In the end, a single banana wasn’t enough to satisfy them all. Emma and I waited to see if they’d continue arguing, but eventually they turned back on us.
“Hey, giants! Give us more!”
“Sorry,” I said. “I only had one of them.”
That was a lie, but I couldn’t exactly start handing them out, could I? If I did, they’d stop fighting. All the same, my idea backfired in the end. Instead of fighting more amongst themselves, they turned their anger back toward me and Emma.
“Then we’ll kill you! Everyone! Attack!”
Guess it wasn’t going to be that easy after all!
“What?!” I said. “No, wait! Stop! I might not have any more bananas, but I do have a cookie. Here.”
I set a delicious cookie down on the floor, but they seemed unimpressed. I’d rubbed them the wrong way by not having another banana.
“This isn’t food,” said one of them.
What were they talking about? Maybe they’d just never seen one before?
“It’s made from wheat flour. You bake it in the oven and…” I realized quickly that my explanation wasn’t going to help. “Fine then. I’ll eat it. I’ll give you something else.”
“Wait! We did not say we wouldn’t eat it!”
They were curious about it after all. But they were cautious too. They had their poison taster take a bite, and the results were much the same as the banana.
“It’s hard, but it melts in your mouth, and it’s yuuuuuummy!”
Thank you, poison taster!
After that, the others started to try and seemed to take a liking to it. Before long, they were demanding more. I wondered how we would have managed if I hadn’t brought any food with me.
Fortunately, I had a few more cookies, so I handed them out. They mowed through them in the course of a few minutes.
“Giants! Entertain us next!”
“Entertain you?” I asked.
“Yes! Do a pig impression!”
Would these guys never be satisfied?
“Woman!” one of them shouted. “Why aren’t you doing anything?!”
“Me? But…”
“Pig impression! Now!”
What a thing to ask of a young lady! Regardless, Emma seemed to be ready for it. She squished her nose up and gave them her best pig impression.
“Oink oink oink oink!”
Silence.
Getting heckled would have been bad enough, but these guys didn’t react at all! They just stared at Emma blankly while she kept oinking. It was almost a minute before they got bored and called it off.
“That wasn’t funny at all. You deserve to die!”
“Umm, but you’re the ones who told me to do it?” Emma said.
Turned out, these guys were just smart enough to be mean.
“No impression then. Just make us laugh!”
I didn’t like how this was going, but right now we didn’t seem to have any other choice. Even so, I couldn’t let Emma embarrass herself again, so this time I stepped up. I pulled a face and put on a funny voice.
“Look at me! I’m an orc! I love meat, but I won’t eat pork! I can’t. It would be too much like cannibalism!”
Silence.
Since they’d asked for an impression of a pig, I’d assumed they liked them, but that didn’t get so much as a single chuckle. Even Emma only looked away from me, embarrassed. Wait. Did I…have no sense of humor? I’d made a complete fool of myself for nothing! Just kill me now. How do comedians deal with stuff like this?!
“Hey!” one of the little people shouted. “Woman! Why do you wear clothes that bare your legs?”
“Because I value ease of movement,” Emma replied.
Seriously? These guys didn’t even know what a skirt was? How would we ever figure out what they found funny?
Emma sighed. She was probably thinking the same thing.
“Hey!” someone shouted. “We’re out of cookies! Give us more!”
It looked like we’d have to find another way out of this. They did seem to have dropped their guard a little, so I figured this was our chance. I took out a piece of bread and set it on the floor.
“This is called bread,” I said. “It’s one of the main things we like to eat. It isn’t sweet, but it’s tasty!”
It was expensive bread too. I’d bought it from a famous bakery in town. But the little people were as cautious as ever.
“Make sure it isn’t poison!” one of them shouted.
It was the same one that had given the order before. Emma seemed to have noticed the same thing.
“Is that their leader?” she whispered.
“I think so. Think you can take him out first?”
“So you do have something up your sleeve. All right. Let’s try it.”
The poison taster finished trying the bread.
“It isn’t sweet, and it has a strange texture…but I like it.”
“Good,” said the leader. “Giants! Drop the rest of it!”
“All right, all right,” I complained. “I’m getting to it.”
Poisonous — 50 LP
Bestow — 150 LP
Time to spice up their present a little! The second I set the poisoned bread down, they swarmed all over it. Only the leader didn’t go for it right away. Damn it, why not?! At least now we had a good chance to take out the others.
“Urghh…”
“My stomach…”
“Hey! Giant! What did you do to them?!”
“Now, Emma.”
“Yessir!”
She fired off a Wind Strike, aiming it straight at the creature we assumed was their leader. In the end, none of them had much in the way of defense. The creature was crushed before it could even scream.
“Boss?!”
“You killed him?!”
We were right about him being their leader. Looked like they’d avoided addressing him directly to stop us from finding out. Now he was no longer a problem, and a good proportion of the little guys had been poisoned. Pandemonium soon followed. Some of them tried to run away while others formed up to make a stand.
“Guess it’s time for us to let loose,” I said.
“They won’t get away,” Emma growled. “Not after humiliating me like that!”
Soon, the peerless duo of Emma and Noir had managed to cause absolute mayhem. Most of the creatures were already dying from the poison, so they didn’t put up much of a fight, and they were weak without their leader. The fight was over in minutes.
“Noir, did you do something to that bread?”
I nodded. “I Bestowed the Poison skill before I gave them the second portion.”
Emma grinned. “You’re so smart!”
We high-fived, and the sound snapped back off the walls. When we checked the door on the far side of the room, it was open, just as I’d predicted.
On the other side, a long corridor stretched out ahead of us. We walked cautiously along it when something grabbed hold of my hand. I almost jumped out of my skin, but in the end, it was only Emma. I still wasn’t used to having her down here with me.
“This reminds me of when we were kids,” she said. “We used to go on all sorts of adventures together.”
“I remember. You were always running headlong into trouble!”
“But it was so much fun!” Emma laughed. “Playing with you like that. It still is. Hey! Why don’t we…you know? Do that thing we used to do, where we’d kiss in a cave?”