Nine Minutes a Hero

The Chronicler gave himself ten hours to become a hero. He stopped trying after nine minutes. He is not proud of this. The Realm should not suppose he is.

At the door of the Heroes' Guild, Achietties looked at him the way a doorman looks at a man holding a book instead of an invitation. She named three things a hero must bring: a firebird's feather from holy Entrana, a lava eel, and the armband of a master thief. She said it plainly. Heroes like their errands plain, and leave the decorating to other people.

Three minutes later Gerrant gave him a jar of blamish snail slime, for a line that would not burn. The Chronicler accepted it gravely. A man who has been handed slime in the name of heroism has crossed some kind of threshold. The slime wanted a clean harralander to go with it. There was no clean harralander to be had. The crew had none, the vault had none and the Exchange had none. He asked six times. On the sixth asking he put the eel aside, because asking a seventh time would have meant he had stopped expecting a different answer and kept asking anyway.

Then the feather. The road to the feather runs through ice, and a sensible hero brings a way out of the ice. A way out is a Varrock Teleport: one law rune, three airs and one fire. The Chronicler had none of them. He wears a Dragonfire shield and carries a Dragon longsword, and four small stones were enough to stop him. He tried six times here as well, then put the feather aside too.

So it was one stage of five, in a tenth of an hour, with no deaths. That last part is not comforting. Dying at least looks like effort. The title of Hero of the Guild is not his, and he does not claim it. What he has is a jar of slime. It sits in his pack at the Varrock fountain, waiting for a harralander nobody owns.