Some friends and I were testing a little light-D&D game last night over a Discord server. I don’t play nearly enough D&D, but it was fun as hell. I sort-of wrote up a little story based on it. The characters may never be used again – it was just supposed to be a test run of the D&D-lite system one of them came up with. But it was fun anyway!

And I appear to have settled into playing reptilian women. I probably have some mild psychosis. Technically she’s an Argonian, but staying in the D&D universe, she’s an unusually large kobold instead. Level 1 Paladin. Large in height and… other ways as well.

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The Myconid she called Shitaki was worried. It didn’t say so in words, of course. It didn’t talk. A mouth would be required for that. But she knew how it felt all the same. It’s communication spores were just another kind of magic to her. She did know a thing or two about magic, but not it’s kind of magic. It didn’t talk to her in any way that could be called ‘talking’, but nonetheless she somehow knew what it wanted her to know. And right now it was upset. Apparently it sensed something WRONG in this old, weird place. Something was coming, but it couldn’t tell her more than that – not because of the communication spores, but because it didn’t know itself.

As for the place, even she could sense it had once been a place of some sort of arcane power. The fixtures and pedestals indicated that it once housed a lot of people working at something. The scraps of writing were unintelligible, but the illustrations were enough for her to gather that they made something here. Something alchemical, which was not her expertise. Still, it seemed likely there might be something left of value here, which is why they came in the first place. So far, though, nothing. It had obviously been picked clean in the intervening centuries since it was occupied.

She watched the mobile fungus climb the stairs to the roof in order to scan the surrounding area while she stayed in the relative darkness inside. Though her companion was odd, somehow the silence within became even more tomb-like. It bothered her, and she didn’t like that. She was a damn Paladin now! She shouldn’t be bothered by just being alone. Her darkvision was more than enough for this place. It wasn’t really that dark anyway. But when her tail accidentally knocked over some unknown metallic tool onto the floor, she jumped involuntarily and spun around, hands readying the spell she always kept prepared.  

“Okay,” she thought as she dropped her hands back to her sides. “Maybe I am just a level 1 Paladin, but no Paladin should be so skittish just because she’s alone. Besides, I’ve got fucking SCALES. I’m not some goddamned skin-bag that bleeds at the touch of a fucking feather!”

She picked up the tool. A long thing, fashioned with metal. Tongs, she decided, though rust had long ago locked the joint up tight. Garbage now.

“What the fuck did you make here anyway?” she thought.

No answer came to her, but she heard the ceiling creak overhead as her partner moved about, obviously not in a hurry. Whatever it was worried about, it had found nothing yet.

And then she noticed a glow begin from the sink. She didn’t know what else to call it but a sink. The design was odd, but it obviously had been made to catch some liquid and pour it down the hole in the center. Only the volume of that liquid must have been massive. The sink’s hole was huge.  And now it was glowing blue from deep below. She stepped away from it and called to the Myconid.

“Hey Shitaki! You better get down here. Something’s happening!”

Sounds began to emanate from the sink-hole. A voice, she realized. It wasn’t Draconic, but it wasn’t the language of the humans either – though it sounded like a human. She looked around for a hiding place and saw a sort of large table, solid to the floor. She got behind it and ducked low, making sure to keep her tail out of sight as well. Something WAS coming, and it was coming through that sink-hole. She made a mental note. The Myconid was weird, but it was right yet again.

And then an oddly dressed human came running through the hole. Not climbing, running sideways as if the ground was on her right. It was all she could do to keep from laughing as the man’s orientation immediately changed and gravity took hold. He fell, but his momentum carried him out of the sink and onto the floor.

“Holy Shit!” he said in an oddly accented, but now perfectly understandable, human tongue as he shook his head. His entry may have been unorthodox, but the man that came out of the sink was clearly human. He was wild-eyed and with an accent that bespoke more than just coming from a different place. Somehow, the twang of it struck her as pure backwoods ignorance. But the wild eyes were obvious enough. This man was high on something. His clothing was well-worn and stained from who-knows-what. He did not spot her, watching from low at the edge of the table. Of course, without darkvision he would have to be looking very closely to spot the head of a very large kobold watching from her vantage point. Large, that is, from a normal kobold’s perspective. Even at full height she still stood a little shorter than a human.

But he wasn’t much interested in his surroundings. Once he’d reoriented himself after coming through the sink-hole, he turned back towards the sink. In one hand he held a smoothly-tapered wooden club of strange design. In the other, something even more strange that she didn’t recognize. It was somewhat longer than the club, but twin metal tubes ran the length of it back to a curved wooden stock. She realized quickly that it was some sort of ranged weapon – the design of the stock was too similar to that of a crossbow to mistake.

Suddenly three more figures came through the sink-hole. More men. Fat men. They took the same odd, parabolic route through the open air that he had before falling to the ground in a pile of fat.

The first man laughed. “Pigs in a Pile!”

Then he turned away, obviously looking to run, but one of the three threw something at him and he went down with a curse.

He wasn’t down long, but it was long enough for the three to untangle themselves and come at the wild-eyed man in earnest.

She got angry. She had no idea what was going on here, but her native sense of balance told her that three-against-one was simply not a fair fight. As she watched it progress, it was clear that the three in identical clothing were gaining the upper hand. In fact it was only due to their own ineptitude that the wild-eyed man survived thus far. One even threw his belt at the guy. It hit him squarely on the head. For his part, the wild-eyed man had swung his club at another man’s jaw, and she winced in sympathetic pain as the man was left with less teeth inside of his mouth than out.

Yet they wouldn’t stop. It was clear this fight was going to be to the death.

Suddenly she felt the Myconid’s question. “Where?”

She did her best to picture where the fight was, and she heard a noise above as her partner moved over their heads. It jumped, hard. She realized Shitaki was trying to break through the roof and fall directly on them. Unfortunately he only managed to break some boards, and she saw what passed for its foot dangling from above.  The fighters below didn’t even look up.

Another blow and the wild-eyed man was staggering, clearly succumbing to superior numbers.  The man who’d thrown his belt was standing now, looking ridiculous as his pants fell to his ankles.

“This can’t end with them winning,” she thought. “No one THAT stupid should be allowed to win a fight like this just because there’s more of them. It’s time I did something about this…”

And then the roof fell in. Shitake’s aim was true. What was left of one of the three men in uniform was no longer recognizable as human. Shitaki, though not THAT tall, was still a massively heavy mushroom.

She’d had enough. She stood up and ran over to the man in his underwear. Both of the men left standing in uniform just stared at her as if they’d never seen a reptile-woman before, as did the wild-eyed man. But she didn’t hesitate. She ripped the underwear from the man and grabbed his penis.

“Drop it now,” she said clearly and distinctly to the other uniformed man who was poised to club the wild-eyed man yet again with a small truncheon, “…or I swear I’ll rip it off.”

He just continued to stare at her, as did the man she held.

“Oh fuck. You don’t believe the word of a Paladin? You will,” she said and pulled. Hard. The scream was pretty much what she expected and she felt the blood spray across her hand and leg.

The wild-eyed man laughed and threw his club at the man in front of him. At the same time, she loosed her magic missile at him, assuming the emasculated man behind her would no longer be a threat. Unfortunately she miscalculated and the missile flew wide.  But the club did it’s job well enough anyway. Though not dead, the uniformed man in front of the wild-eyed man was down. She spun around as the scream behind her changed in pitch, and she saw the emasculated man running at her, murder in his eyes and apparently oblivious to his own pain. She had no time to react, but she saw the wild-eyed man raise the odd weapon. She fell to her knees.

Her ears rang with the sound of thunder at close-range, as she was blinded by a flash of light from one of the two tubes of the weapon. Instantly the rain began to fall as well. It took her a second to realize that she was unhurt herself. Then she looked behind her. Where the man’s head used to be, there was nothing. The rain she felt was blood and gore.

“Holy fuck!” she said, eyes wide, as she turned back to the wild-eyed man.

“Put HIM the hell out of his misery! Fuckin’ pig.”

She looked at the wild-eyed man behind the weapon, her own eyes wide.

“I’d say so! What the hell IS that thing?”

“Aw, this? It’s a shotgun. You want a taste? I don’t know what you are, but I got another round.”

“Hell no! Look mister, I don’t know you. Me and my partner were just here to see what we could scavenge.”

“Partner?”

The Myconid moved towards the wild-eyed man, towering over him menacingly.

“That’s my partner, Shitaki. I suggest you put that weapon down. You can’t kill us both and…” she smiled a toothy grin as she dropped something at the man’s feet. “If you don’t kill me, I can perform instant gender transformation on you, too. But I warn you, my friend is meaner than me. It can do things I have no idea of!”

Which, technically speaking, was true. She liked the Myconid, but she knew little about their kind. They were just too different. But it had stayed with her the past few weeks since they met, and she was happy to have it’s company.

“Aw shucks,” said the wild-eyed man as he lowered the weapon. “Didn’t mean nothing by it. Not every day I come across a big-boobed lizard and a mushroom man!”

She instinctively looked down at herself, trying to decide if she wanted to be offended or not. Other than her admittedly big tits, she was covered in blood and gore. She smiled. Even in his drug-addled state, she must look pretty wicked to his eyes. She decided not to be offended. This time.

She put a hand out, in the standard human method of greeting. “Well then, if we’re going to be peaceable, I guess introductions are in order. What’s your name, human?”

He took the hand and she breathed a sigh of relief internally. That weapon was awesomely powerful.

“I’m Cletus. I’m from Tennessee! Where the hell am I now? You don’t look like you’re even from Kentucky!”

She cocked a head at the strange words and looked back towards the sink-hole. “Tenasea? Is that down there?”

“Fuck if I know!”

“Well, Tenasea Cletus, I’m Darvan and this, I think I mentioned, is Shitaki.”

The man reached out a hand to the Myconid.

“He doesn’t shake. Or talk.”

“Damn, this is some GOOOO meth! I ain’t never had no trippin’ this bad-ass before! Where the fuck am I?”

“As best we can figure, this is some sort of achemical shrine. I think thousands of years ago some alchemists made something here, though I’ve no idea what. But enough of that, I want to see what your friends were carrying.”

Cletus look around, then back to her as she bent to rummage through the pockets of the dead men.

“Wooohoo! Ain’t no lizards got a booty like that where I come from!”

Darvan rolled her eyes. Humans. He might use odd words, but his meaning was clear enough.

“I get it. I’ve been around humans plenty. You want to fuck me. Do yourself a favor, Tenasea Cletus. Keep your penis in your pants and stop calling me ‘lizard’ or I’ll make it so that is an impossibility. Now, what are these?”

She showed him what she’d found on the dead men, but she watched his eyes closely. They went instantly to an odd L-shaped object that had a triggering mechanism similar to his ‘shotgun’.

“Oh, that’s nothing… Here, let me take that off yer hands…”

“Ah-ahh… No, I don’t think so,” she said, her eyes narrowing. Instead she packed the object into her inventory and turned back to him.

“Tenasea Cletus, do you trust me?” she said, an inspiration hitting her.

“No,” he said, rubbing the blood from an eye from a gash over it.

“Well, I don’t trust you either. But I’m a Paladin. Do you know what that means? A Paladin?”

“Um… like a knight?”

“Yes. Like a knight.”

“You look more like a dragon than a knight,” Cleatus said.

That surprised her and her head retracted a bit in surprise at the unexpected complement.

“Well Cletus! That’s very nice of you to say! Thank you!”

Cletus smiled. The gaps where some teeth once were didn’t bother her too much. All humans were pretty disgusting anyway. She continued…

“Anyway, it also means I have some magic ability of my own. I can heal you, if you let me. But I have to touch you.”

“Well, hell yes! Heal away dragon-lady!”

She put a hand to his head and mouthed the words of the spell. Instantly the wound over the eye healed itself as well as other other wounds that weren’t as apparent.

“There,” she said, but didn’t take her hand away. “You’re not completely healed. I’m only a level 1 Paladin, but it should help.”

“Sure! I feel great now.”

Then she cast another spell, while she had him under her hand. Just a little charm spell. She needed something more from him.

Unfortunately, it failed to cast. “Dammit,” she said.

“What? What was that?”

She looked at him hard. She was going to have to trust him to learn what she wanted to know.

“Cletus, that was a charm spell. It didn’t work though. Cletus, I need you to show me how these things work I got off that guy. I know it’s a projectile weapon – that’s pretty clear by the mechanism on the bottom. It looks just like yours. I also know you want it. Well, Cletus, I want it too. I need to trust that you’ll show me how to work it, and then give it back.”

Through the drug-induced haze, it appeared Cletus was struggling to decide if he wanted to be trustworthy or not. But it wasn’t long before he came to a decision.

“Sure, dragon-lady. I’ll show you. It’s called a pistol…” he said, and she reluctantly handed it to him.

A few minutes later, she felt confident she understood it’s functionality, as well as the loading of the magazines that held the bullets that he showed her how to use. And, fortunately, he handed it back to her.

“Thank you, Tenesea Cletus. For a drug addict, you’re not a bad guy.”

“For a lizard…” he began, but she held up her clawed hand with one sharp finger raised.

“I mean, for a dragon-lady…” he corrected.

She nodded happily.

“You’re okay too.”

“Well”, she said, turning to Shitake. “I think this qualifies as a successful scavenge, don’t you? This ‘pistol’ is a powerful weapon! It’ll come in handy when I’m out of spell power. It’s a shame it will stop working when I’ve run out of bullets. But till then, this is better than anything I hoped to find here!”

The Myconid sent out spores and told her that it agreed and was satisfied.

“Well, Cletus, I don’t know about you, but I’m getting hungry. You got any gold?”

“Gold? No. No gold. I have about thirty dollars to my name.”

“Dollars. Can I see one?”

Cletus fished out a wrinkled up, rectangular piece of green parchment from his pants and handed it to her.

“A piece of paper?”

“That’s YOU-nited States money right there!” he said proudly. “Legal tender for all debts, public and private!”

“Maybe in the YOU-nigted States. But it’s not worth shit here,” she said, tossing it to the ground where Cletus scrabbled to pick it back up.

“Come on, let’s go find a tavern. I’ll buy for now. I’ve got a little coin left.”