Garrok was no fool, he would’ve been glad to tell you. But he was also not the most personable wizard you were likely to have met, which he also would’ve been glad to tell you. At length. Well past the point of you caring to listen. He suffered under the burden most ‘geniuses’ do: that being other sentient creatures having this nasty habit of forming their own opinions about things. Opinions that differed from his own.
Which, of course, made them wrong.
Among many of the wrong opinions that were currently troubling him were those of the gate-builders in the mage tower. Sure, the gates were a pretty good modern convenience. That is, if you didn’t mind having an open door to your inner sanctum just sitting there waiting for who-knows-what to wander thru. He barely put up with the company he invited, so he had sworn off of having one. But this new project they were neck-deep in? And working with those creepy Illithid? No thank you. He’ll go it alone, thank you very much.
He had tried pressing so many different types of underlings into his service in the past. All grated under his supervision. The slaves? Understandably so. The hobgoblins? Not too terrible, but hopelessly too stubborn for his taste. He shuddered to think of the other creatures he tried and the resulting revolts to his direction. The griping. The strikes. The mutinies. The flung excrement.
The skeleton workforce he settled on was almost ideal. No backtalk, no difference of opinion, and especially no thinking it knew better. No thinking at all! He told them exactly what to do and they did it. Perfect.
Well, almost perfect.
—
“Do you have ANY idea how much this has set my plans back?!”
The skeleton currently bearing the brunt of his ire begins to shake its head ‘no’ – one of only three replies it was capable of giving to anything – before Garrok bellowed once more.
“That question was RHETORICAL!!! Do you know what ‘rhetorical’ means?! Oh, STOP NODDING!”
Garrok probably would have gotten no small amount of satisfaction from knowing that his opinion of the current discipline-spanning project going on at that moment above ground was right – that the grand designs the Eladrin and their illithid allies were in fact laboring towards, though truly epic and glorious in their scope, was something hopelessly dangerous, something that would definitely result in everyone’s utter doom. Everything he had been trying to warn any of the fools in the tower about for years, until finally giving up and making his own plans.
—
“So let me theorize what happened here. You were excavating the east corridor and broke into a kobold den, and they raided the complex to halt our progress, yes?”
[nod]
“And apparently you didn’t lift a SINGLE boney finger to stop it, forcing me to take the matter into my – admittedly much more capable – hands?”
[nod]
He would no doubt have swelled with pride to learn that his underground stronghold would protect those inside from the worst of the destruction the cataclysm eventually wrought. The construction of which, being done by a collection of undead, was not without its mishaps.
There was, of course, a catch when dealing with brainless automatons that only do what they are told; and that is they do ONLY what they are told.
—
“*sigh* … why did you LET them just traipse in here?”
[nothing]
“*grrrh* it has to always be a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question with you empty-headed lot, doesn’t it?”
[nod]
The wizard had taken to keeping a ledger. A book detailing all of the instructions he had given to his army of skeletons, just so he didn’t have to remember what exact wording he used. It was also quite useful for keeping notes on what instructions worked best, what actions it resulted in, the tweaks to his commands to fix them, the resulting new issues, etc.
It was becoming quite the tome, and there was a brief pause in this one-sided shouting match as he went to fetch it.
The skeleton remained motionless as the mage stormed off to find his ledger, a string of invectives and muttered insults filling the air as he rummaged about the remains of his makeshift lab. A lab that sat in complete disarray after the onslaught of kobolds his skeleton army had done absolutely nothing to stop.
He had to resort to using some of his most powerful spells to wipe them out, causing no small amount of destruction to his private quarters. Not to mention the loss of a great deal of structural integrity, but we’ll get back to that.
—
“You were instructed to, and I quote: ‘excavate the east passage, killing anything that gets in your way, until told to stop’, yes?”
[nod]
“Then WHY did you stop?! *I* didn’t TELL you to stop, did I?”
[shakes head]
Unfortunately, Garrok would have been very disappointed to learn that he was not going to live long enough to see his grand underground complex completed, this current setback notwithstanding.
In fact, he wouldn’t live to see the horrible calamity he had tried to warn them about come to pass, either.
“Were you *told* to stop?”
[nod]
“That was ALSO a rhetorical question, you brainless- wait. Yes? You WERE told to stop?! WHO told you to stop?”
[points at the corpse of a kobold]
But Garrok would’ve been utterly devastated to learn that none of that mattered, since he wasn’t going to live past the next ten minutes anyway.