Gruntle took a step towards the door.

  "Someone subtle can open the door instead of me," Al clarified insistently. "I don't think someone who's sitting around loudly playing a lute is planning for violence."

  "Unless it's an evil bard!" Wikwocket argued.

  "An... evil bard?

  "They do have a reputation for immorality," Bote said, "though I believe the stories are exaggerated, often by the bards themselves."

  "Always scheming to seduce everything!"

  "Can we not talk about bards right now? I want to just get done with this and get on with the rest of whatever nonsense we're going to have to deal with next. Maybe just a nice dinner and somewhere comfortable to rest for a while?" Al asked, glaring up at the ceiling.

  "Is this about your great-grandmother?"

  Al huffed angrily. "This is not the time to talk about this. What's so funny?"

  Wikwocket stifled her laughter. "Nothing! So, you want me to quietly open the door and see what diabolical plotting is going on in there?"

  "Yes. Please."

  Wikwocket saluted sloppily. "Yes, sir, mister magical sword hero sir!"

  "Please stop that."

  "Shh! I'm about to do something quiet!"

  Wikwocket gave the door a precautionary examination, but there wasn't much to find. There was no lock or signs of any sort of mechanism. There wasn't even a latch, just a handle for pulling the heavy door shut. Wikwocket pushed. Despite its bulk and heft, the slow silent movement of the heavy door was testament to the quality of its engineering. The loud playing of a lute poured through the narrow opening along with the sound and flickering light of crackling flames.

  Wikwocket crouched and carefully leaned to peek around the door. She stared a moment, then gave Al a bemused look and motioned for him to come look as well.

  Al approached, and leaned over to see.

  Just beyond the door, an uncomfortably hot fire burned in an open oven-like structure in a corner, smelling of odd chemicals. He leaned further in to look around the door into the rest of the room at whatever Wikwocket saw.

  A lute spun lazily in mid-air near the far wall with its strings vibrating as it played itself. Lounging on his belly on the floor in front of it, a robed figure faced it idly kicking his feet in the air as he read a book and bit into an apple.

  "Eric?" Al asked. The figure gasped and turned to sit up with such force that the apple and his copy of Dark Crown of the Dark Demon Prince of Darkness went flying and bounced off of the wall.

  "Master! All the chores are done so... hey! Who are you? You're not supposed to be in here! I told them not to let anyone but me and the master be down here! You'd better leave, right now!"

  "You are Eric, Ebeneezer's apprentice, right?" Al asked insistently.

  "So what if I am? How did you even get down here? This is private property!"

  "Ebeneezer asked us to put out the fires and rescue you, that's how we got down here," Al answered testily.

  "What fires? I don't need rescuing!"

  "Do you have any idea how close you were to having Ebeneezer's flying cleaning supplies come in here and beat you to death?"

  "Those aren't Ebeneezer's!" Eric shouted, "I made them! I tell them what to do and they do it!"

  "You?" Al asked, incredulous.

  "Yes, me! With one of Ebeneezer's spell-scrolls! He kept saying I couldn't do it, but I just proved I can! He'll have to let me learn real magic now!"

  "You'll be lucky if he doesn't throw you out."

  "It was just one spell-scroll."

  "No, it was a bunch of magically-animated flying objects going on a rampage breaking things and starting fires!"

  "I never told them to do anything like that!"

  "It would seem," Bote said, leaning around the door to look inside and join the conversation, "that your magically-created servants were enthusiastically obedient to your commands, but not very careful."

  "Wh...what?" Eric said, his bravado wavering.

  "You asked them to do your chores." Al stated. He looked down at Wikwocket. "See, this is why I try to avoid going straight to working magic to solve all of my problems."

  "Yes? And?"

  "And they did, very badly. They were knocking things over and breaking things and starting fires through the whole building! If we hadn't gotten here when we did, the room with the dangerous chemicals would be a smouldering hole in the ground buried under the rubble of the rest of this place!"

  "You can thank Sir Fluffington on our way out... if he survives his injuries!" Wikwocket added, dramatically putting her hand over her heart.

  "Someone... died?" Eric squeaked.

  "No, not as far as we know, but a customer did get beaten unconscious by a broom."

  "No. Oh no," Eric said in a small voice, sagging. "Ebeneezer's going to kill me!"

  He went from deep despair to panic a moment later when Gruntle - feeling left out - pushed past the others to see what was happening in the room.

  "Gnoll! GNOLL!" Eric screamed, and with a short complex gesture and vocalization that seemed somewhat familiar to Al, Eric launched a spurt of fire at Gruntle's head. The gnoll yelped and ducked, then snarled and took up his flail. Al hurried in after him and got between him and Eric.

  "Stop provoking him! He's with us!"

  "That's a gnoll!"

  "Yes, we know! Stop! Gruntle, don't smash him! There's no way we're getting dinner if we kill him!"

  "Could be dinner," Gruntle growled.

  "It talks!?!"

  Al's exasperated sigh nearly drowned out the roaring fire of the incinerator.

  "Yes, he talks."

  He glared up at the imaginary ceiling-god again. "I swear, the next person that says that I'm going to... well... I don't know. But I'm getting tired of hearing it."

  "Gnolls don't talk! They're monsters!"

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  "Yes they do. What do you even know about gnolls?"

  "Lots! I read all about them in Rampage of the Dark Beast!"

  "How did you even survive learning to conjure magic fire?"

  "Wasn't that hard," Eric mumbled sullenly. "You know, shapechanging magic is illegal. I could tell the guards and you'd get in trouble."

  "Nobody's using shapechanging magic."

  "I don't believe you."

  "Well, then, let's get going so you can report us to the guards, they're waiting outside for us."

  Eric's moment of defiance burned itself out. "I am so dead," he muttered.

  "You'd better not be, Ebeneezer asked us to bring you back alive!" Wikwocket said.

  "Can I just stay down here for a while?" Eric pleaded.

  "No. Come on, let's go. If your legs don't work, I'll ask Gruntle here to carry you...Put that flail away, we are not going to beat to death the person we're here to rescue!"

  The gnoll hesitated for an uncomfortably long moment, but then slowly hung the flail back on his belt without looking away from Eric.

  Eric stood and hung his head in defeat as Al beckoned for him to follow, and lead the others back to the rat-cage room.

  "Perhaps bring your hovering musical instrument," Bote suggested on the way out, "though it may be best if it was silent for now."

  Eric looked dejectedly to the floating lute. Its strings immediately stilled, and it floated along behind as Eric shuffled out after the others. He gasped in horror at the state of the room and the sounds of scurrying rodents.

  "Ebeneezer's rats!" he shouted. He spoke some arcane syllables and made another complicated gesture. "Quick, before they wake up, help me catch..."

  The next thing Al was aware of was Wikwocket's clearly overacted cry of anguish, Eric pleading for mercy, and Bote hastily negotiating with Gruntle. Also, the floor against Al's back.

  "Our valiant magical sword hero has fallen!" Wikwocket wailed, though as Al opened his eyes to see her standing over him, she was grinning.

  "Asleep," Bote insisted, voice raised to be heard over Gruntle's extended growl, "He has fallen asleep, and is unharmed, and will be very unhappy if you harm the subject of our rescue mission."

  "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I thought it would only affect the rats!"

  "I'm fine, I'm fine," Al said, trying to work out what had happened. "Did you just work some kind of sleeping-spell?"

  "Just to put Ebeneezer's rats to sleep so we can catch them and get them back into cages! I didn't expect the magic to affect anyone else!"

  "I'm very tired. You have no idea what we went through to get down here to find you," Al groaned, and sat up. He felt relieved to hear Gruntle's growling cease, though his bared teeth continued to threaten. Rather than frightened, Eric looked so sad and defeated that Al felt a twinge of sympathy.

  "All right, fine, we can help you catch some rats, but then we're leaving."

  They found most of them, and gently moved sleeping rodents into a few of the intact cages.

  CRUNCH

  "Stop eating them!"

  "Snacks," insisted Gruntle.

  Al picked up the badly abused broom as they left, anticipating more broken glass on the way back up.

  "What's with the door?" asked Eric as they moved to the stairs, in a tone that suggested he was afraid to find out. The door in question leaned against the wall on the landing where Gruntle had discarded it, glittering with embedded shards of glass.

  "Something caused an ongoing explosion upstairs, there's a lot of flying glass. Gruntle, you might want to grab that again."

  "The master was making a flying potion."

  "Well, apparently it works."

  The glass still hung in the air, though the magic seemed to be fading since there was now less of it near the ceiling and more down low near the floor. The path they'd made through the room remained clear but Gruntle held the door up and pushed it across the floor anyway. The floor was wet, and a few drops of water still dripped from the ceiling to splash off off the glass on the way to the floor.

  Gruntle sneezed as they got near the fading smell of caustic smoke.

  "Something's burning!" Eric shouted in alarm.

  "Not anymore, thanks to the brave and selfless actions of Sir Fluffington!" Wikwocket said proudly.

  "Is he the customer who got hit?" Eric asked.

  "Um, no," Al answered. "Look, I find it's easiest to just play along."

  Gruntle carried the door into the next room, and paused to examine the closet he'd ripped it from. After a moment, he pushed the door back into its place in the frame and headed for the next set of stairs.

  The gnoll sneezed mightily as he left the room. The unsecured "Danger: Volatile Chemicals" door Gruntle had replaced tipped back into the room and slammed heavily to the floor, sending Eric scrambling to steady a wobbling jar of Ebeneezer's Explosive Extract on the shelf inside.

  "There's no way that's a real gnoll," he gasped.

  "Sir Fluffington! We've come back!" Wikwocket called out as they reached the mushroom gardens. She rushed to the pillow and lifted one end gently as though cradling someone's head. "Speak to me, Sir Fluffington! Al, he's so cold!"

  Eric looked on with the stricken expression of someone far outside of a normal situation.

  "Told you," Al said to him quietly, and knelt by the pillow. "Sir Fluffington, it's not your time to pass on, the world still needs you."

  Al spent a few moments magicking the last few rips in the fireproof pillow back together.

  "You can work magic, too?" Eric asked in surprise.

  "Yes. You think I'm wearing these robes as some kind of fashion choice?"

  "But, I see chainmail, and you've got a sword!"

  "There's no actual law against wizards having a sword, and anyway a dead elf insisted that I take it." Al stood, and conjured a small ball of fire to throw at "Sir Fluffington". The pillow twitched from the tiny explosion, but suffered no harm from the fire.

  "Warmth returns to Sir Fluffington's body!" Wikwocket announced, then laughed and stood up, throwing the pillow over her shoulder. "Good work, magical sword hero..."

  "Please stop calling me that."

  "...the not your time to pass on line was great, but you need to put more emotion into it to really make the audience feel it!"

  "What are you people?" Eric asked.

  "We're heroic adventurers!" Wikwocket answered.

  "I've read a lot about adventurers, and you're nothing like any I've ever heard of."

  "No, I'm sure we're not," Al agreed. He began sweeping the patch of glass out of the way so Gruntle wouldn't step on it.

  "How is there so much broken glass in here?" Eric asked.

  "When the alchemical mixture came to life and chased after us, it brought the broken glass with it."

  Eric stared skeptically at Al. "No, seriously, what happened in here?"

  Al stared back. "You really want to know what happened? Somebody decided to resort to some admittedly-impressive magic to avoid doing a little work, and they conjured up some spirits and stuck them into inanimate objects and told them something like hey, do the things on this little list, and be quick about it, and don't let anyone bother me, so they quickly rushed around dusting and sweeping and organizing with no real understanding of what they were doing and beating people unconscious so they wouldn't bother you and they knocked a whole bunch of who-knows-what off of the shelves in the stockroom upstairs which all mixed together into a sticky glowing flammable mass full of glass shards that chased us down the stairs to here where your magical slaves had fertilized the garden by dumping an entire bag of Magic Grow in one place and we ended up having a fight to the death with giant violent mushrooms and a flaming sharp alchemical blob..."

  "I didn't tell them to break things or dump all of the fertilizer!" Eric objected as Al paused in his rant to inhale.

  "You didn't tell them not to, either! And I guess the spirits were as lazy as you were!"

  Al's voice trailed off as a tangential thought occurred to him. "Oh...," he muttered to himself. "Of course they were. That's why it works. So, when I..."

  Al dragged his attention back to the world outside of his head.

  "Never mind, just some research I've been working on. Oh, quit moping!" Al said to Eric, who had virtually deflated until he looked absolutely miserable as Al had berated him. "I'm reasonably sure murder's illegal here and the guard's right outside, so probably the worst that'll happen to you is getting kicked out. If you can do that," Al said, pointing to the lute that was still obediently floating along behind Eric, "even with a spell-scroll, you've got plenty of skill to work for a living with somewhere."

  CRUNCH

  "Hey, Al, the mushrooms are still fresh, try some!" Wikwocket announced as she chewed.

  "Those things were trying to kill us just a few minutes ago!"

  "All the more reason to eat them!"

  Gruntle gave an emphatic grunt of agreement and broke off a piece of one of their fungal foes for himself.

  "Please tell me those aren't poisonous," Al said to Eric.

  "Well, they weren't, at least, they're medicinal."

  "What kind of medicinal?"

  "Master makes hair-tonic with them."

  Al froze, and watched Wikwocket and Gruntle for a few moments expecting them to be buried in suddenly-sprouted hair. He was relieved when nothing of the sort appeared to be happening.

  "How about we keep moving before somebody does anything else inadvisable?"

  Most of the glass shards on the stockroom floor had been picked up by the malicious blob of alchemical goo, along with most of the puddles of liquid, so the trip back around the shelves presented substantially less of a hazard. Eric stared morosely at the half-emptied shelves. The nearest shelf as they came up the stairs actually had nothing but large pieces of broken glass, piled up as if someone had gathered the biggest pieces and put them there. Without the distraction of immediate danger, Al could see that some sort of order had been imposed on what still remained intact. Past the shelves of broken glass Al found a set of shelves with all round glass bottles. The next set of shelves were all clay pots and jugs. The next had containers with wooden stoppers. The next was containers that were tall and narrow.

  "You didn't tell them how to organize the stockroom, did you."

  "...no...," Eric mumbled guiltily. "You might as well kill me now before Ebeneezer does."

  Gruntle huffed as Al's immediate shout of "No!" interrupted before the grinning gnoll could so much as take a step in Eric's direction. Eric watched Gruntle over his shoulder as he hastened to obey Al's emphatic gestures towards the steps up to the shop