Kid Quest

Billy Peters

Raindrops slowly dripped onto Billy's face as he lay in his bed, unblinking, with bags under his eyes. It had been raining for 4 hours now, and all the while he watched as water poured in from the giant hole in the ceiling, flowing out of his room and down the stairs like a river. Billy lived alone, orphaned at 4, in this old, decrepit, abandoned house, with it's missing ceilings and walls.

He'd been here for almost 4 years, having lost his parents on a stormy night like this one. His bed, old and tattered, was located under the only intact part of the ceiling, but even this didn't stop the rain. And so Billy laid there, like he had been since the storm began, letting water slowly soak his bed.

Finally, the early morning came, when the sun began peeking above the horizon. Billy sat up and checked his bed, the only dry area was where his feet were located, and one of the legs had warped overnight due to the rain. With a sigh, Billy stood up and began picking up any stray pieces of building that had been knocked off or washed away during the storm. Once that was done, he went outside, cleaned the wrap-around porch, and stepped down onto the chunk of sidewalk that was still attached to the house.

When he came to this world, the night his parents died, Billy's house followed. He woke up the first morning, the beginning signs of water damage, no holes, and a dry home. But the place he'd been taken to seemed to have quite a lot of storms, and over those 4 long years, his house slowly broke away.

His parents had stepped outside to sit and watch the clouds, and saw a small creature in the road. They both went out, in an attempt to get the animal out of the road, when a car came over the hill. It was moving too quickly. The driver saw the animal first and swerved, striking Billy's parents as he watched from the window. Terrified, he ran to his room, jumped into his bed, and covered himself with his blankets. At some point, in the middle of the unending tears, he fell asleep. His house was gone before the paramedics had arrived, in its place a giant crater.

He shook himself out of his mind, away from that day, took a deep breath and walked back into the house. Clanking, crashing, banging, and a loud thump followed by a hearty shout could be heard from the inside, then silence.

Billy emerged from his home, fully clad from head to toe in his armor. A mismatch of goblin armors that he'd been taking over the years, each from a different hive. He'd used these armor pieces to infiltrate goblin camps, troll caves, ogre mines and even feral orc dens to varying degrees of success, before they began to tell stories. They'd given him such a strange name, 'Sep Talie Myrkul.' Billy often couldn't pronounce it. But he enjoyed their stories, their legends, their myths. They gave him a way to use their fear against them.

He took his sword and shield and secured them to his back. He'd been tracking a few gnomes to a nest a few days travel from here, they would make for a good distraction, something to take his mind off the past, away from the false hope of returning home.

"Time for pest control." He said to himself as he set out to the nest, not knowing he would soon find more than just a simple distraction.