My DnD character I did with friends which you can hear at RPG Pals Club

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Every night, as he’d check on the prisoners in their quarters, Oi noticed  something odd developing. It started off innocently enough: a captive would bang out a beat on their walls to a satisfying rhythm, but then others started joining in. Eventually one of them fashioned a guitar and bass out of some enchanted webbing and various bits of wood. It was crude, but it was incredible how it all came together, and the drow became enamoured with the sound this new device made.  

Normally it was Oi’s job to keep  these people in line, but the longer and longer these midnight musicals went on, the more sense it all seemed to make to him, where each part contributed to a greater whole for the sake of improving, not on the behest of of an authority.   

Then they started singing.   

They sung about their pain, they sung about their feelings, they sung about those from the surface they had missed after being brought down to  the underdark. Each night, a different tune of loss and hopelessness, joy and respite, fond memories and lost loves.  While most drow would revel in such pain, Oi only asked them this:  

“Could you do it faster? And louder?”  

For a while, the band of captives acquiesced to Oi’s requests. 

The music filled him with an energy he'd never felt before; he could move twice as fast, lift twice  as much and when he was on, um, "personal" duty, he, uh, ahem, provided much better “service”. 

While the prisoners didn’t mind so long as Oi didn’  cause them any trouble, they still longed for the lives on the surface world.   

“You know,” said Pubrin, a half-elf bard from Waterdeep, “I used to be part of a band before I was captured and brought down here. If you let us out, I can reunite with them and you can join us.” The offer,  while incredibly tempting to Oi, was bittersweet: the Underdark was all he knew, and he had heard that most surface dwellers despise the drow.  

“I’m sorry,” he said with a frown, “but I'm not sure I can make it out there.”    

To which Purbin replied, “Have it your way”  

The next night, there was no  music.                                                              

This continued on for at least another week. With each night of silence,  Oi could feel himself slipping more and more; his mind was always  somewhere else, his body not quite working right, as if it were only a  puppet. The high priestesses kept scolding him on his shoddy work and he  knew if this kept going on, he could be executed or worse, relegated to clean up duty.  

Oi still tried to remember the music, grasping on to whatever fragments of song that had filled him such vigor before, but it did not have the same effect. Lying on the dirt floor he called a bed, he closed his eyes and sang the remnants of ballad of the city Purbin called home. 

As he fell asleep, he could hear not only the chords of the makeshift instruments and the beats of the upturned buckets, but the hustle of the city and the pounding of hundreds of feet on cobblestone. Turning his head up, he could no longer see the rugged stone ceiling of a cave where the laborers were forced to call their quarters, but a wide open sky.The air was fresh.The people kind.

And no one to tell him what to do. 

Purbin awoke from his usually frenzied slumber with the sound of his  cell door being ripped open. Oi was there in the doorway, covered in  sweat and his Mohawk in shambles atop his head. 

 “We’re leaving tonight.”

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Art by  marsel-defender