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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Boojum" data-source="post: 1845280" data-attributes="member: 21028">Yelmak hurried through the grand hall, barely even noting the ostentatious richness of the decorations.  The kobold walked as fast as he possibly could without breaking the illusion of the humble servant.  Approaching a gathering of four high-ranking ship captains, he docilely extended his tray of appetizers.  They glanced down at him and seemed to agonize over the decision of which morsel to take.  Yelmak barely suppressed the urge to yell “They’re all the same, you bastards!  Just empty my tray so I can get back to the kitchen already!”  After they finally made their selection, he made the rounds to a couple of other groups, but so near the start of the feast, most of the guests had had their fill of the sweetmeats.  Left with one final solitary piece that no one seemed to want, Yelmak looked around to make sure he was unobserved, then surreptitiously scarfed it down himself.    His tray finally empty, he hurried back towards the kitchen.  As he did so, he rehearsed again in his mind the details of the plan that had just been interrupted when the head steward had ordered him to take the appetizer tray out.  He would bring the tray of glasses he had filled with the clear liquor known as ochleq to Melchor Vorstad at the head of the table in preparation for the toast to begin the feast.  He would make sure that the glass on the left would be given to Melchor himself.   A few minutes later, the tycoon responsible for the largest slave-trading cartel in the city of Ferrum would transform into a giant chicken in front of his favored business partners and most of the captains in his fleet.  With any luck, he would be a laughingstock without credibility.  His empire would crumble, a great blow struck for the Kobold Liberation Front.  Yelmak almost giggled at the thought of it, but breathed deep and composed his features as he passed through the kitchen doors.        His tray clattered to the floor, dropped from his suddenly nerveless fingers.  He stared in disbelief at the drink tray.  It sat on the table right where he had left it, but two of the glasses were empty!  <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17115" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17115</a>  All the kitchen staff were staring at him.  He bent and picked up his dropped tray and smiled in a forced grimace.  Three months of work infiltrating the household and becoming a trusted part of the serving staff wasted.  He had turned his back for just a minute and someone had taken the opportunity for some free booze.  It might not be totally ruined, he thought, trying to perk himself up.    One of the glasses was full, and they had all been rearranged.  The remaining one might still be the one he had slipped the potion into.  Gritting his teeth while attempting to act nonchalant, he refilled the other two glasses.    Yelmak tried to put all his doubts out of mind as he carried the drink tray out to approach Melchor.  He shuddered inwardly as he approached the corpulent human, who sat in his chair, waving his sausage-like fingers around to punctuate a story he was telling to the guests.  When he had nearly arrived, a door burst open with a bang.  All eyes turned toward the noise and saw a cloud of feathers and a massive white shape burst into the room, followed by a figure that Yelmak recognized as Gribblik, one of the scullions.  The panicked slave was pointing and yelling at the beast, and a hush fell over the crowd as they wondered if it might be some sort of special entertainment for the night.  “Flames take you,” Yelmak cursed under his breath at the scullions, as he looked up and saw a murderous rage glinting in Melchor’s pig-like eyes.  Not daring to approach, he kept right on walking as if he had meant to do so all along.  His cover was blown now.  There was no way the questioning that would follow this incident would fail to turn up just who had prepared those drinks.    Luck seemed to be with him as no one glanced his way while he made his way out the side door.  He stashed the drinks in the nearest alcove and sprinted towards the exit, slowing down just before he came in view of the guard at the gate.  He waved cordially, “Hi there Laine.  They’re just sending me into town to pick up some more fruit.”  He prayed to the air that the words carried by his breath would be believed.  He let out a sigh of relief as the guard smiled at him and began to crank the gate open.  Just then, another servant came running out and ran up to Laine, speaking quickly to him while casting a suspicious glance at Yelmak.  The guard looked surprised, but shrugged and reached out again for the lever, causing the gate to begin to close again.  Looking around in a panic, Yelmak dove forward through the last crack as the gate closed.  Ignoring the shouted commands to stop, he dashed out into the streets, narrowly avoiding the wheels of a steam-carriage.  Behind him, he heard whistles blowing, and glanced back to see Laine running out in pursuit, still with a confused look on his face.    The streets were a blur as he ran:  taverns, smokestacks, shops, foundries, carriages, the legs of big people.  From time to time, he would catch a glimpse of his pursuers, hard-faced men in armor and the livery of the Vorstad cartel.  He ran by instinct, not even sure of the direction he was going, and soon found himself near the docks.  A hideous, ant-like being stepped out of the shadows on his left.  It stood upright on four of its legs and held a gun in the other two.  Yelmak quailed—now that one myrmidus had seen him, he knew that it would have relayed his location to the others in the area through their hive mind.  This wasn’t his first run-in with them, and once again he cursed being forced to operate in a town that employed the devil-touched creatures as law enforcers.  He tried to dodge aside as the creature raised its rifle, but as he did so, felt a sharp pain in his calf.  He tumbled forward to the ground as the creature advanced on him.  He saw another one approaching from down the street as he fought to regain his feet.  He hobbled forward, and the myrmida seemed to be in no rush now.  They knew that he was cornered and hobbled, and were enjoying the last moments of the chase.  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” he muttered.  He dropped a pouch of marbles behind him in the hopes of slowing down the pursuers, and kept limping forward    Yelmak found himself in a huge open square at the edge of the docks.  A chaotic tangle of platforms extending into the empty air at the edge of the island, they were the mooring place for an eclectic of collection of airships and zeppelins, of both magical and steam-powered designs.  Over a dozen myrmida were emerging into the square from its tributary alleys.  They seemed to regard him with a cold amusement, making no move to attack.  A crowd had emerged from the Rusty Shiv, a popular sailors’ tavern, to watch the entertainment.  Knowing they had him cornered, the ant-creatures slowly moved in to make the capture.  He knew there would be no mercy for him in the enforcement system after offending a citizen as powerful as Vorstad.  He was backed up onto one of the docks, with two of the myrmida slowly approaching.  He glanced down at the clouds below and the blasted contours of the surface even below that.  He bared his fangs.  “I won’t give you the satisfaction, oppressors!” he called, and took a final step back off the end of the platform.      Yelmak caught a momentary glimpse of the shocked expressions on the bystanders’ faces as he began to fall.  The black carapaces of the myrmida betrayed no emotion, but he imagined their bafflement with a sneer.  The cold wind whipped at his clothes as he dropped.  The docks and the stony surface of the island passed before his eyes, and in seconds they were above him and he was falling free.  His lips curled into a tight smile as he raised his left wrist to his face and looked with gratitude at the broken shackle he wore as a bracelet.  The symbol of the Kobold Liberation Front, it was enchanted to aid agents in just such situations by slowing their fall to a safe level.  He glanced down again, and the smile disappeared.  He would survive the fall, confounding his enemies for a little bit at least, but there was no guarantee he would survive much longer.  He shivered, recalling the bedtime tales told to him by his father, of the Devourer, the unrestrained force of pure entropy and destruction, which lay in wait on the surface.  Its creation 500 years ago had been the greatest cataclysm the world had ever known, and had forced the devastated remnants of civilization into the sky to escape it.  None of the stories ever mentioned the physical form of the Devourer, for none had seen it and lived.  It was only known that its attention and that of the demons that somehow seemed to coexist with it on the surface were drawn like iron shavings to a lodestone by any form of order or technology, even one as simple as woven cloth.As he continued to fall, Yelmak reached into his beltpouch and withdrew a small paper fan, inscribed with intricate glyphs and sigils.  He raised it to underneath his chin and fanned outward as he spoke tersely, “KLF high command, this is agent Yelmak.  Mission failed, I am wounded and have been forced off the side of island.  Now falling towards surface.”  The breeze from the fan seemed to catch the words as they left his mouth and whisk them away into the air.  As it did so, the glyphs on the surface of the fan flared and then faded, one at a time.  With his last word, the last glyph faded, and the fan crumpled into dust.  Yelmak glanced down and saw that he was nearing the ground.  Trying to compose his mind, Yelmak began removing his equipment, as he had been warned to do.  His pistol, dagger, lockpicks, rope, and everything else he was carrying were soon in a bundle in his arms.  He glanced down at his clothes.  Well-spun woolen cloth emblazoned with the Vorstad symbol.  He grimaced—they would have to go too.  When he was naked and shivering, he wrapped the clothes around the rest of the equipment.  He looked at the broken manacle, but couldn’t bring himself to throw it away as well.  He needed it to fall safely, and whatever order it had once had was lost when it was broken, he reasoned.  He was within a few hundred feet of the ground then, and tied his belt in a knot around the bundle and used the trailing end to swing it around twice and launch it into the air as far away from him as he could.  Yelmak hit the ground and his legs almost buckled under the force of the impact.  He bent down to snatch up a rock from the ground, and looked around to take in the surrounding terrain. It actually didn’t look as bad as he had initially expected from the tales of horror of the surface.  He was in a hilly scrubland dotted with occasional rock outcroppings.  A few small animals were nibbling at the bushes.  There was no sign, at least in this area, of any disaster.  A chill wind blew from the west, where the sun had just set behind a large hill several miles away.  His teeth began to chatter and he started awkwardly jogging toward the hill, simply as a way to keep warm.  The first thing to do was to find shelter, he thought, and then work from there.  Yelmak deliberately focused his mind on the mechanics of survival, squelching the part of it that kept threatening to start gibbering in uncontrollable panic at being exposed to the Devourer.As Yelmak crested one of the rock outcroppings, he looked back the way he had come.  A little ways south of the spot he had fallen, he was barely able to make out an indistinct number of shadowy shapes milling around the spot where his bundle had landed, doing something to it.  Somehow, the sight of them instantly filled him with an indescribable sense of dread and unease.  Something just seemed utterly wrong about their shapes.  They seemed to finish with whatever it was and began moving off in various directions, several appearing to be coming towards him.  He shuddered, wishing he hadn’t looked back, and redoubled his speed.With his mind on the things behind him, he skidded around another large boulder and let out a sharp yelp as he came face to face with some sort of beast with four legs, two arms, two heads, and a variety of indefinable protrusions.  It seemed to leap back in startlement at the sight of him as well, and as he caught his breath and looked at it more calmly, he realized that it was simply an old halfling riding a donkey.  The old man’s hair and beard went wildly in all different directions, he was garbed in unworked animal furs, and he stared at Yelmak through rheumy, distrustful, eyes.  <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17116" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17116</a> Yelmak stood there trying to decide whether to fight, run, or try to talk, with one hand holding his rock raised to throw and the other covering his nakedness.  After a tense moment of staring at each other, both parties seemed to relax a tiny amount.  The old halfling spoke up in a querulous voice, “Aright, then demon.  My time’s long up, and ye can have old Mohai without a fight.”  It was a strange, archaic dialect of the halfling language, but Yelmak was able to make it out with difficulty.  Still distrustful, Yelmak replied, “I’m no demon.”“Aye, ye looks different.  But if ye’re nae demon, what—“ The speech cut off as a spine-chilling growl was heard, and a spined, dog-like creature leaped down from the outcropping.  There were bulges under its skin that seemed to constantly move about as though something was trying to fight its way out.  In its first rush it knocked Yelmak to the ground and its claw ripped into his side.  As he tried to regain his feet, the beast slapped him back down with another claw and gathered itself for a lunge for the throat.  Yelmak looked up and saw Mohai shrug and his eyes roll back in concentration.  Suddenly there was a loud snap and the beast leaped into the air, yowling in pain and shaking its head wildly.  It turned to face the old man, and Yelmak seized the moment of distraction, leaping to his feet and stabbing the pointy part of his rock into the creature’s eye.  It let out a piercing shriek and then lay still.  The old halfling extended his hand to Yelmak.  “If ye want to live now, ye’d best come.  There’ll be more o’ them along now that they’ve heard this one.  Up on Binster now.”  With a last harried glance behind him, Yelmak leaped up onto the donkey, which began to canter forward at a rapid clip.  With several minutes of distance behind them, they pulled to a halt.  Yelmak heard snorts, growls, and calls in some strange language echoing from the rocks seemingly all around them.  They had stopped at the edge of a large trench, a place where the bushes and grasses vanished and a scar had been cut into the land.  The ground sank down nearly 10 feet, and no plants grew there—just barren black rock.  <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17117" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17117</a> “Quickly now.  Into the tendrilscar.  They willnae find us there.”  With some prodding, they coaxed the donkey into the trench and followed it down themselves.  They crouched under a slight overhang, and slowly let themselves relax.  “Heh.  These tendrilscars be the safest places to hide.  There’s nae life in them, so we be harder fer the beasties to find.”The horrid sounds seemed to be coming no nearer them now, and even dispersing somewhat.  Yelmak looked at his new companion questioningly, “But what causes them?”“Well, the beasties out there,” he made a vague gesture with his arm, “they come find ye if there’s too many of ye, or ye have too much stuff with ye.  But if there be something even bigger, like one o’ them big metal things from the sky, a tendril o’ pulsing light shoots out of the earth and rips along until it gobbles up the big metal thing.”  The old man bowed his head and Yelmak made out tears standing in the corners of his eyes.  “This’n’s from when a metal thing came down and the big folk in it rounded up all my tribe in chains.  Binster’n’ me were out getting herbs when they came so they missed us.”  His voice was oddly calm and steady as he related the story.  “They fought off a bunch o’ the beasties while my people were fighting to get free o’ them, and something happened to the metal thing.  They couldnae fly any more, and while they tried to get it to fly, a tendril came up and ripped the whole thing to bits.  All me people were inside the metal thing when it happened.”Amazed at the old man’s fatalistic tone, Yelmak didn’t know what to say.  “I hate slavers too.”  He offered lamely.“Aye, ye seem like a decent sort.”  Seeming to sense Yelmak’s surprise at his attitude, he added “It’s just a part o’ life.  Ye can’t expect to live long.  I was about ready for me own end so I headed out to find the beasties, but ye seemed like ye might not be ready just yet.”  He cracked a slight, toothless smile.As the rest of the night passed, they talked for a little bit longer, and then fell asleep. Dawn brought Yelmak awake with a start.  The trench looked equally bleak in the daylight, but he could almost kiss the black rocks for hiding him from the creatures pursuing him.  He looked up into the sky, hoping that he hadn’t missed his chance by falling asleep.  His heart leapt and he had to rub his eyes to make sure he wasn’t imagining it, but right there above him and to the north was a cloud that was moving quickly, and against the wind.  He leaped to his feet and began waving his arms, and the cloud began to approach and descend.He roused his companion.  “My people are coming for me.  You can come too, since there’s nothing left for you down here.  You’ll even get a chance to strike back against the slavers.”With a bleary look in his eyes, Mohai nodded.  “Aye, I suppose ye’re right.  Perhaps me time isn’t quite yet.”  A slight smile played around the corners of his mouth.Yelmak waited, dancing from foot to foot in impatience as the cloud approached.  Finally, it enveloped them in a thick fog, and he saw the swirling mass of air of the creature that was pulling the ship.  A rope and a ladder dropped to them.  “Hurry aboard.  There’s demons inbound.”  Rushing through the motions, Yelmak tied a knot around Binster and he and Mohai scurried up the ladder as the donkey was hauled up.  The ship lurched forward again into the air as they were surrounded in the fog by kobolds congratulating them.  One of them tossed a black robe to Yelmak <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17118" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17118</a> “Here, put this on so you’re not naked at least.”He gladly did so, and relaxed among friends as they flew higher and higher into the air.  He would yet have his chance to bring down Vorstad.</blockquote>

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