in its aspect as solid support, nourisher of crops, provider of mineral wealth, and mother of metals) joined in the War on the sides of Fire and Water, respectively, mainly so as not to be left out of the entertainment.

There were no formal rules, just ongoing attempts to covertly land burning fireworks into the pewter tub of pure water atop the temple to Karosh by the Fushites, and attempts by the Karoshites to douse the symbolic fire in the massive brazier atop the tower of Fush. Normally, the firewatchers keep the fire fed and otherwise spend their time meditating and being alert for messages from the flames, but during the War of the Elements they had the job of defending the fire from assault.

Frieda's bored musings were interrupted by a an odd low rumbling from the ground and a simultaneous shout from somewhere up in the sky. "TUNNEL!" Frieda's mother was already reaching into the fire, pulling sparks from it and invoking her Celestial Authority to turn them into bright flares around the tower. In the sudden glare, Frieda could make out three distorted figures in blue-and-white robes on the ground next to an almost organic-looking hole in the ground. They were gesturing in her direction. An instant later, her eyes focussed properly and she realized she was looking at them through a quivering glob of water, arcing rapidly towards her like a cannonball made of jelly. There was no time for consideration. She stood straight up, spread her arms, and closed her eyes. In her mind, only the words: "Protect the fire."

SPLOOSH!

Frieda was on her back, her clothes and hair soaked. She could hear the water running back off of the tower. Other than the hissing of a few droplets, it seemed she'd completely stopped the watery missile from disrespecting the sacred fire. Sodden clothes slapping wetly, she rose and quickly leaned back over the tower wall. "HA!" she shouted triumphantly at the laughing Karoshites retreating back into their tunnel. It closed smoothly behind them, leaving the ground looking as though it had never been disturbed. As Frieda glared down, her mother patted her on the back.

"Good job, Frieda. You know, I heard Brother Heinrich built something special for tonight. After you've dried off, go down and tell him I said it was okay for you to help. Maybe he'll let you light the fuse."

"What are those baskets the elders float down the river every autumn?"

(Nowhere in particular along the Glass river, Kingdom of Riparialand)

Those are offerings to Karosh, the god of water. This river and the ocean are vital to the health of the little local kingdom, so they want to keep Karosh and all the smaller gods in his branch of the omnitheon happy.

The baskets are assumed to contain offerings of things like beef, cheese, wines, and small bits of jewelry and precious metals. When they finally sink into the river or ocean, it's assumed one of the water dieties has accepted the offering.

Rumor has it that those fishing boats from the poor Republic of Sabbatalia across the eastern desert come all the way out here around then not to fish for scuttlecrabs, but to try to snag any offering baskets that are still floating. That sacriledge is probably part of why they're inflicted with constant poverty.

"Precipitation"

(Ebenezer and Gladys Stover, proprietors of the "Genral Stor"[sic] in the Village of Venison Heights, Kingdom of Riparialand)

Ebenezer Stover was checking over his merchandise at the Venison Heights "Genral Stor" (as his sign out front said), when he looked out through the propped-open front door and saw the storm coming. He called out through the back window to his wife, puttering about in her garden.

"Gladys? Looks like a storm's a-comin'."

"I see it, Eb, I'll be in shortly."

Ebenezer went to shut the front door, when his attention was drawn by a flicker of lightning in the clouds, silhouetting wispy streamers below that looked too dense to be a rain-shroud. Well, it was still early spring...

"Gladys? Looks like there might be skysilk, get the mule in so's he don't get bit!"

"Okay, Eb!"

He closed the door. The thunder was getting louder. As he listened to it, he thought to himself about the price of skysilk - his mind was always on business, it seemed. It was usually more of a hassle to collect skysilk than it was worth due to the trouble of dealing with the spiders. However...

"Gladys? We still got any of that repellant left that we got from that alchemist that lives in the woods?"

"Yes, Eb, it's underneath the counter."

That might do it, then. If enough intact skysilk balloons were left behind by their passengers, whatever he could collect would be like free money from heaven.

Moments later, the loud rattling started. Hail. Ebenezer cursed, just slightly.

"Dagnabbit. Gladys? Sounds like hail!"

"I hear it, Eb." answered Gladys, coming into the shop from the back room. "Sounds pretty big, don't it?"

Hail would tear any skysilk to useless bits. Oh, well.

The pounding lasted for less than a minute. The thunder continued on its way, leaving the village behind, and the evening sun glowed through the oilskins over the windows. Ebenezer opened the front door and marveled at the layer of grape-sized hailstones that had littered the street in front of the store. Some of them had dark splotches inside. Ebenezer bent down to look closer. Irregular silvery things with white stripes. They were juvenile storm-spiders, not even past their first molting and no bigger than beans, their legs curled up tightly around their bodies protectively, and completely encased in the icy hail. Ebenezer had been alive in the world for more than sixty years, and he'd never seen anything like it. He bent down and picked one up to examine more closely, but a sudden shock made him reflexively throw it away. Although startling, it was no worse than a petting-the-cat-on-a-dry-cold-day static shock, but it meant those things were still alive in there.

He marveled as he imagined recently-hatched storm-spiders, small, soft, and vulnerable, spinning their first balloons of skysilk and rising up into the storm, then being torn from their silk by the violent winds, encased in ice, and flung back to earth, where perhaps the ice would armor them against their larger hungry siblings who would be gone by the time they were freed when the hail melted.

Like little storm-spider seeds. A few of them rocked slightly on the ground as their inhabitants tested their temporary prisons. "Instant storm-spider, just add heat." Ebenezer chuckled.

Then Ebenezer thought about the array of oddities that alchemists and apothecaries and just plain odd travellers had requested or bought from him over the years.

His mind was always on business, it seemed.

"Gladys? Gladys??"

"Lands Sakes, Eb, I'm standin' right here, what is it?"

Ebenezer pulled on a pair of gloves and grabbed a bucket.

"Go and make as much space as you can in the icebox, Gladys, we just got us a shipment of exotic perishables!"

"Let them take our swords, we still have..."

("Darkfist", Bleekly P. Kikijiki, Diebner Handenfuss, and members of the Secret Council, Independent City of Sewerdeep)

"...the most devious pixie sorceror in...oh." He trailed off as the guards tossed a vociferously cursing cloth sack onto the table, where the symbolic watchful eyes of the Great God carved into the wall by a local Consecrator would prevent magical meddling.

"Well, we have the finest dwarven locksmith in the land, he's always got a set of lockpicks stashed in..." he trailed off again, as an embarassed-looking dwarf, naked but for a plain loincloth the guards had given him, was ushered into the cell and shackled to the wall. The dwarf looked up briefly, shook his head sadly, and resumed looking at his feet.

"Um...my...fists?" he tried, half-heartedly attempting to get the manacles loose. He slumped in his chains against the wall.

Moments later, the sound of several people's footsteps came echoing down the hall outside. The guards looked in the direction they were coming from, bowed hastily, and scurried away in the other direction. Five grey-robed, hooded figures stepped into the cell. One of them closed the door, another placed three cloth-bound bundles on the table. A third took a step nearer, and spoke in a sonorous voice.

"You've caused quite alot of trouble here. A civilized society doesn't lightly suffer malcontents disrupting orderly affairs with magical mayhem, casual violence, brazen theft, murder..."

"We didn't never kill nobody that didn't need killin'!" he interrupted, shaking his manacles angrily. He'd have continued, but those eyes on the wall seemed to be staring at him. Sure, they were mostly symbolic, but it's just not smart to antagonize The Great God. "And we never steal from churchfolk" he muttered lamely. The hooded figure was silent for an uncomfortable moment, as if making sure the rant was done. Then:

"We know. And now you have nothing. No magic, " the figure gestured towards the bag on the table, which cursed again. "No secret thievery", he gestured at the mostly-naked dwarf. "No means of fighting back." finished the figure in the direction of the manacled man.

"Nothing. Except what we're going to give you now. It's time you all paid for your crimes." In spite of themselves, the two prisoners not in a bag flinched as the figure reached into its robes, but instead of a torture implement or weapon, it pulled out three formal-looking scrolls, wax seals upon them bearing the mark of the local church authorities.

"A malediction?" asked the manacled figure?

"Of a sort." Then the hooded figure held up the scrolls, examined them briefly, chose one, and held it above his head.

"BLEEKLY P. KIKIJIKI", the hooded figure announced loudly, and threw the scroll atop the bagged pixie, who flinched.

"DIEBNER HANDENFUSS", the figure intoned, then stepped forward and stuffed a second scroll into the strap of the bashful dwarf's loincloth.

"ALOYSIUS DEXTERSON...yes, we know your real name" and the third scroll was pushed into the manacled man's hands.

"Here in the sight of The Great God, we declare you Adventurers."

The bag stopped cursing. The dwarf looked up. The manacled man stared, shocked. Four of the hooded figures left. The remaining figure spoke, in a more conversational tone now.

"Some of sewer-workers say they saw some imps building something down there under the city, and one of them swears she saw a goblin. You're charged with stopping whatever they're up to. The bundles here contain some appropriate weaponry and tools, some food, and a bit of money, as the rules require us to provide during conscription. Return with proof that you've done what we're sending you for and we'll even return the rest of your own equipment."

The manacled man finally found his voice again. "But...what...why?..."

"If we let you continue as you have been, it costs the city money in guard expenses. If we hang you and bury you, it costs the city money in labor and cemetary fees. On the other hand, if there's infernal harm coming but we get it stopped before it becomes a problem on the surface, it will save the city money. We'd rather you direct your mayhem and theft at them instead of us anyway."

The hooded figure turned to leave, but paused at the doorway.

"We'll send the guards to release you in a few minutes. You may freely discuss your plans for investigating the sewers in the meantime." Then the figure was gone.

Shocked silence descended. Then, an incredulous squeaky voice came from the bag on the table.

"'Aloysius???'"

"Yeah, uh, I didn't want to say anything before, out of politeness", muttered the dwarf, "but can we just call you that now instead? No offense meant, but 'Darkfist' sounds a bit stupid."

"Who is the Watcher on the Wall and why does nobody bother him?"

(Quintilius Insperatus - "The Watcher on the Wall", Nebulia, Kingdom of Riparialand)

The "Watcher on the Wall" is an elven archivist who works for the king. Every night he goes out there and walks around and around the walls, staring up at the sky. He gets very agitated if you bother him - he insists that if he doesn't watch the sky carefully, it could disappear.

Every morning when the sun rises he comes back down. He says the sun does the watching during the day. Most people think he's insane, but the king seems to like him.

"What's for dinner?"

(John Setter, proprietor of the Stag-in-Stupor, Venison Heights, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"We got lots of choices. We got venison pie, cheese and venison sausages, a pottage of venison and barley, some steamed scuttlecrabs just up from Fishmeet yesterday, and venison steaks. What'll you have?"

Primitive village on the moon

(Helmut Lesenschreib, dwaven scholar, and Georgette Plumer, human scholar, having a conversation over a very old object, University of Salamander, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"You fished this out of the river at Wintergate?"

"Yes, I took a sabbatical to relax and see if I could catch a few icefish, and this bottle just came bobbing up from under the glacier upstream of me. Could you read the writing on the parchment inside? The style is too odd for me to make out. It's some kind of Ancient Common, isn't it?"

"That's right. If what's on these pages is true, it was written by someone from among the first few generations of humanity."

"One of our people's first settlements was somewhere North beyond the Frozen Forest? This is from them? Might they still be there?"

"Calm down, Georgette. Human culture produces such impatient people. You could probably read this yourself if you people could focus on one thing at a time. If this is from an old human civilization upstream of here, the writer was a very imaginative prankster. Otherwise, this bottle came from a lot further away than that."

"Hey, we can't all be dwarvish obsessives, Helmut. Come on, out with it, what does it say?"

"See? Impatient. Okay, here - page one. 'I knowe notte if thee this missive may reach unto, but if I may by the goddes forgiven be...' "

"Could you maybe translate to modern, otherwise we'll be here all night."

"...fine. Here's a summary for your distractable human capacity. The writer spends the first page going on about how he shouldn't have tempted fate and gone places he shouldn't and so on, then...oh, no, wait, it goes into the second page, too. Anyway, then he spends a few paragraphs saying, in essence, 'Help, I'm stuck on the moon.'"

"WHAT?"

---

The bottle, once clear but now scratched into opacity by millenia, had contained a series of small parchment sheets, apparently made from some sort of fish skin, each sheet covered on both sides by almost illegibly-old calligraphy. According to the text, it was one of a number of bottles that the writer had intended to send out. He described how a young humanity had learned shipbuilding from the elves, and had almost immediately assembled a fleet to go test the boundaries of the world. They'd gotten too close to the edge, ran into a storm, and been swept over and off into the void.

Most unfortunate things that fly off of the edge of the world find themselves assaulted by hungry dracosharks and their remains following the Celestial current back around to crash back onto the top of the Great Central Mountain many years later. The timing of the unnamed author's ship's path had been just right though, and the ship had instead crashed into the vast palace of the goddess of silver, the purification of water, and the palace itself which we know of as "the moon".

The moon is not, as the commoners usually assume, a disk. It is actually a vast silver bowl, filled with the purest water. Within the water is the moon-goddess' palace. The parchments don't describe it much - the author had not seen much of it at all. The moon-goddess banishes all impurities to the outside of the bowl - the "dark side". Impurities in this case included the remains of the ship and the surviving crew.

They found they were not the first to have ended up banished to the backside of the palace of the silver goddess. Through the ages, a few elven, gnomish, and even dwarven ships had similarly found themselves there at one time or another, along with various bits of stone, whale carcasses, and other such detritus. An earlier batch of survivors had started cobbling these together into a crude settlement - a village of broken wood, old bone, and the skins of fish and other sea-creatures. The landing of living people was a rare thing (and of people sufficiently unharmed to survive even rarer) but whenever it happens, they find the ramshackle village, make repairs, and spend the rest of their lives on the dark side of the moon. There have never been enough of them at once to make a self-sustaining population, but if one walks to the very edge of the dark side and leans over, one can apparently reach the water and catch some of the smaller abundant silvery luminescent fish that swim in it, and survive for a surprisingly long time on just that.

---

"I must admit, the claims about the shape of the moon surprised me. I thought it was just common knowledge that it was a flat disk."

"Now, see, Helmut, if you could pay attention to more than one thing at a time you'd already understand - the appearance of the phases of the moon only make sense if it's a hemispherical rotating bowl with a dark side and a shiny side. Never mind that though, is there anything else interesting? Is there any indication when this was written?"

"Well, here on the 26th page, the writer says he had just watched the dragons leaving. He spends several paragraphs being poetic about the streaming sparkling colors of them as they flew off the edge of the world. He spends another paragraph saying one of them stopped to visit the moon. He didn't see much from his side, but it was, hmmm, let's see, undee argent and azure...I think he's describing a rippling blue-and-silver scale pattern. It says the dragon left shortly afterward carrying something that left the writer blind for a day when he tried to look at it. He says the experience filled him with dread, and here on the last page he describes how he's taking bones and sinew from a fresh whale-carcass that had just fallen recently to try to build a sort of catapult to launch his messages back at the world in hopes that someone might know his story. He hints that if it works, me may try to enlarge it and throw himself back."

"Wow, that would put him stuck up there literally just before The Punishment. I wonder if any more of his messages survived? It's kind of sad to think we'll never know what happened to him, or if he actually ever got back off of the moon."

"Are you sure you're human, Georgette? You're not going to go launch yourself off the edge of the world at the moon to find out?"

"Humanity may tend towards recklessness, but I'm pretty sure most of us prefer to stay outside of dracosharks, thank you."

"What are all those strange markings on that map of yours?"

(A conversation between some well-travelled visitors at the Stag-in-Stupor, Village of Venison Heights, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"Oh, you're not familiar with this? Here, help me unfold it on the table here - CAREFUL, don't smear the charcoal. It's a long, cold climb back up to the cave where I made this rubbing if this one gets damaged. See, draconic script is all markings that can be made with claws. These three parallel, diagonal marks in the upper-left indicate where the script starts. I guess whichever one carved this was right-handed...or taloned, or whatever. This little patch of scratches and dots is probably just the title for the map - it just says "belongs to me". Apparently where we are now, this dragon felt was its territory a few thousand years ago. See, there's "volcano" scratched over here, where University of Salamander is now, Here's the route that the Glass river took to the ocean back then, and, look, down here where this very village is now it says...let's see..."mage bad food". Wonder what that's supposed to mean. Anyway, there's nothing especially important here, the dragon's long-gone and most of the landscape has changed a bit since way back then. It's mostly just a historical curiousity."

"Huh, I didn't know all that, but that's not what I was talking about. I meant these tiny little symbols, here. That'd be over in the middle of the Brightly Woods just outside the village, right?"

"That's funny, I swear I don't remember seeing those when I made the rubbing. I can't read it, it's not draconic. Is that...infernal script?"

"I can't read it either but, yeah, I think so."

"Oh my. Do you know if they've conscripted any Adventurers around here lately?"

"Why are my bones so small?"

(Regarding an unnamed victim and Snorri Steinnasen, a dwarven sorceror, Town of Salamander, Kingdom of Riparialand)

Let me guess, you made fun of Snorri Steinnasen's hat. Dwarven sorcerors aren't very common, so he takes his homemade "wizard" outfit kind of seriously, especially that gigantic hat of his.

This spell he put on you should only last an hour or two - you're not the first one to annoy him. Your best bet is to just lie still right there as comfortably as you can with all that loose flesh hanging off, and your bones should pop back out to their normal size and position when it wears off.

And next time you run into Snorri, be respectful and don't mention the hat!

"You meet a nomad kobold vendor. How do they greet you? What are they selling?"

(Unnamed travellers discussing an exotic trinket over a meal at the Stag-in-Stupor, Village of Venison Heights, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"I traded a couple of vials of ink to a kobold for it."

"A KOBOLD? Are you nuts? Aren't they our enemies?"

"Apparently not all of them. I know they say they were made by The Opposer, but not made for The Opposer, so they're kind of like orcs in that way. Even though most of them pledge for The Opposer, they don't have to."

"I didn't even know there were any around here, where did you see them? What happened?"

"Well, I was coming back from Dunkelangsam with some alchemical rarities for trade back up at the capital, and me and that hunter I hired as a bodyguard are just a couple of hours from coming out of the woods when there's suddenly this weird-looking halfling standing in a patch of sun in the middle of the road, only when we got a little closer, say about 50 feet away, it carefully took off its cloak, not making any sudden moves, and it's not a halfling at all, it's a little lizard-person, and my bodyguard Rupert is freaking out and frantically looking around at the trees with his hand on his sword, but there's just the kobold standing there in the road, kind of shading his...her? Its? Whatever, shading his eyes with one hand and holding this thing out towards me with the other, and then he starts pointing at my saddlebags, pointing at this thing, pointing at my saddlebags, and I finally figure out he wants to trade.

So, I climb down off my horse - HA!, you should have seen Rupert all bug-eyed and freaking out, 'What are you doing?! What are you doing?!' - and I start taking my goods out of the saddlebags and putting them on the ground, and I get to the vials of ink and he gets all excited and he's pointing at them and going '2', '2' with his fingers and pointing at this thing he's holding, so I left two vials on the ground and packed everything else back up and got back up on my horse."

"It wanted ink?"

"Well, obviously it wasn't ordinary ink. One of the dwarven alchemists worked out a process for making usable ink out of that alchemically-pure darkness they've been pumping out of the mountain. Enchanters go NUTS for the stuff. Whatever this thing is, I'm pretty sure I overpaid for it, but the situation was so bizarre I just couldn't help going along with it, just to see what happened. 'course, Rupert was still doing his owl imitation, eyes wide open and practically spinning his head around trying to see everything around us at once, too, which just made me more curious what was going on."

"So, then what?"

"Well, when I get back on my horse, the kobold puts this thing down in front of him, pulls his cloak back on, and steps off of the road. Rupert and I get our horses walking down along one side of the road and the kobold just kind of casually saunters past on the other side and goes and waits by the ink vials, and we walk up to where this thing was laying in the road and I get down - you should have seen Rupert, 'NO! DON'T TOUCH IT! IT'S A TRAP!', poor guy's a great bodyguard but he's got no feel for merchanting at all - and when I bend down to pick it up I hear the ink vials clink together once as the kobold picks them up and when I look up he's just gone. By the time I climbed back on my horse Rupert was calming back down but still kind of shaken. He insists we were surrounded and there must have been at least twenty or thirty of them hiding in the forest around us. Once we got to Venison Heights later that day I went straight to the little temple there and asked the senior priest to check it out, and she said it wasn't Infernal or cursed or anything, but it's definitely some kind of magical piece."

"So...what is it?"

"What do you mean, 'what is it'? Who cares, probably just some kind of good-luck charm or something. It was worth it just to have the story to tell!"

"What happens when I touch the Crying River?"

(No particular place, a discussion of someone dreaming about a place described in childrens' stories)

"Well, most people just wake up at that point. You DO know that the Borbory-book fables are just stories, right?"

"Yeah, but I keep DREAMING about it! I want to touch it. It WANTS me to touch it! I have to know what will happen if I do!"

"Beats me. I only remember the stories having people NOT touching it. I guess if you disappear in the night or we find you drowned in your bed or something we'll know you finally did it. Oh, relax, I'm kidding! I'm telling you it doesn't even exist!"

"The rings are falling"

(Some foolishly arrogant person, undisclosed location)

"...right off my fingers now. They're so thin and bony. I can't tighten my armor any more and I still feel like the clapper of a bell in this chestplate. I'm always hungry, but no matter how much I eat, I just keep wasting away like this!

Look, I know we're days away from there but I've got to turn back. I've got to get back to that shrine before I wither away so much that I can't even walk. Maybe if I make an offering and apologize I'll be allowed to live.

I know I shouldn't have done it, I know messing with offerings is sacrilegious, but I didn't think it would be missed! Gods don't even EAT cake!"

"What did you have for breakfast?"

(An unnamed Goblin noble, somewhere down in the Infernal realms)

"Such an amusingly impertinent question from a lowly imp, but I will generously indulge you today. I had a scoop of nutgrubs in wine sauce on a fungusbread trencher, followed by a fresh imp's heart."

"What? YouAAAARGH....kkk...k..."

"You, hobgoblin. A clean plate and my fork. NOW!"

Whats in the Buried Tome?

(Dexter Henning, secretary and Vizier for the "mayor" [regional governor] of Venison Heights, speaking to an unspecified Adventurer, Village of Venison Heights, Kingdom of Riparialand)

Our house-spirit, Greezel, led us to a loose stone in the basement wall told us to dig out what was in it and give it to you. I don't know why. I've learned it's better to go along with what Greezel says than risk offending it. Our household runs much more smoothly that way.

There are rumors that the foundation upon which the regional governor's home here was built was the remains of a sorceror's tower from way back before The Punishment. If that's true, this old book that was in the lead box we found was probably his.

It appears to be some kind of strange recipe book. See, the first entry is "A Dish of Baked Chicken". They get increasingly strange as you go in, and for some bizarre reason nearly all of them call for orc's blood. It seems likely the sorceror who wrote it was becoming increasingly insane as he went along, towards the end he has recipes that include bits of furniture and cavern-jellies and such things. Probably died of indigestion.

I don't know what he was trying to accomplish - my talents are mainly in prognostication, remote-sensing, and wards, not alchemy. Anyway, Greezel said to give it to you, so, here. Have fun with it.

I mean this mostly but not entirely in a spirit of jest when I say "please don't invite me to dinner".

"What kind of a name even is Klorgin?"

(Undisclosed participants in a conversation somewhere in Nebulia, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"It's hard to say, are you sure you heard nothing else?"

"No, just something about everyone being speechless when 'Klorgin suddenly shows up', before they got too far into the crowds for me to hear them anymore."

"That doesn't give me much to go on. It does have the sort of sound that could be Orcish. Then again, I would swear I once heard of a "Kikijiki" gnomish clan, and I think something like "Klorgin" would fit the gnomish naming aesthetic for it. You only heard one name, not two separated by an initial? 'Klorgin M. Kikijiki' or something like that?"

"Nah. But then none of them were gnomish or halfling, and I definitely didn't hear or see any pixies."

"Hmm, still seems unlikely then, but I guess we can't rule it out. It doesn't really fit what little I know of modern Infernal naming styles, so at least we probably don't have some apostate conspiracy going on. I think I'd have heard the name at least once by now if it was an orc, not many of them around here deal with civilized folk, and the few that have are pretty well-known. Definitely something foreign in some way, then. We haven't had visits from ANY foreign lands really, except rare stragglers escaping the poverty over in the Republic of Sabbatalia, and their names aren't that different. A daemon, maybe, or a small god?"

"They seemed awfully enthusiastic for it to be something like that, and they didn't strike me as particularly mystically-inclined."

"That's all they said? 'speechless when Klorgin suddenly shows up?'"

"Something like that, I mean they weren't what I was there for. Actually I think they said 'sets down' instead of 'shows up'. Does it matter?"

"It might, language can have subtle...'sets down'? Like from above?"

"Well...I guess maybe, they didn't actually say that. ... What are you doing with your fingers, and why do you have that look on your face?"

"Just...seeing what the name would look like written in...yeah. Hmmm."

"Now you're starin' at nothing out the window. WHAT?"

"Well, you can say it without lips, and aesthetically it DOES kind of look right...in what little I've seen of authentic draconic script."

"That's stupid, dragons haven't come back..."

And then they were both staring far off to the south, just above the mists around the edge of the world, where SOME said the glittery cluster of stars there was light glinting from the wings of dragons, unhurriedly on their way back to the world. It didn't seem any closer tonight than it ever did.

"Um...Fred? Can I borrow your shovel?"

"Huh? What for?"

"I kinda want to expand my basement a little."

"We're not allowed to stab the map anymore"

(Regarding the meeting-hall of an explorer's society, Nebulia, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"Ambassadors to the Sea", they call themselves - they were a loose coalition of successful merchants and fishing-boat operators who took it upon themselves to explore and map out the forgotten territories beyond the Kingdom of Riparialand and its neighbor, the Republic of Sabbatalia. They were a reasonably prestigious bunch and occasionally were enriched by returning with exotic animals, rare minerals, or unusual trade-goods from lost settlements.

Their process was simple: they had on the wall of their meeting-room a large, crude map of the local world, reconstructed as best they could from what old records they could find and updated from their own explorations. After getting together for friendly banter, gossip, and expensive beverages, a chosen member would determine the target area for the next exploratory expedition in the time-honored manner of covering their eyes and blindly pushing, stabbing, or throwing a sharp object at the map. It was agreed that no matter where it landed, one of them would agree to lead an expedition to the location, or at least as close as could reasonably be reached by ship.

On one occasion, a drunkenly-hurled dart had landed off the edge of the map, but Captain Wright had bravely agreed to lead an expedition as close to the edge of the world as he could. (It was he who had discovered the Fleeing Land and made contact with the benignly-insane Sossaurian people who had a city there.)

Then, one year, Frederick DeBorge, the wealthy wine-merchant, overindulged on his wares at the meeting and decided to face away from the map and fling a dagger backwards over his head at it. The dagger had missed the map entirely, bounced off of the wall, and impaled itself into a book of children's stories sitting on a desk.

Poor, deluded Captain Miriuch had immediately gotten quite excited, insisted that it was an omen, and could not be dissuaded from leading that year's expedition to find the imaginary land in the book's stories. That disastrous trip is now referred to as "Captain Miriuch's Last Stand", and is somewhat infamous. There was only one known survivor.

Although usually still somewhat inebriated when they do it, the Ambassadors to the Sea now choose their expeditions' destinations by a somewhat more rational examination of which areas of their map are least explored, rather than simply "stabbing the map".

"Tell me about Captain Miriuch and his last stand"

(Undisclosed location, somewhere in the Kingdom of Riparialand)

"Last Stand"? Is that what that crazy gnomish sailor that shows up down in Fishmeet from time to time calls it? That story gets more dramatic with every retelling.

All his life, captain Miriuch had an unhealthy obsession with those Borbory book fables that they read to children. He was convinced he could actually SAIL to the Borbory Jungle. Yes, the imaginary place in the stories, really! Apparently he convinced himself AND his crew that it was a real place in the Near Dreamlands and all they had to do was get drugged up enough to see it as they sailed on. Fool ran into some rocks and the ship broke up. Cilia S. Garish, that gnome, was apparently the only survivor. She says she was up in the lookout watching the crew try to deal with an ant infestation that had showed up on the ship a few weeks out of port...yes, in the middle of the ocean, supposedly. I mean, I've heard of "army ants" in far-off lands but "navy ants"? I think they were hallucinating from the drugs, personally. anyway, she claims while the helmsman was distracted swatting at a swarm crawling up his leg, they suddenly smashed into a grove of trees sticking up out of the middle of the ocean and she was thrown out of the lookout and into the water. She claims the last thing she remembers seeing is Captain Miriuch clinging to the wheel and trying to keep from being eaten by some aquatic sharp-toothed bird and a school of feathered fish. His "last stand". I'd love to know what it was the captain fed them to make them see crazy stuff like that.

That "strange branch" she clung to for days before being found is obviously just a piece of the broken up ship. I think the moral of the story is "keep your eye on the waking world while you're sailing in it".

"What are these annoying ass milkshrews doing in my basement? How did they get here and how do I get rid of them"

(No particular place, Kingdom of Riparialand)

You've been keeping unwaxed cheese down there, haven't you. I thought EVERYONE knew that attracted milkshrews!

Pay no attention to the hotheads advocating extremely destructive methods for getting rid of them. I mean, I like acid fumes and fiery explosions as much as anybody, but it's really not necessary. All you need is a little patience and proper cheese-storage practices.

First, get ALL of your cheese out of the basement. That's what they're THERE for. Go down to the village chandlers as soon as you can and get enough lavender-infused beeswax to cover it. The cheese, that is. Yes, I know it'll make the cheese smell funny at first when you go to eat it later, but you brought this on yourself and anyway it's actually not bad that way. Milkshrews seem to hate the smell, I think it overwhelms their being able to smell anything else, and they're practically blind as it is.

Once the cheese is completely covered and the wax has hardened, you can put it back down on the shelves in the basement. By that time the milkshrews will be getting hungry and restless, but ignore their hissing and creaking noises - that's just how they ask each other if any of them have found food yet. They'll stop doing that and start making that annoying "EEEE-chitter-chitter" noise at each other as the lavendar scent hits them and blocks out their sense of smell, at that point they won't even recognize the lumps of cheese even if they bump right into them.

Their rambling around and chittering might keep you up for a night, but by morning they should all have left the way they came in and gone elsewhere to find food. As long as you keep your cheese well-sealed in wax (once they're gone, you can switch back to ordinary beeswax) they won't find you again.

"One year from today, everyone - no exceptions - will die."

(Somewhere down in the Infernal realms)

The initiates - several gremlins, a few imps, and a lone goblin, nodded agreement. A few of the gremlins even cackled maliciously. They were all aware of the risks when they had petitioned to be allowed to join.

Root'Needoj, Infernal god of tormented sleep, offered a path of descent to nigh-foundational powers( * ), but it was a tricky path with a hefty toll.

For one year, they would submit to the mentally and physically brutal instruction of the priests. Physical discomforts and sleep deprivation would be plentiful, of course, to develop the necessary bodily tolerances, but the real difficulty would be getting through the controlled experiences in nightmare realms of the Dreamlands and still be sane, or at least non-maladaptively insane. Finally, once the year of education was complete, they would all be thrown into the ice pits to freeze to death.

That, naturally, is when the difficult part of the initiation would begin. Root'Needoj itself, it was said, would personally then chase their spirits away from the gates of death and into some of the most terrible corners of the Dreamlands, until it caught the slowest of them and devoured them. That was the price.

The rest of them were expected to find their way back to their bodies in the waking world and upon returning, shock them back into motion through sheer force of will backed by terrified mania to climb back out of the pit.

Any that fail quickly die again and their spirits wander pathetically through the gates of death to fade away, but should the initiate escape the ice pit and make it to the warming ceremonial fire the priests keep burning nearby, they are welcomed as full members. It's said that nothing outside of their own minds ever causes them fear or distress ever again.

( * ) The humans and pixies and dwarves and the rest of the chaydchuzhom [people of the sunlight] up on the surface-world would instead say something like "rise to the pinnacles of power", as though being further from the root of the world was somehow desirable. The sooner the Opposer's people finished the task of eliminating them all, with their backwards and upside-down delusions, the happier everyone would be, obviously.

"What is the song "Salt and Ash" about?"

(Random conversation somewhere in Nebulia, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"Oh, wow, that takes me back. First day of "Introductory Alchemy" at University of Salamander we had to memorize this little educational mnemonic ditty to familiarize ourselves with some basic concepts and terminology. How'd that go? "Sulfur and mercury/Salt and ash/in flame sublimate/in mortar smash", something like that. It's been a while. To be honest, I'd have probably failed the class if one of the professor's research students hadn't been involved in that catastrophic accident that discorporated a big chunk of the administration building. They fired the professor and she had to leave, so they just gave us all "passing" grades and sent us on our way. I've forgotten most of the class since then, I haven't had much need for "essence theory" for my studies in intercelestial administration."

"The last thing you want to do in this city is anger the Lamplighters."

("Harry Hands" and "Cheesemonger" Dave - members of a small thieves' guild cell, Nebulia, Kingdom of Riparialand)

"Why not? We were just fine before those pixies came along and started setting up those light-poles all up and down the streets."

"Those aren't alchemical, you know, that's Celestial magic. Them coming around and lighting them up is a kind of blessing, right? You don't want them to stop doing it."

"So what? That god of theirs is just a little god. It's not like it can do much to me. 'Oh, no, my candles keep going out, oooo, I'm so scared!' Bah. I ain't afraid of the dark anyway. OW! Hey, what'd you hit me for?"

"Because it don't matter what you're afraid of. Okay, fine, 'Cheesemonger Dave sure is awesome. Cheesemonger Dave isn't even afraid of gods! Everyone in the guild wishes they were as awesome as Cheesemonger Dave!' That what you want? Fine. There. You happy? Dumbass."

"Ow! Hey, quit hittin' me!"

"Then pay attention - I told you not to draw attention to this place, right? What do you think happens if this block ends up being the only one the lamplighters won't bless anymore? I swear, if you blow this operation we've been planning for months just trying to prove what you ain't afraid of I'll see you booted out of the guild and anywhere you move designated for training new members, you got that?"

"Yeah, yeah, all right...sorry, Hands. I guess I kinda got carried away."

"Happens to the best of us. Now go down to their little temple and apologize, maybe throw a few coins in the offering bowl, and from now on: LOW PROFILE, okay?"

"What do I want? Hm...well, a visit from the Weeping Girl would be nice."

(An unnamed wealthy merchant a the Emperor's Lament, Nebulia, Kingdom of Riparialand)

That was another thing the Emperor's Lament was known for.

"Are you sure?", queried the bartender, "she's 150 gold pieces for the evening."

"Today's business went quite well for me, I think I can afford a bit of luxury."

"I'll go get her, then. Hey, everybody, be respectful, somebody's getting a visit from the Weeping Girl!"

A happy cheer went up and everyone watched as the bartender turned down the lamps, went into the back room, and after a few minutes returned with her.

He led her by the hand. Her smooth, pale skin was shining and free of any blemish. Her face was frozen in an expression that suggested she had just found True Love of a mythic quality and might burst into joyous tears at any moment. The bartender held her by her left hand, and she glided almost soundlessly behind him, holding a crystalline goblet in her right.

The patrons watched in respectful silence, admiring, as the Weeping Girl's left hand was passed to the patron, who grasped it lovingly and pulled her closer.

The lucky merchant stared into the Weeping Girl's face, entranced, and slowly, gently took the crystal goblet from her right hand. In response, phosphorescent tears flowed from her eyes. The other patrons watched the solemn spectacle in a hush.

She was an Elven work. To say she had been "carved" would be misleading - her sculpting had begun with the artist rubbing the original block of white jade with handfuls of sand. It had probably taken several decades just to get the basic shape, before the sculptor moved on to softer materials for the details. All told, it had probably taken more than a century to finish the amazingly lifelike detail,including a decade of polishing with silk. A further patient several years of careful work with fine wire tools was required to hollow the head and create the lachrymatory mechanism.

A century or two counts as a pleasant diversion to pass the time, for a true elf.

The Emperor's Lament had been lucky to buy her. Now, for a small pile of gold coins, her head was filled with Goblin Wine, which she cried into the fine crystal cup whenever it was taken from her hand, and after an evening of conspicuously advertising to the whole tavern how successful he or she was, the Weeping Girl's companion for the evening could stagger or be carried home, literally glowing with happiness from the wine.

Not Without

(Lord Gerald Pymly, Village of Baconham, Kingdom of Riparialand)

(The original "prompt" for this was "Mirror Wraith". It turned out long enough that I thought it deserved an independent title.)

In the little village of Baconham, at the Eastern side of Baconham Park, a minor noble named Lord Gerald Pymly has a small country estate. He's a reclusive fellow, with a reputation as bit of a curmudgeon. He does go out of his way to be kind to children, though. He's awkward and obviously uncomfortable about it, but he makes a sincere effort just the same.

He wasn't always this way. Just a few years ago, they say he hated children.

---

Lord Pymly opened his eyes, grumbling. This was the third night that he'd slept in his new country house, and the third night the noise had awakened him in the middle of the night.

"BAAA! BAAAA!!! BAA!"

It sounded as though somewhere out there, some toddler was trying to find a lost lamb, calling out to it. The previous two nights, Gerald had simply clapped his hands tightly over his ears, rolled over, and gone back to sleep, but tonight he had run out of patience. In a fatigue-fuelled rage, he flung the bedcovers aside and stomped angrily to his bedroom window, flung open the shutters, and shouted.

"GO TO BED AND FIND IT IN THE MORNING, CIVILIZED FOLK ARE TRYING TO SLEEP!", he shrieked with hoarse aggravation, and then slammed the shutters closed and turned back towards the bed.

Baconham was supposed to be a quiet, peaceful place, thought Gerald. Some fifteen years ago it had been a community of pig farmers, but after somehow being swindled or extorted out of all of their livestock by, it was said, unscrupulous wizards from the neighboring Republic of Sabbatalia, the villagers that remained rather than seeking new fortunes elsewhere had become shepherds instead. As the objectionable odors of intensive pig-farming had faded, the village had become popular as a place for country manors among some of the nobility from the capitol city, just a day's travel away by coach. This was one of the only two things Lord Pymly knew about Baconham's history.

An only child, Lord Pymly had inherited a modest title and lands from his father. The lands produced enough income from rent to provide a comfortable living. Growing up, they had paid for his father's house and offices in the capitol, and a reasonable supply of good food and drink, and competent tutors, all of whom he'd disliked. He appreciated, though, that they'd taught him enough logic and mathematics to be able to manage the family holdings sufficiently well, and that they'd taught him reading and arts, as he enjoyed both. He could dabble in painting or sculpture, or read his books, without needing to interact with anyone else at all.

It had taken him years after his father's death, but he'd sold off the house and all of the buildings but a single apartment for doing whatever business just had to be conducted at the capitol, paid reputable agents to invest most of the proceeds in additional lands, and with the remainder had bought this plot of land in Baconham and had his new house built on it. He'd considered it a shrewdly-made deal, made possible by the other thing Lord Pymly knew about the village's history.

Apparently, some eighty or so years ago, when the kingdom was still new, the village had suffered a violent raid from the East in the night. Popular folklore blamed orcish nomads, but they could easily have simply been bandits. Being the Easternmost dwelling, the house that had been on what was now Lord Pymly's lands was the first hit. The inhabitants had been brutally killed, their meager property ransacked, and the place set ablaze. What histories there were said that the commotion had alerted the rest of the village in time to cobble together a defense, and though there were quite a few additional casualties, the attackers had been driven off. The remains of the first house's victims had been gathered up from the burned wreckage and given a proper burial, but still for eighty years, nobody had been willing to use that plot of land again.

The inhabitants properly laid to rest, there was nothing supernatural to fear, and there had been no reports of banditry or similar violence anywhere nearby in decades. It was therefore obvious that such hesitancy was simply superstitious nonsense of the sort that frequently latches onto the local folklore of unlearned rural folk. The land should have cost him ten times the pittance that he'd paid for it.

He'd had the house built, and his belongings moved to it, and had looked forward to quiet days of reading, accounting, tea, and modest servings of fine foods, and to quiet evenings with a glass of wine and artistic amusements, and especially quiet nights of restful sleep, with nobody disturbing him with their noise. He didn't even keep his own servants in his house, hiring them instead from among the locals and sending them home in the evening, with instructions to return late the following morning as needed.

And now he'd had to get out of bed himself to issue verbal correction to some uncouth local's unsupervised little child. It really was intolerable.

"BAA! BAA! BAAAAA!"

Lord Pymly froze as he was pulling the covers back over himself. The voice had not come from outside at all.

"BAAAA!"

"WHY WOULD YOU THINK YOUR LOST LAMB WOULD BE IN MY HOUSE?" Lord Pymly shouted, flinging the covers back again and stomping towards the bedroom door. The voice continued. He could hear it just on the other side. The creaking of the new floorboards told him someone was standing there. "BAA! BAA!" Lord Pymly wrenched the door open quickly and lunged to grab the trespassing urchin and give them a good thrashing.

But there was nothing there.

---

"BAA! BA! BAAAAA!" The floorboards still creaked, but there was still nothing there. Lord Pymly made a few frustrated, experimental grabs at the air, but found nothing but a hint of a cold draft. Then he stood there, puzzled, as the sounds continued in front of him. They didn't stop as he went back to his nightstand and got the candle lit again. The flickering light only confirmed that the space before his bedroom door was unoccupied by any apparent source for the creaking of the floor and that aggravating - and now somewhat disturbing - voice. "BAAA!"

Lord Pymly relaxed. He'd heard of fevers causing hallucinations. He had, after all, just the previous week finished dealing with many, many people in the process of selling off his extraneous inherited properties. He hated dealing with people, and he knew that stress could cause sickness. It would be a long night, but he could go to the village healer in the morning if necessary, determine what sort of cure he needed to buy, and he'd be well again and finally be able to enjoy the comfort of his bed. He turned away from the noises he imagined he was hearing at the door, and walked over to sit at the table where he kept the washbasin. He splashed water over his face. He adjusted the shaving-mirror on the table to examine himself in it. What were the visible symptoms of illness? Let's see, he thought to himself, yes, reddened, puffy eyes. His did look somewhat pale, and he was sweating a bit despite the cool evening, and something was moving in the mirror behind him...

He spun rapidly. Behind him was nothing but the empty doorway and the parlour beyond. He turned back to the mirror and stared in shocked fascination at the thing that was reflected in it. It looked as though someone had made a very rough model of a small child's skeleton, defining a tiny body with spindly arms and legs and an oversized head, and then stretched a thin layer of greyish clay over it like a crude skin, and pressed a pair of a painted doll's eyes into the front of the head. A few smoky wisps served for hair, and its mouth was simply a slit in the face. In the mirror, it paced back and forth across the floor behind the reflection of his bedroom door, pausing every few seconds to bend down and pat or claw at the boards. "BA! BAA!" the reflection would mouth as it did so, in time with the voice from outside the room. Unable to look away from the mirror he watched for several minutes as this distressing pantomime went on.

"What is it DOING?", Lord Pymly asked himself aloud.

The thing in the mirror looked up at him. "Ba." answered the voice behind him, as the creature in the mirror pointed at the floor. Gerald stared back, speechless. "Ba!" the voice insisted as the image pointed again emphatically. The thing haunting his mirror reached one hand towards him and clumsily ran at him as the floor creaked in time with its steps behind him. In a panic, Gerald leapt sideways, stumbled over his bed, got his feet tangled in the covers as he tried to back away. He fell.

---

Lord Gerald Pymly dreamed.

He was standing in the field where his house was built, but the house wasn't there - only a few weathered chunks of old burnt wood and charcoal. The walkway to his house from his gate was there, as was the gate itself. He saw someone standing there, but could make out no features on the shadowy figure. It was as though someone had taken whatever a starless sky is made out of and sculpted a person out of it. It took no notice of him, and seemed to be watching the spot where Gerald's house should be.

A quiet scrabbling came from the ground there as first one and then the other tiny skeletal hand poked out of dirt. That thing, that babbling wraith from the mirror, was pulling itself up from somewhere below. It stood, then laid down to reach one arm back down as far as it could into the earth it had just emerged from.

"BA!" it cried, tugging desperately at something. "BA! BA!"

The shadow-man at the gate stepped forward and strode, businesslike, up the path. It made no sound, but the mirror-creature noticed it.

"NO!" it yelled angrily, pulling even more frantically at whatever was under the ground beneath it. "BAAAA! NO! NO!" The shadow ran. "NO!!!", the pale thing from Gerald's mirror shrieked, letting go of whatever it had been pulling at and dodging away in an uncoordinated zig-zagging sprint.

Gerald's mind had given up trying to make sense of the disquieting spectacle. As he observed the pursuit, some still-functioning part of his rational self made him remember once looking out of his father's office window to watch an exasperated mother trying to catch her young child who, it seemed, was determined not to take a bath.

"At least it seems that it can say something besides 'ba'." mused Gerald aloud.

Oh, no. It had heard him. It looked into his eyes, and changed direction, ducking once more under the reaching arms of the shadow-man and charging towards Gerald with its little pale hands outstretched. Gerald felt a wall against his back. He couldn't move away. Involuntarily, his legs went limp and he slid to a seated position. His breath came in rapid frightened gasps. "NO! NO!" the mirror-thing was still yelling, and as its outstretched frigid hands touched his face, Gerald willed himself with every last bit of force he could command to move away, but this only pushed his head back further against the pillow. "NO! No, I don't think he's injured, but he's certainly not well. Lord Pymly! Are you all right?"

Gerald opened his eyes, blinking. Cold water was dripping from his face. He was lying on his bedroom floor, though someone had placed a pillow under his head. He reached up to wipe his eyes. He saw Betsy and Cyril, the two servants he'd hired, watching him with worried faces.

"Apologies, Lord Pymly, it's cold water from your washbasin. We found you here on the floor and thought it might help revive you. Are you ill, sir? Shall we bring a healer?"

"I...yes, I..." Gerald began. He was still trying to make sense of what he'd just gone through, or at least thought he had.

"Was there someone else here?", he finally asked.

"Not that we saw, sir. We found you like this when we arrived to prepare today's meals. Did someone assault you, sir?"

He sat up and rubbed the back of his head. There was no lump there, and he didn't seem to be hurt.

"Yes, no, I ..." he began hesitantly. Then with firmer purpose, stiffly pulled himself up and got to his feet.

"No, no, just some disturbed sleep."

"Shall we fetch the healer, sir?", suggested Cyril, still concerned. Lord Pymly wasn't exactly a pleasant person to work for, as such, but he didn't begrudge them a fair wage for their labors and paid them promptly, which is more than could be said for many of the other nobles who'd been moving into the village.

"No healer just yet, Cyril. This village has a blacksmith, doesn't it? After you've prepared my food and made my tea, go and fetch me a shovel and a prybar. After that you may leave until tomorrow."

"Sir? I...yes, sir, I know a couple of hardworking lads available for labor, I'll bring them, too. Do you..."

"No. Just the tools, if you please. I'm not to be disturbed afterwards until tomorrow, thank you."

"Yes, sir."

---

It was mid-afternoon. The servants had left. Lord Pymly had been standing in front of his bedroom door with a prybar in his hands for several minutes, reluctant to start. He told himself that he was just reluctant to undo the work that had gone into his new floor.

One way or another, he meant to personally verify that nothing of importance was to be found down there. Of course, there was, he supposed, a small chance that there was some long-lost cursed family heirloom or something of the sort buried there causing nightmares, the old stories were full of things like that. In that case he could simply dig it up and be rid of it. All he had to do was pry up the boards and start shovelling.

He felt embarassed for himself as he leaned down and rapped on the floor with the prybar, saying aloud: "Is anyone down there? Hello?" He tensed, then cursed himself for expecting a response. Superstitious nonsense! Even so, he couldn't stop himself leaping back as he finally pried up the first board and flipped it aside, half-expecting pale hands to reach up at him from beneath, but there was only what a rational person would have expected to find: dirt. Emboldened, he pulled up a few more boards to make room, and set to work with the shovel. More dirt, with a few bits of very old charcoal left over from the previous house that'd burned so long ago. By the time he'd made a wide hole two feet deep, he had stopped half-seriously listening for the metallic clink of the shovel hitting the Ancient Cursed Sword of Porcine Woe or whatever such silly thing pig-farmers might have kept secret beneath their house. He was beginning to wonder how much further he should dig before deciding there was nothing to find, when he felt the shovel strike something solid. He stabbed into the ground experimentally a few times. It felt and sounded like a large piece of wood. "Oh, joy, at last I have found the lost treasure of Pigbeard the Pirate", mumbled Gerald aloud to himself, and he forced himself to laugh at the joke. He resumed digging.

Heavy wooden beams held together by bands of rusting iron formed a flat lid. A corroded ring of metal was attached at one edge. There it is, thought Gerald, the illiterate pig-farmers probably murdered someone for a piece of jewelry or something and hid it down here, and now he could get rid of it and finally have some peace. He grabbed the ring and with a mighty grunt of effort, flung the lid aside. He leaned forward to look into the revealed hole, then found himself scrambling back.

There were three things in the shallow pit beneath, but it took a while for him to notice the other two, as his attention was fixated on the bones.

The hole extended less than three feet below where the lid had been, and was perhaps the size of a bathtub. At the bottom, the slowly-crumbling skeleton of a small child, perhaps a toddler, was resting on its back. It seemed to be intact, other than a bit of scattering as it had fallen apart over the long years. Gerald stared, shocked. Had they buried a dead child under their own house? But, no, why would they have left a lid if they had? Maybe being put in the hole was some sort of cruel punishment used by rural folk?

As he speculated, Gerald finally noticed what else was in the hole. They were two cloth objects. One was a small bag of some sort, resting open next to the child's remains. He carefully picked it up and looked inside. It was half full of old raspberries, long dried and hardened now. He looked at the other, resting against the skeleton's ribs. It was a cloth toy, not much larger than a kitten and sewn into a shape that resembled a hedgehog, or perhaps a tailless dog. Being irrationally careful not to touch the bones, Gerald gingerly reached down and picked the imitation animal cautiously up from its resting place. It was darkened by age and mildew, but still whole. It seemed to be stuffed with leaves, and pine-needles had been pushed out between the threads of the cloth to suggest fur. It had a pair of small black glass beads for eyes. Probably not a punishment, then, with a snack and cuddly toy for comfort.

Gerald struggled to come up with a plausible scenario. Did the child's parents reluctantly try to sacrifice it to gain favor with some sort of evil spirit? Somehow this didn't sound right, but it would make sense if the awful thing he had seen in his mirror was some sort of daemon, trying to retrieve a sacrificial offering. It was horrible to think about, but if this were the case, hopefully when it came tonight it would be the last time. Gerald would happily let it take the old bones if it meant it would go away and let him sleep.

Gerald shivered. He was going to have to see it again. He knew he wouldn't be able to sleep until this was over. He stepped out of the hole he'd dug, leaving the bones in the pit. The sun was setting.

---

Lord Pymly sat at the washbasin, the toy and the bag of raspberries on the table along with a lit candle. The shaving-mirror faced his open bedroom door and the hole in the floor beyond. He shook, just a little, with a mixture of fright and relief when the voice finally began echoing from the pit.

"Ba? BAAA! BAAA!"

Gerald glanced at the mirror. The small, pale, misshapen monster was pulling itself out of the hole. It looked around the floor, moving quickly, obviously searching for something. It hadn't come for the bones after all, it seemed.

"BAA! BAAA!"

He was going to have to talk to it. He picked up the objects he'd brought up from the pit, one in each hand, stood up, and faced the mirror, standing to one side so that he could still watch the questing creature in it.

"Is...is...is this what you want?", quavered Gerald. The thing in the mirror looked out at him, then at what he was holding. Its fake eyes and slit of a mouth seemed to grow slightly. Both hands reached out towards the little cloth animal. The thing's mouth opened as the voice from the doorway gave a shout of excited recognition.

"BA!"

"Yes, fine, take it, you can have it, just take it and leave me in peace!" Gerald begged the mirror. The image inside groped pleadingly. Gerald wondered, how did you give something to a reflection in a mirror? He held the toy behind him as far as he could and backed towards the bedroom door, watching in the mirror to maneuver the reflection of the toy, but the disembodied voice screamed behind him, the sound of it moving past him towards the mirror, and the thing reflected in front of him ran towards him, until its hands appeared to be pressed against the glass. They slapped frantically at it.

"BA! BA! BAAAA! BAA!" the voice cried desperately.

"Yes! Yes! Here it is, TAKE IT!" shouted Gerald with equal desperation, lunging towards the mirror and pressing the toy at the reflection's hands, "HERE! TAKE IT!" On the other side, the mirror-wraith seemed to grab onto the bottom of the toy and began lunging backwards as though trying to pull the little animal through the glass. The voice rose to an unceasing shriek of frustrated anguish so loud that it hurt. Gerald stumbled back, letting go of the toy. It stuck to the glass, the creature still yanking at it from the other side with the force of it's whole malformed body.

His nerves at their limit, Gerald fled.

The piercing wordless cries of the voice continued all night, only finally fading at dawn.

---

Lord Pymly sat on his front porch, knees drawn up against his chest, hands clasped tightly over his ears, and eyes wide and staring into he distance.

Cyril and Betsy spotted him as they came through the gate. They conferred with one another briefly, and Cyril went back, running towards the village. Betsy hastened to check on their employer.

"Lord Pymly, what's happened? Are you all right? Cyril has gone to get the healer, sir."

"Yes. Good." mumbled Gerald hollowly, still staring at nothing in particular.

Betsy managed to persuade him to come back inside, and made him some hot tea.

Cyril returned with the village healer half an hour later. As was typical in small villages, the local healer was also the local priest. The village's patron was just a small god of herds and flocks of domesticated animals, but Gerald was glad for the help of anyone with supernatural authority at this point.

"That will be all for the day, thank you," he told the servants, "I'd like to speak with the healer in private, please."

The priest waited until the servants had closed the gate behind them, then spoke up.

"You look far more troubled than ill, sir. What seems to be bothering you?"

"I'm haunted." Gerald said flatly, and then he told the priest about the voice, and what he'd seen and heard that first night, and the frightening dream he'd had before finding himself on the floor.

"That does sound like a restless ghost, but I was told that the victims here had all been properly buried and their spirits long since departed."

Gerald shook his head. He told the priest about yesterday's find, and showed him the pit, and what he'd found in it. Then, haltingly, he described what had happened that night.

"Well, that settles it. What you're dealing with is obviously the ghost of a small child from the family who was killed here eighty years ago.", the priest nodded confidently.

"But if that thing is the ghost of a child, why doesn't it...he look like a child?" Gerald had no idea whether the child had been a boy or a girl, but knowing now that it had been a child, he no longer felt comfortable thinking of the mirror-ghost as an "it".

"He has been dead for longer than many people are alive. There probably is almost nothing of him left in the ghost. He simply doesn't remember what he's supposed to look like."

There was no way to be sure, but the two of them were able to piece together a plausible scenario: Violent invaders break into a home, able-bodied family members defend as a parent hurries the youngest child to a hiding-place. They give something to eat and his favorite toy for comfort, admonish him to be quiet while he hides, tells him they'll come back to let him out as soon as it's safe. They close the lid and cover it.

Then everyone is killed and the house burns down and collapses. Nobody ever comes to let him out...except for Lord Gerald Pymly. The tragic child's ghost manages to evade the keeper of the gates of Death for 80 years, entirely driven by the demand to take his favorite toy with him.

"But how do we make him leave? I can't live like this! And anyway, we really should do something to help the poor child." Gerald was a little surprised at himself as he realized he'd said "help the poor child" with complete sincerity. "Would it help if we gave his bones a proper burial or something?"

"Probably not. We're simple folk around here. As long as you're not disrespectful about it, you can just bury them out in the lawn. You could even just leave them where they are, but I'm guessing for your *own* peace of mind you won't want to do that."

"Well, what can we do?"

"Unless the gatekeeper can catch him, he's not going to leave without his toy. Just give it to him and I'm sure he'll pass on."

"I tried that already, he's on the other side of my mirror! How can I give a real thing to a ghost in a mirror?"

The priest shook his head a little sadly. "I think you'll have to kill it."

"How do you kill a ghost? They're already dead!"

"I wasn't talking about the ghost."

---

As the sun set, Lord Pymly went to the kitchen and fetched the largest pot he could find and set it in the middle of his bedroom floor. He lit the candle, then returned to his chair by the washbasin and waited for night to finish falling.

"Ba? BAA? BAAA!" echoed the voice once more from the hole outside his bedroom door. In the mirror, he could see the twisted ghost pulling itself up. It was still hideous to see, but not as frightening now that he understood what he was looking at - it was like a very young child's drawing of himself made real, a big head with flat eyes and a slit for a mouth, and long thin arms and legs with sloppy approximations of skeletal hands and blobs of feet, all attached to a little body. With no life to maintain it, the child's spirit had forgotten, bit by bit, what was happening, where he was, who he was...until all that was left was the knowledge that he needed to go somewhere, and especially that he was not going to go without his beloved stuffed cloth companion!

"BA! BAAAA!" the voice of the ghost called out, looking for it.

Gerald cleared his throat. "It's okay, I brought it for you."

The ghostly child in the mirror looked out at him again. His little hands grasped pleadingly at the toy Gerald held.

"BA!"

Gerald put the little cloth hedgehog, or puppy, or whatever it was supposed to be, into the pot. Then, he reached for the candle.

"BA! BA!"

Gerald hesitated, suddenly reluctant. He hoped it didn't hurt. "I'm, um, sorry, little friend." he muttered to the stuffed creature in his pot, feeling foolish, and then quickly thrust the candle flame at it.

He was very relieved that there was no disembodied wail of pain or unnatural stench or other reaction, just billows of smoke smelling of burning dead leaves rising from the rapidly combusting toy. It had been very dry and old. It was turning completely to ash as he watched.

The ghost hadn't even voiced any objection. Gerald looked at the mirror.

The ghost was just watching the reflection of the pot and its burning contents quietly. Gerald stared - the "smoke" rising from the reflection wasn't black, but a golden glow, which sank back down after reaching the ceiling like a very tiny heavy fog, congealing into a shape on the floor.

"Oh!" exclaimed Gerald, "It was a BEAR."

In the mirror it had eyes like polished hematite, and it was covered in a fur of golden wires. It had shining white fangs and sharp black claws, both of which somehow seemed not at all threatening. It stood up on its hind legs, half as tall as the ghost, and held its forepaws up in the universal gesture of a small child wanting to be picked up.

Gerald was entranced, and amazed at the implication that while the child couldn't even remember himself, he had kept such a vivid and imaginative memory of what his toy bear companion looked like.

"BAAAA!" the ghost squealed, picking the bear up and hugging it tightly. The bear sniffed at the ghost's head, and nuzzled against his neck. Then it looked up at something just outside of the mirror's field of view. The ghost looked, too.

The ghost held the bear out with both hands towards whatever was there. "Ba!", he announced triumphantly.

A featureless hand the color of night extended itself into view. The ghost shifted the bear to his right arm, and reached up to grasp the offered hand.

In the mirror, Gerald watched the shadow-man lead the ghostly child and his bear by the hand around the hole in the floor and through the reflection of the parlor towards the front door, as the sound of one small set of footsteps quietly tapped away behind him in the house.

The featureless figure opened the mirror-house's front door, revealing...nothing. Then it turned, and seemed to lift a hand towards Gerald, just briefly, in acknowledgement, before turning back and leading the ghost into the emptiness.

It wasn't until sunrise that Gerald realized he'd been staring at his own completely ordinary reflection in the mirror all night. He could not tell how much of what he thought he remembered was real. Well, some of it must have been - there was a pot of ashes on the floor, and an old cloth sack of dried, shrivelled raspberries next to the washbasin...and still a hole in the floor in front of his door.

The uncertainty caused him no distress any more, however. He felt he'd be able to sleep just fine from now on. Not just yet, though. It didn't seem right to sleep before doing one more thing. He stood stiffly, and reached for the shovel.

---

In the little village of Baconham, at the Eastern side of Baconham Park, a minor noble named Lord Gerald Pymly has a small country estate. Where the edge of the estate meets the park is the estate's garden. It is a neatly arranged collection of herbs carefully maintained by the estate's servants, with the exception of one corner. In this corner is a wildly-growing raspberry bush. It's marked by a simple wooden post, atop which is a carving of a bear, gilded and painted by Lord Pymly himself. He returns to it regularly to correct any harm the outside elements may have done to it, talking to it quietly as he works.

He's a reclusive fellow, with a reputation as bit of a curmudgeon. He has no love for trespassers, but he does let children visiting Baconham Park pick the raspberries freely.

"Tell me a legend/folk tale/myth/etc. from your world"

("Taken by the Borborygmies", a story from a well-known old collection of children's stories known generally as the "Borbory Books" - this setting's equivalent of "Grimm's Fairy Tales")

Taken by the Borborygmies

One time on the Borbory islands, there lived two dwarven brothers, Hans and Heinz. Since there were no mines on this island, the two of them made a living growing fruit. One day, Hans had gathered a bushel of cherries. “I will take these to the village at the other side of the island and trade them for sausages!” he said, and Heinz said “That is a good idea, and I will gather a bushel of pineapples and follow you, and I will trade them all for bread, and when you get back and I get back, we can have a feast of bread and sausages!” “That is a good idea, and now I feel hungry. Instead of going around the island, I will take a shortcut through the Borbory Jungle so that I can return faster with the sausages!”, said Hans, and he picked up his bushel of cherries and set off through the jungle, while Heinz set about picking pineapples.

The jungle was dark and dense, and Hans soon lost his way, and then fell into a pit! “If only someone would help me get out of this pit, I would share some of my cherries with them!” cried Hans. The Borborygmies who had dug the pit heard him, and they jumped down into the pit and tied Hans up, and took him and his cherries back to their camp to see their chief. “For the crime of carrying cherries through our jungle, you are sentenced to the terrible punishment of Zhunga-zhunga, and we will use the cherries you have brought!” commanded the chief. But Hans just laughed. “Why do you laugh, dwarf?”, asked the chief. “My brother is a day behind me with pineapples!” laughed Hans. But then the borborygmies took him and locked him in a hut to await the terrible punishment of Zhunga-zhunga.

The next day, Heinz had finished picking a bushel of pineapples, and he thought to himself, “My brother is far ahead of me, so instead of going all the way around the island, I had better take a shortcut through the Borbory Jungle so that I can return more quickly with the bread!”, and he picked up his bushel of pineapples and set off through the jungle, but soon lost his way and fell into the same pit as his brother. “If only someone would help me out of this pit,” he cried, “I would share my pineapples with them!”, and the borborygmies heard him, and jumped down into the pit and tied him up and brought him back to see their chief. “For the terrible crime of carrying pineapples through our forest, you are sentenced death - by Zhunga-zhunga! And we shall use the pineapples you have brought!” But Heinz pleaded with them that Zhunga-zhunga was not the proper punishment for a dwarf, and demanded to choose the manner of punishment. “How should a dwarf be punished with death, then?” asked the chief of the borborygmies. “Bring me a knife!” insisted Heinz, and so the borborygmies went to find a knife. Eventually they found one and brought it back,and they gave it to him, and Heinz stabbed himself to death with it. Then the borborygmies chopped off Heinz's head, and then skinned him, and made a canoe out of his skin.

Hans saw this and thought to himself, “Heinz was right, Zhunga-zhunga is no punishment for a dwarf, but neither is being made into a canoe. I must think of a way to avoid that.” And so, when the borborygmies came back to punish him, he told them “Zhunga-zhunga is no punishment for a dwarf, and so I should rather be put to death.” “Death…by Zhunga-zhunga!” announced the chief, but Hans pleaded with them that this was inappropriate for a dwarf. “How should a dwarf be punished with death then?”, asked the chief. “Bring me a fork!” And so the borborygmies went to find a fork.

But while they were gone, a Borbory jungle-cat snuck out of the jungle and went to the hut Hans was locked up in. “There are two crimes that the borborygmies punish with Zhunga-zhunga, ” it told Hans, “the carrying of fruit through the jungle, and hunting in the jungle. Now, I am a fearsome Borbory-cat and I hunt for my food, so I do not like seeing hunters punished, but I have no use for fruit. Which crime are you to be punished for?” “Why, for hunting of course!” answered Hans, thinking quickly, and so the Borbory-cat used his long fangs to break open the lock on the hut and carried Hans quickly into the jungle before the borborygmies returned, and when they had gotten far enough away, Hans quickly jumped off of the Borbory-cat's back and ran off into the jungle, laughing.

“Ha ha, that foolish cat will never know I was carrying cherries, I will go back and pick some more, so that I can take them to the village on the other side of the island and trade them for sausages!” laughed Hans.

But just then, he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was the Borbory-cat, who said:

“You're not here for the hunting, are you?”

And the Borbory-cat ate Hans all up, and Hans and Heinz never got to eat sausages and bread after all.