It took Mercy about fifteen minutes of careful questioning to realize that, while Harald was earnest and being as helpful as possible - people tended to get like that, after their first brush with His Loony Lordship - he really didn't know much of value about the situation. The people of Dunshire had discovered something that they knew they weren't equipped to handle, it frightened them, and they immediately called for help from the nearest so-called "expert," so that he and his could come in and deal with the situation, allowing the villagers to go on with their lives as if nothing had ever happened.
It was an understandable reaction, but it was damned unhelpful for the person who was going to be responsible for planning the operation against this Keeper. Knowing there was nothing for it, Mercy set Harald up to enjoy himself in the estate's vast kitchens, where the promised food and drink were available in abundance - courtesy of some friendly serving girls - and where the Lord himself would never dream of intruding. After all, it would be most unseemly for one of noble birth and station to consort with the rabble in their own element, no matter the number of charming maids to be found therein.
Also, the head cook was a tyrant of the first order, who had flatly forbidden the Lord from intruding on his domain. This edict was enforced via whatever cooking implements or materials happened to be at hand, be they fresh fruit, bludgeoning rolling pins, hot stew cast from ladles, or flung knives. The nerve of the man! Commoners forbade their Lord nothing, especially not foreign mongrels who could barely speak a civilized tongue! Lord Luthor would go go where he wished and consort with who he desired - especially the nubile young ladies he had hired expressly for their comely looks and accomodating natures - and no red-faced mustachioed pot-stirrer with delusions above his station would gainsay him!
"Does meelord veesh to face zee cheese-grateur again?" the chef asked, intercepting Luthor before he'd even fully opened the kitchen door. The Lord's gaze fell to the mentioned implement, which gleamed in a manner most unholy from its place within the chef's beefy hand. "Or per'aps, eet eez time at last for zee green oneeons?"
"That... will not be necessary." Luthor executed a swift but dignified withdrawal, muttering under his breath as he went. "Insufferable barbarian... food is not meant to be used in a such a manner... the justice of Heaven shall smite thee yet, o fiend!"
"Hey, boss. Chef booted you out again?"
"I know not what you speak of, Mercy," Luthor denied, as he dropped out of his dramatic pose. "And why, pray tell, are you not engaged with the interrogation of the traitorous peasant, as I ordered?"
"He's being uncooperative," Mercy said without missing a beat. "I decided to ask the chef for some... advice."
Luthor slowly parsed this, shuddered at the images that came to mind, and turned away. "Carry on, then, carry on..."
Mercy did that, heading not for the kitchen - which she'd just left, unnoticed by her employer due to his tunnel-visioned ranting - but in search of the captain of the Lord's guard. If she was going to plan an assault on a Keeper, she needed more information, and the task of obtaining that knowledge would require people with a special mix of qualities. They had to be willing to risk their lives against an unknown evil for pure mercenary gain, honorable enough to stick to their assigned task, and skilled enough to complete it, yet still be sufficiently-expendable that their inevitable capture or death wouldn't be too inconvenient.
In short, she needed some heroes. If there weren't any available in the current crop of guards, Mercy figured it would take her about two days to find them elsewhere, three more days after that for them to reach Dunshire and start searching for this Keeper, and a week at the outside for them to enter the dungeon and make first contact with the enemy. What happened after that... well, she'd have to wait and see.
Mercy's estimations were good. Eight days after the initial discovery of the magic spring, Harald and a quartet of variously-armed and equipped strangers rode into the village of Dunshire. They were quickly ushered into a meeting with the town council, only to re-emerge mere minutes later, the heroes-for-hire following Harald as he guided them to the field where the Keeper's presence had been found - and where, from what the elders had just said, that influence had been growing at a most alarming rate.
It was a well-known fact that Dungeon Hearts corrupted the earth around them, and that this corruption quickly rendered the afflicted regions inhospitable to natural life. After seven days of unchecked growth, Harald feared that what had started out as an ambitious puddle and a few overgrown snowflakes could well have swallowed up the nearby fields and half the marsh in an arctic nightmare, complete with raging blizzards, jagged forests of razor-edged ice, and murderously cold pools deep enough to swallow a man whole, yet frozen over just right to let a hapless soul stumble halfway across in apparent safety, before the devilish ice gave way all at once.
Instead of becoming a wintry hell, everything within about a mile of the spring had been flooded over by sparkling azure water, turning the nearest field into something that more closely resembled the marsh it had been just a few years earlier. That which was marsh when Harald rode off a week earlier was now covered by a shallow lake, whose darker waters gave off a cloud of ghostly vapor that had spread out across most of the affected area. Tiny specks of aquamarine energy glittered like distant stars within the mist as it danced lazily on the faint afternoon breeze, flowing over and around the tree-sized frozen spires that had grown up seemingly at random in the marsh. More ice could be seen in the lake, some of the pieces small enough to float freely without scraping the shallow bottom, but three or four house-sized chunks of irregularly-shaped ice simply sat there, rivulets of melt flowing steadily down their sides and into the pool below.
"It's... pretty," said one of the heroes, a slight young woman with short dark hair and pale grey eyes. She wore dark leathers that fit her entirely too snugly for any man's peace of mind, yet somehow managed to carry more knives than Harald would ever have believed possible for a single person.
"Unnatural is what it is, Lynn," growled the taller of the two men, whose shaggy brown hair and beard could have used a trim. He too wore a great deal of leather and carried several knives, but the former was clearly meant to be armor rather than a distracting fashion statement, while the latter appeared secondary to the well-used bow in his right hand.
"Keeper," grunted the dwarf, who had more hair and carried more metal than all three of his companions put together.
"True enough," the archer agreed, before turning to a blue-eyed blonde who looked like the medieval equivalent of a college quarterback, albeit with white robes thrown on over his armor and a very heavy-looking mace propped on one shoulder. He too was frowning as he took in the scene, but where the archer was clearly angry and the dwarf merely stoic, the cleric appeared puzzled. "Problem, Gabriel?"
"I'm not sure. My detection spells aren't picking anything up."
"No gate, huh? Well, it's not like we haven't dug into a dungeon before."
"No, Aron," Gabriel interrupted, "I mean I'm not picking anything up. No gate, no evil magic, not even a hint of a Dungeon Heart's corruption."
His compatriots looked at him for a moment, then back at the clearly supernaturally-created ice, water, and mist. It was Lynn who finally spoke.
"So is that thing broken, or what?" She cast a meaningful glance at the sunburst medallion that was the symbol of Gabriel's faith and the focus of his god-given magic. The cleric sighed, murmured under his breath, and caused his holy symbol to glow brightly. "Okay," Lynn admitted, "not broken. But then why is it telling you that there's no Keeper here?"
It was an indication of just how deeply polarized this world was that none of those gathered could provide the obvious answer as to why a spell meant to detect evil magic was failing to register the presence of a Dungeon Keeper.
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(Posted Mon, 06 Sep 2010 03:10)
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