Irolt and the Plastic Trumpet Approach

Irolt’s first instinct was to rush forward, club swinging, into combat.

Simply put, it was a mistake.

A shadow tripped him a good six feet from the ladder. Belthor had been trying to flee from the very fight that the half-dwarf was so eager to get to. He had barely righted himself when Franza knocked him back into the elf.

With only three members present, and all of them tangled up on the ground, the encounter got off to a poor start for The Resistance.

The Parliamentary on the other hand, started things off rather splendidly. A scaly in steel armor was slithering down the ladder with more agility than could be expected. His human colleague didn’t even need to wait for him to reach the bottom. She just hopped gracefully down the hatch and landed dramatically on one knee, her sword already drawn.

That motivated Belthor to get up and get moving. In a flash he was behind the scaly and fighting. That gave Irolt the space he needed to pull himself to his feet and swing at the woman.

Crack!

His weapon splintered and she reeled back.

“Narutano!” Cried the scaly, who tried to rush to her side. He was kept at bay by the silver flash of Belthor’s dagger. Belthor himself had sunk into the shadows of the small space just between the ladder and the far wall.

Irolt swung, but was thrown off balance by the sword scraping against the iron plate of his armor. He dodged back clumsily from the flurry of attacks that followed. His opponent moved in, and he feared the handle of his club didn’t have the structural integrity required to block reliably.

“I’ve got this!” Franza cried from just behind him. They sounded so sure that for a moment, Irolt was optimistic. He glanced over his shoulder to the dog. His eyes widened in horror.

They’re going to die.

Franza did not have it. In fact, he was pretty sure they had nothing. They were about to hop into the fight wielding nothing but a piece of blue plastic that approximated a child-sized trumpet.

Irolt opened his mouth to scream a warning not to move forward with whatever they had planned. But before he could find the words they had moved forward anyway. What followed made him temporarily lose touch with reality as he understood it.

He couldn’t move or think. The world seemed strange and slow suddenly, as the white paws lifted up the toy trumpet and Franza pretended to play.

The fading echoes from the stalling battle took on a sort of rhythm.

Swing! Scrape… Swing…. Clash!

The syncopated percussion served as the start of a song.

Swing! Scrape… Swing… Clash!

And Franza began to dance to the sounds, hopping up on one foot and holding their little instrument proudly in the air.

Swing!

Scrape…

Swing…

Clash!

The melody to the number existed only in the hearts of the combatants watching. But it was there. The dog had captured the attention of them all, and even the swing-scrape-swing-clash crawled to a muffled silence. For a moment, the sound of a trumpet could almost be heard throughout the base.

Almost.

“I’ve got to get a picture of this!” Cried the scaly emphatically, and was too stunned to stop him as he moved forward.

Franza continued prancing and puffing up their cheeks to blow air into the fake instrument. The fighter they had so captivated proceeded to pull out parchment, a quill, and finally an inkwell from his bag.

Only when he began scribbling away at his artwork did Irolt remember this was a fight - even if it was unlike any fight he had ever found himself in.

The spell was fractured, but not yet entirely broken. Irolt was determined to use this distraction to their advantage.

Crack!

He landed a hit on the human’s armor with enough force to snap his club clean in two. Her sword pierced at his underarm in retaliation as she too remembered where they were outside of the dog’s charm.

Half the room had now recovered.

Franza, the obedient model, had completely frozen in their pose. The artist was still sketching frantically. Belthor was able to swipe his sword, marking the elf’s return to reality.

Reinforcements then arrived for The Resistance, just as Irolt was suffering a nasty hit. He had no weapon. No way to block. No way to attack. But his heart soared briefly when he saw the other two Allian recruits appear from the secret tunnel entrance.

We won’t have to surrender the base!

They were dressed only in their street clothes, and carried no weapons, but they brought hope. On paper, they turned the tide of the battle. In sheer numbers, The Resistance had won.

Poindexter.

Even without the nasty recollection that The Parliamentary still had a gold guard lurking around somewhere, luck didn’t seem to favor the base for long. The newbies had clearly never seen combat before, and even facing off against the one guard with her head in the game, they fell quickly. One was run through with her sword, and the other fell to the ground dramatically at the sight.

And still, the small space was filled with the deafening sound of cross-hatching.

Irolt felt powerless.

He wanted to defend his allies. He wanted to defeat The Parliamentary. He wanted to keep the base that he had personally established. None of these things were possible without a weapon.

Whap!

His helplessness was accentuated as he was knocked to the ground by the flat of his enemy’s blade.

The sword.

His eyes flickered up to his friend, and the stolen sword hanging from his belt. If he could get the sword, they would have a chance. But he was looking up at that part of the fight just in time to see their final advantage disappear.

“Hey! I drew that!”

The Parliamentary guard-turned-artist that Franza had been distracting was snapped back into reality as Belthor tried and failed to steal the drawing he was working on. Irolt caught just a glimpse of an impressively rendered portrait before the art supplies were gone and all minds were officially back on the fighting.

Damn it, Belthor!

Irolt supposed he just had to be grateful that his friend’s kleptomania had been useful before it had become a problem. The guard was looking frantically for his weapon as Irolt ran to collect it from the elf.

But Belthor pushed Irolt away from the sword when he saw he meant to take it.

From the corner of his eye, Irolt saw Franza rushing to tend to their fallen allies.

“Want to give me that sword?” Irolt asked in a way that was not really a question.

Belthor hesitated.

Irolt looked at him expectantly. Their window of opportunity was closing.

Belthor looked to the blade, then to Irolt, then back to the blade. He made no move to offer the weapon, despite his daggers being drawn already. And then Irolt remembered.

Kleptomania and hoarding. He’s going to be the death of me.

“Belthor, gimme the sword!”

Perhaps Irolt snapping convinced him to yield his prize. Perhaps the approaching enemies did. Belthor reluctantly held the stolen blade to Irolt.

No sooner was his hand once more graced with steel than another complication presented itself. There was a glint of gold in the hatch just above the ladder.

Weak, dude!

“Retreat!” He called. The word tasted of bile. He couldn’t fathom surrendering the base, but it was too late. They had already lost.

He held off the guards as Belthor and Franza ushered their stunned and wounded allies back through the secret entrance. Irolt used all his remaining speed and energy to rush in and seal the entrance behind them. Surely they could lose the enemy in the tunnels as easily as they had lost them in the plastic trumpet approach to combat.