Ten Pranks on a Necromancer

Fred could feel himself drifting off to sleep. Yet, as nice as Belboaz seemed, he couldn't really bring himself to trust the old man. He couldn't really bring himself to stay awake either, not if he had to sit and listen. That droning recitation was awful. Besides, he'd gotten the important part. He had to do quite a quantity of pranks to advance in power - forty pranks just to get the ability to manipulate socks.

It was a bit of a step down for a proud King's Knight, but Fred figured it'd only take a few weeks at worst. By then, maybe he'd have gathered a few ideas for how to drive off a dragon. Size differences be damned!

Searching for things to keep his attention occupied and off of Belboaz, Fred looked around the necromancer's cave. He hadn't given it a proper examination before. In his nervous state, he'd noticed only the magic light and Belboaz himself. It was still there. It still burned his eyes to look at, though he noticed that he could see a weave of magic around it now.

That wasn't the only enhancement to his senses. The room quickly gave up its secrets to the inquisitive gaze of a faerie dragon. Fred noticed a pair of fine dress shoes sitting under a coat rack and with his control of laces caused one of the laces to unravel, just slightly. Now the shoelace was sure to fall apart entirely at an inconvenient moment. Then he winged his way into the air before he knew what he was doing, and had flown over to land on Belboaz's desk. He sniffed around on it, then poked at the open book that'd been left behind when Belboaz had set it down to fetch the one he was currently droning away over.

The book had a weave of magic around it... a rather forbidding appearance, in fact. Some faerie dragon instinct recognized and was repulsed by a book of necromancy. Fred fought down the urge to desecrate the book entirely; Belboaz may have gotten absorbed in his current book, but Fred didn't want to push his luck and risk notifying the necromancer to what he was doing. Instead he searched until he found something that looked like an incantation, then gave the page a little scratch with his claw. Now it looked just slightly different, and the resultant mispronunciation would surely foil the next casting of that spell.

Fred turned to the inkwell nearby then, and using the ink, carefully drew a little message on the desk's surface. It was rather rude but looked to the incautious glance like a chance speckle of ink. The faerie dragon, warming up to the business of making mayhem in quantity, searched the room for other tricks to play. The dresser, the coat rack, the bookshelf, the potions... there was plenty of things he could do.

Belboaz seemed to take forever to finish reading. In that time, Fred had managed to misplace three small objects, drip a few drops of ink into one of the potions, steal two left socks (he was seized with a terrible urge to eat them, but he managed to stop himself after only a few bites of the first), and swap the labels on some of the potions. When finally the necromancer looked up from his reading, Fred was perched with the alchemical equipment.

"What are you doing with that!?" cried Belboaz as he noticed Fred apparently mixing two potions. The little dragon was doing nothing of the sort. This time however, he was interested in being caught, so Belboaz would panick over the 'loss' of the potions. As Belboaz rushed over to sieze the potions from him he leaped into the air and winged away to the other side of the room. "Bah, faerie dragons! Why did you have to become a faerie dragon!?" said Belboaz despairingly. Fred answered with a belch of some odd shimmery stuff. His own response surprised him; he'd been about to say something. And the shimmery stuff made him want to sneeze. Worse, it seemed to be drifting off his wings as well now.

"Oh no, it's faerie dust," said Belboaz. "Ten pranks, you must've, you're level two. A few minutes with my gaze averted and it'll take hours to find everything and clean up again..." But as the necromancer moaned, Fred had already cackled and swooped away back down the cave.

Taking vengeance for an irreversible, ill-considered, useless transformation was never supposed to be this fun!

But what was Fred supposed to do now? Faerie dust didn't seem like a good reward for the effort, sock manipulation at level three wasn't going to be any better, and it would only get harder and harder to level after that. Prank Powers didn't seem like they would ever allow him to overpower another dragon anyways... What was he going to do, animate a horde of socks to step on the dragon?

Fred decides to ---

1. fly deeper into the caverns to secretly observe the dragon's lair.
2. seek out other faerie dragons for advice.
3. leave the caverns to practice his skills on peasants.
4. seek faerie vengeance on the King for giving him this Quest.

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