Glib traveled North, even if he wasn't aware of that. For weeks he wandered around randomly, driven by his intense curiosity, his quest for world domination (whatever that meant), and his short attention span.
He eventually happened upon a small coastal town called Aspaura, and the as he approached it the lively sounds of the townsfolk slowed his pace and made him duck into the shrubbery.
He sat in some bushes at the outskirts of town, occasionally picking up a bug that happened to be crawling by, and watcing the citizens going about their business.
This simple observance, however, simply would not suffice. The sneaky grin spread across Glib's face once again and he began stalking his way into the village, making sure to stay out of sight.
He noticed a human carrying something large -and thus innately interesting- into a building that was larger than the surrounding human-burrows.
Glib waited a few moments, and the human came back out again, this time without carrying anything. Using his kobold powers of deductive reasoning, Glib suspected that the human must have left the large -and thus innately interesting- object inside the building!
After looking around to see if anyone was watching, Glib crept over to the door and let himself in. What he saw inside made his already-rapid heartrate flutter. There were tables upon tables of stuff lining the walls. There was red stuff and brown stuff and green stuff and flowing stuff and scrunchy stuff and lots of other stuff, and all of it was just sitting there!
Glib could scarcely believe his eyes, and he started rolling around in the merchant's wares, delighting in the pure joy that only comes from rolling around in someone else's loot pile. At least for kobolds.
He would have kept this up for some time, had not a particular item caught his attention. Glib stared in amazement, his eyes going absurdly wide as he looked at the absolute treasure that lay in front of him.
A sack.
It was the most beautiful thing Glibitikus had ever seen, the tough and wiry cords of rope reed colored a bright, pleasing red with redroot dye. It had smooth-yet-scratchy leather decorating it in swirls and zigzags, and it had bands made from the bones of a very large creature encircling it at regular intervals. Along the outer edge of the bag ran a line of birch wood spikes, and even Glib, with his limited knowledge of trees, could tell that this was superior quality birch.
With tentative claws, Glib first simply touched, and then lifted the magnificient thing up. He stood on the pile of random clothing and goods and held the sack above his head and let out a triumphant battlecry, shaking the thing at the heavens in his victory.
When the shopkeeper opened the door to his shop again, he found a small creature with light brown skin standing on one of his goods displays, holding up a backpack (one of the junk items he had been meaning to clear out of his store since he couldn't even hope to sell such ugly things) and yelling.
For a moment, he could only stand there in the doorway and stare at the kobold howling at the backpack over its head. Then his shopowner instincts kicked in and he shouted at the kobold.
"HEY! Hey you! Drop that!"
There was really no point in telling the kobold to drop the foul bag, he was going to throw it out anyways. However, he couldn't let some random kobold come into his shop and steal something, even if it was worthless.
Glib's battlecry stuck in his throat with an odd *GUCK* sound. Slowly, he looked down from the bag and turned his head towards the open door, and the angry-looking human standing in it.
"EEP!"
Glib almost leapt into the sack's strap as he put it on. The shopkeeper let out another "HEY!", but it was to late. Glib was in full flight, and a cloud of miscellaneous items went flying into the air as he scrabbled across the counter away from the human.
The shopkeeper charged after him, running through the kobold's rooster-tail of debris as he chased him around the shop.
Kobolds, already quite nimble, gain an almost supernatural agility when frightened. Glib dashed across piles of clothing, crawled underneath chairs and tables, and even scrambled along one of the walls as the angry shopkeeper came after him.
In a desperate attempt to get more time, Glib started picking up some of the things he was running over and throwing them back at the human behind him. Far more accurate than the wild spray kicked up by his feet, the flopping projectiles smacked dead center into the shopkeeper's bright red face.
"HEY! I SAID STO- *FWAP* -OOF! CUT THAT OU- *FWAP* -RRMPH! I'M GOING TO CALL THE GU- *FWAP* -MMR!"
Glib, who wouldn't have been able to understand the shopkeeper's shouting even if it wasn't cut short by random articles of clothing, paid no heed to his threats. Instead, he just ran faster.
After making a few laps around the shop in this manner, Glib's panic had cooled to the point where he could start looking for an actual escape route. The door was too heavy for him to open quickly enough, and so he started looking for something, anything, that could get him away from this screaming human.
He spotted the window and made a mad dash for it, leaping out and onto the street outside. The shopkeeper stuck his head out and bellowed into the street that most ancient of commands.
"STOP! THIEF!"
The townsfolk, stunned somewhat by the appearance of a kobold wearing a backpack, were kicked into action by the word "thief".
Glib gulped. Glib ran. The town ran after him.
The nearby guardsmen gathered together and chased after the kobold, clanking after him in their armor. Waving their weapons and bellowing like men on a fox hunt, they ran through the streets after the bag-thief.
A watchman armed with a bow woke up in the comotion and fired an arrow into a nearby tree in his confusion. After getting his wits about him, he looked at the approaching parade. A stream of townsfolk ran behind the three guards, and the guards ran behind a kobold carrying the strangest backpack he had ever seen. Taking careful aim, he fired at the kobold, landing an arrow into its left bicep.
Glib cried out in pain as the arrow struck him, but he kept running as wuickly as he could manage. At least his legs still worked.
The watchman, the guards, the shopkeeper, the mayor, the local schoolchildren, a small dog that yipped as it pranced along, all chased after the thief. Down dusty streets, around corners, up slopes and down drops, they chased him.
But Glib was simply too fast. Too fast, and too intent on keeping his life and his newly-acquired loot sack. He continually added to the ground behind him, and dashed off into the falling darkness as the sun settled in for a night's rest.
Some distance away from the town, once he'd convinced himself that he had evaded the guards, he sat down heavily and rested his legs. He looked over at the arrow still sticking out of his arm, and with a pitiful expression of dread he grabbed it and began tugging it out of the wound.
Luckily for him, the shot was as close to a graze as it could get while still sticking into his skin. The few muscle fibers that had been cut would heal in short order. None of this made much difference fo Glib, however, since he still had to pull an iron-headed arrow out of his arm. As he pulled it free from the flesh, possibly doing more damage than the initial insertion of the thing, he gabbled and gibbered in the kobold language's equivalent of swearing.
His short attention span came in handy. Soon after he pulled it out the pain in his arm was forgotten in lieu of admiring the shiny arrow. He had raided a town and come out with a sack and a shiny arrow. A bright smile spread across his face.
Life was good.
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Topic: Death and Glory! (Read 58254 times)