Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn
From: arsmith@nyx.cs.du.edu (Alan Smith)
Subject:  [NTY] Gunther...Gunther?
Message-ID: <1993Jul25.124909.2463@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>
References: <1993Jul24.221546.6706@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>
Date: Sun, 25 Jul 93 12:49:09 GMT

Palandun finally found his way to Gunther's camp.  He wasn't exactly sure how
he would sneak in, spirit one person away, and get out without getting clobbered
but they didn't seem to leave a watch, which made his job easier.

They also seemed to be rather messy.  The tents the bivouac had put up were     
still standing, but there was gear strewn about without rhyme or reason.  He
stalked up to the main tent and whipped open the door:

  Scaring the life out of a two-foot rat, which squeaked and ambled out the 
door.

  "Hello?" Palandun said, rapidly searching the camp.  "Anybody there?"  He
found nobody, no bodies, no wounded.  There was blood here and there but
not much. It looked as if a nonlethal battle had been fought here.

A little farther down the tunnel he found the remains of the lethal part.
A half a dozen bodies lay strewn about, with evidence that upards of a dozen    
more had been removed by the toumb denizens.  There was copious amounts of
blood, slippery where it hadn't coagulated.  It reminded palandun of a half
a dozen times in the third and fourth wars, coming to the battle after it
had happened, trying to bury the dead and succor the wounded.

For that, Palandun managed to think analytically, and turned his attention
to the wounds the bodies had recieved.  They tended to be cleaving, slashing
wounds, as if some gigantic claws had caught them.  They were not the
pincer bites and poison stings of scorpions (Palandun nursed some of them
himself, though he had taken care of them) Nor the gripping and biting of
Para-kobolds (What palandun called the kholboldi, after their distant cousins
on the west continent.)  The bites of t-crocs or the wounds of any other dungeon
animal he could think of.  Those were sword slashes, and in the tunnels sword
slashes came from two places: Drow, and the rest of Nexus above.

Gunther was not one of the slain that Palandun could see, and he suspected
not one of the slain that had been dragged off.  He was in the nonlethal
scuffle at the camp.  Palandun went back there to investigate and literally
stepped in his biggest clue of the day:

  "Yech."  Horse manure. 

Palandun recreated the scene.  Gunther encamps with his entorague, then deploys
his watchmen and goes into his tent to write a report or make some tea or
something.  Some men from above ride in (Drow don't as a rule keep horses,
finding fodder in a dark cave is just too hard.), are challenged by the
guards, and when they don't answer, there's a fight.  Sometime during the
fight, a horse takes a dump.  Victorious, the riders ride into camp.  Gunther
hears a commotion, comes out of his tent, and dives back in again for weapons,  
but one of the riders gets to him first.  The encamped party is caught          
unprepared, and after a brief struggle gives up.  They are marched off back
the way the riders came, where there is a large ramp to the outside.

Palandun heads off down the corridor to find this ramp, and maybe track 
Gunther down.