June 2025 Realmgard Short Scenes: Day 2
Why DO pirates always bury their treasure?
Day two of a month of Realmgard Short Scenes. You can follow along throughout June here, on my Patreon, and on the Realmgard blog.
Also, I've realised it might be helpful to give some more context for the characters appearing in each of these scenes — especially to my new followers and subscribers. With that in mind, this story features Kat, Dunstana and Scarlet.
“Careful, Kitty-Kat,” Scarlet says as she and Dunstana lower Kat down into the treasure pit by a rope tied around her waist. “There’s a chance the gold might be cursed. I can feel magicological energy, but I’m having trouble telling where exactly it’s coming from.”
“Or maybe the gold isn’t cursed,” Dunstana offered. “Maybe the gold is the curse!”
Scarlet blinks down in surprise at Dunstana.
The little pirate shrugs. “I don’t know,” she admits. “That’s what my Dad says whenever there’s gold and a curse.”
As Scarlet and Dunstana talk, Kat hangs there in silent indignation, dangling most of the way down to the bottom of the treasure pit.
She clears her throat, the sound echoing off the walls of the pit.
Then, she yelps as she suddenly lurches downwards. The rough, unsteady movements eventually give way to a smoother descent.
As Kat reaches the bottom of the treasure pit, she unties the rope from around herself. Her legs are still a little unsteady and her brain and stomach haven’t quite caught up with the rest of her at the bottom of the pit.
Kat realises that if she had a mark for every time she’d been lowered to the bottom of a pirate’s treasure pit, she’d have almost enough marks to start a treasure pit of her own.
This part has never made sense to Kat. Why do the pirates bury their treasure at all?Digging a huge, structurally sound treasure pit that would even still be there without collapsing by the time you come back for the treasure years later sure seems like an awful lot of work when you could just sell the treasure as soon as you have it and get so rich you could eat solid gold breakfasts for the rest of your life.
But she puts all that aside as she considers the logistics of getting this specific treasure out of this specific treasure pit.
“How am I supposed to do get all this gold back up?” Kat calls.
“Just a second,” Scarlet calls down.
The rope lifts out of Kat’s sight and shortly returns with a bucket tied to the end.
“That’s it?” Kat cries. “You can’t even find me a bigger bucket? This is going to take forever!”
“So, you’d better start now, Kat!” Dunstana notes from the top of the pit.
“Oi!” Kat hears a voice call from the shadows at the edge of the pit.
She didn’t expect somebody else to be down here with her.
“ ’Oo are you?” the voice continues, soon revealing itself to belong to a huge Troll holding a club — which Kat does not fail to note, has a rather large nail driven through the top.
“I’ll ’ave you know that I was ’ere first, young lady,” the Troll continues. “And as per the Admiralty Law o’ the Free Mercantile City o’ Porthaven as what governs the customs and practice of salvage, any and all claims to this ’ere pile o’ treasure are rightfully mine.”
He hefts his club.
“So do please scarper right off.”
Kat looks up towards the lip of the pit. “Uh, guys?”
There’s a span of silence from the top of the pit as Scarlet and Dunstana confer with each other.
“Don’t worry, Kitty-Kat,” Scarlet tells her.
Kat’s spirits are momentarily lifted at the prospect of help…
“We have full faith in your abilities to handle yourself,” Scarlet concludes. “But we’re with you in spirit and we’re cheering you on.”
“Yeah. You’ve totally got this!” Dunstana agrees.
I think that Troll — who, admittedly, does kinda (not unlike a certain Randal Keith Orton) come out of nowhere…
…is a pretty good combination of traditional Fantasy Trolls (big and threatening) and my take of Realmgard Trolls (surprisingly erudite).
"Oi, ’oo are you?" is basically what the talking purse in that one scene in The Hobbit says and seemed like a good excuse to have the Troll talk in a Cockney accent…
Follow me every day in June here, on the Realmgard blog, and on my Patreon.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
