Robin chewed on a mushroom—rubbery, earthy, absolutely vile, but technically food—as he listened to Lantha and Ora-Jean argue in hushed tones. Ora-Jean was all for charging in swinging, decapitating goblins left and right, and winning their way to the exit that way. Lantha was a bit more reserved. The elf liked to have options and disliked (intensely from the sound of it) how underequipped they currently were. She wanted Taterpicker to sniff out another way.

Eventually Ora-Jean won out by the simple expedient of refusing to do any more scouting until this path was explored further. Robin stood as the party gathered up their gear, such as it was, and prepared to move out.

‘We move smart,’ Lantha emphasised, shooting Ora-Jean a look. ‘We don’t know how many goblins there are, how far it is to the exit, or what else might show up to ruin our day.’

‘This whole excursion has been a disaster,’ Grathilde agreed sourly. ‘Bad enough you drag me back underground, but—’

‘We move silent and smart,’ Lantha said. ‘You know the signals if we need them. Bard—’

‘Not a bard,’ Robin quipped. Not yet, something whispered in the shadows of his mind.

‘Fine, Baggage, stay close, stay quiet, make yourself useful, don’t stab us in the back, and you might have a shot at getting out of these tunnels alive.’

Robin bit back the urge to respond. Lantha didn’t look to be in a joking mood. He’d probably have to save her for last. She was nearly as humourless as Mr. Elrond Smith. Or Queen Victoria.

He simply nodded. For a moment Lantha looked him over, weighing the pack in her hands. Then she grunted and passed it to Grathilde to shoulder. Yeah, she still didn’t trust him. That was going to be one tough nut to crack a smile from.

‘Let’s move.’ Lantha jerked her chin at Ora-Jean and the halfling slipped into the tunnel.

The rest of them followed. Lantha with her conjured magelight bobbing ahead of her, then Grathilde and Robin, with Fiamah bringing up the rear. They moved fairly silently, which was a double-edged sword. While the party had had time to grab their weapons in their escape, armour was bulkier, harder to carry, and took too long to don. So there wasn’t much of it around right now.

Robin was likely the only one wearing more today than yesterday. He and Grathilde were the only ones not carrying weapons. Come to think of it, hadn’t the dwarf said something about losing some of her magical equipment? Robin glanced over.

Grathilde was stomping down the tunnel, a sour look on her face. She looked insulted to be alive. Well, she was clearly unhappy about something, and unhappy people tended to love talking about whatever it was that was pissing them off, so—

‘Yeah, I don’t love being trapped underground either,’ Robin said softly to Grathilde, conscious of Lantha’s insistence to ‘stay quiet’.

‘It’s the absolute worst!’ The words burst out of Grathilde in a fierce murmur. ‘I didn’t leave Doran-Dorlin for the fresh air and ever-shifting skies of the surface—Goddess above but I miss the sky—only to end up down in yet another bjurking hole.’

‘It’s definitely the pits,’ Robin deadpanned.

Grathilde shot him a startled look. A nervous laugh, the kind that bursts forth more out of confusion than any actual appreciation for humour, escaped her lips.

[Laughter is the Best Medicine] Progress: 1/4! Bonus: 1/4!

Robin smiled. He’d gotten lucky there. Still it was a start.

‘Sometimes it helps to laugh about it,’ he said to Grathilde.

Proficiency Unlocked: Empathy!

‘Quiet!’ Lantha ordered.

Robin and Grathilde subsided, but Robin sent another smile Grathilde’s way. This time, her answering smile was more genuine. He waited several more paces before speaking again.

‘So why are you down here?’ He needed to know more. Humour was situational. If you wanted to make someone laugh, you needed to know what made them tick.

Grathilde shrugged. She shot a nervous glance toward Lantha’s back. Right. Why would it be that easy?

Robin mentally pulled up his interface. He glanced at his progress bar. He had some experience to play with. As much as he’d like to rush to the tier or level or whatever, he got the feeling that doing so without also levelling his skills (sorry, proficiencies) and investing in spells (peculiarities?) as he went along would be a mistake.

He mentally prodded at his proficiencies list. He could take any unlocked skill up to a maximum of 4. He focused on various areas of the screen until he managed to find the desired information.

Proficiencies are capped at 3 + Level. To increase your proficiencies, further gain experience, and progress toward higher tiers!

So tiers weren’t quite levels. How many levels were there per tier? Robin looked at his character sheet. Probably either 3 or 9. He couldn’t spend experience enough to lower him further than 33% on his progress bar—he did some quick mental maths.

He’d need to get past 45% or so and try to spend down below that level. That would tell him if he was functionally a level 1 or a level 3 right now. He assumed level 1, but there was no way he’d found to tell for certain. Yet.

Well, he wasn’t going to get anywhere like this. To paraphrase the maxim, ya gotta spend xps to get xps! Now, could he get some more information out of this interface on what each proficiency actually did?

Expression

The fine art of Expression governs all manner of communication, whether you intend to express yourself with words or actions. Useful for all manner of performances, making yourself understood, or otherwise making your point! Words can hurt, darling!

Well, that would certainly be useful. He had stubborn people to make smile, as well as insults to craft to fuel his [Cutting Words]. Hopefully there was some nice synergy there.

After a moment’s consideration, he upped Expression to 3. That should give him a feel for the skill, and the chance to try it out in conjunctions with [Cutting Words] at multiple skill levels, in case it made a noticeable difference.

Then he upped Empathy to 1 and Deception to 3. He still felt Deception would synergise well with his [Lesser Phantasm] even if it did not have a direct impact.

He rode out the strange sensation of growing weaker then growing back stronger and then checked his character sheet.

ROBIN PARKER Heritage: Shadeling, Juvenile Profession: None Tier: 0 (Progress to Tier 1: 34%) Properties

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

Physical (4/9) Mental (1/9) Social (5/9) ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? Deception: 3 ??? ??? Empathy: 1 ??? ??? Expression: 3 ??? ??? ??? Ranged Combat: 0 Insight: 0 ??? Sleight of Hand: 0 ??? Persuasion: 0 Stealth: 1 ??? Socialise: 0 Survival: 1 ??? ??? Peculiarities Blessing of Rhyth Tongue of the Fallen Tower

Yup. He was further away from Tier 1 now, but his skills had advanced. Ugh. This was going to be tough. He really wanted to unlock more peculiarities, but smart money was on the slower road to power. He needed to up some of his skills and master them first.

He reviewed his recent interaction with Grathilde, trying to empathise with her. There was a slight but noticeable difference. He could clearly see non-verbal cues and his instincts prompted him with an educated guess as to what those cues meant for her emotional state.

The tightness of her lips when she talked about being underground, for example. She didn’t like it but not because she was afraid. There was some personal hurt or dislike there.

Robin was jarred out of his thoughts by an abrupt halt. Lantha stood, one fist raised. Grathilde’s hands came up and she flexed her fingers. Fiamah was behind him, and Robin couldn’t see Ora-Jean.

They held position for a long moment until Ora-Jean reappeared, looking grim.

‘What?’ Lantha asked, voice pitched low to keep from carrying.

‘I think the kobolds have sent out search parties that have ranged this far.’ The halfling grimaced. ‘With the way these tunnels all twist, I can’t promise that we won’t run into them or the goblins with little-to-no warning. As far as I can tell, both are nearby.’

‘Foegathi,’ she said. It sounded like a curse.

Robin mentally filed it away with the rest of the language fragments that keyed him in to [Tongue of the Fallen Tower].

‘Do we continue forward?’ Grathilde asked, face twisted with indecision.

Ora-Jean’s face was set. The halfling clearly wanted to continue on. Lantha looked sour. Fiamah was unreadable, serene.

The decision was made for them, however, by a volley of crude black arrows. The missiles shot out from the shadows, and Lantha was the only one to escape unscathed.

‘Ambush! Defensive positions!’ Lantha sent her magelight soaring up near the ceiling and disappeared into the shadows.

Robin didn’t need to be told twice. He backed himself up against a wall and wrapped himself with a [Lesser Phantasm] of cave stone. His blood thundered in his veins, and his eyes darted through the shifting shadows, trying to pick out the enemy.

Fortunately, as a shadeling, he could see in the dark. Even with that boon, however, his first sight of a goblin came when one of the small, green humanoids tumbled out of the shadows to splat on the stone near his feet. A second smile grinned ruby at its throat. Lantha’s work, no doubt.

The elf was hard to follow, even with is ability to see in the dark. Fiamah was easy to pick out. She tended to gleam with a burning light as she laid about with a mace. Grathilde moved with extreme grace, almost dancing through the air, and blasts of air sent the few goblins that got too close to her tumbling.

They didn’t look very robust, at least. Though there were probably a lot of them. Robin flashed his hand through the motions of [Lesser Phantasm] again, renewing his camouflage.

Ora-Jean howled with fury as she laid about her with a double-bladed axe. Goblin war cries answered her fury, echoing off the stone. [Tongue of the Fallen Tower] translated them all. ‘Blood,’ ‘kill,’ and ‘filthy elf’ figured prominently, as did several anatomical impossibilities.

‘Who are you calling filthy?’ Robin seized on the idea and spun it into some [Cutting Words]. ‘You put the ‘dirt’ in ‘dirt cheap’.’

The goblin who had been shouting about filthy elves staggered. Red eyes darted around the tunnel, seeking the sources of the voice. Robin renewed his camouflage. Seconds passed but the goblin didn’t make any move toward him.

‘Come to think of it, you look like you put the ‘cheap’ in it too,’ Robin added, taking another shot with his cantrip.

The goblin’s green skin went an apoplectic grey. He howled in fury and began to foam at the mouth. Before Robin could say anything else, however, the little beastie dropped to the floor, dead.

Well, that was one way to do things. Robin blinked. He hadn’t expected the cantrip to be that effective. These goblins must be similar to the ones he was familiar with in D&D. Very low hit points. Or whatever the equivalent was here.

Robin began calling out every schoolyard insult he could think of. He insulted the goblins’ mothers, their personal hygiene, their sense of taste, anything he could think of. Noses were fair game, and a few seemed very sensitive about the size of their ears. It was hard to tell when an insult really landed, but Robin had a feeling those landed particularly hard.

Once or twice, he had to dash out of hiding as the battle spilled near him. Fortunately, the goblins were more concerned with the women with weapons cutting them down, and Robin managed to hide himself away again each time without getting caught.

In what seemed both a very long and a very short time, the skirmish was over. Goblin bodies littered the floor of the tunnel, and the party stood, splattered and bleeding, victorious.

Ora-Jean was ruthlessly looting the bodies, for what little there was to be found. Mostly a few coppers coins, though she also took a small spear.

‘Do you want any of the bows or arrows?’ Ora-Jean asked Lantha, who shook her head in the negative.

Fiamah moved from person to person, her hands bringing healing light and purifying fire. Curiously, after she left, each member of the party was spotlessly clean as well.

‘Your [Hearth Blessing], is much better than my [Cleanse],’ Grathilde complained. ‘Not that I’m complaining.’

‘Finish up,’ Lantha commanded, ‘we need to keep going. I don’t want to be here when more goblins find this place.’

‘How many more do you think there are?’ Robin made the mistake of asking.

Lantha’s face was grim when she answered.

‘Hundreds.’