“What’s all this?” the gnome managed to bluster.
“What’s wrong with your voice?” the elder kender asked, his jaw falling open.
“My voice? My voice? Does it sound confabulated? Oh, dear. I hope you didn’t pour anything unmaturated down my throat while I was napping. Say, what happened? The last thing l remember is bending over to pick-up the keys and hearing a loud bang…”
“Someone hit you on the head with the door,” the elder kender answered, interrupting him. “We found you here. I thought for a moment that you weren’t a gnome. You looked like a gnome, but you were talking much too slowly. It is very important that we see a gnome, but now I see that you are one after all, and so it is much better.” He helped the gnome to rise.
“By the way, my name is Morgrify Pinchpocket,” the kender said, extending his small brown hand.
The gnome placed a pair of spectacles on the end of his nose and examined the kender’s hand. “Whatap-pearstobethetrouble?” he asked, while removing a small rubber mallet from one of the two-dozen pockets in his long white coat.
“Nothing’s wrong with my hand!” Morg responded, snatching back his hand and stuffing it safely into one of his own pockets (as opposed to someone else’s). “It’s my nephew here, Whortleberry Pinchpocket. Show your manners to the doctor, Whort.”
The younger kender stepped forward and dragged his foot across the floor, his head bowed. “Erngh,” he said, or something very like that.
“Remarkable! I’ve never seen a case like it. What-doyoucallit?” The gnome dropped his hammer and pulled a rather large book from a rather small pocket in his coat, opened it, and began flipping through the pages. “Manners, do you say? Let me see… mumps, mouth-and-foot disease, melancholy measles, mealy mouth malthasia… Nope, no manners. Is it a partic-ulated kender confliction?”
“A what?”
“Is it peculiar, to your knowledge?” the gnome attempted to elaborate.
“Most peculiar,” the kender answered. “You see, he’s broken, and I’d like to get him fixed.” He leaned closer and whispered, “I think he’s been afflicted.”
“Anafflictedkenderohhowmarvelous!” Dr. Palaver exclaimed as he led them through his alchemical laboratory.
Several large pots galloped atop a small stove, which caused the whole contraption to rock and scoot slowly around the room. Morg stood on his toes to see what was cooking and very nearly set his topknot on fire. Meanwhile, the doctor led Whort through a door that opened into an examination chamber.
“I’ve never had the opportunity to study an afflicted kender before. How did he come by it? I have heard that it is caused by expostulation to some source of vaporous fear, like that induced by dragons or other… do you mind if I measure his skull?”
He took down from the wall a device that looked like a giant nutcracker and approached the younger kender. Whort backed away, shaking his head and moaning “Erngh!” most emphatically.
“What is he afraid of?” the gnome asked.
“Everything!” Morg groaned.
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Mostpeculiarindeed!” the gnome squeaked with a little gleeful spring. “Renderareafraidofnothingbuthe-isafr iadofeverythinghowmarvelous!”
He began opening cupboards, of which there were perhaps three score, and drawers numbering in the hundreds. In the middle of the room stood a squat white marble examination table covered with what looked to be the same paper a butcher uses to wrap pork chops or whatnot. The large drain in the floor also did not bode well.
Dr. Palaver rattled about the room, gathering his instruments onto a large wooden tray and spilling various gleaming metal contraptions in his wake. Morg dutifully followed behind him, picking them up, but most of them somehow ended up in his own pockets rather than atop the doctor’s tray. The gnome did not seem to notice, so intent was he on his “unprecedented opportunity maybe even an article in the MMGGMN semi-quarterly annual,” and with running about, snapping his fingers and exclaiming, “Yes, I shall need that too!”
Whort crawled onto the examination table and curled up into a ball of dirt. His rat poked its head out of his hair and watched the doctor with growing alarm.
Finally, Dr. Palaver stood beside his patient and fingered through the instruments on the wooden tray. He picked up a small yellow card and held it at arm’s length from his face, peered down his nose and through his spectacles at it, reading aloud, “Now then, what seems to be the problem?” He dropped the card, lifted a device that looked like a flat piece of wood, and shoved it into Whort’s mouth. “Say ah.”
“Erngh.”
“He can’t speak,” Morg said.
“Cannot speak? Tch-tch. What a shame.” The doctor sympathized while trying to maneuver the beam of a bullseye lantern into the kender’s gaping mouth.
“It’s a tragedy!” Morg exclaimed.
“Erngh,” Whort agreed, choking on the stick.
The doctor removed the stick from Whort’s mouth and snapped the lid on the lantern. “Repeat after me. Big brown bugbear biting blue bottleflies.”
“Erngh.”
“You have been living with gully dwarves,” Dr. Palaver noted.
“Erngh.”
“That’s remarkable!” Morg said in awe. “I found him in the sewers in the company of about forty gully dwarves. You see, his mother sent me to look for him-”
“Elementary. The smell alone testifies to his modus homunculus,” the doctor said.
“Yes, I had noticed that. You see, his mother sent me-”
“The prognosis is obfuscated,” Dr. Palaver announced.
“She sent me- It’s what?”
“I know what is wrong with him.”
“You do?” Morg asked excitedly. “Can you fix him?”
“I am not a surgeon, and even if I were this boy’s cure is not to be found at the point of a knife,” Dr. Palaver said, as he dumped the tray of instruments on the examination table. He lifted a long butcher’s blade from the mass of metal and held it up to the light. “Not this one, anyway.”
“Erngh.”
“Whortleberry is suffering from acute panic psoriasis,” the doctor pronounced.
“It sounds horrible!” Morg cried. “Is it catching? Does it itch? Will he live? What is it?”
“It means that he is afraid.”
The elder kender’s face hardened. “We already know that! Are you sure you are a doctor?” he asked. “Don’t you fellows carry a badge or something?”
“There is the name on the door if you care to look,” the gnome answered, somewhat miffed. “In any case you did not allow me to complete my diagonal, concerning the gully dwarves. You see, the laborious odor of these creatures has permutated into his speaking glands, interrupting their normal effluvia of sound, while his fear-whatever its cause-has conscripted the muscles around his talk bone, preventing its ability to swing freely.”
“So what is to be done?” Morg asked.
“There is only one cure, and of course I have only just invented it today. That is why I was so late leaving, or you might not have found me on the floor,” the gnome said as he helped Whort from the table. The rat retreated back into Whort’s hair.
“The cure,” Dr. Palaver said as he led Morg and Whort down a low, dark, odiferous tunnel, “is to face the fear that produced the affectation, while at the same time indigesting a special formula-of which I am the inventor and which should evacuate the speak glands. Since I speculum that the source of the fear originates down here in the sewers, where you first found your nephew, the cure for the fear must also lie in the sewers.”
“If you only just invented it today, how can you be sure it will work?” Morg asked.