Robin watched the activity in the cave, passing his hands through the gestures needed to regularly renew his [Lesser Phantasm]-generated hiding place. The illusion did not last long, but thankfully he had yet to run up against a limit on casting it.

With an eye out for danger, Robin opened the status page he’d found earlier but hadn’t had time to examine in detail. He was far from safe here, but he needed to know more about what he was working with if he was going to incite a rebellion and rescue the captured adventuring party.

ROBIN PARKER Heritage: Shadeling, Juvenile Profession: None Tier: 0 (Progress to Tier 1: 36%) Properties

Physical Mental Social Strength: 11 Intelligence: 17 Charisma: 15 Dexterity: 14 Cunning: 18 Manipulation: 13 Fortitude: 11 Resilience: 14 Poise: 15 Proficiencies

Physical (2/9) Mental (1/9) Social (1/9) ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? Deception: 0 ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? Insight: 0 ??? ??? ??? ??? Stealth: 1 ??? ??? Survival: 1 ??? ??? Peculiarities Blessing of Rhyth Tongue of the Fallen Tower

A couple things stood out immediately. First, nowhere on his sheet did it say human, and the closest thing he could see to some kind of species designation was the Heritage line. Yeah, no. Worrying about the implications of that later. Second, that whatever this system was, it liked the number three and multiples of the number three. Third, it also liked alliteration.

From a D&D perspective, his stats would be good, but this clearly wasn’t D&D, so a comparison with those stats might get him nowhere. Without knowing standard averages in these ‘properties’, or if there was a soft or hard cap on them, Robin couldn’t say how good or not they were.

He also didn’t like that his Deception was ranked at zero, in light of the plan he was forming. It’d be nice if he could get it higher. Well, maybe he could. He focused his intent and luckily the desired prompt appeared.

Would you like to raise Deception to 1 with experience? Y/N?

Yes please and thank you!

But could he get it to 2?

You do not have the required experience to raise Deception to 2. Continue adventuring, complete quests, or otherwise engage in shenanigans to amuse the gods to continue increasing your proficiencies!

Shiz. Not enough experience. Robin reopened the status page. Huh. His percentage progression to Tier 1 had gone down to 34%. So the system didn’t outright tell him how much experience he had? Or he hadn’t found a way to make it show him. Frell. There was no way he could do the necessary math to break this all down.

The Heritage line caught his eye again. Shadeling, Juvenile. What the heck did that even mean? Then the screen blipped as his focused attention activated the more-info-sorta-tooltip function and rewarded him with a few paragraphs with some basic information on the subject.

Well. Robin was now either more, or less, human than he’d been before. A shadeling was a being with an inherent connection to the powers of Shadow, whatever that meant, and it granted him several abilities which he’d already seen, and a couple more that were hidden in the descriptive text he was reading.

Shadelings receive triple experience when they use illusion or trickery instead of brute force to solve a problem.

Well, if that wasn’t a sign that he was on the right track with this plan, he didn’t know what was! Not that he had any idea how experience worked, or how much of it he’d accumulated. Problem for another time.

The problem at hand was the kobolds, their orc chief, and the mysterious priest hunting the shrine of Rhyth. Hopefully the priest would move on. He didn’t seem the sort to hang around and was definitely the sort that could put a crimp in Robin’s plans.

Robin dismissed his status to examine the cavern more closely. The priest was gone! That set a chill in Robin’s stomach. He hadn’t noticed the man leave, hadn’t heard if he was coming back soon. He might have just stepped out to use the latrine.

Robin gnawed at his lower lip. Nothing for it. He needed a bit of time to listen to the kobolds anyway, so he’d keep an eye out in case the priest returned.

He set to it, picking threads out of the conversations nearby. There was a lot of boasting, a lot of complaining. These kobolds were not happy with their lot in life. Good. Robin could use that.

His hand was starting to ache from the constant casting of [Lesser Phantasm]. It only required one, so Robin eased the discomfort a bit by alternating hands. Still, there was going to come a time when his muscles rebelled and he wouldn’t be able to maintain his cover.

The chill from the stone around him leeched into his flesh. He shifted as quietly as he could, stretching his muscles. He’d need to move quickly when his opportunity came. He mentally plotted a course along the outer rim of the cavern. His route was thick with dancing shadows, thanks to the massive cookfire.

Time for a test. Robin rehearsed the words and phrasing he wanted to use in his mind, made sure he was as well-hidden as he could be, and let his illusory hiding place drop so he could cast some phantasmal words amongst a nearby group of kobolds, their heads down as they scraped some hides with sharp stones.

‘Work, work, work, all Ratscale does is work!’ one of them complained. ‘I’s tired of it.’

‘All any of us does is work, stupid!’ another replied. ‘Is always same.’

This was his chance! Robin slipped his conjured words into the conversation.

‘Is not always same,’ the words came out sounding much more kobold-y than if he’d tried to speak them himself, thankfully, ‘was better with old chief.’

‘Old chief gone,’ Ratscale said morosely. ‘Bula chief now.’

They didn’t seem to notice that none of them had said the words. Each probably assumed one of the others had spoken. So far, so good! Robin waited to see how the conversation would turn before adding anything else.

The conversation continued in a grumbling vein. These kobolds seemed predisposed to it, though Robin wouldn’t assume this was true of all kobolds. That was the sort of lazy thinking that got adventurers in his old D&D group killed.

‘Maybe we need new chief,’ he conjured, when the conversation sounded like it was starting to die out.

For once, this didn’t provoke a reply. A few heads nodded, then several pairs of reptilian eyes shot nervously about the room. One or two even eyed their compatriots, as if trying to figure out who said those words.

There was fear there, with the resentment. Robin wasn’t exactly working with a tinderbox here, but there was some fuel to set fire to. For now, though, he let the embers just burn, and he turned his attention to another group.

Robin repeated the process twice more, sounding out the small groups of kobolds gathered near enough to his hiding spot that he could hear them. He had to shift his position a few times to hear clearly. His heart hammered in his chest each time he did so. He was one naked guy against a small horde of fanged and scaled monsters.

With some experimentation, Robin found he could overlap invocations of [Lesser Phantasm]. The duration wasn’t great, maybe 10-15 seconds, but he could switch off between his camouflage and his ventriloquist act, refreshing his hiding place, then adding a sentence or two to the conversation, then refreshing the image of stone around him again to keep himself hidden. It made him feel a bit more secure.

He even figured out how to program in a small delay in the audible version of his cantrip. This allowed him to follow up one of his statements with general sounds of agreement a few moments later, without having to recast. Once he hit upon that refinement to his technique he noticed his conjured words carried a great deal more weight. From that point, he started upping the ante a bit.

‘Bula bad chief.’

‘Bula not care about kobolds.’

‘When last time we got shinies not Bula?’

‘We need new chief.’

‘Bula gots to sleep sometime.’

‘Big and strong still bleed when you cut they’s throat.’

The general noise level of the cavern increased as Robin fanned the flames of the kobolds’ discontent. He needed to speed this up. He was getting tired, and his hands were starting to cramp.

He spared a glance for the prisoners. They didn’t seem to have noticed the mood in the camp shift. Maybe they couldn’t speak kobold. Maybe they were just preoccupied with being stripped nearly naked (oh, to be so lucky!) and tied up.

If he knew the language they spoke, he might risk trying to send them a message with [Lesser Phantasm], but being uncertain, he didn’t want to risk it. He’d just have to hope they moved quickly when presented with an opportunity.

Robin risked moving once more before executing his plan. He wanted the best angle to dash along the edges of the cavern. There was no path that would keep him completely hidden, unfortunately, and his camouflage trick wouldn’t work while he was moving. He’d just have to hope he got lucky. Or pray to Rhyth for aid.

He crossed his fingers and did both. For better or for worse, he needed to move now. He was nearing the end of his endurance. He took a deep breath, ran through the three things he could fit in his next casting of [Lesser Phantasm], and went for it.

‘This stupid! Bula should scrape own hides!’

The words rang out, clear and loud and predictably disruptive. Rather than stunned, terrified silence, however, Robin had made sure to add in a few barks of laughter and a couple indistinct murmurs of agreement.

‘Bula bad chief! Kobolds want kobold chief!’

This time there were several real voices that intermixed with the fake shouts of agreement Robin had woven into his [Lesser Phantasm].

Bula was turning red, her temper clearly rising. The unexpected outpouring of discontent stymied her, however, and she was slow to react.

‘New chief! New chief! Down with Bula!’

The third and final illusory statement elicited a roar of approval from the assembled kobolds. There was a lot of jumping and clashing, but no outright violence yet. Robin had planned for this, however.

Quickly, he flung a rock he’d gathered during one of his tactical relocations. It flew over the heads of the assembled kobolds, right at Bula’s face. It came in at a bit of an angle, so it caught her by surprise, thunking against the back of her throne.

Robin wasn’t so great a shot he’d expected to hit her, but his aim was good enough for his purposes. As soon as the kobolds saw someone attack Bula, their fear vanished. They were, to some degree, packlike animals and they smelled blood in the water.

Bula bellowed a war cry as a horde of the small reptilian monsters swarmed her. Robin didn’t bother to watch. He dashed along the edge of the cavern, trying to keep to the shadows and draw as little attention to himself as possible. Thankfully, the other residents of the cavern were otherwise occupied.

The party he was trying to rescue had been taken completely by surprise as well. Only one of the four of them had the presence of mind to take advantage of the distraction to try and escape. She was wrestling with the ropes around her wrists when Robin appeared out of the shadows. She jerked back but he held a finger up in front of his lips.

The woman, an elf if he had to guess (ethereal beauty, pointed ears, this would be so cool if he wasn’t naked and under threat of messy, painful death, ahhh), eyed him only for a moment before thrusting her wrists at him. Robin went to work on the knots. They were fiendishly tight, but nothing like the Gordian Knot his nephews turned their shoe laces into, so he managed it.

The woman, hands free, undid the ropes on her legs and slunk over to their packs, rummaging around until she came up with a knife. Robin had moved on to help the next woman, but before he could even get started a great shout echoed across the cavern.

‘Bow before the might of Urkhan, vermin!’

Frell. The priest was back.