Robutar, formerly the Relentless, put his bony wrinkled hands on his hips, and took in a deep long breath of fresh air. This wasn’t the best idea, as he immediately started to cough and hack, having overdone it as far as his old lungs were concerned, and that ruined the moment. He had been looking forwards to this day for some years now. Finally, he had retired. He would have done it years before, but had never been able to afford it, the travelling adventurer business not being terribly lucrative. But Robutar had lucked out and acquired a barber’s shop a couple of years ago, and made a decent amount of money removing every follicle from the heads of the witless troglodytes who came in to see the once great warrior who had turned to hairdressing. Hairdressing was probably a bit strong. His technique was invariably to pull a silly face and spread his arms apart in a hideous parody of a mage making jazz hands, before muttering the same four words that instantly got rid of anything that was remotely hairy from his customer’s body. Still, it became something of an attraction in the tiny village, and Robutar’s reputation for getting into all kinds of odd trouble was soon superseded in favour of being known as the country’s oldest and most bizarre shaver of heads. He had even been called upon to do his little performance for a couple of grinning kings who wanted to look like they had a sense of humour.

When he had accumulated enough gold and gotten sufficiently disenchanted with being stared at by the brain-dead masses he had taken on an apprentice to teach his technique to, and then given the young man the shop to do with as he liked when his tuition was over, approximately two minutes later, before taking all his savings to auction and bidding on a little cottage some distance from the nearest village, up in the mountains with woodland around it and a little stream running past that the auctioneer had said to be capital for trout fishing twice a year. The auctioneer had said this in a slightly odd tone, and nobody else had bid on the property despite its considerable charm and various advantages, but Robutar was so eager to pack in working and having unusual experiences that he took entirely no notice and instantly raised his hand to buy it.

When Robutar had arrived with his meagre possessions (assorted mementoes of past adventures, a change of clothes, a fishing pole and the large trophy he had been given by the people from Middle-Earth’s Got Talent for doing his hairdressing act for them) at the cottage, he had felt a deep sense of peace that had been missing from his life up to this point. The scene before him was every bit as idyllic as it had been advertised to be.

Now he was standing on his front doorstep on the first day of his long-awaited retirement, dressed in a garish cotton shirt and shorts, a floppy hat riddled with hooks and lures perched on his bald scalp, fishing pole brandished like a weapon in his right fist, happy that he had finally gotten away from all the crazy things that had happened to him. With a real sense of purpose the aged warrior strode the five meters to the bank of the stream and sat down on a fallen tree trunk. Having taken a few minutes to drink in the serenity (sadly disturbed prematurely by the termites inside the dead wood who felt that being sat on called for sharp nipping of certain sagging buttocks) and wriggling around on his seat to get properly comfortable, Robutar targeted a single large fish that could be seen just under the surface of the gently running water and cast his line out just in front of it. The fish was still a moment, before obviously snubbing the proffered bit of bread and the large hook within, turning around and swimming away. Robutar snorted and started to hum a little tune he had learnt as a boy; he wasn’t in a rush anyway, so sod the cross-grained bugger. There were plenty of fish in the stream, he told himself.

Six hours and not a single bite later, Robutar’s once seemingly infinite calm and patience was wearing thin. He sat forward on his trunk, leaning over the water slightly and glaring at his line as though by sheer concentration and dint of mind he could make a fish appear on the end of it. Every time a trout swam languidly past whilst blatantly ignoring it and twitching its tail with a derisive air, Robutar would start to twitch and curse the creature and its ancestors.

It was with a certain shock then that when the pole solidly lurched away from him that Robutar fell flat on his face, inches from tumbling into the stream. He desperately reached for the pole before it could disappear, and heaved back on it. “Bloody hell, but he’s a big bugger...”

Robutar’s line was stretched tauter than the elastic of his old shorts around his belly, and the pole was being curved in half with the strain so much that Robutar thought it might snap in twain. In desperation he yanked with all his remaining strength, arching back with his face to the sky and roaring with the effort. He heard the rending crack as though it were in the far distance, unwilling to believe that it was made by his pole breaking in two, before dropping swiftly backwards and smacking his head on the dead tree.

“Getest thou lazy arse up! Feeble old fool!” Robutar’s head was aswim and his wits utterly astray as he woke up to find a severely beautiful young woman with blue skin and webbed toes slapping his face with her bare foot. “Vandalising oath, thou art going to geteth it if thou don’st remotheth thy vile hook sooneth!”

Robutar swatted the young woman’s offended appendage away and rolled over with a groan so that he could push up with his arm and sit up. For a long moment he just looked at her outraged expression, and worked his toothless gums against one another. She was obviously a water nymph, and part of Robutar’s line was dangling limply from her mouth. Finally he spoke to her. “Oh you must be bloody joking.”

“What do thy mean byest that?” The nymph reached her leg out and gave him another slap, indignation plain all over her features.

“I mean, what the hell are you doing in my stream?”

“Thy stream! Thy impertinence knoweth no end! Yon stream ist mine! Thief! Hound! Brigand! Poaching my fish and then claiming thou art in the right! Damn thee!” With a final slap the nymph spun on her heel and ran away to the stream crying.

“I think I need to go have a word with that auctioneer tomorrow. Ain’t going to catch of nothing in this here stream afterall, that lying bugger.” Robutar sighed with disgust and rambled over to the cottage, rubbing his cheek. “Never seem to be able to get a quiet life.”