Outside

Drex felt a little trapped in this tavern with its odd duerger and his daft dwarven tales of surface elves. Besides they were out there, lying in ambush. His instincts on these things were uncanny.

The drow picked up his overlarge cap from the bar bench and dropped it over his course and unruly white locks, mismatched eyes alight with mischief that lingered on the edges of his grinning grimace. He gingerly extracted one of his glasses cases from one of the many pouches on his bandolier and put a pair of ruby lensed artificer goggles on. He checked Dues Ex Machina, his custom kusarigama by reflex.

Lipp and he had devised the peculiar weapon which consisted of twin black-bladed sickles with obsidian pommels, joined by a fine mithril chain enchanted with silence. Its preternaturally sharp blades could spring out, change angle or retract to transform each weapon into a dagger, sickle or grappling hook. The chain could extend to a hundred feet or retract entirely, instantly drawing the pommels together into a short, double-ended bladed staff. Intricate mechanisms and enchantments made the weapon astonishingly versatile, deadly, silent and ingenious.

“You plan on using little ripper tonight?” Lipp asked with a mad gleam in his eyes. “You want a hand?”

Drex turned and looked down on the dwarf. Barely. He was short for a drow, four and a half feet thanks to his goblin ancestry. “I do… and I don’t. This is my problem and it requires drow finesse… Perhaps you can regale me with your tales another time mate,” he said, tossed the pretty goblin barmaid a platinum and slipped silently out into the deserted cobbled street.

He stepped from the tavern’s low threshold into the chill damp of the Underdark. The street was empty, the usual clamor of the lower bazaar reduced to the distant drip of water and the soft snoring of chained demihuman slaves curled at the feet of shuttered stalls. Their iron collars clinked faintly whenever a slave shifted in sleep; masters long gone to their own beds had left the slaves where they lay, trusting the city’s unspoken rules more than any lock.

Fairy-fire lanterns still burned in their endless outre glows of purple, orange, sullen red, casting crooked shadows across the cobbles. Drex pulled his oversized cap lower, red lensed goggles half hidden as he began to walk to the outer chambers. He was being followed and he knew where he wanted to fight.

He had not gone thirty paces when the twang of a tiny hand crossbow made him drop as the bolt hissed past his ear and shattered against a stone pillar. A second poisoned missile followed, closer but Drex sprang to the side and ran without thought, leaping and bounding off cobbles and shop fronts with acrobatic alacrity, ducking behind a stack of empty mushroom crates then into a dead end alley as he drew Deus and threw one of its kama up high as a grappling hook, catching a shingled roof top and shooting upwards by making the chain shorten.

Three figures detached themselves from the deeper bazaar shadows and converged on the alley with murderous intent thinking Drex trapped. Their naked blades gleamed in the faerie fire light, and the hired knives gleefully moved in for what the thought was an easy kill.