The grue had never seen such creatures in the Underground before.

Well, that wasn't entirely correct. She knew a human for what it was, a tasty little morsel of a creature. Some had nasty swords or arrows or spells that made it difficult to get at them, but this one was unarmed as far as she could tell. He wasn't even wearing metal armor, which would have been wise of him to do when entering the territory of a grue such as herself. Instead, he was only done up in leather armor that would prove no hindrance to her mighty claws, if only she could get hold of him. Unfortunately, the human carried a torch with which to illuminate the caverns, unknowingly driving the light-fearing grue to trail him at a far distance.

It was the creature with the human that was totally new to her. It looked something like the cave lizards that she would snatch off the walls and eat if larger prey avoided her, except that it was far larger than she was, and had a strange set of extra appendages on its back. The grue was used to being the biggest beast around, so encountering this strange, giant lizard when she had never seen such a thing before was incredibly odd to her. She was curious to see if its throat would be easy to tear out, and could only hope that the human's torch would go out so she could get close enough to find out.

The human murmured lowly to the lizard-thing as they walked, and his whispers bounced off the rock surroundings until they reached the ears of the grue that trailed them. As she skulked from stalagmite to stalagmite, she listened carefully the echoes of his voice. The grue had learned that sometimes listening to adventurers gave her clues as to when or how they could best be ambushed.

A noted example of that was the time she'd overheard an adventurer pair lamenting they were down to their last torch. She'd then managed, by making lots of loud noise and staying between them and the nearest exit from the caves, to keep them within her territory until their final torch had sputtered and died. She'd had fine eatings that day!

"Who thought wandering aimlessly into dark caves would be a good way of finding candidates, again?" the human muttered. "This must be how Tenken feels, down in the Dungeon all the time..." The giant beast rumbled deep in its throat, and as if it had said something he understood, the human replied, "Well next time G*non calls our Crescent for Search duty, I'm going to tell him right where he can shove it."

His companion rustled its strange back-appendages and made a scoffing noise.

"Well I'd sure like to, anyhow..." the man muttered.

The grue did not have any notions of miles or kilometers with which to judge distance, but she trailed the strange pair halfway through her considerable territory, listening to the man's apparently one-sided conversation without comprehending the subject. Along with the "candidates", he growled about "dragons" and "hydras". If she had been a human, she might have known enough lore to know that a dragon was the beast that walked with the man, but since she was a grue, the word was unknown to her.

But even if the man's speech wasn't giving her any clues of how to ambush him, the length of his tirade was doing her a different favor: he wasn't paying attention to his torch. In one final rapid moment, it dimmed and then spluttered into darkness.

The man didn't even have time to mutter a curse before the grue released a gurgling howl and charged to cross the distance she had kept between herself and the pair to stay away from their hideous torch. The lightlessness of the cavern was no hindrance to her eyes, so it was with an eager kind of glee that she watched man and creature turn towards the sound of her, their eyes wide and blinded by the darkness. She would snatch the man and merrily gobble him down, and maybe claw his strange beast-friend up a bit before retreating to her lair, maybe track down that wandering male she had scented in her territory to let him follow her home and start her newest litter of slavering gruelings....

But then the cavern erupted with light, and the grue screeched with unrestrained terror as it washed over her, born of a gout of flame that left the strange beast's jaws as it wheeled towards her. The flame did not touch her, and the light vanished as the jet of flame died as suddenly as it had appeared, but the grue still screamed as if in pain, and tried to scrabble to a halt on the rocky cavern floor. When suddenly shown a monster that could produce light from its jaws, any grue would do as she tried to do: flee.

As she skidded to find purchase in the stone, she just barely heard the man yell, "Grab it!" above her own frantic wailing.

Almost before the words had been shouted, the beast was upon her, wrestling her to the ground with its greater weight and bugling fiercely at her. Even as she shrieked, she tried to slash and claw her way to freedom, but the monster managed to hold her down so that her own body pinned her legs to the ground. With the rasp and hiss of a match, light returned to the man's torch, and the grue's yelling picked up an octave as he brought it near her and she tried to throw off the weight of the beast that had her trapped.

::BE SILENT!::

The voice rang out in her mind as if it had been a solid thing, striking her into stunned silence. Though the light of the man's torch now had her blinded with its nearness, the grue was dumbstruck by the mental attack.

"Good gods..." she heard the man hiss, unable to see him in the light but hearing and smelling him before her. "That's got to be the ugliest thing I have ever seen. Beats even those nasty xenodragons down in the Dungeon."

Something hard nudged her snout--the toe of a boot--and reflexively the grue tried to snap at it. Her teeth barely nipped at the air, though, and then the beast slammed her head against the ground and held it there with its massive forepaw.

::Don't you move. And shut up,:: hissed the voice in her head, as a whine tried to build up in her throat to another scream. She immediately silenced herself, and tried to close her eyes tight against the painful torchlight.

She wasn't quite sure what to do, now. She'd never heard of a grue being caught before. Grues either killed what they caught, or were killed when they did something stupid, but she didn't think any grue had ever been caught. What did men--and large beasts with too many limbs--do when they caught a grue?

"What do you mean you want to Search it?" the man exclaimed into the quiet left since her screaming had been silenced. "It attacks us, and you want to take it back to the Dragonstake? ... I know G*non said 'tough or evil', but still! ... All right, fine. Hey, you, can you understand me? ... Hey!"

The man kicked her snout again--and not gently! The grue bared her teeth in automatic response, though the growl she would have liked to make only made it out as a whimper.

"My dragon says you've got sentient thoughts inside that ugly skull of yours, so if you don't talk, blink or something if you understand me."

The grue tried to shift a leg out from under her so that she could block the light from her eyes with a paw. "I... understand," she breathed through her gritted teeth, her gruish accent making a guttural mockery of the words.

"Ugh, even its voice is ugly," the man muttered in disgust. "Well, Ugly, my dragon seems to think you're candidate material for the Bipedra, so: will you come with us to stand for a hydra?"

The words meant nothing to the grue. Stand for a dragon? Stand where? Why? What was a hydra?

Perhaps this was what men and beasts did when they caught a grue.

"No... light... please," she gurgled, trying to turn her head again. "Will... come... but no... light."

The man snorted disdainfully. "No light? I suppose that can be managed. We'll find a dark room to throw you in somewhere." Then, mercifully, he put out the torch and the grue was able to open her eyes again. When the after-images had faded from her eyes and she was no longer blind, she looked up at the man, who was sneering down at her.

"At least no one can see how damned revolting you are in the dark... though those glowing eyes of yours are something else. You have a name?"

The grue blinked at him, then uttered the rolling word of slavering syllables that was her name among her kind.

The man made a face. "I couldn't pronounce that in a million years. Not that I'd want to. Sounded like someone retching and dying at the same time. All right then, what are you?"

"A... grue," she rumbled.

"Then we're just going to call you The Grue and leave it at that." His attention turned towards the beast that still pressed her to the ground--had he called it a dragon? "Let it up--let's get it to the Dragonstake and be done with it."

So the dragon let her up, and after she'd stretched her legs and promised not to attack anyone at the place called Cy Dragonstake--another demand of what men made grues do, she supposed--the dragon grabbed hold of her, and they were off.