Copyright J.B. Norman
“They’re, uh, they’re stealing King Guthrum,” Pela tells the other members of the Lyte Brigade as she watches the group of thieves struggle to make off with the ornate stone sarcophagus.
“Huh,” Nolan muses. “We got the warning about somebody trying to steal his treasure from the museum, but I never thought they’d try to steal him.”
“I say we just let the curse handle it,” Matilda offers.
The others blink dumbly at her.
“What?” she asks defensively. “I know how this kind of thing goes. Digging up some dead guy and all his stuff and setting it up for people at the Museum to gawk at? There’s no way it isn’t absolutely, one-hundred percent cursed.”
“They’re getting away,” Amara tells the others. She narrows her eyes as she watches the sorry spectacle. “Slowly and ineffectually…”
“I think they’re stuck in the doorway,” Matilda notes. “See? It’s clearly the curse.”
“Pivot!” the thief at the front of their group calls to the other. “Pivot! No! The other way!”
“They are bogged down in unfavourable terrain,” Falcata notes, hefting her spear. “We should strike now.”
“Carefully, though,” Tancred notes. “It wouldn’t do to damage poor King Guthrum. Well, not any more than those louts already have.”
“Alright,” Nolan says. “Lyte Brigade, move — Did you just shoot them, Pela?”
“No,” the Half-Goblin replies, lowering her crossbow. “I shot at them.” She points to where one of her bolts is now buried in the wall. “See?”
She nods with satisfaction.
“And it worked!”
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” one of the thieves moans. “You dropped it! It’s on my foot! Pick it up! Pick up!”
“They’ve seen us!” the apparent leader of the thieves cries. “Run away!”
The unfortunate thief with his foot pinned under King Guthrum’s sarcophagus watches with wide eyes as his companions leave the sarcophagus wedged in its current awkward position stuck in the doorway and on top of his foot and bolt into the night.
“Falcata, Tancred, Pela,” Nolan says, nodding towards the fleeing thieves. “You go after them. We’ll… do something about this guy.”
Falcata is already out the door by the time Nolan has finished speaking.
“No fair!” Pela moans, chasing after her taller guildmates. “Guys, come on! Your legs are, like, as tall as I am. You can’t just go running off like that!”
With that, Pela goes running after them, having to pump her shorter legs almost twice as hard just to cover the same distance.
Meanwhile, Nolan, Amara, and Matilda approached the trapped thief.
“We accept your surrender,” Amara declares.
“Uh, yeah,” Nolan mutters. “That.”
“You two can deal with this,” Matilda says, deliberately hanging back from the ancient king-in-a-box. “They’re not paying me enough to get cursed — especially not in the middle of the night. That’s, like, the most horrible time to get cursed!”
“If you just lift the box off my foot, I’ll help you however you want,” the trapped thief begs. “Please?”
“Yeah,” Nolan says. “We’ll figure something out.”
“It was self-defence, by the way,” the thief insists. “We tried not to steal the box, but then it overpowered us, I swear.”
Couple things here. First, while it’s not exactly a reference per se, the sarcophagus getting stuck and the directive to ‘pivot!’ was at least inspired by the famous Friends scene:
Secondly, Matilda bemoaning how horrible it would be to get cursed at night is a roundabout reference to the almost famous “What a horrible night to have a curse” line from Castlevania II — which is apparently supposed to be mean something along the lines of the night itself being horrible or accursed…
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