This place is a hellhole, and I’m not saying that just because it’s an unholy pit of agony and despair where hopes are dashed against solid rock.
It’s like this: I put in a day’s work, training in the training room (which is too small, despite my lodging formal protests with the Head Shitlicker) and working up plenty of toxic bile guaranteed to cause warts, rashes, and temporary blindness. Real shit, it’s a certified biohazard with its own MSDS. I can hit a gnat from two cubits. Anyway, I’m going down to collect my pay and maybe buy some of that fancy cat shit all of my mates are raving about getting this amazing buzz off of, when who should wander in but a fucking warrior!
Swaggering around, talking like he’s the biggest horsefly ever to suck down a warm smelly one, absolutely reeking of gin and the fetid water just beyond the outer walls. He also needs to use more soap and less spice, if you know what I mean.
So I fly up and lob a really fragrant loogie right at him. It hits the moron right between the eyes! He is stunned for a few, long enough for some of those goddamned pantywaist imps to crack him a few about the thighs and shins. That doesn’t accomplish much, but what can you expect from something quickened from something I wouldn’t even eat?
The hero, obviously not one big on tactics, blunders right on in after a bit, nearly tripping over a bile demon in the process. Now, bile demons ain’t The Dark One’s brightest minions: They will repeatedly get roaring drunk and bash around dark caves. But when they do, it’s commonly the cave walls that end up the worse for it, if you know what I mean.
This bile demon is especially aggro: He’s just come off a two-day bender and is nearly dead from a monster hangover the likes of which would rip the mind out of any creature that had one. But a bile demon near death is a bile demon redoubled, so the ugly little meat tank rears up and bites the closest bit of flesh it can get its rotting mouth around.
When the hero lets out a shriek like a rabbit being crushed under a rock, I know precisely what bits that bile demon will be feasting on later. The chainmail’s crunch only accentuates a very bad day in that bloke’s life.
I hock one right in the poor bugger’s left eye, but it hardly seems worth the trouble. Some of my mates swing round and help me feast on the bowels (bloody typical for them to smell food faster than they can raise poison) while those slavish imps relieve the guy of his swag.
Sometimes I wish I’d listened to my mum, gone to Uni, become a Master of Bilious Amalgamations, but seeing the pain in a hero’s eyes as he loses all hope and goes down for the long count makes it all worthwhile.
If they’re late for another paycheck, however …
