The Dungeoneers (The Dungeoneers, #1)

by Jeffery Russell

“Cheese, where you takes liquid from a cow lady's business parts, mix it with a bit o' juices from a baby cow's fourth stomach and then let it grow all fuzzy-moldy for a few years, eh?”

“And sausage,” Thud continued, “where you takes all the bits with the tubes and orifices and grinds 'em up together. Then you takes an intestine, squeeze the turds out of it and stuffs the ground-up tubey bits in.”

'Adventure' is a word people use to put a shine on lack of preparation and surviving through dumb luck. We're professionals and that means we leave the adventure out of it.

There is a distinct evolutionary advantage to being fuzzy, as much of the mammal kingdom had discovered, particularly when you wanted a human to scratch your back. The dwarven evolutionary tree had embraced this concept wholeheartedly only to discover that once you started talking and expressing opinions a human’s desire to scratch your back became directly inverse to how fuzzy it was.

Chickens are true creatures of zen-they live only and absolutely for the moment. Their actions one particular second will not necessarily have any influence or bearing on their actions in the next second, nor are they necessarily influenced by their actions of the prior second. Chicken thoughts arrive in their tiny mad little minds like flashes of a strobe light, each light being an action, each flashing with the brilliance of a not very brilliant thing. Each action utterly random. The complete randomness of chaos. Chickens are notorious escape artists, not due to their ability to devise cunning plans as they huddle together in their coop beneath a bare light bulb, scratching out complex diagrams in the dirt, but simply out of sheer unpredictability. They are the pachinko balls of the animal kingdom, effecting their escapes through the simple device of, say, turning left for no particular reason.