Noon comes, and Rufflesnout finds himself awake. Normally accustomed to waking at dusk, the sun shining into his cave blinds him, and his eyes struggle and twitch as he tries to adjust his eyes. He takes stock of his valuables like he does whenever he wakes up, and then goes to sit and eat of his most recent bounty, a large sack of jerky. He reaches into the bag and pulls out of a piece… of nothing… In fact, the bag itself is missing! Rufflesnout curses for overlooking his food, and then looks around his cave for signs of the intruder. After an hour of searching he has found nothing but some small muddy footprints, from someone with webbed feet, and then it dawns on him.

“Murlocs.”

The little fishy blighters that inhabit the coastal regions of the area had come and stolen his food! Some of the hair on Rufflesnout’s back stood up in anger at the notion of those disgusting little creatures invading his cave. He grabs his spear, and leaves his pouch be, today is not a day for subtlety. He leaves the cave almost in a sprint for the nearest coast, but then thinks better of it, he slows down and stays in tall grass, because the closest beach takes him dangerously close to the human town “Moonbrook”.

Rufflesnout reaches the beach with little difficulty, the smell of salt burning his sensitive nose a bit. Then he spots one, a small scaled creature, with streaks of blue and yellow, it has a spear like him, but it looks to be made of coral. Rufflesnout tries to sneak up on it, hoping to kill it before it makes that… horrific noise, but fails utterly, the murloc notices him, raises it’s twisted mouth to the sky, and lets out a shrill gurgling noise. “MUUURRRRGLGLELELEGLELGELGLEGLE” *SPLAT* as Rufflesnout’s spear impales the creature’s neck, and blood spray outwards staining the sand.

After a bit of searching, Rufflesnout finds his sack of jerky in one of the beasts’ flimsy huts, and hauls it back to the corpse where he sits to think for a moment. “Hmmm… Soup…” he thinks aloud, and gouges out the eyes of the murloc, the only palatable part of the beast. He throws the eyes in the sack of jerky and hefts it over his shoulder, then he hears something strange, a combination of gurgling water and rumbling. He looks around and sees the source, a veritable army of murlocs have showed up in response to the horrific noise the one had made.

Running as fast as he can, Rufflesnout forgets, for a moment, of the human town between the beach and his destination, sprinting at a break-neck-pace through the town as an army of twenty or more murlocs chase after him, emitting their horrific screams. A woman screams out “A GNOLL! A GNOLL! GUARDS HELP, A GNOLL IS ATTACKING!” and the guards quickly exit the tavern to combat this brazen foe. One of the guards faces the running gnoll and yells in a sturdy authoritarian manner, “Stop beast! You will find no easy food here! Die in the name of the King!” the guard draws his sword, and readies himself to attack. Then he sees what is following the gnoll, drops his sword, and a small trail of yellow fluid can be seen leaking through the leg of his platemail.

Rufflesnout doesn’t stop for the guards, as more competent ones flood from the tavern and enter melee with the murlocs, and he doesn’t stop running until he has reached his cave. None of the townspeople or the guards saw which way the gnoll had run to, they were too busy with the fishy menace that had descended upon them, and so Rufflesnout decided to rest again. “Tired” he exclaimed as the sun began to wane, and he drifted off to sleep again with a stomach full of dried meat.