A RAT IN THE SEWERS: an introduction to Teak, the sewer rat

"C'mere, you filty turdling..."

An eerie scraping sound farther down the sewer was the only indication that Teak wasn't alone down here. It was pitch black, and except for the occasional rattling and the sound of his feet schurlmping through the sewer muck, there was only the sound of Teak muttering to himself. He'd been following the trail, as it were, for a couple of hours. This was one tough rat to corner.

It began a few weeks earlier when Teak, known to the town of Rygenhijo as the crazy street urchin, got a job as the town rat catcher. The previous rat catcher had been missing some weeks, and Teak had jumped at the opportunity to earn a steady wage. Food was hard enough to come by, but without the necessary clink, he'd never be able to get the residuum he needed to perfect his magical arts.

Tead was short and wiry, scrawny even by gnomish standards. He wore beggar's rags, but a careful observer would see a glint of gold around his neck. It was a five-pointed star gilt in gold and hanging from a ratty leather collar. It was also one of the only mementos Teak had of his mentor, Kenji Kobe. Teak carried a canvas bag tied over his shoulder, a metal rod in one hand, a hand crossbow in the other, and seventeen rat traps (mostly of the humane variety) tied on where ever they might fit.

He looked and smelled, like a small pile of trash, decorated with rat traps in a random pattern.

Today he wasn't worried about his humane catch-and-release traps. His prey was not the catch-and-release type. It was a certifiable killer dire rat; a big bugger the size of a pony, all fangs, with a tail two feet long, and a taste for human blood. Teak had heard of some rich folk rearing and training dire rats as pets for their privileged children, but he had a feeling this varmit he was hunting wasn't the kind to be petted. Several bums, half a handful of dogs, and the town's previous rat catcher had all come up missing over the course of a month, and Teak was sure he was about to come face-to-face with the villain responsible.

"It is already the eating time, and ye keep running away. But I'll be finding yer lair, ye fiend, and I'll eat YOU if you keep me down here much longer," Teak spat out as he traversed the mucky muck.

Even though Teak could see twice as well as any human in the dark, it was still dark as pitch down here, yet he knew better than to try to light a torch. Hundreds of years of sewer gas build-up made any open fire a risky business. The rattling was getting closer with each step, though, so he reached a hand into the bag at his side and pulled out a small glass vial.

It was a perfectly round and fully enclosed orb filled with an alchemical concoction of his own invention. He gently shook it and then hooked it onto the leather strap at his neck with a practiced twist. Within seconds a dull blue glow filled the sewers surrounding the odd gnome. It was a simple matter of using red phosphorus with sulfur, salt peters and a drop of sewer water, and a pinch of swamp moss for color. It would burn out in in about an hour, but it was cheaply made, refillable, mostly safe down here where any flame was most defiantly unsafe. He called it a flame globe, in memory of a toy Kobe taught him to make with a globe and a wintery snow scene. Teak rehitched his bag over his shoulder and continued hunting his quarry.

He was entering the oldest part of the city. The pipes here were big enough for a horse to walk in comfortably. No one lived in this part of the sewers. No people, anyway. There were plenty of other dangerous denizens of the dark down here. Still, it was a rare thing for a foul creature such as this to have moved in. The dire rat had become more of a public nuisance. It was a threat to the lives of the people living down here. There was no one else to protect them. Teak was not only the best equipped to deal with the dangers of the sewers, he was also one of the few people that cared.

Teak knew these tunnels as well as any of the citizens of Rygenhijo. After all, he had lived down here for most of his life. Toward the east end of town, close to the river, was an entire underground community for outcasts, orphans and street people. His brief tutelage under Kenji Kobe was the once exception. The kindly old toy-maker welcomed Teak to his home, gave him food and shelter, and began teaching him a trade. Those were the best years of Teak's life. After Kobe died Teak was left alone again. He continued to study the arcane arts, but his education had been incomplete, so he was forced to improvise. Sometimes it resulted in something good and useful like his flame globe, but other times it resulted in explosions of various sizes, or some other misfortune. There was no other way to learn other than trial and error, however, and there was no one left willing to teach him.

He turned down a different tunnel. He took a step and felt something slimy moving at his feet. The slimy part was expected, this being the sewers, but the moving part was a bit disconcerting. He jumped up out of the filth he'd be walking in all afternoon, trying to find a handhold along the wall to his left so he could see what was beginning to constrict his foot--too late. He felt a sharp pain and realized he'd just been bitten by a leekert. Half snake, half leech, it hid at the bottom of a pool of dirty water and waited to be stepped on. Then it would wrap its eel-like body around its foe, bite with both its heads, pumping its venom into its target, leaving its prey in a blissful numbness, unaware that it would soon be eaten, digested, and shat out by a two-headed freak of nature. It could be a lethal predator to those caught unaware. To Teak, a long-time resident of the sewers currently bent on the destruction of a dire rat, it was a just an inconvenience.

If anyone had been watching, they would have seen Teak suddenly disappear. He was still right where he had been standing, but gnomes had a knack for vanishing when they got into trouble, and Teak had mastered it. Teak quickly grabbed the leekert with the hand holding the rod and ripped its toothy mouths off of his foot before the strange amphibian was able to pump its mind-numbing poison into his leg. He shouted "Away!" just as he clicked the small tab on the metal rod in his hand. The leekert appeared ten feet back up the pipe the other direction, further away from the now vanished gnome. Confused and disorientated, it was still smart enough to realize this foul-tasting gnome was more dangerous than it was edible. It buried itself back into the muck at the bottom of the pipe, content to wait for a frog or a delicious water tarantula to come by.

Water splashed down the pipe as an invisible gnome (followed by a bluish glow) retreated to the safe distance. Careless, he thought to himself. He'd been distracted by the threat of the dire rat and had let down his guard. That was a dangerous thing to do down here. Luckily it had been a male leekert or it might not have given up so easily. The females were twice as big, and often had little hungry mouths to feed. But then again, a leekert made a fine meal if they were big enough, so the sewer denizens brave enough to go hunting them ate well when successful. The usual method was to use a stick, though, not your foot.

After a few seconds he reappeared. He took a moment to look at his bleeding foot. The bite itself was far from lethal, but an open wound down here could invite disease much more dangerous than any leekert. Teak adjusted the glowing blue ball at his neck, moving it underneath his ragged burlap shirt. He reached into his bag, pulled out a vial half-full with a pink liquid, and drank it. The bleeding stopped and the small wound covered up with new skin. He put the empty vial back into his bag. Next Teak began moving his hands in a complex pattern, caressing and then banging the rod he used to teleport himself and the leekert. After several minutes of messing with it, a faint *click* was heard and the button near the base of the rod popped back out, ready to be used again. He began walking, but then paused a moment to looked at his ripped pants. He moved his hands quickly in an arcane ritual, almost as an afterthought. His ripped rags returned to their previous dirty, but intact, state.

"Now I'm coming for ya, ye bugger, and I'm hungry and harassed. I'll be dining rat-kabobs within the hour, or I'm a cross-dressing dwarf. I might even have a new hat, too. A nice fur hat!"

Still muttering to himself, he pulled his glowing orb out from beneath his shirt and continued down the sewer, now moving as quietly as he could, toward the weird scraping that he knew to be the sound of a rat chewing on rather large bones....