The evening before our competition, everyone was preparing.
Felegum had scoured Reach’s Fallow for instruments.
“I need instruments for me and Dronie,” he’d said after dinner at the Raven’s Talon. Outside, a bird cawed.
“A little late in the game,” said a server dryly.
“Mine,” Iago said proudly, “is coming in tomorrow morning.”
Felegum contemplated the window sill. “Maybe a lute for Dronie.”
“Don’t you need lips to play a flute?” asked Tem from her dinner.
“No,” said Felegum and Iago in unison. After this weird moment of cosmic agreement, Felegum left, presumably to see a man about a lute.
I vented my spleen about how we really had no plan and how this felt like it ought to be more distressing than it was to my compatriots. Tem asked me what I thought we ought to do, so I suggested dance.
I had intended to ask her to teach me the haka that we’d done in our audition. I’d been kind of lurking invisibly and managing illusions so I hadn’t really paid as much attention to mastering it as the others had. I didn’t want to bring down the team.
Tem, though, thought that I would be a great teacher. She was more than happy to show me the haka, but she also wanted me to show her something too.
I settled on knife throwing. Obviously. That always looked impressive, even if most of its practical applications were just moving a blade from a less dominant hand to a more capable one.
Tem took to knife throwing like a(n) (aquatic) dragon to water. “It’s like a smaller greatsword,” she said, thrilled by the realization.
We had been practicing with my knives and whatever cutlery Tem could scavenge from the surroundings. Unfortunately, the servers in the Raven’s Talon were less enthusiastic about Tem’s temporarily purloined goods than Tem was. After some back and forth, she ended up buying ten knives from their stock for a few gold.
We started out with one knife at first, since that was how I’d learned. Tem did well, so maybe her experience with the greatsword really was paying off. At my suggestion, we moved onto two knives.
Because I am no one’s fool (and also because I have stabbed myself before) I summoned my mage hand. Just in case. It helped that it was invisible, because no one liked being doubted, but also I wasn’t about to not be prepared.
Tem threw both of her knives up in a juggling fashion and managed to catch one. The other was arrested midair before it could do damage to the paladin, me, or the floor. I returned the knife to its new owner, gave Tem a pep talk about single knife stunts, and then headed upstairs for the night.
I was still pretty nervous about the act tomorrow, so I invested some time teaching Kheryph how to do the haka that Tem had just shown me. It took an excessive amount of berries and training, but he seemed to be getting there.
Downstairs came the unmistakable sound of a door closing, a raven cawing, and more butterknives hitting the floor.
“Darling,” Zeno’s voice floated up from the common room, “maybe we should stick to what we’re good at.”
“Oh,” Tem said, dejected as hell.
Felegum was muttering something, but the only things I could pick up were “Matter…vegetable matter…”
I decided that I did not want to get involved after all, and went to bed.
By the time I woke up, Felegum was already gone, presumably out to pick up his instruments. Breakfast was an affair of build-it-yourself omelets, the idea of which I liked, but the execution of which was a little rough, as everything was already cooked. You basically had the eggs and then toppings you could add to them.
I made up my dish, piled with a variety of vegetables and meats.
Felegum came back with some instruments and a magazine-looking publication titled “Eleven Tips to Become a Certified Genius in Battle of the Bards”. He and Dronie pored over it while I contemplated whether or not I wanted to wait in line for the waffle maker. There was only one of them and it was taking a while. Eventually, I accepted my fate, added more toppings to my omelet, and sat down.
Other offerings were porridge, oatmeal germ, and slop, as well as summer berries and compote.
“Remember the three L’s,” Zeno was saying to a very intensely studying Felegum. “Lutes, Linguistics, Lube.”
“Ah,” noted the mage.
Iago finished off his morning ale. “Well, time to pick up my instrument.”
He left for the market and unknown outcomes.
I put my head in my hands. “I don’t even know what we’re doing. This is so stressful. I feel responsible to win this thing and yet we have no plan.”
“Obviously we have a plan,” Zeno said dismissively. “I’m just putting the finishing touches on Cohemian Crapsody.”
I returned to the omelet bar for more toppings. Surely that would fix this mess. Kheryph looked upon my pile of greens with intrigue and delight.
“I didn’t know you played an instrument!” Helli said in pleasant surprise to Felegum.
“Hold that thought,” the sorcerer said.
Then he abruptly ran out of the building.
I sat down again with my eggs, mushrooms, spices, peppers, and a bowl of weird oatmeal stuff. I contemplated eating.
Felegum returned in a rush.
“I thought you were dancing, darling,” Zeno said over his show notes.
“I thought I’d try this!” Felegum held up some drums and music. To be fair, he did have more of a sense of musicality than most of us, though it was hard to find anybody who could match Zeno’s skills.
Zeno beheld this new musical addition. “Will you do well?”
Felegum checked his notes, then sighed and gave Dronie the bass guitar. I wasn’t sure what passed between the monodrone and Mechanicus in that moment, but the little guy began strumming out a pretty catchy bassline. Felegum, meanwhile, proved he could operate drums.
The bard sighed, then handed over the papers he’d been working on. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but have him follow this.”
Both Felegum and Dronie looked over the scribblings.
“Are you okay?” Zeno turned to me.
“What about me says I’m not okay?” I said behind a fortress of omelet toppings.
Zeno looked down at the pepper-mushroom-gruel congealing over the blueberries and rested his case.
“We don’t have any kind of plan,” I said, exasperated. “I have literally no idea what we’re doing.”
Zeno pulled a face over the waffle he’d managed to acquire without a wait-time due to force of charm alone. “Set, come on. You’re like a Fallow’s Reach boy with all your order.”
Felegum glanced up hopefully at the mention of order. Realizing this was in fact an injunction against order, he returned to his music studies with Dronie.
“What you need to do,” Zeno continued, “is to think like a Reach’s Fallow person. It’s chaos. That’s what we do best!”
I handed a berry to Kheryph absent-mindedly. “Okay.”
“It’s going to be good precisely because we don’t know what we’re doing. That’s the whole appeal.” Zeno was intently watching my lizard for some reason. I gave Kheryph another berry. “Oh!”
Kheryph reached for another berry, I gave it to him, and he struck a pose.
“Yeah, okay,” I said, feeling at least a little more settled. “That makes sense, actually.”
It was hard to think of Zeno prepping our group on purpose to be unprepared, but like, maybe that really was the way to appeal to people here. I ate a very soggy omelet, but it went down better than it had been.
“So the shopkeeper at the bard place– the Bark and Sinew or whatever– said that it was insane preshow,” Felegum said.
Iago returned, triumphant. “You’ll never believe this– someone tried to buy my fish out from under me!”
We all stared at him, balanced precariously on a barrel that, probably, contained a very large fish.
“So watch out for ruffians,” Iago added, rolling away back toward the bar.
Helli made overtures at taking the buffet with her (not allowed, sadly) and Felegum got his tub from upstairs.
A server shook their head while watching our slow progress to our call time. “Why are you guys so unprepared?”
The appeal was already working, I realized. Maybe Zeno did know what he was talking about.
“Trolls stole our cart,” Zeno said blithely.
“Our cart,” Felegum mourned. We all had a moment of respectful silence for the Sovereign Dungeoneering Cart, gone too soon, mostly eaten by lizardpeople.
“Do you sell carts?” Zeno asked, inspired.
“Ah no,” the server replied. “I just mock people who don’t have carts. I’m uninterested in actually fixing the problem.”
“I see,” said Zeno.
“It’ll be hard getting through the city without one, though.” The server squinted at the crowds gathering outside. “A lot of people come out to the streets to watch.”
As this was happening, I stole some more blueberries and raspberries for Kheryph to snack on during the show.
We departed and were frustrated to find that the server wasn’t totally wrong. It was hard moving through the city and getting to our call time. Everyone was excited about the show and truly did not seem to care that we were in it. This at least felt pretty typical of Reach’s Fallow.
The appointed time was fast approaching when we finally made it to the check-in area, which boasted a small security outfit that we had to clear. It was run by a person reminiscent of a slug with a low and gravelly voice.
“Can you prove,” she said to Tem, “that that sword is of musical use?”
Tem threw it up into the air.
“That proves nothing!” the officer howled.
Annoyed, Tem missed the catch on her sword and it smashed into a cask of beer. Iago’s face was an attitude of horror.
“I’m going to need to confiscate that.” The officer licked her pen and wrote a damning line next to Tem’s name. The paladin looked anxiously up from extracting her sword.
Another sigh from the back of the group. “Look, ah, what’s your name?” Zeno stepped forward.
“My name,” said the officer, already puffing herself up, “is Francois Beauregard Centraveris.”
“Are you–” Zeno frowned. “Are you from here?”
“No,” she said, eyes narrowing.
“Well, Mademoiselle Francois, I am going to tell you how to do your job because you clearly don’t know.”
The officer’s eyes narrowed, until Zeno offered his hand to shake hers, and I caught the glint of a few gold pieces.
“You’re still late to your call time,” Francois said sourly, but she did pocket the gold. “This way.”
Nothing further was said about Tem’s sword. We walked through the backstage area to all sorts of strange sights. The architecture was massive and elaborate, and behind a wall lurked a pair of ankylosaurs munching on the grass. Giant tents, hotel billboards, and an arcade glittered in the distance.
Some squinting at signage revealed that this was the Goblin Shopping Hotel Network, here to expand temporary housing during the event.
Iago bumbled his barrel along. Zeno leaned over and asked if he wanted help.
“Oh no,” Iago replied, “nah.”
Vincenzo shrugged.
Eventually, we reached another table where we’d have to check weapons not being used in the act. While the double layer of security was commendable, it was also annoying when we were already late.
As soon as we approached them, there was the old refrain: “That’s not a bardic weapon!”
Once again, Tem’s sword became an issue. She lit it up, which convinced the security people, while Helli investigated where the weapons that got confiscated went. I was in the moment jealous of the idea.
“It’s Csipherian sword dancing,” Tem explained.
The corner of my eye twitched, but I kept everything under control. It was fine. We were just making things up to get the sword through.
Francois scowled. “I doubt it. I can make shit up too. Ctsiferi isn’t a real place.”
“It’s Csipherus,” I said.
“That’s what I said,” she replied. “Styhhrus.”
My fingernails bit into the meat of my palms. I unsheathed the shortsword I literally never used anymore and stabbed it into the table, leaving Francois to wrestle it out. It seemed to amuse her but it did much more to mollify my feelings.
“This whole thing isn’t safe,” Helli whispered to me.
“I hate her,” I whispered back, nearly shaking with anger.
“Yeah, but they’re going to maybe steal our stuff!” Helli stressed.
Luckily, Felegum had overheard and had a plan: he cast an alarm spell on the locker that held the stuff we’d stowed. Supposedly, this would alert him if anyone attempted to get into our stuff while we were on stage performing. I still didn’t give up more than the shortsword because my trust in Francois had evaporated at her refusal to believe in the existence of my city.
She cast a spell on the locker, but from what I could tell, nothing had changed.
We continued to wait for a whole longer, Tem’s sword still on fire as she carried it through the backstage rooms. According to the crew, the two groups before us (Fostrumus and the Neon Slugs, the Cumulus Clouds) were going overtime, so we had to wait before going on stage.
I didn’t like this. I was getting bad vibes ever since they had us checking weapons.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the rings.
Then I held one out to Zeno.
“Remember what I said when you asked me to trust you back in the auditions?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
The space around us had gone very quiet, in spite of the massive competition taking place overhead. Or maybe I just couldn’t hear it anymore.
“This is a spell component,” I said, holding out the ring. “I need you to wear it for the spell to work. Do you trust me?”
Zeno took the ring and put it on.
“Okay,” I said, also putting the other ring on my middle finger. “Okay.”
Someone gave us our cue that we’d be on stage soon and to get ready. “The Lord wanted this first round to be interesting,” they said, waiting for the signal to let us go onstage, “so prepare for stuff to happen.”
This only reinforced that the rings had been a good idea. Having interesting things happening unbeknownst to us felt very Reach’s Fallow, that was for sure.
Felegum got his tub out and evoked a mist off some dry ice for our entrance to look super cool. Zeno grabbed my shoulder.
“We’ve got this,” he said.
For the first time since coming into this town, I actually felt like maybe that could be true.
I tapped his fist with mine. “Yeah.”
Felegum handed Helli a rope for her disco ball, and as she tied it on Iago rolled his barrel out into our opening act. He set up in the middle of the stage area and uncorked the barrel.
“Guys, gals, and nonbinary pals of Fallow’s Reach,” he began.
A chorus of boo’s roared up at him. Felegum winced; Zeno buried his head in his hands.
Iago had made the classic blunder.
“Worry not, people of Reach’s Fallow!” Iago called back to the antagonized crowd. “Let’s get ready to rock opera!”
I could almost swear that he’d stabbed something in the barrel and had been talking with it, but that was all I could see. A gust wafted more fog onto the stage, molten bird shapes floated upwards as bubbles in the lava popped, and that was our cue.
Zeno signalled to Felegum and began droning on the bagpipes. Dronie cut in with his rhythmic chords, perfectly back up Zeno’s melody.
Helli, meanwhile, took the opportunity to become the disco ball, igniting the lamp she’d purloined from Egonia and sticking inside the disco ball she carried, encrusted with gems.
We went out. Tem was sword dancing already, so I grabbed some fleece and cast an illusion on myself to make it look like my own dancing was gradually coalescing into flame, like my clothes were catching fire as I danced until I was this aesthetic immolation. It was metal, I had to say.
On the whole, it even seemed like we were doing pretty well.
Then the rats came out.
They swarmed through the gaps in the doors, out from the smoke, overwhelming the stage. We’d heard that they’d been granted special permission to have more members than usual, but I hadn’t thought that it was going to mean this much in terms of raw numbers. There was an embarrassment of rats.
It wasn’t until Tem started to cough on the smoke that I realized it wasn’t Zeno’s normal bagpipe smoke (a weird phenomenon that I had gotten used to and regarded as normal, even beneficial) but something else.
It was different smoke, and bad.
Another thing that came with the smoke was a wall of sound, two words matched to an unrelenting percussive wave.
“RAT FOLK.”
The guitar and drums hit us again, and we were in the thick of it.
The waves of sound were also proving deleterious on more levels than just the obvious ones. My pants, the parts that hadn’t been swathed in my cloak or covered by my boots (so like the calves to about the knee) were ripped to shreds by the sonic blast. Never before had I been so relieved to be hidden by illusory self-immolation. Faced with the prospect of wearing clamdiggers in front of a live studio audience, I wanted to immolate for real.
Anything that was nonmagical seemed to have taken the worst of it. Felegum and Zeno, despite being magical, were also hurled backward by the sound. Zeno bounced pathetically off a door and dangled above the lava. If this was for show, then it was a very good act.
“Both performers have delivered satisfactory acts to move onto the next round,” boomed an announcer’s voice from nowhere, “but we regret to say that there can only be one.”
Suspended over the lava, Zeno laughed, a little manically.
Tem expressed her own feelings with fire. She breathed out onto the rats in a stream of flames, while the rat musicians tried to deflect her dragonfire with the power of extreme chords.
“They killed Cuthbert,” Iago said, gazing upon the destroyed slivers of his barrel and hors d’oeuvres of cooked fish littering its insides, the ground, and crisping into lava. His eyes contracted, then widened into rage. He removed the pot from his brow. “FOR CUTHBERT!”
It sounded louder than usual. Maybe the acoustics of this place were just that good.
Iago strode forward full wroth. “Allow me to play you the song of Cuthbert.” He flourished his pot. It ignited. “Who’s next?”
Felegum, as was his custom during times of immense stress, had begun to sweat profusely. Grabbing a mineral reagent, he combined it with the sweat. “Storm time,” he said, and a hailstorm gathered above the rats.
The rats, obviously, were not fans of this development. They strummed more on their guitars, and somehow the force of sound they produced managed to knock the forming storm off-course a bit. Felegum’s perfect control was not musical enough to resist their influence, and the hail smacked into both Tem and Iago as well as the rats.
Iago smacked a rat with his pot, flooring them. He turned to Tem. “One to zero, bud!”
I beheld the fracas before me and turned my back on it. I leaned over the ledge where Zeno was still holding on above the magma and grasped him by the hand. “Time to fight fire with fire,” I said. “The show must go on.”
Then I cast the spell.
It was the first time I’d ever used this spell, and it was more a feeling than anything flashy. It was like coming home after a long time traveling: the familiar weight of a door under your hand pushing open, the low rumble of conversation and clinking glasses, and the spice and dry adobe smell of the Bacchus Jolly.
Behind me, Disco Helli dashed into the battle, casting wild shapes of light everywhere as she moved.
Zeno took my hand and pulled himself up. We had exactly one person on this team who was good at music and this was it. Wasn’t our best strategy to let him play to his strengths without being, I don’t know, wiped out by molten rock?
Playing once more on his bagpipes, Zeno produced a haunting tune and conjured a strange shifting pattern amidst Felegum’s hail. The crowd oohed, transfixed. Soe of the rats too seemed fascinated by it.
Others, though, did not. Those spread out, continuing their aggressive chorus of “RAT FOLK”, scrambling up one of the four towers. Once up there, one of them slammed a rope into their guitar and it seemed like even the air vibrated with the sound. Lava shook in circular wavelets.
The others who were closer to the music seemed more affected by it, headbanging to RatCDC. Zeno, Felegum, and I were the only ones who seemed able to shrug it off enough to move.
“Zeno, go!” Tem yelled between thrashing. She jerked her gleaming head in the direction of one of the other podiums.
Iago took the opportunity to replenish himself from a flask. “So, who’s next?”
Felegum, aware now of a moment to shine, picked up his drums. He played, moving toward the center of the stage. I was proud of him for following his heart and playing music, though also surprised– Felegum’s strength and the thing he relied on in these high stakes moments was magic. Why wasn’t he calling on that now?
Either way, this was a war of sound. I had to even the field.
Letting the dregs of my fiery illusion fall away, I fixed my gaze on at the one rat on the podium playing guitar. “Stop!” I yelled holding out both hands in the universal gesture for do not pass go. “Bagpipe time.”
The sound around that rat cut out. Only one rat podium still produced music and now that the onslaught was lessened, I could hear myself think a little better.
“Get ’em, Z,” I said, as Helli headbanged and entire stage became a riot of glitter.
Indeed, Zeno scampered up the podium to the northeast, found the rope, and plugged it into his bagpipes. He took the melody that the rats were playing and began distorting it, making it sound less and less sure of itself, more echoey, strange and haunted.
“Thanks for the tip,” he called to a now-moshing paladin (a substantial danger). “Now you do something cool.”
Angsty Teen Breakfast Blog 