Luther's Adventure Log

They Like Dudes

The so-called 'Gutter of Misery' was actually a well-lit giant staircase. No enemies were to be seen, unless you counted the boxes Herman smashed. Up around the corner was a broken down room with a healing fountain. Since Monica refused to take her clothes off and splash around in it for our viewing pleasure, Herman and I decided to explore the giant man-sized mousehole in the wall. Monica instead decided to fix the nearby shattered Riftstone. After looking between us for a few seconds, Gillian finally decided to follow Herman and I into the hole and leave Monica to blow all of my Rift Crystals on broken rocks.

Inside, Herman was distracted by an ore vein, leaving Gillian and I to head into what looked like some kind of incredibly shitty apartment on our own. As it turned out, it was an incredibly shitty apartment, and Barroch lived there. He was freezing his ass off in front of the fireplace. He turned to chat with us, and while he was talking, I noticed something incredibly annoying about him. He couldn't stand still. He waved his arms around, shook his hips, bounced from one leg to the other, wobbled his head around... he just kept moving. It was infuriating. By then, Herman and Monica had joined us, so I left Monica and Gillian trapped in a conversation awhirl with metaphors from the head-bobbing hermit, and Herman helped me trash Barroch's place.

He didn't look up once as we ripped things off the wall, rifled through drawers, pocketed all of his hand grenades, smashed all of his boxes, destroyed his dishes, ripped all the paper off his corkboard, and stole his tupperware. Herman even snapped the picnic table covered with a blanket that Barroch apparently used for a bed in half and threw part of it at a wall. We ducked out before he noticed, heading back to the Gutter of Misery. We walked all the way down the stairs and found, to nobody's surprise, another gaping hole in the wall. As we walked through it, a swarm of tiny bats flew by us, freaking all of us out.

"BATS!!" I screamed flailing wildly. "FUCKING BATS!!"

"Chill out, Dad. They're not attacking." Gillian said, hopping down the ledge we were standing on to reach the wet smelly cave area below.

"Smells like a sewer." Herman commented, also ignoring the bats.

"That's ridiculous. We haven't found even so much as an outhouse. Why would there be a sewer down here?" Monica said, waving the bats away indifferently. Of course, we naturally found ourselves in a giant sewer. "...I refuse to be surprised by this." Monica said stubbornly, crossing her arms with a scowl. And what would be in a sewer but assloads of giant lizards?

"Aren't these saurians kind of big, even by giant lizard standards? These are like saurianzillas or something." Herman asked, poking one of their dead bodies. It hadn't taken us that long to kill them, seeing as they weren't much stronger than regular saurians, just bigger. The corpses exploded into giant piles of rotten meat. "Well, that was weird." I got a little dizzy after that, and my vision blurred some kind of disgusting yellow-green-gray-orange yuck color.

"Master, are you feeling alright?" Monica asked, touching my shoulder gently.

"Dad, look!" Gillian gasped. "It's an ogre! Where did it even come from!?"

"It's an Elder Ogre. I've seen them before." Herman said warily, covering his backside. "They, uh... they like dudes."

I didn't need to hear more than that. I fired several dozen Ricochet Hunter bolts directly into its face. Meanwhile, Herman was engaged in another life-and-death melee with a Maneater, or as Monica would probably call it, a box worm. The sewer was a brilliant place for my ricochet bolts to achieve maximum efficiency, and so the Elder Ogre was actually lifted up into the air and juggled there by the bouncing bolts. I didn't let up, though, and continued firing them ad nauseam until it was thirteen different kinds of dead. Some of the bolts slapped against the Maneater, killing it in the process and freeing Herman from its mouth.

"Why did you interrupt!? You stole my kill! I had that chest-defiling bastard right where I wanted him! Why, Luther, why!?" Herman cried, shaking his fists at me.

"Herman, you were ankles-deep in its mouth." Monica pointed out.

"Right where I wanted him!"

"Sure you did, big guy." I laughed, walking away.

"I was baiting him! I wanted him to think he was winning, and then WHAM! Dead!"

"Herman, nobody is buying it." Gillian said gently, helping the angry dwarf to his feet. "I'm sure there's more of them down here. You'll get the next one!"

"I had this one, though..." Herman mumbled, stuffing his pockets with loot from the battle.

We walked away from the dead, melting ogre and the now-vacant chest, wading through the sewage and up the stairs to what declared itself grandly as 'The Shrine of Futile Truths'.

"It's like some emo kid just sat around thinking of the most edgy names he could cut his wrists with and putting them on random doors." I groaned, shoving the doors open. "Alright, so what's this place's stupid gimmick? So far, we've had a sex dungeon, a crappy apartment, a room full of stairs, and a really dark sewer. What's next on the emo wheel of sadness?"

"I believed myself the one to end the great cycle. To free the world... Yet here I reach my meager end, lost in quiet oblivion." The ghostly whining of a dead Arisen came as we walked over her dead body.

"Uh... Dad, this is a really big room." Gillian observed, rubbing her arms to warm herself. "And cold. I don't like this."

"The background music changed, too." Herman noted, looking around.

"Background music? What music? What are you talking about?" Gillian asked, confused.

"And look! Health potions and recovery items strewn across the floor! Luther, in my professional opinion, I think we're near a boss fight!" Herman said, his expression grim.

"So... what, the monster who signs everybody's paychecks?" I asked, not quite following.

"Let me explain, Master. A 'boss fight' is a Pawn term for a very difficult battle, usually with a large, powerful being." Monica said patiently, trying to keep the condescension out of her voice without much luck.

"Like that giant motherfucking beholder over there?" I asked, pointing to the biggest goddamn eyeball stuck in an open mouth lined with huge, sharp teeth and covered in tentacles I'd ever seen.

"Master, you can't call it that!" Monica scolded, shaking her finger in my face. "It's a licensing issue."

"Oh, I see. So what do I call it?"

"The small ones are Vile Eyes. The slightly bigger ones are Evil Eyes." She turned to gesture towards the really, really big one that was patiently waiting for us, checking a watch on one of its tentacles. "And this very large one is a Gazer. They're completely different, you see, because of the mouth theme. They're eyeballs inside of mouths, see? And their tentacles end in mouths instead of smaller eyeballs."

"Alright, so those greedy bastards at Wizards of the Coast can't sue!"

"Exactly!" Monica said, clapping gleefully. "Oh, Master! You're finally getting it!"

"...I have no idea what's going on." Gillian said, completely out of the loop.

"If you have no objections, I propose we begin our battle." The Gazer said, its posh, elegant voice echoing in the hall.

"Oh, sure. Die, you disgusting giant mouthy eyeball son of a bitch!!" I snarled, setting myself on fire and jumping from the ledge directly onto the giant eyeball. It screamed, which opened its mouth-slash-eyelids wider, allowing me to get a better grip with my burning body and slash away madly with my daggers at its exposed eyeball.

Tentacles the size of trees warped through reality to, for some reason, ignore me and slap at Herman, Gillian, and Monica, none of whom were really capable of hurting it right now. Herman and Gillian couldn't climb for shit, and even if they managed to cling to the eyeball, their massive swords made it impossible for them to hurt whatever they were sticking to at the time with more than weaksauce pommel bashes, and Monica's offensive power was actually pretty limited.