The ogre Blag-ak always means well, but having the IQ of a cucumber this doesn’t always play out well… especially if his little buddy Quickfoot isn’t around to act as social interpreter.  Such as in this scene…

“So-rry,” Blag-ak rumbled.

He was outside of the large building, on an open tree-lined avenue. The human lady down in front of him was holding the rather tattered remains of what used to be a fur-lined hat with a couple of feathers still sticking up out of it. The lady, dressed all in rich-looking silk and trusses, appeared rather miffed.

“Blag-ak think small animal attack you on head. Blag-ak try kill it; help good lady.”

He tried smiling as sweetly as he could, to reassure the woman. This meant, of course, that she was staring up into a mouthful of misaligned teeth and cavities the size of most people’s thumbs.

She gave out a short cultured scream, harumphed as she turned around, and then walked off.

Blag-ak looked down at the fist-full of fur and half of a feather that he still held and then dropped them, looking up at the woman as she got lost in the crowd.

“Blag-ak just try be nice,” he said to himself.

Blag-ak, however, didn’t stay dejected for long. Having an attention span only slightly longer than your average gnat’s, his feeling of dejection soon left him when he heard the sound of singing. Sounds drifting upon the breeze like little golden droplets of glistening dew.

“Blag-ak like singing,” he said. “Me go find where.”

Actually, that was the large ogre thinking to himself, but since thinking and talking were pretty much the same to him, he most always spoke his own thoughts out loud.

At any rate, he went walking through the crowd towards the sound. Down the crowded street, as people walked quickly out of his way, until he came upon a tree, under which a minstrel of some sort had seated himself. The minstrel looked to be elvish, with his pointed ears and long silvery hair streaming out from under his cap.

He was playing on what would be called a lyre of standard design. The backbone of the instrument curved down and around, spiraling inwards, round and round until it stopped. Strings went across the space between a given outer loop of the backbone and the given inner one, getting shorter as they too spiraled inwards. The main part of the instrument appeared to be made of ordinary wood, with but a few small painted figures decorating its length.

Blag-ak stopped and smiled as he listened to the sweet playing of the lyre and the elf’s melodious voice. The minstrel smiled and nodded over to him as he sang, apparently unafraid of the towering hulk standing over him, smiling stupidly.

Perhaps swayed by the music, or perhaps by the fact that the minstrel wasn’t running away or complaining about him, Blag-ak made a decision that everyone present would live to regret.

“Blag-ak want sing too.”

Not knowing any better, the minstrel just smiled and nodded his approval as he continued on with his playing.

Encouraged by the response, the ogre took a deep breath, held it for a brief instant, and then let out with, what he thought to be, a fine example of his best singing voice.

Somewhere, miles away, a cow suddenly died, right while it was chewing its cud. Elsewhere, several horses stampeded in terror. In the port-side walled town by the lake, many miles away, a glass maker suddenly found himself out of business, as every piece of glassware he had just gave up and shattered. In the castle-city itself, people ran at the sound of the horribly off-key droning roar, thinking for sure that an invasion of dragons was upon them all. Overhead, three small song-birds fell dead to Blag-ak’s feet. Somewhere a man became permanently tone-deaf. As for the minstrel, a third of the strings on his lyre suddenly snapped as the minstrel screamed and grabbed as if to pull his ears right off.

In short, and to state it with great understatement, Blag-ak’s singing was awful.