"I have something important for you to do!" "I didn't know she was a priestess of Sune! No one told me about that festhall! I'm innocent!"
"It wasn't my fault!" I shouted, pulling the bed sheets back over my head and hoping I could be heard clearly. At the moment, I was too frightened to care.īravely, I faced the mightiest mage of Waterdeep. I did not doubt that his head was still attached to his body back in Water-deep, and he was sending an astral whatsit or a phantasmal thingamabob to address me. I popped an eye over the edge of the blanket and saw Granduncle Maskar's fiery head. 'Tertius Wands!" thundered a frighteningly familiar voice from the direction of the ceiling. I did what any rational man would do-I hid beneath the covers and promised whatever gods would listen that I would never touch Dragon's Breath Beer and death cheese again. Every loose article in the room, from the chamber pot to the steel mirror, joined in this vibrating dance of doom. I sat bolt upright, and noticed that the bed itself, a stout four-poster of ironwood, was shimmying and jumping like a nervous carrion crawler. Well, it did not exactly explode, but the thunderous boom from above was akin to a roof collapsing. I was setting the scene, dressing the stage, laying the groundwork. Ampi had at one time suggested that it would be advantageous to follow Volo around, opening new inns in his wake, as the ones he talks about are soon filled to the bursting with warriors and wizards carrying his dratted little tomes.īut I digress. As a result of Volo's work in popularizing certain locations to travelers, those locations have ceased to be popular to natives, necessitating new inns, dives, and hangouts for adventurers to hang out in. The Otyugh is one of the new establishments that have popped up after the last Volo's Guide. It was a little before three bells, and Tertius Wands, yours truly, was blissfully asleep in my quarters at the Otyugh, third floor stateroom with an odorous view of the stables. Of course, it did me little good since I was in bed the night before when everything went south. I was eager to accept my next assignment-to earn another clue to my identity.Īs I sat on the balcony of the Nauseous Otyugh in Scornubel, suspended between the hangover of the previous evening and the one that was yet to come, I meditated on the phrase "should have stayed in bed." Sound advice, probably postulated first by some spell-flinger after a particularly bad morning of fireballing and lightning bolting and whatnot. The mysterious Kitten, my protector, and nurse Lothar, and the silly business of retrieving a manuscript by some hack writer didn't seem as important as living from day to day, and paying off the terms of my inden-turement. Strangely enough, I was not troubled by this recent revelation, as if I had already accepted this fate at some earlier time. A different ink bore the message First Payment.Īs I finished reading the page, it and the envelope burst into flames, leaving nary a whiff of smoke.
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