|
Sponsors:
|
Tunnels & Trolls Fantasy Role Playing Game : Gristlegrim Fiction : The Last Adventure of Big Jack Brass - Page 5
|
But looking down, he discovered that some of those yellow spots in his vision were gold pieces. The treasure chest was literally bulging with them. "Jack, where are yer?" Tom yipped out. There was no reply. (And here we leave Thomas the Whelp. This really isn't his story. If you care, he manages to slip, slither, and hop through several more adventures and finally escape from Gristlegrim intact with a considerable collection of treasure. Which only goes to show, the race doesn't always go to the swift, the strong, the smart, or the pleasant. Sometimes, all you need is luck, and a good sense of when to run away.)
Just before his warhammer touched the treasure chest, Jack heard a great bamffing noise and felt a flash of heat and light. Then he made contact with the chest in front of him, and forgot all about it in the midst of his own crisis.
OOOOOOOWWWWOOOOOWWWWWIIIIIEEEEEEEEE! Sirens went off on all sides of Jack, shattering the silence with the most amazing howling Jack had ever heard. The noise went on and on and finally died away.
Jack found himself sitting on the hard stone floor, while liquid trickled down the sides of his head. Putting a hand up to see what it was, his fingers came away red. He also noticed that he had the worst headache of his life, and there had been some doozies in the past. Jack wrapped his hairy arms around his hairy head, and put it down between his hairy knees, and concentrated on slowing down his breathing which was coming in quick little gasps and moans.
Seconds passed like hours of agony while Jack sat on the cold stone floor, teeth gritted and eyes screwed tight in creases of pain. The noise had stopped, at least, replaced by the booming rush of blood and now a silence which pressed against him with an almost physical presence and Jack fought to recover himself, knowing that he was a tempting target. He cursed himself for an impatient fool, using only the choicest morsels from his abundant store of vulgarities, then abruptly stopped, head cocked to one side.
"....." he said. And again. He was deaf, entirely without hearing. Panic welled up in him for a second, but he fought it down even as he spurred himself to action and hauled himself to his feet with his warhammer.
"Crippled then, eh Jack?" he thought, continuing unspoken the third-person dialogues which characterized his speech. "Cruel and cunning, that dwarf, aye... Faster Jack, or he'll be lunching on your sweetbreads!" The big man glanced around. Then, satisfied of comparative safety for another moment or two, he scooped the meager bounty of silver from the chest with a spade-like hand, depositing it in a worn velvet purse and dropping that in his pack. The faint scent of brimstone came to his nostrils and Jack liked it not at all.
He swabbed his bloodied ears with a once-fine kerchief, glancing around the room again. Sure of his direction outdoors, Jack was more easily confused inside; and with the battering his senses had just taken he was not wholly certain through which door he had entered. Swinging the pack into place once more, he closed the empty chest and heaved his massive shoulder against it, forcing the sturdy box from the platform. Quickly he yanked the carpet away in several large sections and tossed each across different stars on the floor; then taking his warhammer to the chest hinges he smashed off the lid, dropping it onto a star and shoving the ruin of the chest across another.
"Time to be going, Jack. There's little enough to see but stars; and you'll be seeing those a while longer anyway," he winced. "Now to this nice slab of marble... A lovely headstone that would make for a certain dwarf!"
Gritting his teeth against the pain, Jack bent to check the marble platform where the chest had stood.
A close examination revealed that the rug and the chest had concealed a wooden trapdoor. Jack opened it and found a small room beneath the floor with another trapdoor in the bottom. Attached to a rung set into the stone was a rope ladder about 100 feet long. Jack opened the bottom trapdoor, but gained no help from it. The room below was full of a murky yellow fog that smelled of sulfur and obscured everything.
Closing things back up, Jack hurried over to the door by which he had entered, and looked through it. The room seemed unchanged--just a big empty room with a treasure chest in the center. There was no sign of Tom.
"Well, Jack, me lad, now what?" he mumbled to himself though he couldn't hear a word. "Too many choices may be worse than too few. There are three other exits, or I could go back and try the rope ladder down, or there may be another trapdoor beneath the treasure chest." As he stood lost in thought, a gong tolled behind him, but he heard nothing. There was also a sudden "bamff!", but he heard nothing.
Some premonition made Jack look over his shoulder before stepping into the other room, and what he saw made him shout with fright. Some THING was rushing silently toward him--it wasn't more than 20 feet away, and would reach him in a couple of seconds.
|
Jack's story continues...
|
Please use the menu on the left to navigate this site.
|
