the inn-cident

​By Izzy

My group had been on the road with the cultists for a couple weeks; we were biding our time and trying to gather as much information as possible. In that regard, we failed miserably. Rose, the five and a half foot tall fighter in our group, had been recognized by one of the cultists.
See, we may or may not have killed many of them in a cave earlier on in our journey.

    Don’t worry though, they’re the bad guys.
    As far as we can tell, the cultists are terrorizing cities and towns, stealing their gold, and then somehow sacrificing it to bring back Tiamat, an ancient five-headed dragon queen.
    Anyway, we had to kill the cultist who recognized Rose. And by kill, I mean I, Asteria Starag, the greatest assassin to walk the Earth, stabbed her to death with a poisoned knife in an alley.
    Good times. Good times.
    After that, things just went downhill. Apparently, people found it rather suspicious that, after accusing Rose of murder, the cultist disappeared. I was not allowed to kill any other people who found us suspicious, something about not wanting to draw any more attention. During our travels, we met a red-scaled dragonborn, a dragon-like humanoid, sorcerer, and a religious human knight, also called a paladin. I don’t remember their names, but they didn’t stay long. They left after the incident at the inn.
    We didn’t mean to cause any trouble.
    At least not that time.
    It was raining, we had to pay four gold pieces just to stay in the stables, and the food was horrible. And I don’t mean it was accidently horrible, like the cook was trying to please too many people; I mean, the cook thought it was absolutely delicious and we had to pretend to like it because we didn’t want to sleep in the rain. Our dragonborn friend, we’ll call him Larry, pretended to like the food and we were able to find out where all the gold was going.
    The cultists had been unloading the gold and bringing it into a storage room on the ground floor of the inn. A storage room that, thanks to me, would be really easy to break into.
    I was very good at my job, okay, like, really good. I was at my very best when I was alone, and not lugging a heavily armored, do-gooder of a  paladin behind me. Needless to say, I’m surprised we even made it through the first door of the room. Yes, there were two sets of doors.
    I picked the lock fairly easily, the door didn’t creak when it opened. The paladin, we’ll just call him Ned, didn’t lecture me on the evils of stealing. We were set.
    The door only creaked when it closed. What door only creaks when it’s closing?
    There weren’t any guards in the room; in fact, it was mostly empty, save for a few boxes. But there was another door, on the left side of the room. I opened that one a little faster, not wanting to give anyone in the next room time to grab their weapons.
    I counted.
    One.
    Two.
    Three!
    We burst through the door, swords drawn.
    Three guards turned to face us.
    And were hit by a cone of fire that singed my leather uniform and heated Ned’s plated armor.
    Apparently, sorcerers with the ability to breath fire can be sneaky, too.
    We whirred into action.
    I used my shortsword to slice at the one closest to me, while Ned chopped off the head of another with his greatsword.
    I will never make fun of a paladin again.
    Ned then chopped off the arms of another before moving aside so Larry could help me finish the last one off. Ned moved back into the previous room, waiting for the reinforcements that were no doubt coming.
    The room was now filthier than before. Blood and dust coated the floor and was splattered on the walls. I mean, I would absolutely detest having to be the one to clean this all up. The cleanest thing in the room was a little spot by a rug; in fact, it looked like the rug had been moved recently.
    I sheath my sword and walked over to the rug, careful to step around the blood. My boots were still semi-new.
    I bent down and flipped over the rug, revealing a trapdoor.
    I smiled and looked over at Larry, “After you.”