Obtaining an adventurer's license and getting the proper equipment were both highly anti-climactic events for Prince Maxwell. At the age of sixteen, he was in all ways effectively considered an adult, so deciding to become an adventurer and getting the proper equipment for the job were considered normal. Aren Doff's selection of equipment was quite fantastic, and the sword, shield, and plate armor were everything that a man intent on becoming a hero could dream of obtaining. Doff had been hesitant in selling this particular sword, as he'd claimed it to be his master's piece. He'd largely kept it for sentimental reasons, he'd claimed, as the item was far fancier than anything else he'd ever made, and had only made the sword this way because the council that reviews submissions for a master smith were far more concerned with style than with actual substance. However, as beautiful as the blade was, even Maxwell could tell that it was a perfectly balanced blade and as fine a weapon as a man could hope for. The dwarven smith had bartered with all the tenacity his people were famed for, talking the young prince into obtaining several enchantments for the weapon, shield, and armor. Some of it, such as the enchantment for lightness on the plate armor, made sense: Full plate is heavy, and without that enchantment, Maxwell would likely tire himself out just walking around. Instead, in armor normally considered heavy even for a knight on a warhorse, Maxwell felt like he could turn cartwheels with little effort. His kite shield likewise felt incredibly light, allowing him to move it into position in an instant when needed. Both were incredibly beautiful and ornate, but also solidly made.

Kitted out in his full gear with a sword belted at his side, Maxwell strode into the adventurer's guild with his helm tucked neatly under one arm. He'd walked up to the counter, gave his best smile, and announced his intent on becoming an adventurer. He was promptly handed a form to fill out and told to have a seat on a nearby chair. He, admittedly, felt rather foolish sitting down in full plate armor filling out forms. Holding a quill and writing while wearing gauntlets was certainly a challenge, but he was able to meet it well enough. After a few minutes, he completed his registration form, signing it with 'Maxwell of Alberdain'. He could have used an alias if he'd had a mind, but if the king decided to track down Maxwell, he'd have little trouble doing so no matter what steps the young man might try to take to cover his trail. Better, then, to not make an issue of his royal heritage, but to also make it clear that he didn't care if his grandfather intended to track him down.

After filling out the form, Maxwell returned it to the desk. After a few minutes, the staff issued him a badge with his name and rank on it. Being new, he'd start out at the lowest rank, and inquired about how he might raise his rank swiftly. The fastest way to go up to the next rank, the girl at the counter explained, would be to retrieve the tails of twenty giant rats from the sewers or the cores of twenty slimes. They recommended that Maxwell form a party with other adventurers on his first foray into the sewers, as more than a few who went down there alone for the first time didn't return. Maxwell thanked them for their concern, then inquired about where he might enter the sewers from. He was given directions to the nearest entrance, as well as shown each entrance on a map of the city. Taking a moment to memorize the map, Maxwell swiftly departed, intent upon gathering the materials needed to advance on his first day.

Maxwell quickly became aware of a few things as he began tromping through the sewers. The first was the fact that his plate armor, while a bit noisy on the surface, made an absolute cacophony of noise as he moved through the sewers. Anything that had working ears would hear him coming from a long, long way off. The second was the stench. The sewers were, well, sewers, with everything that went with that, but while it was logical that they'd smell foul, the prince was not prepared for just how awful the stench could be. It was like being punched in the face with a fist made of feces, urine, and decay every time he made the mistake of breathing through his nose. He quickly learned to breathe through his mouth to avoid gagging or vomiting. His helmet had only a pair of slits for eyeholes, and a few holes on the faceguard to allow for ventilation, and if he started vomiting, he might not get the helmet off in time. The third thing he noted, and this was the one he noted far later than he should have, was the fact that the sewers didn't seem to follow the same paths as the streets did. However, while he was late in noting this, he also failed to take into account the full implications of that fact.

The prince's excursion was halted when, without warning, a slime dropped down from above, right onto the prince's helmeted head. Shocked, he reached up to try and pull the creature off, only to find that it was too slick for him to pull it off. The creature kept its body pressed against his faceplate seemingly trying to force its way through the holes in his armor. Fortunately, it had no luck in doing so, but it did succeed in rendering the prince unable to see, as well as in blocking the flow of air. Becoming increasingly panicked, the prince pulled out his sword and awkwardly tried to cut or pierce the slime's body. It took several tries to succeed, but he finally managed it. As the slime fell to the ground, its body fluids leaking from the cut he'd managed, Maxwell considered himself fortunate. Had he opted for an open-faced helmet, that slime may well have gone down the prince's throat and asphyxiated him from the inside. He made a mental note to thank Aren Doff for his recommendation for his current helmet. Clearly, the dwarven smith knew what he was about.

Slimes were ambush predators, opting to drop down from above, rather than attacking prey head-on. The prince made a note to keep an eye on the ceiling going forward and put a hand on his dagger to keep it at the ready in case of another ambush. Giant rats were unlikely to be encountered right now, given the noise Maxwell's armor made, so slimes seemed to be the most likely threat. The young prince looked up...

Just in time to see a massive number of slimes drop down from the ceiling as one.

Slimes are drawn to sound and vibration, the prince recalled, and would quickly gather to assault something if it made enough noise. Maxwell had read that in a book once but had failed to realize the full implications of that. Maxwell, by walking around the sewers in full plate, was essentially ringing a dinner bell for every slime in the sewers, and they were all showing up to get a slice of prince pie.

Individually, a slime is just a few pounds, at best. However, this was a colony of perhaps fifty slimes or more, enough to knock a grown man off of his feet if taken by surprise. If the prince had not had his dagger in his hand and kept it gripped even as he fell, he'd no doubt have died, the sheer weight of the creatures making movement extremely difficult. He'd never have gotten his sword loose, nor have managed to use it effectively before he ran out of air. Instead, it took several panicked minutes of knifework to kill enough slimes for him to finally be able to clear his helmet's faceplate so he could get a breath of (Arguably) fresh air before the slimes moved in again. Thankfully, the slimes were primarily focused on the prince's face, finding the gaps in his armor too narrow to exploit. Had even one of the straps holding it in place had come loose, the prince had little doubt that they'd have all flooded inside, and that would have been the end of him.

In what seemed like a desperate eternity of stabbing and slicing, but in truth could only have been a few minutes, the prince finally managed to kill the last of the slimes. Unfortunately, that only meant he had just enough time to look up and see another mass of the creatures drop down on him. For perhaps an hour or more, this trend continued, slimes piling onto him in waves as the prince desperately slashed and stabbed at his assailants. Again and again, the creatures fell upon him, and the prince worked desperately to keep his faceplate clear and to finish off the current wave of attackers before the next one came. By the end, his arms felt as heavy as lead and his lungs ached as much from the exertion as they did from the repeated lack of air, but finally, blessedly, the slimes quit attacking. The prince slowly, laboriously, rose to his feet and looked around, seeing dozens upon dozens of slime cores, little rubbery balls that made up the closest things that slimes had to a brain. There was little doubt that there was enough here to advance him in rank a dozen times over. He began collecting them, stuffing them into his knapsack, and only stopped when there was no more room. He dusted off his hands, satisfied in a job well done, and in having kept from soiling himself in the terror of that assault. As his first encounter with the monsterkin who roamed the sewers, it was far from what he'd envisioned, but he was alive and unharmed, barring the wounding of his pride and the aftereffects of fear making him feel weak and unsteady on his feet. Still, all he had to do was return to the surface and turn this bounty in, and he'd be set to move on to bigger and better things. He looked around to get his bearings...

...And realized that he had no idea where in the world he was.

This was the realization he should have had earlier, that if the sewers didn't match the layout of the streets, he'd have no idea where he was or how to get back to the surface when his job was done. He had no map, no means of making one, and in the terror of the assault he'd just survived, he had no real recollection of the path he took to get here. Resisting the urge to slap himself for his folly, Maxwell picked a direction at random and began moving. If he kept going, he was certain that he'd eventually reach an entrance and be able to reach the streets.

He was able to maintain that certainty for nearly two days. For two days, he wandered the sewers, finding them to be more labyrinthian than he'd ever imagined. There were no landmarks by which to orient himself, no markings to indicate where the closest route to the surface might be, just a seemingly endless maze of tunnels and intersections. Worse, he'd encountered no one in all of that time. He came to realize that this was due to the heavy armor he wore: Anyone who heard the noise would know where he was, but rather than being drawn towards it, they avoided it either because they didn't want to be ambushed by slimes, or because they were trying to avoid the cacophony scaring away the giant rats.

And on that note...

At the end of the first day, the prince noted that he was being followed. Beady eyes in the distance, just at the edge of vision, were watching him. The giant rats had finally appeared and were waiting for the inevitable.

The first time he was attacked, it was when he'd finally tried to get some rest. He didn't see any rats nearby and didn't hear any. So, he put his back against a wall and tried to catch a nap, standing up. As he was about to drift off to sleep, a giant rat attacked, its teeth gnawing against his greaves. The beast withdrew the moment Maxwell drew his sword, scampering off before the prince could try to attack. Maxwell's stomach growled, going more than a day without food and rest making him ravenously hungry. However, a giant rat was not a good meal, the creatures no doubt containing half the diseases in the kingdom. Slime cores, on the other hand, were completely indigestible, and toxic. Worse, his waterskin was empty, and no amount of desperation would make the prince drink sewer water. Dying of thirst would be preferable to whatever that might do to him.

By the end of the third day, Maxwell struggled to keep one foot in front of the other. The inside of his armor was a foul, stinking mess, as he dared not stop to relieve himself normally for fear of an assault by slimes or giant rats. He had not been assaulted by slimes since that first day, but that was likely because he'd killed half the slimes in the sewer in that one encounter. More might arrive at any moment. Worse, the rats came and harried him every time the young man tried to stop. Hunger, thirst, and exhaustion warred against the prince's resolve, trying to drag him down, but to stop now was to die, and the prince still believed that he had a great destiny before him. He'd be a hero, the man to herald a new, better age for his kingdom.

That delusion kept him going for two more days. Then it, along with all of his other delusions, was stripped away. He no longer knew who he was. He no longer knew why he was here. All he knew was that he needed to keep moving and keep his sword in his hand, or he'd die. Sadly his body was pushed to the brink, and it could no longer sustain itself on only raw determination. He was fading fast. A swarm of giant rats, and even a few dire rats, no longer bothered waiting on the edge of vision. Instead, they kept just out of the reach of his sword. They knew his time was coming, and they were ready to feast.

His legs finally giving in, he fell flat on his face into a puddle of sewer water maybe an inch deep. He no longer had the strength to move, to escape from the indignity of drowning in a puddle that was more shit and piss than water. This, he realized, was his fate. He was meant to die a meaningless death to perhaps warn others of the price of hubris. He'd come down here unprepared and alone, and now he would die alone, drowning in the sewers while being eaten by giant rats. Some distant part of his mind wondered if he'd be lucky enough to drown before the rats got through his armor and started eating him alive.

Then, he heard a noise. Rats screeching, the twang of a crossbow, and the sound of a blade cleaving flesh sounded increasingly distant but constant. Just as he was about to lose consciousness completely, he felt something pull his face out of the puddle and turn him over.

He couldn't make out much detail. He could see a figure clad in a combination of leather and steel armor, a helmet obscuring their face. In a dull, monotone voice, they muttered, "Third fucking shitcan this month. What kind of fucking idiot comes down here in full plate?" A shitcan. The slang used to describe someone who'd died in their armor, eaten alive by a monster that could get through its defenses and leaving a suit or armor filled with monster feces afterward. That was very nearly what the prince's first foray into the sewers had turned him into on the first day, and what he'd nearly become a few minutes ago. A fitting end for a fool who'd walked into this place without taking even the slightest precautions, some distant part of him admitted, and only dumb luck had saved him from it. If he lived, he'd need to learn from this. A second experience like this one would most assuredly be the death of him.

The prince managed to cough, forcing foul water from his lungs.

The figure knelt down to get a good look at the prince, before saying, "So, not a shitcan yet. Just a fucking idiot." The figure pulled off its knapsack and began looking through it, muttering, "Ogre's Strength, Ogre's Strength, I know I've got at least two of them in here..." After a moment, they seemed to find it, then turned their head, opened the front of their helmet, and took a drink. Even if the prince had cared to look in his current state, he wouldn't have been able to see anything from that angle. After the figure finished their potion, they put the empty vial away, then hefted the prince's armored form effortlessly over a shoulder and began hauling them out.

The prince, fighting unconsciousness and slowly losing, managed to sputter out a weak, "Who?" If he was being rescued, honor demanded that he return the favor. He couldn't do that if he didn't know at least the name of the one who'd saved him. Even if the prince couldn't remember who he was, some part of him knew that he'd never forgive himself if that debt went unpaid.

The prince's rescuer didn't answer for a moment, seeming not to have heard the question. However, when they came in sight of a ladder, leading up and out of the sewers, they answered, simply stating, "The Ratter."