Bal crouched low near the ledge, knowing his next
move must be timed perfectly. As the first goat lept to attack him,
he leapt as well and delivered a spinning crescent kick to the goat, knocking
it into the other one and causing both of them to plummet 30 feet to the
ground, fracturing at least a limb a piece and making further attempts
to climb the building impossible.
Balanthalus smirked as the flaming creature approached
him. No intellegence, this one. The creature did not appear
to be magically bound or loyal to its creator. How foolish.
He began to weave a tale of how J . . Julian was his name, planned to quench
fires and how he planned to bring all fire creatures to the coldness of
the material plane. This, along with the cloud of frost the bard
produced from his bag, convinced the creature to channel its agressions
back onto its summoner.
A loose stone made an almost inaudable noise.
Bal backfliped just in time to avoid a searing blast of lightning. "Nice shot, Blackhand," said the bard, "if you're aiming for the sky, that is. If you were aiming for me, that was a pretty lousy shot."
Bazil's staff flared again and again, but his magical
bolts were not as quick as the agile half-elf. Then the bard seemed
to dissapear. At the same time, Bazil felt a sharp pain in the back
of his leg, then turned to see a grinning Bal holding a bloodied rapier.
Infuriated, Bazil summoned all of his strength for an enormous fireball,
which from his point of view hit the bard dead on and engulfed the area
in a thick smoke.
"Damn cocky bard," muttered Bazil, "he got what
was coming to him."
"Sorry, not quite, but thanks for playing our game,"
said a voice behind him. Before Bazil could react, the end of some
kind of percussion instrument connected with the back of his head, knocking
him out cold.
Balanthalus moved to finish him, but something seemed
unpleasantly dishonorable about that, and he also had the nagging feeling
that this conflict would have a grander ending Besides, he had just
had a positively hillarious idea. He rolled on the ground for a while
in laughter considering what he was about to do.
Bal was still laughing when he got back. He was
almost hoping that Bazil would survive, just so he could see the look on
his face. Somehow sensing that his other adversary did not yet grasp
that he had two mortal enemies to confront and was going to "get grub"
or some such thing, Bal turned his attention to other matters.
He knew that summoning endless monsters would not
get the job done, and if both of his adversaries survived what he had just
done to them, melee combat against both of them would possibly be more
than he could handle, Balanthalus looked for an "edge." He sat in
a lotus position, communing with the Muses and Fates and Monty Pythons
to find an ultimate weapon to defeat his enemies. A map vaugely formed
itself in his mind. After several minutes of meditation, he knew the general
direction in which to travel, although this vauge feeling gave him no destination
and no idea of the nature of the item he sought. Balanthalus set
off heading north.
About ten miles to the southeast, as dawn was breaking,
Bazil came to. Groggy, he felt his hands and feet bound, the feeling
that he was suspended in midair, and a breeze. Strange. Opening
his eyes and trying to shake off sleepiness, he slowly made a series of
startling realizations. First, he noticed that he was tied to the
top of a 20 foot high wooden flagpole. After taking this in and starting
to become afraid of a sudden drop, he looked down and became aware that
a crowd was developing in the village below. It consisted mainly
of women, some staring open-mouthed, some pointing and giggling, and some
just shaking
their heads.
It was then that he noticed his equipment was missing.
ALL of it. Including his clothing. He turned beet red with embarassment
and started to feel the pain of all those splinters in his backside, as
well as the nasty wound in his leg that would prevent proper walking for
a few days. The bard had a sick sense of humor. He would pay.
But first, how to get down? Bazil tried to figure out a dignified
way to ask the townspeople for help. However, it seemed that a small
band of
men was approaching to help him.
Bazil was slighty unsettled to find that they carried
weapons when they came closer. "We are followers of Paladine here,
pervert," said the leader, "we don't appreciate your kind in our village."
"But . . . but . . . someone else put me here!"
The men shrugged. They didn't seem to be incredibly
bright, and Bazil knew that reason was not going to be able to penetrate
their thick skulls. Normally he'd then resort to magic or force,
but in this case, niether seemed possible. "Can this day get any
worse," he thought?
As if to answer him, one of the men said, "Make
your peace. In these parts, indecent exposure is punishable by death
. . ."