Aimless and hopeless, the troll wandered…

His name was Brick, although currently he couldn’t remember this. His head ached. It really ached. It was der Scrape that did it. What did dey always say? When you sinkin’ to where you was cookin’ up Scrape, you was so low even der cockroaches had to bend down to spit on you?

Last night…what had happenin’? What bits did he see, what bits did he do, what bits in der thumpin,’ scaldin’ cauldron of his brain were real? The bit with der giant wooly elephants, dey prob’ly weren’t real. He was pretty sure there weren’t any giant wooly elephants in dis city, ’cos if der were, he would’ve seen ’em before, and dere’d be big steamin’ turds in der streets an’ similar, you wouldn’t miss ’em…

He was called Brick because he had been born in the city, and trolls, being made of metamorphorical rock, ofter take on the nature of the local rocks. His hide was a dirty orange, with a network of horizontal and vertical lines; if Brick stood up close to a wall, he was quite hard to see. But most people didn’t see Brick anyway. He was the kind of person whose mere existence is an insult to all decent folk, in their opinion.

Dat mine wi’ dem dwarfs, was dat real? You go an’ find a place to lie down and watch der pretty pichturs, suddenly you’re in dis dwarf hole? That couldna bin real! Only…word on der street was dat some troll had got into a dwarf hole, yeah, and everyone was lookin’ for dat troll an’ not to shake him by der han’…Der word said der Breccia wanted to find out real hard, and by der sound of it dey were not happy. Not happy that some dwarf who’d been puttin’ der bad word on the clans was off’ed by a troll? Were dey mad? Actually, it didn’t matter if dey was mad or not, ’cos dey had ways of asking questions dat didn’t heal for months, so he better be keepin’ out dere way.

On der oder hand…a dwarf wouldn’t know one troll from anoder, right? And no one else had seen him. So act normal, right? He’d be fine. He’d be fine. Anyway, it couldna bin him…

It occured to Brick—yeah, dat’s my name, knew it all der time—that he still had a bit of the white powder at the bottom of the bag. All he needed to do now was find a startled pigeon and some alcohol, any alcohol at all, and he be fine. Yeah. Fine. Nothin’ to worry about at all…

Yeah.