D&D 5E So long and thanks for all the fish!

"Something's wrong." Exclaimed Throg with a nervous but heavy heart...........

Hermione tenderly turned his heavy face towards hers.

"there's nothing wrong. Throg, son of Throg. It is all's well that ends well. I know no ways to mince it in love, but directly to say ‘I love you.'''

Gildan set the mood lighting before departing. Spiton, slowly backing off, played a respectful piece.

"If music be the food of love, Play on."

"Aye..... Play on."

Though on hindsight I should have paid more attention to the signals.

"Doth thou bloody mind! you young moonsong lack-beard!" exclaimed Hermione

"I am trying to hath the most romantic of endings to this thread and we doth nay need my little bloody pony clopping and interupteth the set!"

"Now Throg. Where were we?"................

What I've seen of Gary's humor tells me he'd have joined in the fun were he still here.

High on a hill was a lonely flounce herd, etc. etc.

"Wake up, you lot," said Clone Fu. "We've got a job for you. I take it you still have the magic carpet?"

"Er, yes, probably," said Throg, who wasn't at all pleased at being disturbed and was considering going passive aggressive but wasn't sure what it meant. Do you add 10 to your Aggressive adjustment, and can you have proficiency in Aggressive? If so, do Barbarians get it automatically? Such questions flitted fleetingly through his mind and vanished forever unanswered.

"Whither goeth we?" enquired Hermione (you knew it was her, didn't you?)

"Athens, 600BC. You're looking for a man with +8 Wis Adj. We need him to crack a DC30 Insight problem."

"What joy," quoth Hermione, "For yonder be the Seven Sages that signifieth and betoken greatly."

"What's this guy's name?" asked Throg shrewdly.

"Solong. Solong of Athens."

A thought stirred sluggishly in Throg's mind. "We'll find him in the fish market, won't we?"

"How did you guess?"

MoonSong said:

But you kind of did, you are Smaug, and a hydra agent and a sock. I'd need a giant laundromat, a hobbit, seven dwarves, the avengers and a man named Bard to defeat you. I'm just a pink pony bard...

Edit: Also you are a lawyer and I'm not allowed into court. And there is a possibility you are a time lord in which case you've already won before it started, I mean I could ask a couple of daleks but they cannot be trusted with your laundry.

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I am a Smaug bastard, true. Puts me in interesting company...




At least I'm not the table.

The Two and 4T's travels brought them to a strange tavern with a cast of fascinating folks, and a soap that scored off the scale on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.

"Well then, we have enough to eat from discarded trenchers." said 4T. "Shall we practice a bit, get up to blue belt?"

"There's a problem." said The Two. "It says on page 135 of Kung Fu For Mice that any belt above orange requires plying one's trade against real opponents."
"Aren't we real opponents to each other?"
"No. To get higher belts, we need to be fighting for our lives."

4T thought for a while. "We're not quite ready to take on orcs or troglodytes." she said "but we can take on rats in the tavern basement."
"You're right." said The Two. "It'll be good exercise, and save our characters from having to do it. They can start out feeling like heroes, rather than members of the sanitation department. Let's go!"

The two mice scampered down the stairs towards the basement. "Hey, Two." said 4T. "You've read more of the book than I have. If we do enough kung fu, will it clear up our color blindness?"
"Hmm. Not sure. One passage I read could be really, really liberally interpreted that way, if you stretched it further than any rack victim."
"Well, at least it's something."

They hovered the magic carpet over ancient Athens, having evaded the thunderbolts flung at them by the gods as they flew over Mount Olympus on the way, and wondered where to land. There seemed to be a building site on the flat top of a large hill in the centre of the city so they put down there, next to a large marble noticeboard. Throg couldn't read the notice because it was all Greek to him anyway, so he risked asking Hermione what it said.

"The archaic writing doth me sore perplex," she admitted, "but seemingly it sayeth COMING SOON - THE PARTHENON."

It meant nothing to Throg, so he concentrated on the task in hand. "Maybe we should ask someone the way to the fish market?" he suggested.

Now, it is an immutable law of the universe that, when you ask someone the way in a strange city, they will turn out to be the only person for miles who isn't a native and who knows even less about the place than you do. This indeed occurred. The man they tried to speak to was a Phoenician tin-trader recently returned from a lucrative voyage beyond the pillars of Hercules who knew no Greek, had never been to Athens before and had got completely lost after leaving the port of Piraeus because this was about a century before Themistocles would be building some proper roads between the two. His name was Stan and he spoke Phoenician with what, about two millennia later, would be recognisable as a Cornish accent.¹

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¹ This is in case you feel like role-playing him. The justification is that, during the bronze age, the Phoenicians did indeed sail to Cornwall to trade with the tin miners there. Also, he is called Stan because the alchemical word for tin was stannum, but he wouldn't have known that so it's not much of a joke.

The man they tried to speak to was a Phoenician tin-trader recently returned from a lucrative voyage beyond the pillars of Hercules who knew no Greek, had never been to Athens before and had got completely lost after leaving the port of Piraeus because this was about a century before those Istocles would be building some proper roads between the two.

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FIFY.

Throg and Hermione followed their noses and found the fish market eventually. Oddly, as well as fish, the venue seemed to involve oratory. A man was standing on a stack of upturned fish boxes declaiming poetry in an odd sort of sing-song way, as if the rules of metre were just getting started out and this guy was basically making them up. Hermione though he looked wise, though, so she waited until he finished and offered him a crate of haddock.

Solong, for it was indeed he, peered at Hermione for a long moment, collected his thoughts and spoke in a Spartan dialect, which she found she could understand surprisingly well. "Did your mother launch a thousand ships?" he asked cryptically.

Hermione was quite surprised by the question because Solong had guessed absolutely right and that was a bit disconcerting. You come thousands of miles to a totally strange city hundreds of years in the past, and practically the first person you speak to, knows more about you than you would care to admit even to your best friends. She formed her words carefully. "Yes," she said.

"You didn't tell me that," said Throg, "Did she do it with bottles of champagne?"

"No, with her face."



"Your father was a great king," added Solong enigmatically.

"Hold on," said Throg, "Who are you? Some kind of princess?"

"I am that Hermione, aren't I? Daughter of Menelaus and Helen of Troy?" she asked Solong. "I wondered why my parents split up. No-one would ever tell me!"

"What brings you to Athens, as if I didn't know?" asked Solong. "And by the way, thanks for all the haddock."

Throg felt a little exasperated, not to say slightly annoyed by the smug superiority of this man they had been sent to find. "Bah!" he said and that just about summed up how he felt. "Bah!".

"Hush, dear," chided Hermione. "The Archon is an important man."

It was Solong's turn to look worried. "They made me take the job," he muttered. "After that business with those wretched Megarians. I don't suppose, being a Spartan princess, you could intervene on our side could you? I know it's a lot to ask."

"We have a favour to ask first," she replied cautiously. "It's this ..."