This narrative interlude focuses on Trixie's background, and takes place between ANNIHILATION ADJACENT EPISODE II and EPISODE III.
We find three furtive figures arguing in a cramped tunnel. The largest of the trio, a bugbear with a squashed face, holds the smallest one up in one hand, her tiny head and shoulders poking out of a rough, burlap sack.
“It will never work,” says the third, a drow elf with a thin scar crossing one eye. She scowls, and stretches. “They’re going to open the bag as soon as we deposit it, and she’ll be spotted.”
“That’s not how bags of holding work,” the bugbear started to say-
“That’s why we’ve got this!” The one in the bag cuts him off, holding up a silvery potion bottle that can’t be any larger than a shot glass. She continues, “If they open the bag, I drink this potion… and poof! Invisibility! Empty Bag. Foolproof. What else have you got for objections, Zel?”
The drow hesitates, biting a lip, but still mutters her reply. “I still don’t like it, but… no. Let’s go for it, Furball. How often do we rob a dragon casino from the inside?”
“Not funny. Wouldn’t rob a real dragon casino.” Furball pauses. “...probably.” The bugbear grunts and follows the drow around a corner out of the tunnel. As we follow them toward The Lucky Dragon, a building at the end of the road, the tiny woman in the sack ducks down into it, disappearing from view; Furball leaves the sack open a bit above her.
We follow her into the sack and see enormous butterfly wings - she’s a pixie! The bag she’s hiding in is no ordinary bag. From within it, she can see strange shapes and colors swirling in a void beyond, shining through the burlap surface. The lights don’t match the dark streets of Cormyr her companions are traveling along - these lights belong to another world entirely.
The pixie squints and tries to peek through the half-transparent burlap, but the details beyond the fabric elude her. Relaxing in the sack, she listens to the voices of her friends instead.
“They’re humans, you know. You remember that, right?” the bugbear asks in a slow monotone. “Just call themselves dragons. Don’t fool me though.”
“Nothing gets by you. It’s a joke.” Zel was bickering in good humor, each has grown used to the other’s strangeness after years of working together. A minute passes in silence before Zel speaks again. “Alright this is the place.”
The bag shuts. Cut off from the outside, time and space do strange things within the bag - Trixie has never learned why exactly, only that it relates to the spells used to craft a Bag of Holding. Sounds from outside are disordered, and echo from two very different worlds. She’s done jobs like this before, but never one this dangerous. Some of the sounds she can hear outside aren’t real - and she knows that - but the disassociation between them is still difficult for her to get used to.
“-at do you think you’re doing?!”
“Lovely, just lovely. This w-”
“-posit my belongings, my manservant here can-”
“SCREEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOAHHHHHH”
“-can’t do that here, sorry.”
“Are those the ones?”
“-wla Abrool is not a good name for a dog.”
“-ean we’ll have to take it somewhere else then.”
“-ot like that! The other way!”
“-nner Winner Cockatrice Dinner!”
“RUN FURBALL!”
Her blood runs cold - the last was Zel’s voice. There’s no way to open the bag from the inside, so we wait with the pixie in the bag as the sounds continue to filter in.
“-alled ‘Volo’s Guide to Monsters’-”
“-ot away. But they left their bag.”
“-ver believe what she said next-”
“-radin’s hammer!”
“-ut this sack with the rest of the loot. It weighs like fifteen-”
“No no no no no…” Trixie is panicking now - she’s only got enough air for a few minutes. If nobody opens the bag…
“Ever let me do anything fun.”
“-ananas, fresh bananas here-”
“-so then she said-”
“-guess I’ll put it in our bag of hol-”
Trixie claws at it from the inside, but knows that won’t work either. Nonetheless - maybe it is working? The sides of the bag are growing brighter - a cosmic rainbow of light that floods her vision. A white noise builds around her, developing to an earsplitting tearing sound - everything goes white.
The whiteness fades, and Trixie finds herself somewhere very far from Cormyr, and no longer alone. Around her stretches an expanse of colored light, broken only by bizarre objects that float through that light. Immediately around her though, she can see floating scraps of burlap, and a very confused fat man holding what appears to be half a bag.
She locks eyes with the stranger, and speaks slowly. “You have bag of holding, don’t you? You attacked a drow and a bugbear, and they dropped a sack, and you put it in your bag of holding. Right? ...Are going to be friends?”
Instead of answering, the fat man reaches for his sword, panic written on his face.
Two minutes later, Trixie wipes blood from her rapier and surveys the far distance. She doesn’t know exactly what happened, but does know the job definitely didn’t go as planned. Dark shapes move through the gloom of the far horizon, immense creatures or ships of some kind; it’s impossible to say which. She gathers her belongings and sets a course to find out.
As she drifts into the unknown, we focus on her eyes. There’s a hunger there for adventure, a hunger to find out what’s around the next corner. The eyes don’t age as time passes. The passage of years on the Astral Plane is meaningless, but pass they do.
We pull back from the eyes as we reach the present. Something has been taken from the mind behind those eyes, but something else has been added as well. The hunger for the unknown is still there as we return to the present and see it directed toward the jungles of Chult. Trixie has encountered dangers before, and lived to tell of it. Chult would be no different.
UP NEXT...
EPISIDE III