Pathfinder Ponies

by terrycloth

Security Theater

As it turned out, the limited range of vision provided by the light cantrips and ioun torches the party was using had exaggerated the actual scope of the trapped area. All told, there were eleven barred doors, one of which was blocked by a cave in and five of which Applejack had already disarmed by the time she reached the intersection. To the left, the corridor met up with a side passage that was completely blocked by the back side of the same cave in they’d seen earlier, and then ended in yet another cave in only a few feet beyond that. To the right, there was one additional door in the far wall, and then the tunnel ended in a second barred door directly ahead. The mechanisms were extremely easy for Applejack to jam, especially with the help of her Goggles of Minute Seeing.

Having disabled them all, however, the party was left with nowhere to go.

“If we have to open one of them up, we should start with one of the ones that faces a T-intersection,” Twilight said. “I can stand back in the corridor and swing into the room with my hammer, and if they step outside to engage, they’ll be flanked by Applejack and Rainbow Dash waiting to either side.”

“What if they shoot arrows at you?” Rarity asked.

Twilight shrugged. “Then I’ll charge.”

“What if they shoot nasty poisonous tentacles at you, paralyze you, and then drag you into the room to devour you at their leisure?” Pinkie Pie asked.

“Then I hope the rest of you can save me?” Twilight said, giving her a strange look. “Actually… that would make a pretty nasty trap. How about we tie ropes to the three of us who’re planning to fight, and have Big Mac or the dragons hold them? Just in case.”

Thus prepared, the party got into formation – with Pinkie Pie behind Twilight so that she could throw a bomb into the room if the forces inside looked dangerous enough to warrant using one up. Applejack and Rainbow Dash each grabbed one end of the heavy oak bar, and together they lifted it off its mount, letting it fall to the ground with a loud ‘THUNK’. The door slammed open, almost smacking Rainbow Dash in the face, and revealed a flaming skeletal pony just through the doorway. Behind it was a room crammed full of more flaming skeletons.

Rainbow Dash tried to counterattack, but the angle was awkward and she couldn’t quite hit it. Pinkie Pie poked her muzzle into one of the pockets of her bandolier, and tossed an icy flask into the room, dousing the flames on half a dozen skeletons, which collapsed into inanimate bones. Without the flames blinding their vision, Pinkie and Twilight could see a more powerful looking undead hiding among them – an earth pony, or gem pony perhaps, with dessicated skin, hollow eyes, and its guts hanging out of its belly, dragging along the floor.

Before they could react to that, the rest of the burning skeletons charged, trying to push their way into the corridor. Twilight easily deflected their claws, but just being close to them was enough to singe her fur.

“Rarity!” Fluttershy said, grabbing a rod in her teeth. “Catch!” Rarity was surprised, but managed to grab it, and transfer it to a hoof.

Twilight recognized it from the shopping trip. “It’s a lesser metamagic rod of reach spell,” she said, as she brought the butt of her hammer down on the skeleton in front of her, destroying the fragile creature in an explosion of flame that washed over her, Applejack, and Rainbow Dash. “It’ll let you –“

“I believe I know what you have in mind,” Rarity said, channeling her communal resistance spell through the rod. The party glowed briefly orange, and the heat from the skeletons faded, no longer burning them.

“Invaderssss…” croaked the creature lurking among the skeletons. “You will join my herd!”

Shoving its minions aside, it burst into the hallway and vomited its guts onto Twilight’s face. She bashed in its head with her hammer as it approached, but losing most of its skull didn’t even seem to slow it down – if anything, it just made it easier for the putrid organs to emerge. Twilight’s armor offered little protection from the disgusting fluids that seeped into her mouth and nose, and she felt her muscles lock in place from sheer disgust as her senses were overloaded.

But before it could take advantage of her paralysis, Applejack and Rainbow Dash put the plan into play. They jumped on the undead pony – clearly once a gem pony, up close – and tore it to pieces. Applejack removed its two right legs with her claws, and cut its guts in half with her knife, but it didn’t stop moving until Rainbow Dash stomped on its chest, shattering its ribcage.

Despite the remaining skeletons’ mindless ferocity, with the party protected from fire it only took a couple more flasks of alchemical ice to wipe the rest of them out.

By the time Twilight recovered from her paralysis, the rest of the party had had plenty of time to thoroughly search the room. It looked like it had once been the living quarters for a group of pony miners, before everything was looted and smashed, and the occupants massacred and turned into undead.

“Oh my gosh!” Pinkie Pie said, her eyes going wide. “Oh my gosh! You won’t believe what my headband is telling me!”

“It can talk?” Applejack asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Only to me,” Pinkie Pie said. “Or to anypony who wears it I guess. It knows allllll about history and it says that this used to be a mithril mine, like fifty years ago, before one day the miners mysteriously vanished. A few weeks later, the kobolds showed up.” She narrowed her eyes. “Suspicious!”

“Well, I guess we know what happened to them,” Rarity said. “It’s a shame that nopony investigated before the grandchildren of the kobolds responsible died of old age. I suppose we could consider this mission one of vengeance, for their sake?” She shook her head. “It rings hollow, since we were already planning on exterminating the horrid creatures.”

“We were planning on investigating the dungeon to figure out what they’re hiding here,” Twilight said, trying in vain to scrape the remains of the undead’s attack from her armor. “But I have no qualms adding ‘exterminate the kobolds’ to the task list.”

Rarity smiled, and whisked her clean with a prestidigitation spell.

“Right. So what’s the plan? Open all of these doors until we run out of undead?” Applejack asked.

“If it was just undead in here, that would be a solid plan,” Twilight said. “They come in manageable packs and can retreat easily if we get too worn down. But kobolds are notorious for setting traps – they won’t sit idle if we leave to rest. So if we’re being methodical, we should eliminate as many doors as we can. For example, the doors in the collapsed hallway and its counterpart couldn’t possibly lead anywhere if we assume a two-dimensional layout for this area, so we can eliminate them.”

“Can we assume a two-dimensional layout?” Rarity asked.

“Hmm. If the mine was run by gem ponies, then yeah, I reckon we can,” Applejack said. “They’re not too imaginative with the architecture.”

“Let’s sketch it out,” Twilight said, taking out a sheet of paper and some ink and a quill. She drew in lines representing the hallways, and boxes representing rooms approximately the size of the one they’d found behind the first door. “Huh,” she said, pointing directly to the right of the tunnel they’d taken from the lake. “This whole area here is blank. That’s probably where we want to go.”

“Search for secret doors?” Applejack suggested.

“That, or we could just take the closest door and see if it connects,” Twilight said, gesturing with the quill until it arrived at the first door, which was also unique in being the only door set at the the end of a hallway instead of being off to the side. “Okay, that should have been obvious without drawing this map.”

“So what’s the plan?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Those bars are heavy, and loud. I don’t think we’re going to surprise anypony on the other side.”

“Rarity, your skeletons are smart enough to open doors, right?” Twilight asked, with a smirk.

“Yes… you’re planning to send them in first?” Rarity asked.

“Isn’t that what they’re for?” Rainbow Dash asked. “It’s not like they can be killed, right? Evil slime?”

“Very well,” Rarity said, with a sigh. “Just remember what happens if this gets them killed.”

With the help of a Reduce Person spell, the party brought Macintosh across the lake in a skeletal dragon’s claws, and then they all backed up to leave the hallway open for the dragons to squeeze through the five foot hallways and approach the door. Before ordering them to attack, there was time for last minute preparations before the assault.

Pinkie Pie passed out Shield infusions, and gave Rainbow Dash a special infusion. “It’s not a songbird, but it should help a little.”

“It’s not permanent, is it?” Rainbow Dash asked.

Pinkie Pie giggled. “Oh, I wish! But nah, not yet. It’ll only last a few minutes.”

With a shrug, Rainbow downed the vial, and squawked in surprise and discomfort as her body shrank and recongfigured itself into an eagle the size of a large dog. She gave a triumphant shriek, and fluttered around Pinkie Pie’s head happily.

“So much for stealth,” Applejack muttered.

“We’re going for surprise of a different sort,” Twilight said. “I don’t think they’re going to be expecting the dragons.”

The CLANG as Sparky II removed the bar was deafening, and then it flung open the door. With a nerve wracking ‘click!’, all the remaining barred doors in the hallway twitched, as the mechanism attempted to release the bars – but Applejack had done fine work disabling them all, and they all stayed shut. After a second, there was another ‘click’, and then a rapid ‘clickclickclick’, as if somepony was trying to trigger the mechanism multiple times.

Then the hallway in which the dragons were preparing to press into the room was engulfed in fire. Explosion after explosion, looking similar to a Fireball spell. Although badly burned, the skeletal dragons attempted to follow their instructions and push into the room, past any enemies near the door, so that the party would have room to charge in after them. Sparky II, who led the charge, was hooked on some sort of polearm and slammed into the ground directly in front of the door – the other three skeletons managed to fly past him as instructed, however.

Twilight charged after the last of them, and swung her hammer at the source of one of the four axe-like pole-arms rising and falling to beat against Sparky II’s bones. Her swing smashed into an elaborate barricade protecting the kobold warrior.

The room beyond the door, illuminated dimly by light cantrips on two of the dragons, was immense – at least a hundred feet in each direction, and spanning multiple levels. The door in which Twilight stood appeared to the be the top level – a balcony, sloping down towards the center of the room, with tiers of seats, most of which had been torn up and shredded, but enough remained to make the entire room difficult to move through for anypony larger than a kobold. There was a railing, after which it dropped off into the darkness. Far to the right, the circling dragon occasionally illuminated a remarkably well-preserved curtain, closed to conceal the stage.

Four barriers each concealed a heavily armored, pole-arm wielding kobold, making them almost impossible to attack from the doorway, and leaving a killing ground between them where anypony attempting to enter the room would provoke at attack from all four of them – as Sparky II had. It seemed unlikely that the warriors were the ones who threw the fireballs, since the dragons’ charge had happened almost immediately afterwards and they’d still been waiting ready for it, but there were no other kobolds visible.

“Twilight, Duck!” Rarity warned, as she flung her own fireball over the unicorn’s shoulder. It sailed between two of the barricades and detonated twenty feet into the room, the wall of fire stopping a few inches in front of Twilight’s nose. The blast of fire washed over the kobolds, who screamed in pain and alarm, but more importantly the explosion shattered the barricades into burning splinters, and cleared away the debris from almost half of the balcony.

It also finished off Sparky II, who collapsed into a heap of slime-covered dragon bones. The slime began slowly, slowly pulling the bones back into shape, but it would take an hour for them to actually bring him back.

With the way clear, Applejack and Rainbow Dash charged into the fray. They had to charge to reach the target, since they’d been waiting so far down the hallway, so they couldn’t flank, but Applejack managed to slip her knife into a weak spot in the warrior’s armor, plunging it into his chest, and Eagle Dash clawed at his face, distracting him from the bleeding wound.

The relatively tiny Macintosh charged one of the other kobolds with his lance, crushing his breastplate and breaking his ribs, but failing to take him down… until Fluttershy followed up with a crossbow bolt, which slipped in through a gap in the armor exposed by the lance’s strike and sunk deep into the kobold’s neck, dropping him.

Pinkie Pie flew into the room and hovered over the melee, holding a bomb ready to throw if the wizards who’d shot the fireballs showed their faces. The party was already protected from fire, but most wizards had more than one spell.

Instead of a wizard, however, a quartet of kobolds in lighter armor, wielding bows, appeared out of nowhere in the clear part of the balcony, and started firing arrows at her. That was close enough for Pinkie, who threw her bomb, but she missed her target, and the kobolds skillfully ducked under their cloaks to deflect the splash – except for one, who was a little too slow, and ended up with burning liquid seeping into his clothing, burning him slightly… and setting off the remaining fireball charges that were hanging around his neck.

That burned him rather more severely, although not enough to take him out of the fight. The other rogues were able to evade the blast, and Rarity’s resist fire spell protected the party, since many of them were caught in the sudden fireballs as well.

When the blast cleared, however, Pinkie Pie was lying unconscious, pincushioned with arrows, bleeding heavily from several shots to her chest.

The warrior kobolds flailed their polearms at Dash and Macintosh and Applejack, trying to trip them, and while Dash dodged them easily and Macintosh managed to keep his feet, Applejack went down, and got hit over the head while she was sprawled out in front of him. It didn’t hurt much, except to her pride.

Fluttershy, seeing Pinkie Pie bleeding out on the floor, reached for her metamagic rod, before remembering that she’d forgotten to retrieve it from Rarity. She squeaked, and darted out into the middle of the room to heal her dying friend. One of the kobolds tried to trip her as she passed, but Twilight threw herself into the way and was tripped in her place. Fluttershy landed on Pinkie Pie, and shoved as much positive energy into her as she could manage, which brought her conscious and, more importantly, stopped the bleeding before she could die from her wounds.

“They were invisible!” Pinkie Pie said, as she quietly healed herself with a wand, trying to keep a low profile until somepony else got the archers’ attention.

Twilight tried to climb to her feet, but was tripped again and hit over the head for her trouble, although it didn’t do any damage. “Stop that!”, she cried, and swung back at the kobold from the floor, rocking him back with a heavy hit, even from her awkward position.

Applejack was a little more graceful in leaping back to her feet, and her target was much more badly wounded, and had been spun around with his back facing her as Rainbow Dash continued to harass him. She plunged her dagger into his back, and he fell.

Macintosh charged past the fallen kobold warriors to attack one of the rogues – the one on fire from having his equipment explode on him – but didn’t quite manage to catch him with his lance. The other three were engaged with the surviving skeletal drakes, although only one of them was clumsy enough to get bitten.

Then, they all vanished.

“I told you!” Pinkie Pie said. “Invisible!”

That left two hapless kobold warriors to fight the party alone. One of them beat on Twilight as she sprawled out in front of him, bruising her slightly before she hit him again and finished him off, then stood up, teeth clenched. “Yes, we’re definitely exterminating these guys.”

The other skittered away into part of the balcony that hadn’t been fireballed, and still had plenty of debris for cover, and managed to hide.

Fluttershy held her forehooves to her temples, then flew up into the air and spread her limbs wide, a ring of blue light tracing along the boundaries of every solid object, and purging all forms of invisibility from the area… but the kobold rogues were still nowhere to be seen.

“Invisible and also hiding,” Applejack said. “Smart little buggers.”

“Hmm…” Pinkie Pie said. “If I was a kobold, I’d be hiding right… there!” One of her bombs went arcing over the skeletons to explode into a cloud of stinking mist in a seemingly random place among the debris, about thirty feet back from where the rogues had disappeared. Macintosh, Applejack, and Rainbow Dash advanced towards the skeletons, and got ready to leap on any kobold popping out of hiding to attack.

On Rarity’s orders, two of the skeletons similarly prepared themselves, while Opal, who had one of the light cantrips, began a sweep of the back half of the balcony, her pool of light and shifting shadows failing to reveal any hidden kobolds among the broken chairs – until one leaped out and shattered her with a well-placed blow from a short sword, and her bones clattered to the ground around him. Everypony leapt to attack him, only to be met midway by three more fireballs, thrown by the other hidden rogues.

Crackle shattered and collapsed in a heap. Macintosh was stopped midway by the tangle of debris, too thick to charge through. Garble, Applejack, and Rainbow Dash reached the target, but none of them managed to connect – and then he vanished again.

Or at least, he tried to. The room was still purged, and he remained clearly visible. Rainbow, Applejack, and Garble made short work of him.

The others were attempting to stay hidden, but they’d given themselves away. Twilight charged at one of them, leaping over the tangle of chairs not cleared away by any of the fireballs to slam her hammer into his head hard enough to drive it entirely into his chest. There was a flash of green fire, and what lay crumpled at her feet was not exactly a kobold – but not entirely a changeling, either.

“You nasty little things! Stop breaking Rarity’s undead!” Fluttershy squeaked, but her target managed to duck out of the way of her wave of disapproval, cackling and pointing at her.

Pinkie Pie threw a bomb centered between it and the last kobold, engulfing them in poisonous smoke again.

Macintosh shouted, “There!” as he spotted one crawling away towards a door in the far wall, and tried to catch it with a tanglefoot bag, but it was too far for him to hit accurately.

Near the back, where she’d been waiting and conserving her spells, Rarity suddenly found herself under attack by the warrior who’d hidden earlier – who tripped her, and hacked at her repeatedly with his polearm while she was down, although he failed to get through an ablative barrier of hardened air that she’d set up before entering the dungeon. She tried to retaliate with her claws, from the ground, but while one did draw blood he didn’t succumb to paralysis. Garble flew across the room at impossible speed to protect his mistress, and caught the kobold solidly in his teeth.

While they tusseled, the party searched the room for the fleeing kobold rogues. “It looked like he was sick from the cloud, but that won’t last long,” Macintosh said, as they scanned the room.

“There!” Pinkie Pie said, and tossed a vial of alchemist’s fire, which illuminated a kobold-like shape that burned as it scurried away. Twilight threw a javelin at him, and it stuck in his back – he collapsed to the ground, still breathing but moving very slowly now.

At the far end of the room, the door opened and a shadowy figure escaped.

“I’m okay!” Rarity called from back near the entrance, as her remaining skeleton shook its head back and forth, finishing off the warrior, who’d ablated most of her barrier before going down. “In case any of you were wondering.”

“One of them got away,” Applejack said. “More of them’ll be coming.”

“And we’re stuck here for the next hour, waiting for Rarity’s skeletons to reform,” Pinkie Pie said, pouting.

On the plus side, upon looting the kobolds, the party found a good deal of magical equipment – the armor was magical, they all had been wearing cloaks of resistance – the rogues’ more powerful than some of the ones in use by the party – and their weapons were masterwork quality, except for the rogues’ bows which were also magic. The warriors had tanglefoot bags that they hadn’t used, and potions of silence which they hadn’t had time to drink, and the rogues were carrying dust of appearance in case any potential attackers tried to take a note out of their book. There were also two rather small fireball spheres left on the dead rogues’ necklaces.

One of the rogues wasn’t actually dead, so Applejack tied him up in the case anypony wanted to interrogate him.

Investigating the lower level of the theater, the party found a massive kobold nest where the main level seating had been – kobold eggs everywhere, along with furniture, bedding, half-eaten meals, and every other indication that until a few minutes ago, a large kobold population had been huddling underfoot, waiting for the outcome of the battle overhead as the invaders fought their champions. When the party had been victorious, they’d all snuck away, somewhere – perhaps out the large set of the double doors that in an aboveground theater would have been the main entrance.

“Some of these eggs look… wrong,” Pinkie Pie said.

“They’re like the rogues we fought,” Rarity said, examining one closely. “A hybrid between kobold and changeling. I wonder how they taste?”

“I wonder if we could get anything for ‘em in the city,” Applejack countered.

“Yes, because I’m sure there are plenty of people who want more kobolds in the world,” Twilight replied. “Oh, go ahead, we can try to sell them.”

“Thank ‘ya kindly,” Applejack said, grinning as she packed them away.

On closer inspection, even the warrior kobolds they’d fought had had slight changeling features – vestigial horns, under their helmets, and patches of chitin among their scales.

“I’m glad we took a prisoner,” Twilight said. “Before we kill him, let’s see if we can get some answers.”

They set Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash on watch on the door they’d come through, so that Fluttershy’s purge would reveal any invisible attackers somehow flanking them, and Rainbow’s keen eyes could spot anyone trying to sneak through the open passageway. They set Garble on guard on the other upper level door, his bulk making it difficult for anypony to get into the room even if they managed to open the door, making for an effective barricade. Applejack jammed one of her less-loved lockpicks into the lock on the double doors below so that they would no longer open with the key. Momentarily safe-ish, Twilight and Applejack woke up the injured and restrained kobold and started asking him questions.

“Let’s start with the basics,” Applejack said, picking at her fangs with her dagger while Twilight stood nearby looking dangerous. “How many of ya scruffy little varmints are there, and how big is this dungeon you’ve set up for yourselves?”

“There are hundreds – thousands of kobold warriors!” he chittered, his eyes darting around wildly. “Our city stretches for miles! I am among the weakest of our kind!”

“You see, that’s what I call a bad lie,” Applejack said. “You know why?”

The kobold frantically shook his head.

“Because it means I got to do something messy to ya. Now, hold still. What do you think, Twi? A finger?”

“An eye,” Twilight replied. “See how good he is at shooting his bow with an eye-patch.”

“No! No! No! Stop!” the kobold squeaked. “I’ll tell you the truth now! Hundreds, yes, but of warriors only dozens. Most are not as strong… the strongest were here to protect the eggs.”

“You don’t understand,” Twilight said. “You already lost the eye for lying to us. Telling the truth now will only keep you from losing more.”

“Twilight!” Fluttershy said, in a voice usually reserved for their enemies. “What did I say about maiming ponies?”

“But he’s a kobold!” Twilight protested. Fluttershy kept glowering at her until she backed down. “Fine, fine, you can keep your eye, as long as you tell us everything.”

“Yes! Yes! I’ll tell you everything!”

The kobold babbled on for quite some time. Every so often, his eyes would shift to glance at the doorway through which his friend had escaped, as if he was expecting reinforcements to burst in and rescue him – but Garble was guarding the door, and no kobold even tried to open it. Whatever plan they had for the party, it apparently did not involve a rescue.

His story started long before he was born, when the kobolds expanding from the underdark came across a recently abandoned mine. After half their expedition was eaten, they discovered that it was not abandoned per se, but infested by undead. Their cleverness and cooperation allowed them to bottle the undead up in a part of the complex they didn’t need, however, and they set up shop. It was a surfacer mine, and access to the surface made it a stop on the trade route with the orcs, bringing them much prosperity… at least until the dark elves managed to conquer and enslave the home warrens, leaving them cut off.

“Yeah, elves do that,” Twilight said. “We had to kick them out of our forest.”

“And then they stole most of our weather magic!” Pinkie Pie said. “Elves are jerks.”

The kobold was happy to agree on that point, at least. Eventually, once the party tired of insulting the elven race in absentia, he moved on to the rest of his story.

His tribe had broken away from the warren because its leaders liked to perform magical experiments considered too risky for even kobolds to stomach near their nests. The most recent leader had been researching portals, and after a few near-disasters trying by-the-book elemental portals, had managed to open one to something resembling an alternate Prime Material Plane. There, they’d contacted strange, magical bugs that shared many philosophical and cultural traits with kobolds, and had entered into a partnership, that included cross-breeding experiments performed by the leader’s three apprentices. Their experiments had led them into the study of alchemy rather than wizardry, but the successful breeding of powerful hybrid kobolds was worth the distraction from pure magical studies.

Then something happened to the changeling hive, and they had to close the portal. The leader was trapped on the other side, and the apprentices began squabbling among themselves. One left with the handful of pure-blooded changelings trapped on the kobold side of the portal, to carve out a territory in the overworld. One rejected the hybrid project entirely, and she and her weakling followers were cowering in some corner of the complex. The third led what remained of the tribe, and would be killing the party shortly.

He glanced at the door again, but the expected rescue party was still nowhere to be seen.

“So where’s this portal?” Rainbow Dash asked. The Beast Shape spell had worn off, along with many of the party’s other magical spells.

The kobold pointed at the stage. Fluttershy flew closer and cast a spell to detect magic, only to squeal in pain as she was briefly blinded by the magical output. Applejack flew over to help her, but she shook her head and smiled, so the rogue went to examine the curtain by nonmagical means instead.

“Huh. It looks like it’s hanging loose, but it’s hard as iron,” Applejack said. She tried to scratch it with her dagger, but couldn’t leave a mark. “Harder than iron.”

“How do you open it?” Twilight asked the prisoner.

“Not here,” the kobold said. “There are controls, but not here. But you don’t want to open it! If you open it it will be very bad!”

The whole party turned to look at the looming curtain.

“Maybe…” Pinkie Pie said, prancing nervously from hoof to hoof. “Maybe we don’t want to wait here for a whole hour?”

“Yeah, we’ve probably already waited too long,” Applejack said. “By now those varmints’ll have something nasty waiting for us, for sure.”

“I am not abandoning my minions,” Rarity said, stomping a hoof.

“We can move them somewhere else,” Twilight suggested. “I know, we can hide them in that room we cleared of undead. The kobolds don’t know which one we opened, and the rest are still full of angry skeletons, so they can’t just check.”

“Ooh,” Pinkie Pie said. “I like it. We can hide them there, re-bar the door, and if we all die down here, then we’ve re-stocked the dungeon for the next group of adventurers! We’ll be like subterranean druids!”

“I suppose it should be safe enough,” Rarity said, reluctantly.

Twilight nodded. “Then we’re agreed. Let’s kill the prisoner and move on.”

“But I did everything you asked!” the kobold whimpered.

“It’s nothing personal,” Twilight replied. “But we can’t effectively hold you. You’ve probably already escaped from those ropes.”

The kobold quickly slipped his wrists and ankles back into the bonds, and held them up for Twilight’s inspection. She just narrowed her eyes.

“Look! Over there!” the kobold squeaked, but nopony was fooled. Twilight lifted her hammer to strike a finishing blow, and the kobold dove aside, leaving the ropes behind, and hid among the debris. Rainbow Dash spotted him as he scurried through the maze of broken chairs, but he was too slippery to be hit by her stunning fist. He tumbled past Garble, and opened the door.

The door burst open, and a wave of steaming green liquid flowed over Garble and the kobold, both of whom threw themselves to the side to avoid the worst of it, as the acid began to eat away at that whole section of balcony. Garble was able to fly up off the crumbling structure, as it collapsed to the level below, but the kobold only just barely managed to climb back up onto the part of the balcony where the party awaited him.

“Um…” he said, staring at the warriors arranged before him, and the long stretch of balcony scoured clean by fireballs that he’d have to cross to reach the remaining door. “I surrender! Again!”

Applejack snuck up behind him and clubbed him over the head with a sack full of provisions, and the kobold collapsed.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

Huh. Potions of silence? An interesting idea. Would they only affect the drinker, or would they establish the usual area of effect? Also, I had honestly forgotten that necklaces of fireballs existed until now. Shame on me.

Kobold-changeling crossbreeds? Huh. That's an interesting concept. Alternate-universe changelings no less. I wonder if that leads to a sorcerer bloodline...

Yeah, when your empire is ruled by orcs, you're probably none too fond of elves. Of course, that doesn't mean elves are universally beloved otherwise. I could tell you stories about my PCs. Stories involving hyena carcasses...

But that's neither here nor there. Nice to see competence on both sides of the equation. The kobolds were done well, and the party's dice decided to cooperate. Definitely looking forward to seeing what the former have cooked up now that they've had time to prepare.

[terrycloth]

5523738 Drinking a potion makes you the target of the effect. Targeting Silence at a creature makes a zone of silence that follows them around. That's how I've always run it, anyway.