"If your Bloat King is so powerful, then let him protect his own!" you announce. With a flick of your tail you turn, spread your wings and leap off the crest of the hill, gliding down over the village and across the village wall before you land and head towards the location of the shrine. Many worried kobolds begin to follow you at a distance, unsure of whether to fear your own apparent challenge or their patron spirit's response.
The village (which you notice is surprisingly well camouflaged amongst the surrounding mangrove forest) is about a mile away from the shrine, which turns out to be a series of tall wooden pillars rising up out of the swamp and supporting a large, crude statue of a giant frog or toad in what appears to be white jade. Hollows cut in the wood pillars house smaller statuettes in stone, wood and palm ivory, some of kobolds, others of animals, and others still of the toad above. At the base of the pillars a huge flat rock serves as an offering stone, upon which necklaces of fine wood and crude jade, beautiful animal pelts, baskets of food and other valuable or desirable offerings have been placed.
You start ransacking it, to the shock and horror of the few kobolds already near the shrine when you arrive (you paced ahead of the kobolds following from the village). You start pulling the more valuable statuettes out of the pillar hollows; they would look nice in the hoard and you wouldn't want them to be destroyed when you set this whole thing on fire. They land in the soft muck of the swamp nearby with heavy squelches. As you hang on the side of one pillar, removing valuables, you become aware of a heavy bubbling from the swamp around you and the sound of distant chuckling echo in your mind.
Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho... A challenger, have we? Let us see what challenge you might present. Hoo hoo hoo. I care little for the adulation of these scant few souls, but my daughter... ho ho, she might take it personally. Dance, little dragon. Dance for my amusement. Ho ho ho ho ho...The voice is deep, strong, cultured and refined, but speaks in your head as if from a great distance away. It is like hearing someone speak loudly and confidently at the far end of a long corridor. More immediately pressing are your surroundings. Dozens of large, black lizards are crawling out of the muck and water, clumping together when they do, and you watch as fallen leaves, vines, mud and rotting plant matter swirl together and rise near the shrine, forming into a breastless but proportionally feminine humanoid form with long strands of matted grass and vines for hair.
A) Go for the humanoid creature before it can finish forming up.
B) Roast the lizards before they can finish emerging and organising.
C) Bellow a challenge from atop the shrine.
!
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Topic: SPAMDRAGON: Swamp Baron (Read 36727 times)