The small village of Fuly is renowned for its eels. Pies, stews, sausages – it seems like there’s no dish you can’t improve with a Fuly eel. In recent days, however, the flow of eels from Fuly has stopped, and the chefs of Amin are beside themselves. The Feast of St. Tondius is in a week, and without eels for the traditional dish, it’s just not worth the bother. Clearly something needs to be done.
The wizard Zurminus was a recent addition to Fuly. A plain and simple town, the people were duly impressed by the black-robed wizard and his hatchet-faced manservant as they strode around town acting mystical. Zurminus’s stone tower, a full three stories high, was erected over the course of a single month, with the assistance of a large band of ipotane laborers – clearly magically transformed giants, ogres, or dwarves. The tower stood for nearly six months until it was felled by a wizardly duel…or shoddy construction on a foundation of mud. In any event, the tower fell into the large moat-like ditch around the village, that separated Fuly from the fens, so no real harm was done...until the frogs appeared.
Zurminus, of course, was a hack. A low-grade mage with almost no ambition, his only talent and primary obsession was breeding frogs. He’d moved to Fuly to take advantage of the moderate climate and abundant insect life, and to raise frogs. The collapse of his cut-rate tower put an end to those dreams and his life (concerned characters may unearth Zurminus’s body from the bottom of the ditch, beneath the remains of his tower), but spelled trouble for Fuly as well. His frogs, a rare and mildly poisonous breed, were exposed to a combination of magical reagents and escaped into the wild. The reagents multiplied the quantity of frogs into the thousands before it became inert. As a result, Fuly is now isolated by a horde of tiny yellow and pink frogs that cause intoxication, hallucinations, and temporary skin discoloration (swirls of blue, yellow, and green). Eel fishing has ground to a halt.
The best and fastest solution is for someone to quickly bring in a flerd of ass-bitterns from the nearby village of Gibbil. The ass-bitterns are natural frog-eaters, hardy enough to resist the intoxication effects, and – as literal bird brains – don’t care about the odd and ephemeral skin markings. A flerd of 20-30 ass-bitterns can remove 90% of the delicious thumb-sized batrachians besiegers in a day, allowing eel-fishing to resume and salvaging the Feast of St. Tondius. But the Gibilians are hard bargainers, and they have want something in exchange for lending their flerd….
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