Baba's Basement Brawl

Old Friends, New Trouble

The smell hit them first.

Stone-cool air, vinegar-sharp, laced with something else — something warm and animal, hiding under the pickled beet funk that had been seeping through Baba’s floorboards for two weeks. The four of them stood in a loose cluster at the old woman’s front door, reacquainting themselves with the particular sensation of being called home to do something unpleasant.

Baba had not changed. She was still small, still sharp-eyed, still capable of making four reasonably capable adults feel about nine years old simply by looking at them. She ushered them through the familiar cluttered warmth of her hut — past the hanging dried herbs, past the row of mismatched mugs, past the framed embroidery that had always said something cryptic — and stopped at a heavy wooden door set low in the back wall.

“Something in my cellar,” she said, as if this were a minor inconvenience rather than a request to venture into darkness after an unknown creature. “Two weeks now. The children can’t have their beets.”

She left to make tea.

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What the Rats Know

Lyra Lightbender pressed her fingertips together, and her eyes brightened — literally. Twin points of warm, dragon-gold light pushed the cellar’s shadows back, illuminating a staircase that descended into the kind of darkness that smells like old stone and something chewed.

Piper, ever practical, crouched at the top of the stairs and produced from somewhere about her person a small tide of rats. They streamed down the steps without a second’s hesitation, because rats have no concept of “a bad idea.” Piper waited, still and patient in the way of someone who has spent quality time in sewers, and then held a quiet, focused conversation with the one that came back.

What the rat scout reported was, in essence: bigger rats, worse attitude, excellent cheese.

Scarg Thundersmack had already started down the stairs by the time this intelligence was delivered.

Lyra went next, her eyes cutting through the gloom. The cellar spread out below them — stone walls, wooden racks loaded with jarred goods, furniture pushed to the margins, a long preparation bench with a scatter of utensils. Lyra swept the room with her lit gaze and caught something: a long, bare tail disappearing behind a rack of jars. A soft scraping sound from the far end of the room. She said nothing for a moment, just watching.

Then: “We’re not alone down here.”

They already knew, really. But it helped to say it.

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Cheese Trail

The evidence was difficult to miss once they were all standing on the cellar floor. A scattered line of cheese — whole wedges, crumbled chunks, the occasional rind — led in a deliberate trail toward the far corner, behind the tallest rack. It looked less like a clue and more like a dare.

Lucy Lupine looked at the trail. The trail looked back at her. She moved toward it as quietly as she could manage.

She was not particularly quiet.

The first rat came over the rack like a thrown stone — enormous, grey, furious, and absolutely convinced about the cheese situation. Two more followed a half-second behind, and suddenly the cellar was a great deal more crowded than it had been, and the jars of pickled beets were rattling on their shelves.

Piper held up a hand and addressed the rats directly, in rat, in the spirit of diplomacy. The rats explained their position: the cheese was theirs, they had found it, it was here, they were here, no further discussion was necessary or welcome.

She hit one with her flute staff anyway.

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The Cellar Brawl

What followed was, by any honest accounting, chaotic.

Scarg’s first swing went slightly wide and took a chip out of Baba’s stone floor. He looked at the dent, looked at the rat that had caused him to miss, and tightened his grip. Piper landed a clean hit with her flute staff — the thwack of hardwood on rat skull was sharp and satisfying — and the rat she hit seemed to find this deeply offensive. It found Piper’s ankle shortly afterward, sinking in with the focused commitment of a creature that has been wronged.

Lucy, meanwhile, had made herself a problem for the rats in a different way. She moved like water around the racks, and every time one of the giant rats lunged for her, it found she was no longer quite where it expected. There was something frustrating about fighting someone who seemed to have read the whole encounter ahead of time. One rat misjudged badly and ended up behind her, between her and the stairs, which was tactically interesting for everyone.

Lyra approached the situation from an angle that nobody else had considered. There was a rat. There was a dragon staff. The arc of a perfect golf swing presented itself to her with near-mathematical clarity. She committed fully to the motion — the windup, the pivot, the long smooth follow-through — and connected with a crack that echoed off the stone walls. The rat departed for the afterlife at considerable velocity. What remained of its momentum carried it sideways into its nearest companion with enough force to knock the second rat off its footing.

The cellar went quiet for approximately one second.

Then Scarg stepped in front of Piper, planting himself between her and the two remaining rats like a very angry wall. He looked at the rats. He looked at his spiked club. He thought, briefly, about the dent he’d put in Baba’s floor.

He brought the club up and around in the same clean, brutal arc Lyra had used, and the results were similar, except significantly larger. The first rat went into the second. The second rat went into the wall. The sound was not small.

All three giant rats had found their end, at the bottom of Baba’s food cellar, defending a hoard of cheese they would never eat again.

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What Happens Next?

The silence that followed was the comfortable kind — the kind that comes after a room of threats becomes a room of problems already solved. Lyra offered Piper a hand and a soft light, and the bite on Piper’s ankle began to close.

But the cellar was large, and they had only cleared one corner of it. The cheese trail had come from somewhere. The jar racks still cast long shadows in the directions they hadn’t searched, and the scratching sounds — they noticed now — hadn’t entirely stopped.

Baba’s tea was presumably ready upstairs.

The beets, however, were still not recovered.