(aka Hammer 6: A Fond Farewell to Captain Liability)

…and then, of course, the scouts of the ARMY OF DARKNESS itself creeping across the land. Against these, Diamond Cascade and his companions fought battle after battle, slaughtering goblins, orcs and even ogres in droves. Diamond Cascade himself personally slew dozens of these evil soldiers of corruption.

Yeah yeah yeah, but not before we spent an entire day being annoyed to shit by some dumbass pixies. HELLO small helpless-yet-hard-to-hit annoying things? Does it occur to you to to go and bother the great big army of orcs and goblins and ogres and so forth with your intensely irritating little pranks? Does the thought cross your eeny-weeny little thoughts that maybe, what with orcs and ogres and slimies being a pretty foul-tempered lot, you might for once in your otherwise futile little lives actually even achieve something useful? A reminder, little pixie-folk: We’re talking about orcs and ogres here. Not slimies. Slimies, yes, well, I can see how you might like to let them in just for the fun of annoying them into killing each other other. But orcs and ogres are another matter. These are creatures who will smash your forest flat if no one stops them. You might get a giggle or two out of them on their way, but in the end they’ll leave you with nowhere to hide. And then they’ll pull your wings off to floss with and, eventually, stick you on a skewer, roast you alive and eat you. But no, no, little pixies, instead of sowing discord among people who would like to rape you and then eat you, you’d rather annoy the nine hells out of us, the only people you’ve actually seen trying to stop them.

So, pixies. You remember this day. Remember it well, just as I will. One day you can rue it.

This all started in the morning and just kept on going. By the time we ran into a gang of slimies, I don’t know what I was more grateful for. Having something to take it all out on, or that something as scary as – oooh – a couple of dozen slimies was enough to scare the little winged jackasses away.  Apparently there were a couple of other things, but I was mostly busy with the slimies. Man, a good slaughter of the little buggers was just what I needed. Cleared my head nicely. Got a nice bow off one of them too. Must have been quite a fight somewhere where I wasn’t, on account of how battered up everyone else seems to look. We’ve lost a dwarf (no great disaster), and the walking liability that was Tiarth appears to have blundered off into the woods. After an hour of searching, we’re pretty sure he’s not dead, on account of there being no body. We’re also pretty sure he doesn’t want to be found, on account of him being a blind elf with extra-acute hearing, and us making slightly more noise than the approaching army. Don’t know what we did, but frankly it’s all one great big sigh of relief all round that we won’t have ever have to experience the sheer jaw-dropping horror of watching a blind man throw a greatsword at a stuck-in-the-mud owlbear before then wading in to apparently try and wrestle it to death. No, bye-bye Tiarth Friend-bane and good riddance.

It’s an imperfect world, so of course we don’t get to butcher a band of slimies and ditch Captain Liability without there being some small price to pay. It seems the goblins had some lunch they hadn’t gotten around to eating yet, some doubtless annoying little halfgit woman. Gives us a reason to head south and abandon our current quest, but we’ve abandoned so many before getting very far that you know, just for once, I think we should at least get as far as the Underdark before we realise what a colossal mistake we’re making and run off to be ineffectual somewhere else.

NEXT WEEK: SLEEPING IN THE WOODS IN WINTER