Sleeping Giants Game 21

Intro

The Butterfly Poop

Stratton.

It’s been 5 hours since your lunch date with Misha. The rest of the Cirque has already packed up and is ready to hit the road, they’re just waiting on you now. You knew you shouldn’t have put off packing until the last minute, but you did it anyway.

You’re swiftly shoving a pair of pants into a saddle bag when there is a knock at your door. A familiar voice follows. “Stratton, it’s time to gooo. We can’t just wait around all day, you knowww. You are quite slow with things that you stow…” the voice of Benedicht the Half-Elf trails off as he continues quietly reciting nonsensical rhymes to nobody in particular.

You approach the door and quickly lock it, holding it back with your little hands in case he tries to force it open. “I’ll be right there!” you exclaim in a panic.

“Well alright, just meet us at the gate.”

He turns and walks down the hallway, singing a little tune to himself. “You’re short, I’m tall. You snort, I bawl,” until he gets out of hearing distance. You roll your eyes and turn back to your gear, hurriedly collecting the rest of it. You toss your saddlebags up over your shoulder and skip down the hall, partially because you’re in a hurry, and partially because you’ll be glad to be out of this sandy city and back on the open road.

You get about halfway to the city gates when you are given a staunch reminder of your eating habits for the past few days. Last night’s celebratory drinking, mixed with today’s Sikander Special, is making quite a rumble in your gnomish tummy. Actually, wait, no, that’s not your tummy. That’s coming from much further down. Uh oh.

You look around at all of the people coming and going around you. Many of them make eye contact with you, smiling and nodding with recognition. If you had an accident now, you would never hear the end of it. It could even be a career ruiner. But that’s when you spot it. Just within dashing distance is a narrow, secluded alleyway, and you’re confident you could duck into it without anyone noticing.

Without a second thought, you make for the alley. You take a quick peek around to ensure nobody is spying on you, and drop trou. And not a second too early, as your bowels evacuate with a swiftness you didn’t know they were capable of. It’s almost impressive really, and certainly worthy of a song of its own, or at least a ballad. If the situation weren’t so embarrassing, that is. But there’s little time for developing a song just now, and as quickly as you showed up, you clean yourself off and dash back out of the alley. Just a few more minutes until you meet back up with the Cirque, and its onward to your next destination.

You never told anyone about what you did that day. Perhaps you might have, if you had stayed in the Cirque for longer. But it doesn’t really matter, because even without your mentioning it, that event took on a life of its own. Your contemporaries might not care what you did, and some may even find it downright disgusting. But rest assured that in the future, historians would look back on that day and what you did, and dub it “The Butterfly Poop”.