The Exiled Prince

The Chase

Nobody was willing to rest. The trapmaster had a head start and they had to catch him.

The first obstacle was a bear trap laid across the way. Herald solved it by throwing his pizza rat companion, Herald II, onto the trigger plate. The jaws snapped shut on empty air. Herald II had already sprung clear, entirely unbothered, and was collected back onto his master's shoulder.

The Lookouts

The stair wound down into the dark and opened onto a room of overturned furniture. Three kobolds had made a firing line, crouched behind tables and barrels with crossbows trained on the bottom of the steps. Bolts came whistling up before anyone had both feet on the floor.

It was an ugly fight from a bad position, and Herald came within a hair of falling in it. Worse, it worked exactly as intended — while the party was pinned at the stairs, the trapmaster slipped out through a narrow passage, and left one last trap armed behind him to seal the way.

Pressed against the northern wall for cover, Herald and Beans found something that had nothing to do with kobolds at all. The stone there was carved with pictographs, and set into it were four plaques engraved with Dwarven runes. Not one member of the party could read a word of it.

The Mermaid Fountain

Ja-ja was not going to let the trapmaster walk away twice. He unbuckled the fine short sword he'd taken off a dead kobold a level above, laid it carefully on the trigger, and stepped back. The trap spent itself harmlessly on the blade, and he was through.

Beyond lay a chamber dominated by a great marble fountain, crowned with a mermaid whose lips were pursed as though caught mid-kiss — or mid-whistle. Finn came through after Ja-ja and stepped a little too close.

The mermaid began to spin. Torrential blasts of water shot from her lips, sweeping the chamber at random and hammering anything they caught. Through the far doorway, Finn made out the shapes of four more kobolds — and the trapmaster hauling that door shut behind him.

By the time the last of the lookouts fell among the overturned furniture and the rest of the party pushed through, the fountain was still turning. Four mechanisms sat at the corners of the basin, one already broken. They proved easy to hit and stubbornly difficult to break. Corpi gave up on them and swung at the mermaid herself, only to find her a maddeningly hard target. Finn and Beans went at the mechanisms with tools and technique and came agonizingly close to disabling them — but in the end it was barbaric strength that did it, one corner at a time, until the water finally died.

The coins in the basin were still there: 28 cp, 8 sp, and 2 gp.

A Dozen Voices

The obvious move was to follow the trapmaster. The party got as far as the door and stopped, because they could hear what waited on the other side of it — kobold voices. A lot of them. Perhaps a dozen.

So they took stock instead. Spells spent, potions drunk, more than one of them a bad hit from the floor, and no proper rest since the fishery cellar. Rather than open that door, they buried it, piling up the rubble the fountain's own water had eroded out of the walls until the way was blocked. Rygel carefully copied down the Dwarven runes to find someone who could read them, and the party climbed back toward daylight.

Tamily's History Lesson

Tamily Tanderveil was horrified — not by the spiders, or the undead, or the sarcophagus, but by the word kobolds.

She told them what the town remembers. After Aesephana Menhemes died, Otari was abandoned, and kobolds overran the empty streets — lighting false beacons to lure passing ships onto the rocks so they could strip the wrecks — until Aesephana's granddaughter came back and drove them out. It seems they never actually left. They went down. They have been living beneath the town ever since, nursing the grudge and waiting for their moment.

She told the party to rest and come back tomorrow, and offered half the promised reward up front. Ja-ja, Finn, Rygel, and Corpi took the 5 gp advance. Beans, Herald, and Shiro turned it down and said they would take their pay when the job was finished.

A Night in Otari

The party rested, healed, and traded alchemical recipes. Ja-ja cooked down the meat he'd been harvesting off the rats and the kobolds, then went looking for self-improvement at the Dawnflower Library — the largest building in town, which smells of baking and is run by the tiny blonde halfling Vandy Banderdash. He came away with a library card, a healer's toolkit, and two borrowed books: Healing for Dummies and Founders of Otari.

Beans took his new sword to Wrin Sivinxi and recounted the whole expedition. Wrin spotted the rune set into his blade is a potency rune, and for a price, a blacksmith can transfer it onto any weapon he likes.

He went on to the Rowdy Rockfish hoping for a gay night out and found the quietest room in Otari — Brelda Venkervale, the mannish dwarven woman who runs the place, sitting alone with her grief over her missing son Lasda.

Finn went to see his contact Yinyasmera at the Crook's Nook and laid it all out: spiders, undead, a sarcophagus, kobolds. Only the last of it meant anything to her. There had been a kobold sighting in town lately, at the Ruins of the Thirsty Alpaca.

The Haunting of the Thirsty Alpaca

Rygel, Herald, and Corpi spent that night in the ruins — the collapsed shell of what was once Otari's largest tavern, and where Herald once worked a kitchen.

They were woken by four spectral blue lights, which drifted together into a single amorphous glow and announced, in a suitably sepulchral voice, that this place was haunted and they had to leave.

Herald was unmoved, and attempted to charge the spirit rent. Corpi began reading the Raven Queen's last rites over it. The lights insisted. The three of them refused to move, and after a while the ghost simply gave up and winked out.

Pay No Attention to the Kobold

In the morning Finn walked over to tell his friends about Yinyasmera's kobold sighting, and found them already camped in the middle of it. They searched the place properly, and in the wreckage of what had been the storeroom, Rygel uncovered a trap door.

The ghost reappeared at once — and its dread pronouncements had acquired a distinctly pleading edge. It begged Rygel to leave the trap door alone. To go away. To pay it no mind.

They were far too tempted to listen. Beans and Ja-ja were fetched, with a stop at the Rowdy Rockfish to put the copied runes in front of Brelda, and then the party came back and opened it anyway.

Below was a crawlspace, mostly caved in; if a passage had ever led out of it, that collapsed long ago. Crouched inside, hands raised mid-incantation, was a small green kobold.

The lights said, with waning conviction: "Pay no attention to the kobold."

Ja-ja was down the hole in a heartbeat and had him thoroughly terrified in about the same time. Whatever else he was, the kobold plainly wasn't a threat — and once he stopped shaking, he talked.

The Prince's Tale

His name is Prince Kolgan, second-born of the kobold royal line, and he is an exile. His sister, Queen Zolgran, cast him out.

Zolgran is raising a dragon beneath Otari.

She has been feeding it stolen fish — which is precisely where Tamily's catch has been going — and it is growing at an alarming rate. When it is big enough, she means to loose it: destroy the town, slaughter the surface dwellers, and settle a grudge five centuries old. Kolgan fought her over it, unwilling to start a war he believes will be the end of his own people. That fight is what brought the Thirsty Alpaca down on top of them.

He has been hiding beneath the ruins ever since, too frightened to go up. He is certain that any human who spotted a kobold walking Otari's streets would see him lynched before he could get a word out — and after the history Tamily had recited the night before, nobody could tell him he was wrong.

Finn talked him around all the same: come back to the fishery, stand against your sister, and give your people someone else to follow. Corpi bundled the prince into a winter coat, and the party walked an exiled kobold heir straight through the middle of town without a single passerby looking twice.

The Riddles of the Four

Brelda's translation turned the four Dwarven plaques into four riddles, and each riddle named an element: fire, air, water, and mountain.

Back at the carved wall, the party pressed the pictographs the riddles pointed to. Stone ground against stone, and a passage opened — flooded, and running deep.

It forks. One way leads toward the source of the flooding, and a faint glowing light. The other leads toward a horrid stench.