The unmistakable smell of roasted meat filled the air of the small room, rising above even the insalubrious stench of Skittering Rat-Thing. The other thing that filled the air was the far less appetizing sound of Skittering Rat-Things eating. Cooked meat might well have been considered a delicacy to the primitive creatures, but they certainly weren't going to let that stop them from stripping the elven corpse as quickly, and most important, LOUDLY as possible.
Maris was fairly glad he didn't have a stomach. He wasn't quite sure how the organ might have reacted to the terrible wet cacophony. Still, it's probably hard eating with your mouth closed when you've got that many teeth.
Sure enough, after he'd flambeed the tediously dramatic Elf the Skittering Rat-Things had started appearing. Crawling out the cracks and hidden burrows, drawn by the rich scent of frying meat. Those first to appear had fallen on the steaming corpse with chittering delight. As more and more entered the room access to this particular prize became somewhat of an issue. Some attempted to clamber over each other, some started fights. Others merely contented themselves by feeding on the corpses of their brethren which the Elven ranger had so thoughtfully provided. The room was a swirling vortex of indistinguishable furred bodies.
Maris just stood in the corner, staring blankly at the scene of culinary cannibalistic chaos before him. Of course, being a skeleton you could argue that he stared blankly at pretty much everything, but this was a particular kind of blankness. This was the blankness of someone staring at a task and realising that not only can they not be bothered, but that they don't actually care even the slightest minuscule iota.
Someone wanted to know how many Rat-Things there were. So what? Maris was pretty sure that no one actually cared how many of the flea ridden creatures there were skulking about this level. They just wanted him to go and try to count them because it was a singularly shitty thing to make anyone do. Inspiration suddenly struck him, and he pulled a piece of parchment out of a hidden pocket of his robes, along with a black quill. It had used to be a white quill of course, but down here everything tended to go black one way or another. particularly when your writing hand gave off a constant stream of smoke. Dipping the quill in a convenient pool of congealing blood he started to write.
Skittering Rat-Thing Population Report
Population in primary dungeon levels: Not as many as there were
Population in Rat-Thing breeding warrens: Not as many as there's going to be
Total: Enough
Signing the document with an indecipherable rune that he'd just made up he summoned the shadow imp that had first delivered his orders. It plopped into existence, a single fist sized eye surrounded by purplish black tentacles.
For some reason it was wearing a top hat.
Maris ignored the demons incongruous head wear and gave it the parchment. maybe it was on it's way to a party, who's to say. Although he'd only met a few, Maris was under the impression that Demons weren't nearly as inscrutable and mysterious as they liked everyone to think.
"Here, that should do" he said to the eye shaped imp. The imp blinked at him.
"What? It's not like any of them will actually read the damn thing. I've got better things to do than spend the whole day nailing rat things to the wall, and I can see you've got better things to do than ferry pointless messages around, so we may as well get the whole thing out of the way, right?"
The imp bobbed it's eyeball, seemingly in agreement.
"Oh, and tell them they might want to send a Gutworm or two up to clear out the pit trap. It's a bit clogged."
The imp gave a mocking salute with one of it's tentacles, and clutching the parchment vanished back into the shadows.
Maris turned his attention back to the corpse in the centre of the room, now reduced to a freshly gleaming skeleton. Several rather contented looking Rat-Things sat around it, making pleased sounding chittering noises and occasionally belching. He still had work to do.
Striding over to the centre of the room he kicked one of the larger Rat-Things sharply in the kidney in order to catch it's attention.
"You. Go and fetch me a sack. Now."
The Rat-Thing stared at him blankly. Rat-Things often had difficulty learning civilised languages. They found overly complex, consisting as they did of ideas like having vowels, or consonants other than K and G. The Rat-Thing language consisted of a series of rapidly articulated chitters, and most people who studied it generally agreed that the Rat-Things were in fact just making it up as they went along. Clearly this particular Rat-Thing was not well versed in the school of modern languages and he would have to try an alternative course of action.
Grabbing the hapless vermin by the head with his smoking gauntleted right hand he lifted it up to eye level. The empty sockets of Maris' leering skull burned into the Rat-Things very soul.
"GET ME A SACK OR I WILL DESTROY YOU." Maris said loudly and slowly, before hurling the creature into the wall. It picked itself up and scuttled off down a corridor. That should have gotten the message across. Maris squatted down and began picking over what remained of the Elves possessions.
There wasn't much left. The clothes and armour had of course been reduced to ash. There were a few arrows left, and he'd dropped the bow he'd been using when he first went up in flames. That looked quite nice. Pretty good quality considering how easily the chump had died. Maybe even up to Pluzzwaans standards.
Pluzzwaan was one of the Slavering Pygmy Smiths who generally provided and maintained the weapons and mechanisms of the dungeon. They were short, muscular, naturally adept at metallurgy and to a man quite horrendously insane. Whilst nature had endowed them with a burning desire for blacksmithery and the hidden fruits of the earth, it had also given them 3 foot long tongues. Hence the the name. This perhaps wouldn't be so much of a problem except that, being pygmies, they didn't often top four feet in height. Their tongues were far to big contain in their mouths, and thus tended to get in the way quite a lot.
Particularly when they were obsessively hammering away at pieces of red hot metal.
Whilst most people in this particular predicament would perhaps seek to keep their tongue away from the burning steel and large hammers, the Slavering Pygmy Smiths found the whole thing hilarious, and each strike of the hammer upon the flailing organ would elicit bouts terrifying laughter. Indeed, you could usually gauge a Slavering Pygmy Smiths rank simply by how scarred his tongue was.
It was also advisable to thoroughly wash any item you purchased from them before using it.
Still, the bow looked like it might worth something, and thus should come in useful. Other than that there was a handful of gold coins and a couple of glass vials. One was labeled "Restorative Elixir" and the other "Wurm Venom"
"He must have use that to poison his arrows" thought Maris as he carefully switched the labels. There was an empty cupboard on level 3 where he could leave those. Should be worth a laugh. He slipped half the Elves gold into his own pocket and carefuly placed the rest into a pouch containing the powdered extract of a Scorpiranhas mating gland. He'd think of somewhere to drop that later.
He felt a tug on his robe and turned to see the Rat-Thing he'd sent off before. It was clutching a small sack that was so filthy most people would have caught a disease simply by looking at it. The only reason it wasn't crawling with lice was that the lice had died out. No doubt this was part of the Rat-Things bedding. No sane person would have come near it, mainly because the stench would probably have knocked them out first.
Foul as it was, it suited Maris' purpose well enough. Taking the reeking sack from the wide eyed creature he began to stuff the bones into it.
That was the problem with these heroic types. They didn't always stay dead. You spend all that time and effort killing the bastard, and then next week his mates show up with some religious head case and have him ressurected. How was that fair? No, if you wanted the job done properly then you had to make sure the remains were well and truly desecrated before you did anything else. Sure, there various black rituals and necromantic incantations you could try, but in Maris experience there were quicker and easier ways to get the job done.
Picking up the overstuffed rattling sack he headed down into the dungeon, in search of an Orc with a full bladder.
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