Six rats remained in stalwart formation, despite my silencing spell and the damage caused to them by my friends. They played another chord, which seemed to resonate through Iago and Helli. Helli’s tentacles, offended at this sonic onslaught, slapped a rat.
Meanwhile, in other rat action, the guy who was playing guitar on the tower that I’d silenced figured out that something was up. This was a pity, as it was kind of funny watching them be confused at the absolute lack of sound emanating from their guitar. Instead, they moved from the southwestern (silent) tower to the southeastern one. I wasn’t worried about the southwestern tower much since I still had my spell on it, but the southwestern one we still needed to claim.
Other rats moved toward the tower Zeno was standing on (the northeast), an oncoming problem I noted for later, and the last rat left on a functional tower did…something.
It’s hard to say exactly what was going on. All I could tell was that when these rats on towers were playing particularly intense parts of music, the arena seemed to respond to it in some way. Either the lava was oscillating or the music was louder, but something out of the ordinary was definitely happening.
When the rat on the northwestern tower played a complicated riff, the lava shifted.
And not just like, bubbled in the weird circular way that it had been doing for the last few minutes.
No, a glob of lava rose from the pit around the towers and washed over the platforms, sizzling the floors as it coalesced into a blob, then a shape, then something more articulated, like a creature.
A lava worm writhed in magmatic agony next to Tem.
This was unexpected. Tem, also having some affinity with fire (see: her still-burning sword), cut at the type-usurper to admittedly minimal effect. She sliced off some alien-looking pseudopods that landed wetly on the platform before cooling to rock shapes, then struck a pose.
Iago, felled by the musical blast from the rats earlier, stood back up. “You think you’ve knocked me down, but I regularly drink myself to the floor!” he said in trademark good cheer.
Then he tried to throw some rats into the lava. The loss of his fish (Cuthbert) was perhaps still weighing on him. Murder felt extreme, but people did weird things in grief.
I’d know.
Anyway, one of the rats Iago yeeted grabbed onto a bridge to save themselves, but the other absolutely bit it–do not pass go, right into the fiery depths.
“Your music is terrible!” he called, then stumbled up the northwestern platform, smacking the playing rat hard enough that they were too stunned to keep going. For good measure, he also smacked the rat climbing up the ladder behind him.
That was how Iago ended up surrounded by frozen rats in lava world. He raised his hands to the audience like a pop idol and then abruptly played statue himself. I don’t know. I feel like I never know what Iago’s going to do next, and involving himself in inter-band freeze tag was not on my bingo card for him.
Next to me, Felegum made a break for the southwestern tower. “Dronie, come here!” he called as he ascended the ladder. The dutiful monodrone followed, playing his relentless bassline with perfect tempo. Once Dronie was on the platform, Felegum plugged the cord into Dronie’s instrument and a second tower starting blasting sound into the arena.
Satisfied with this result, the sorcerer accompanied his familiar on the drums as the lava around them rippled into waves.
All things considered, I wasn’t sure that these rat guys were that bad. Like, yeah, okay, they had sound. We were literally at a bard event. I wasn’t seeing swords here. Zeno had told me to do what I did best, and that was defense.
So I danced into one, two, three copies of myself, a blur of jukes and abrupt movement. It was cool.
I did not like the cut of the lava worm’s gib, so I moved into his path before Zeno’s tower. Defense was, after all, the name of the game.
Helli had a much more straightforward approach to dealing with the lava golem, which was to place her disco ball on its head. It radiated outward like a dying star, gems dribbing down in molten tears.
It was, in the best sense, a disco inferno.
“You got this?” she called to Tem, holding up her daggers. “Or we got this?”
Tem, scales glistening from the disco heat, shook her head. “I think we got this. I do a lot with fire, but this thing is already fire.”
Behind me, Zeno did something weird (usual) and the a pillar of magma shot up from the center of the arena (unusual). The middle of the stage became hot, rocky sludge as the magma hardened and several of the rope bridges between the towers had caught fire.
Including the one I was standing on.
“Look out, Hell!” the firebug called. “The floor is lava!”
Then he danced on the tower to his own song.
A rat charged up his tower (they were surprisingly fast!), trying to wrestle Zeno out of his spot. Luckily, he was too caught up in the music for the rat to find purchase on his fine purple robes. Another rat rushed up into the tower that I still had silenced and was confused. The rat that been in the southwestern tower plugged into the northwestern tower and tried to play riffs to calm down the lava.
It did not appear to have an effect.
Tem and Helli were blasted by the sound of the rats playing their chorus again, but it seemed like their band was losing power. In an effort to keep Helli and Nisbit off the lava floor, Tem put the spider-gnome on her shoulders, cast a shield spell on herself, and then posed.
I was beginning to sense a theme here.
Iago, meanwhile, grabbed onto the cable in the northwestern tower between his teeth. He jolted like he’d been zapped at first and then pulled.
It was still attached to one of the rats’ guitars (and the rat who refused to let go of it), and this generated enough momentum to swing Iago, the guitar, and the rat off the platform to dangle above the lava like fishes on a hook. The strange old man struggled with the rat for control of the guitar, all the while gripping the cable between his teeth and getting lightly singed by proximity to lava.
Felegum’s drums beat out the percussive coda of a spell as sweat dripping onto the drumhead. A tidal wave crashed out of nowhere to break over the lava worm as well as the rat who had tried and failed to harsh Zeno’s groove. The rat (who I had been planning on addressing) fell off the platform and into the lava, and the outside of the magma golem hardened into crackly rock.
This also put out some of the bridges that had been on fire, and it was good to know that safe ground existed somewhere in this chaotic performance.
Still, if I was hoping that this would signal that the insanity was going down, I was about to be sorely mistaken, because that was when Dronie strummed his own guitar and summoned a second lava worm into existence.
Seeing no other option, I summoned my wings and became a full-on epilepsy warning.
I flew over to where the rat was crisping in the lava by Zeno’s tower and called out for him to take my hand. They were good performers. I respect artists. They were also professionals, in their own way. It just didn’t make sense to kill them to entertain some guy who all evidence so far pointed to him being Pretty Shitty.
Helli, meanwhile, pulled out her poison dagger and invoked it. I didn’t even know if lava worms could get poison, but I supposed we were about to find out. Sometimes experimentation was the spice of life.
Zeno leaned more into the distortion of the rats’ song that he’d started earlier in the fight, learning literally forward, almost in an intimidating posture. I don’t know what he did, but it was like the arena leaned with him, causing the lava to flow to the southwestern tower, submerging it (silently).
“Guys!” he called over the flow of lava and sick riffs. “We need to use all the plinths to succeed!”
This felt like a dubious strategy, given that literally only one of us did music as professionally. Iago seemed to have the northwestern tower (kind of) under control and the noted duo Felegum and Dronie were holding down the southeastern one while Zeno had the northeast, but like, that left one tower and only people who were untrained in musical arts.
Also, it was under a significant amount of lava.
Tem had found her calling in the lava worm and, having embraced her role as protector of Spider Helli, found a critical weakness in the magma golem as it attempted to attack the gnome. Tem was also hit by the lava worm in return as it pushed its way south, scenting its equal and foe in the worm raised by Dronie. It spread itself out like a slug, becoming very flat and very hot.
A rat trying to go up the northwestern tower, escaping away from the action was booed. I hadn’t even realized that people sitting in the cheap seats had been burned by the lava tilt, but now that I looked, there was a swathe of molten rock in those seats. Yikes.
“Helli!” Tem yelled. “I guess we’re continuing to cut chunks off this thing!”
This was very grand, but when both of her strikes went wide, it became less so. But then Tem knelt so that Helli was closer to the worm, which was epic because she was kneeling in LAVA.
Metal. Even I’d rate that high in style points.
Iago committed to playing as fast as he could (perhaps hoping that listeners would only notice speed and not quality) and then ran up the tower. It was not clear to me how he had acquired sole possession of the guitar, but he had.
Felegum continued to hold down the drumline, uttering commands to Dronie between stanzas.
Dronie’s lava worm also unfurled into wet, fiery mess. Attack mode for slugs, I guess. I don’t know, I’m not an entomologist.
I’m just the guy who pulled a rat bard out of lava.
He was struggling, because I guess he thought I was going to do even worse things to him, which like, valid, but also it made flying with him a bit harder than it needed to. I swear I reassured him that I did not want him dead. I even healed him.
Maybe I could have been more personable, but like, everything was on fire and he had a point that my friends had killed a lot of his friends. I really didn’t know how to answer that one, especially when my friends were booing me and being annoyed that I hadn’t left the rat bard to give his curtain call in lava.
Even the rat bard seemed disappointed to be saved, which was frustrating.
“Calm down!” I said through clamped teeth, flying us to a damp bridge. “You’re okay.”
“I just watched all my brothers die!”
“Oh god.” I’d thought they were just friends. “You had siblings.”
The rat looked at me with complete betrayal.
It must be said that I’ve previously received feedback that my bedside manner is not the Best.
“Just don’t kill us,” I said hastily. “You’ve got to promise not to kill us.”
Or else I really would never hear the end of it from my friends. I liked one group’s music and this was where it got me. It was a tough life being a fan.
“Okay,” said the rat bard. I felt like I could trust him.
Helli stabbed the unfurled worm and also shot the magic missile wand into the air, for show, downing three people in the audience instantly. I wondered belatedly if this was normal. The crowd (not destroyed by us) went wild.
Zeno shook his head at me and the rat bard in disappointment. Yeah. I’d had a bad feeling that one was coming. “Watch your feet,” he said, and the lava sloped back slightly. Still not quite enough to get the tower unsubmerged, but it was better. “Felegum, help! I’m trying to dance my way out and not fall!”
I felt it was very telling that he did not ask Iago for help with the lava.
Iago helped anyway by playing his stolen guitar and summoning a line of lava across the arena.
Tem, perhaps in a show of dominance to hot things, walked into the lava line, limbed in platinum light. Honestly, I don’t know why my friends keep doing these things.
Felegum & Dronie, noted music duo, actually tried to fix the lava issue and things receded slightly back to a more normal axis. Not all the way, but getting there.
I continued to talk with the rat bard, whose name was Carji.
Then I realized that I had the power to maybe fix this whole situation with the last cable. I felt kind of dumb for not seeing it sooner, but better late than never.
As I got into position, Helli twirled for the crowd, building up to a grand finale. Again, Zeno played to quell the lava. Again, the lava remained unquelled.
“Are you goading me toward gnome tossing?” Tem asked Helli. “Because I am very goadable.”
“Tem, I have no instrument,” the gnome said with her usual calmness.
“But you’re a rock gnome!” Tem replied, and yote her unto the lava.
I think the intention there was to get Helli onto the platform with the cable. It did not turn out like the dragonborn had envisioned.
Helli burned forlornly in molten rock, Nisbit’s spider legs curling up in an attitude of extreme suffering. Helli did not look much better. To her credit, Tem looked on with abject regret.
Then she also jumped in the lava after Helli, perhaps to self-immolate as atonement for her sins. A little extreme, but it’s Bahamut. Maybe he’d appreciate that.
I experienced a moment of gratitude that Lathander seemed generally to want me alive and bodily unharmed.
Iago jammed on his guitar, and Felegum sweated.
In fact, he was sweating so much that I was beginning to worry that he was going to get too dehydrated to play the drums, but no– he was just casting another spell, this time a massive globe of water that enveloped Tem and Helli, saving them from death by lava.
Dronie continued his endless riff (that bard book really was coming in handy, I had to give the sorcerer credit there), and I floated to the limit of my bond with Zeno, letting go of my silence spell to summon my invisible hand and fish out the cable from the lava. Somehow it hadn’t melted.
I was pleased to have it in hand (so to speak), though less pleased that I couldn’t bring the cord to myself without breaking the other spell. “Guys, I got it!” I said. “I can fix this.”
I just had to…play music somehow.
While I was working out how to do that, Helli broke free of Felegum’s sweat prison, popping out of the bubble and onto the top of the plinth.
“Can I use that?” she asked me, gesturing at the taut string of the cable.
“Oh yeah, totally,” I said, kind of relieved not to have to figure out how to sing or if I even could. “Get it.”
And that’s how Helli pulgged the cable into Nisbit.
I wasn’t even aware that legs counted as an instrument, but maybe that’s why I am not the musical talent. Obviously, I will never admit this to any of my friends.
Anyway, Helli played Nisbit like a xylophone. Or rather, she would have, but she was still so woozy from magma golems and lava damage that she initially played on her own legs instead.
Zeno, always knowing when to inspire a rowdy but flagging group, called out, “Let’s play our finale!”
Iago jammed on his guitar. Tem remained stuck in the sphere like a sad, sweaty goldfish at a festival until Felegum, still drumming, dumped her on a pedestal. Zeno was obviously doing fine, and nothing short of Mechanicus imploding was likely to stop Dronie.
I flew back to the center of the stage and pulled Carji into a dance. “Just keep this up and we’ll get you out!” I said.
Carji seemed skeptical at first, but went for it. He was actually great at dancing and totally showed me up, which was fine, because there were still like four of me flickering around like a seizure on bad drugs and hopefully that was distracting enough to cover my lack of skill.
“You’re really good at this!” I said between spins.
“We’re actually trained performers!” he called back.
At last, Helli and Nisbit got their act together (literally) and the finale notes of our chaotic song faded into silence and applause. The cables disconnected from everyone’s instruments, the lava chilled out a bit and the worms returned to wherever the worms had come from.
Above us, a platform lowered from the unseen heights of the arena, bearing on it a man.
“Well, this is very surprising. Only the fourth of the bards to succeed on this day,” said the man in an accented voice. “We shall be moving on. We have enough groups to continue to the second round. Give your applause for this group–“
The arena appropriately burst into riotous, thunderous applause.
“We don’t know where they came from,” he continued, “but I’m sure we’ll find out.”
I elbowed Carji. “Who is this?”
He looked at me like I really should know the answer. And I did. I just wanted someone to say it. I suddenly felt very glad I had not broken the protection spell on Zeno.
“The sacrifices of this contest, those who did not make it, will get their rewards in due time,” said Lord Reinbach III, though how that was supposed to happen if they were dead was beyond me. “This concludes the first round of Battle of the Bards: Flames of the Phoenix.”
With that, he burst into flames himself as the platform shot back up into the flies.
We were escorted (all of us, including Carji and another rat bard who had survived, Garj-drull) to a green room back in the wings. A small individual was there waiting for us. He introduced himself as Stanley and said we had a lot to work on, starting with not icing people so aggressively.
We were, according to him, a bit of a PR nightmare.
“And you don’t even know how to play instruments,” he said, rubbing his temples. “We’re going to work on this for next time. Okay? We’re going to have to do a major overhaul. You killed a lot of people.”
I told Carji to help himself to as many snacks and goodies as he liked. He was still anxious, a fact not improved by my friends making jokes about all the rats they had killed.
“We did kill all their family members, though,” Felegum pointed out when I pulled a face.
“Felegum, you are literally undoing all my good work.” I sighed, head in my hands.
“Sorry,” he said, still smiling.
I wasn’t sure what I was more worried about: Stanley’s suggestions or what we might get up to without them.
Angsty Teen Breakfast Blog 