A Big Mouth Don’t Make A Big Man

So after Frankie gave us his whole speech, we uh.. well we clobbered him. It wasn’t a fight it was a slaughter. He had a whole buncha the undead goblins, but they wasn’t tough. I just felt bad for those poor folks, even in undeath they probably didn’t wanna be fighting. But they would die to a strong gust of wind, which was probably great for everybody but ol’ Frank. We seen Luca’s parents, we knew it was them because there was four corpses missing from the graves downstairs and we seen two men fighting our living goblin buddies outside. So Vebradu and Sledge ran up and tried talking to them to snap them out of whatever stupor Frank had ‘em under. Larry used the last of the potion we got from the witch to turn himself invisible and start messing with Frank. He had a bunch of summoning circles and pentagrams and such and Larry just waltzed right up and started scraping the paint off. Meanwhile, me, Big Clyde, Vidar, and our cleric buddy was dealing with the goblins.

There was a whole bunch of ‘em, so we wanted to deal with them first before advancing further. But that didn’t turn out to be the best strategy, they didn’t harm us much. The real problem was stupid Frank, he had a whole buncha spells. I dunno if I can.. make this… make any sense. But, if you ever get out adventuring - which I do not recommend - this’ll be something that might make sense. Whenever you’re fighting a mage or wizard of some kind, there’s usually three types. One is a healer who’s surrounded by a buncha stronger fellas. Another is a lone wizard who knows a bunch and’s got thirty spells that can flay your skin in thirty different ways depending on their mood. The last one is a stupid, stupid maniac who thinks he’s better ‘n you and has only got spells to make killing him annoying. Nothing that’ll kill you, nothing that’ll heal him, nothing that’ll turn a prince to a frog or make gold outta iron, just stuff that makes it take too damn long to kill him! He put these stupid.. you ain’t gonna believe me, he summoned skeleton hands out of the ground to grab our ankles.

Why would I know where they came from? No, just straight outta the ground. Probably hundreds of hands, I dunno, I wasn’t really counting. But Vidar, Big Clyde, Vebradu, and our cleric buddy got stuck in ‘em, I just barely avoided it because Frank is stupid and has bad aim. Oh, I shoulda mentioned, we found those hostages from town. The blacksmith and the guard boy. They was tied up in the back of the summoning circles. By the time I’d killed probably.. I dunno, 30 or so goblins?

Well how would you know how many I killed, you was busy looking at dusty skulls. Okay, maybe it was like.. 20. But it was still a lot. More than you.

That don’t matter, I killed a whole buncha goblins. And then I realized that the dang ritual was about to happen and Frank was probably gonna kill ‘em. Vebradu and I made a plan, he has this spell that.. well I don’t know how it works, but its like a lil dart that always hits exactly where he wants it to. He fired one off onto the blacksmith’s restraints, and I hopped on Big Clyde to get over the stupid skeleton pit to run over to the boy with my knife. I untied him, but the mommas was right next to me and Vebradu and Sledge hadn’t been able to get them out of whatever spell Frank had ‘em under. They seemed more aware of what was going on, it was just hard for them to find the strength. I know it hurt a whole lot, because right after I helped the kid out of his ropes, Frank put some kinda spell on me. It hurt like hell. My bones and muscles didn’t want to move with what I was telling them to do, they wanted to listen to the damn necromancer. It was alright, though, by then he realized the jig was up. I ran over and punched his smug self in the face, his minions was slowly turning on him, his ritual circles was broken, and his sacrifices was out of his reach. There wasn’t nothing more he could do but grab our ankles some more.

He turned into a bunch of bats and started flying to the window, but he was too damn stupid to fly out of the window. He turned into bats to fly about.. 10 paces? Then turned back into a man, in order to announce that he was leaving. He’s so stupid. Obviously Sledge and Vidar and me ran up and ganged up on him. They did most of the work, Vidar had dislocated his jaw and Sledge was bashing his head in the wall. I just kicked him in the stomach a lot. But it felt good. It really did.

I don’t really know how to explain what happened after. It was weird. Okay, so you know how some wizard folk have themselves a little critter that follows them around? Frank had one too, a crow of some kind. The crow watched us from some hanging lights but didn’t do a whole lot. It was wearing a funny looking necklace with a rat head on it. But after we killed Frank the skull started.. talking. In Frank’s voice. He started spouting on about how he hates us so much and we ruined all his plans and this would take months to set back up again. We shut him up after. Sledge just crushed the rat head in his hands. Thank goodness.

After that we helped the living goblins go back home. They was real happy to have their buddies on the way back. Town was also real happy that all their problems was over and done with. They didn’t have much more to give us in return for everything. Well, Vidar turned in his bounty, which I hear fetched him a pretty penny. Then we picked up Enrique and made our way to Camino. Which was real bad timing for me.