Oliver D. Bernuetz's Stories

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Get My Point?[1]

Woof, it is exhausting being as awesome as I am.  Some back story. I am known as Brightspear, a follower of ol’ Papa Brightpants as I call him.  I believe lesser beings refer to him as Yelm, Emperor of the Universe, Lord of Everything, etc.  But I will always fondly know him as Papa Brightpants.  A long time ago I was, well let’s say different in form and function.  Man, I was great, arms, legs, wang. I was the total package.  Oh, I forgot one thing.  A Mouth, capitalization fully intended.  Yeah, I had a Mouth.  Looking back I maybe could have used the Mouth a little less.  But you know what they say, “NO REGRETS!”  Sure, let’s go with that.  You say one tiny thing too much and one minute you got extremities branching out in all directions and the next you’re a stick with pointy bits on each end.  SIGH. 

Anyway, so for time without measure I was the pointy part of a bunch of friggin’ tools.  Heroes are rarely fun but man, Solar heroes are the worst.  Every man, and I do mean man, an immense TOOL and no friggin’ fun whatsoever.  You couldn’t find a spec of FUN in those stiffs if you had Vrimak’s eyes.  That last Yelm follower, he was the worst, Brightspear do this, Brightspear do that.  When I had the chance to run off with that red-haired rebel rouser[2] I literally leapt at the chance.  She was different and kind of cool if I do say so.  Funny though, now that I think about it that no one ever came looking for me.  You’d think ol’, jeez what was his name, would have come looking for me or at least looking for revenge for getting the shits, that was a good one.  Hmm, but he never did.  Anyway, ol’ Skerri was pretty cool.  Shame about how she ended up mind.  And then her son Bjorn was, eh, I’d shrug if I could but you know no shoulders.  But when he died without issue he dumped me in his mother’s barrow and went off to seek his own. 

I had thought that maybe I would enjoy being in a warm, snuggly barrow and get a good rest after all those years of saving loser so-called heroes.  And I thought I’d stay there forever or at least til Papa Brightpants called me home.  Huh, funny, He never did call me home.  I wonder why?  So there I was in the dark, no proper place for an awesome follower of Yelm as myself.  My only light source being, well myself so I guess it really wasn’t that dark.  So I must have dozed off because the next I knew was that Bjorn guy was back, not in his old body mind you but in some young, pseudo-divine wannabe hero called Belintar.  And we ran around and did some stuff and fixed the barrow which was being disrupted, bothered by some River Goddess.  Huh, wonder why I didn’t notice that while I was napping?  Anyway, ol’ Bjorn was back and while I didn’t get to do much stabbing I have to admit it was kind of good to be out under Papa Brightpants’ sky again.  I looked up kind of in longing but I don’t think anyone was looking down on me…not with longing anyway.  What did I do?

So Bjorn did what he had to do and he was gonna move on, whatever terminal rebels do after they die, sink into the muck?  Blow around in the wind?  Kick up some dust?  Be an asshole dust devil and kick dust in people’s eyes or is that Storm Bulls? Whatever.  And I thought, here we go back into the dark, dank hole and back to napping but no what does he do, he gives me, like I’m some family heirloom to the hero wannabe.  Okay, I guess I was relieved.  I mean when he handed me over there lots of better hero candidates around, even some Humakti with Papa Brightpants’ mark on his forehead!  Man, who do I gotta stab to get that kind of notice.  Of course some guy named Argrath was there at the time and I looked at him and I thought, now that guy is trouble on a stick and I know all about trouble!, so I was happy to be with the kid.  So I decided I would help him reach his full potential, yadda, yadda. 

So baby boy hero wanna be dog walker hangs around with a bunch of loons, some invisible sorcerer[3] and his pet rat, the aforementioned Humakti[4] with the godly divot on his noggin, some sad sack blowhard priest[5], a big stinky monkey[6] and the least sad one of the lot, though still pretty sad, Lord something or other of Bunny Ears Plantation[7].  Or something like that, some follower of the lame light in the Hills.  I mean really, why worship some literal lesser light that couldn’t start a fire without two hunks of rock when you could worship the Big Guy, Papa Brightpants.  But whatever.

So Lord Bunnyears and his happy party of misfits and lost boys had pissed off some major goons who had sworn vile vengeance, etc., etc., etc. and had somehow been organized enough to be pretty damned effective.  They’d managed to nab Lord Bunnyears’ wife and spawn and dragged them off to the Krjalki Bog and demanded that he and his friends follow them or…  Obvious trap but you know humans and their obsession with their stinky progeny.  So off they all charged to the rescue!  I tagged along to see how this would all play out.  It was a classic set-up, swamp full of broos, lost city of the ancients, underground antics.  What a melodrama.  So we went underground in full predictable pursuit of the bad guys.  So we made our way through the swamp without much fighting, I mercy killed some chaos alligators, or were they crocodiles?  I mean who does that?  Dog sitter[8], that’s who.  So we got through the broo-laden swamp without much fighting, the broos if you can believe it, had been ordered to let these bunyips go past and someone managed to muzzle Kannedgoods so they wouldn’t waste all their time fighting hordes of broos and we found some abandoned temple to one of Lost Genert’s daughters. We went down a spiral staircase, hate those damn things and found the top bit of some abandoned city. 

So we found the expected ruinous dungeon down there.  You know no light, damp stone walls, tiled floor with big scary holes in it that dropped down to who knows and a line of little dimwit critters that could blow themselves up into balls.  I looked at them and thought, oh man, where’s the imagination? So predictable and boring. Down some hallway we found this giant toothed wheel and a huge pot hanging from a chain that went over the wheel.  In the pot were the missing family and some broos.  Surrounding the pot was some ogres in iron plate and heavy crossbows.  Some posturing occurred and our boys were ordered to surrender posthaste or the pot would be dropped!  Supposedly this would kill them all.  Well our boys dropped their weapons, not terribly posthaste but eventually.  But then this Swordsticker shows up all aggrieved and such and challenges our Swordsticker to one of their tedious duels. Something about betrayal or maybe it’s just the fact that he was enthralled by some succubus.  Classic. The ogres are pissed since this wasn’t part of the script but they can’t seem to gainsay the enemy Swordsticker so they allow the duel.  The pot is sent down and the “invisible” sorcerer jumps on the chain and goes down.  With his rubbish rat.

The rest of us go to a prepared circle cut in the floor by the enemy Swordsticker.  They fight their fight and our boy keeps maiming the enemy Swordsticker.  But he keeps calling on his god for handouts, see what I did there?  He kept on getting hit in the arm and I said, ah nuts, forgot to mention the arm thing.  Anyway eventually he gets knocked down by a blow to the head and when he calls on the god, for the third time he lies there and claims he’s better now, let him up and everything’s groovy.  Naw, not so far as Kandida is concerned.  Yield or die says he.  So the prone Swordsticker calls on his god for a fourth time and bugs off! 

The writings on the wall as far as the ogres are concerned and they run for it.  They manage to get ahead of our boys through some daring leaps over holes and slide down some sewer[9].  My boy Dogwalker and Lamey the Monkey decide not to jump over any holes that go down an unknown distance and instead decide to follow the invisible sorcerer down the chain.  Fun.  I look at the chain and see the runes lovingly carved in each link, Disorder, Movement and Illusion?  You’re going to trust a chain made by that asshat?  No skin off my teeth.  No rust on my blade?  Hmm, going to have to work on that one.  Anyway, we start our descent into the unknown.  Wooooo.  I was going to be all right no matter what so.

We descend into the dark and then some mist and then back into the light.  Fun, hundreds of metres off the ground.  Dogwalker and Stinky Monkey hang on tighter.  The pot’s about 50 metres below us.  We pass another pot on the other end of the chain filled up with the puddin’ guys, no sorry, roly-poly guys.  They wave.  I’d have waved back but you know.  So as we get lower we spy the welcoming committee, three or four handfuls of broos and some more of those fun ogres with the iron armour and the heavy crossbows.  You know people don’t normally look up and we probably would have been safe BUT these goons seemed brighter than the usual rent-a-thug and they spotted us.  As soon as they did so they started cranking on their crossbows and casting spells on them.  Monkey boy hangs onto the chain with his toes, impressive and casts some rune spell.  (I’m guessing Impede Chaos).  Quarrels start flying and our boys start climbing down.  Sadly Dogwalker doesn’t believe in armour and he takes a quarrel in first one arm and then the other.  Rats.  Well I was firmly strapped to his back for the climb along with some bloody arbalest he’d picked up and he asked me nicely with his last thoughts to get him out of there.  So I started flying away with him hanging limp below me.  This elicited some gasps of awe and bellows of rage from below.  Always a nice thing.  I flew him at top speed out of the light.

Meanwhile Wild Safari was in trouble.  He might have been hard to hit with his god’s stink on him but that didn’t make him impossible to hit, just unlikely.  One of those impossible things happened and he got impaled in the chest with a quarrel.  Enough damage to knock him off the chain helpless and still high enough off the ground to splat quite effectively.  And I thought, ugh in for a clack, in for a wheel so I swooped in for the rescue!  Sort of.  No hands right?  So I tried to gently spear him through some fleshy bit to minimize damage.  Nope, missed right through the head.  More awe and rage from below and we flew off.  Now I could bring them back from the other side but I couldn’t pull any quarrels out of them and I don’t do regular healing.  But as we had been descending I had smelt divinity nearby in a cave past some waterfall higher up.  So that’s where we flew.  I’d have sung some victory song but my mouth was full of monkey.  Yuck.  So we reached the cave and I circled waiting for permission to land.  I thought the nicest thoughts I could think and eventually I felt a sensation of welcome.  I flew into the cave which turned out to be a ruined bank of all things.

Inside the bank I found the daughter of Lost Genert whose temple we’d passed through.  She was big and beautiful and completely missing her hands and feet.  Sigh.  Another victim of Eurmal’s “help”. Always with the hands and feet.  What is with that guy?  What a fetishist. I tried to greet her properly but first I had to get that damn dirty ape off of my head.  I scraped him off on some wall, it is going to take some time to get rid of the taste of monkey.  I was a little careless mind you and he almost fell into a river.  Thankfully two of the little roly-poly guys were present and they grabbed him before he fell into the water.  He would have gone right over the waterfall and I wouldn’t have wanted to patch that back together.  Anyway.  Great daughter of Lost Genert, I said, could you please heal these fallen for me?  I have some magic I could use to bring their spark back but I haven’t got any more mundane healing.  Wait, did those little roly-poly guys look like Koncord and Windy?  Ooh, boy baby someone got bizz-zay.  My boys got game.  Maybe they’re not a total loss.

Well the goddess was not loath to do some healing but she kind of had the same problem I did no way to do a standing O[10].  Thankfully the half-pint roly-polys had hands and with some coaching they pulled the quarrels out of my boys and the goddess zapped ‘em with the good stuff.  Then I reached in deep and dragged the last two sparks, I’d err, borrowed from Papa Brightpants way back when and zapped ‘em into Larry and Dogwalker and the boys were back.  The goddess folded some space to give us some privacy and all was as right as rain.  For the time being.  We’ll just have to see where this all goes.  Should be good for some laughs anyhoo.

Last updated February 17, 2020

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