Sometimes, You Gotta Take A Little Risk

Galbret stepped up to the off-color wall panel and pressed a hand to it.

“Do you really think no one knows about this passage?”

“Yes.” Galbret tried to focus his hearing on the door, but Xendin’s pacing, heeled boots clicking on the stone floor, made it impossible to hear anything. “Just hush for a minute.”

Xendin stopped pacing and rolled their eyes at Alesi, but her back was turned as she watched the way they’d come.

Just as Xendin was about to speak again, Galbret laughed and stepped back from the opening wall panel. “Ha! I knew I could figure out the lock!”

As Alesi and Rogmaff started down the hallway, steps silent as they went, Xendrin paused next to Galbret. “How do you know this passageway is unknown to the Corpsedancer?”

“I don’t. But this place is so chock full of dust, I doubt anyone uses it. Plus, we only need it forgotten long enough for us to escape since we’ve got the Orbs of Zillamur. Once we’re out of the castle, it won’t matter.”

“Sure, and if there’s traps waiting for us on the other side? Or it leads to the Corpsedancer’s Hall of Bones?”

“Then we improvise.” Galbret ushered Xendrin inside and closed the wall panel. “Now hush. We’ve gotta catch up to the others.”

“How can you be so comfortable not knowing what awaits us?” Xendrin’s heeled boots clicked down the passage as they forgot silence in the face of their queries.

Galbret shrugged. “Sometimes you just gotta roll the dice.”

The entire table erupted in boos and hoots of derision as Thomas, a grin plastered across his face, waggled his eyebrows at Sam who sighed and covered their face with their hands.

“Sorry,” Thomas grinned even wider. “Was that too PUNishing for this group?”

Deck the Hall

I got along great with my neighbors until John Hall moved in next door.

He had points against him moving in because he pushed his father, Jack Hall, out of the house he’d owned his entire life. We all pitched in, but Jack was getting to the point where he couldn’t handle things on his own. So it made some amount of sense, but it still felt awful to come home one day and discover Jack had been stuck in some nursing home before we could say goodbye.

That was only the start. John started throwing parties. Lots of people in beat up old cars attended and they went late into the night, often with frustratingly loud music. I tried to be understanding, but I couldn’t put up with it forever.

John laughed and flipped me off the first time I talked to him so I got the neighborhood association involved. They fined him, but he refused to pay since his father had signed the agreement, not him. I called the police, eventually, in the middle of one of his parties, and a bunch of people got busted for drug possession.

We got a couple years of peace out of that, but Jack was eventually back and John had passed away in the meantime. Instead of throwing parties, he started planting bushes that grew onto my property and sued about property lines. After he lost and had to trim his hedges, he started throwing things into our yard to get our dogs to eat them. Which is why I went over there today to confront him. He said he hoped our dogs died so I decked him.

 

-Statement to the Police regarding assault at 81 Oak Tree Lane on June the twenty-seven between one John Hall and one Lawrence Henderson.