Case narrative
What the report says
Brambleton was a quiet farming village, which meant the people there had devoted an alarming amount of energy to making sure it stayed that way. The village maintained twenty posted rules governing fences, crops, roads, tools, fires, livestock, and other matters that most communities trusted common sense to handle. Brambleton did not trust common sense.
Among the rules were several masterpieces of rural government. Scarecrows could not be dressed to resemble living residents. Mabel Bramblefoot could not possess more than six chickens, four goats, and two cows at one time. Livestock had to remain where livestock properly belonged: sheep in sheep fields, cows in cow fields, chickens making a reasonable effort, and goats remaining a matter of ongoing discussion.
Then Terry Tossmane was murdered.
The Field Unit for Bizarre and Unusual Reports was dispatched to Brambleton because strange incidents had already been piling up. Livestock had been slaughtered. A drunk had reportedly been thrown through a window. Now a young halfling had been found beaten nearly to pieces beneath an apple tree. The case was sufficiently bizarre that normal investigators wanted nothing to do with it, which was more or less why F.U.B.A.R. existed.
The agents assigned to the case were Tomothy Brightfoot, a polished halfling rogue who had discovered that law enforcement made lockpicking much easier to explain; Hobitus Wobbleknees, whose relationship with procedure was considerably healthier than his relationship with alcohol; Iven Oldbum; and Thad Bramblewick, an eccentric former battle mage who looked as though he had been assembled from items recovered behind a tavern.
Thad had fought goblins. This had left him with a simple investigative philosophy: unexplained events were probably caused by goblins, fae, or something that was basically a goblin if one stopped being pedantic about taxonomy. Before the investigation had properly begun, he was already warning the mayor about fae folk and promising to blast them out of the sky.
Mayor Milo Underbrow greeted the unit with visible relief and one firm request: obey Brambleton's rules. Every house displayed them. Every citizen knew them. The rules mattered. F.U.B.A.R. agreed to keep them in mind, which was not quite the same thing as agreeing to follow them.
Terry's body was the first real clue. He had been killed by overwhelming blunt force. His bones were shattered and his head crushed. Near the body were strange bootlike tracks, too large for a halfling. Tomothy thought they suggested a larger humanoid. Thad thought they suggested a large goblin. Neither theory yet explained why Terry had been in the orchard with a half-eaten apple.
The agents questioned Terry's family and neighbors. Terry had been mischievous, but not cruel. He liked harmless tricks, especially stealing pies from home and leaving them on other people's windowsills. Nobody seemed to hate him. Nobody had a motive to beat a child to death. The apple looked insignificant until the group remembered Rule Two: take nothing from another person's land without permission.
Other incidents began to line up with other laws. A local drunk had been thrown through a window after becoming an obstruction. Cows and sheep had wandered into a field where they did not belong and were beaten to death. The village normally punished livestock violations with things like pies to the face at the next festival. Whatever was enforcing Brambleton's rules had adopted a slightly harsher interpretation.
The livestock scene introduced a second mystery. The cows and sheep were dead. The goats wandering among them were completely unharmed. This naturally led the investigators to consider whether the goats themselves were responsible, whether the goats were goblins in disguise, or whether goblins had infiltrated the local goat population for reasons not yet understood.
Thad selected the nearest goat for further investigation. It stood about fifteen feet away. That was close enough. He declared it a goblin and attacked it.
The goat died.
Two scarecrows in the nearby fields immediately came alive and charged the agents.
The attack transformed the case. These were not possessed decorations or creatures hiding inside straw shells. They were constructed magical guardians. They moved with enough strength to explain the crushed livestock and Terry's injuries, and they reacted to the goat's death as though they had just witnessed another violation of Brambleton law.
F.U.B.A.R. destroyed both scarecrows. Their remains were wood, straw, machinery, and magic. Someone had built them. Someone in Brambleton had given them a purpose.
That someone was Tobin Bramblewick, Thad's nephew.
Tobin admitted he had been developing an automated security system for Brambleton's farms. The village had rejected the idea, so he continued the project without permission. He had improved ordinary scarecrows, given them enough autonomy to patrol the fields, and programmed them with all twenty of Brambleton's rules.
The problem was not that the scarecrows failed to understand the rules. They understood them perfectly. They simply understood nothing else. A child stealing an apple was a violation. Livestock in the wrong field was a violation. A drunk blocking a road was a violation. The constructs had no concept of intent, mercy, context, or proportional response. They identified offenses and corrected them.
The goats survived because Brambleton itself had never decided where goats properly belonged. For once, bureaucratic indecision had saved lives.
Tobin's reaction did not help him. He argued that the livestock should not have been in the wrong field. Terry should not have taken the apple. The system had problems, certainly, but those problems could be corrected. From Tobin's perspective the constructs were not fundamentally wrong. They merely needed further refinement.
The agents disagreed. Strongly. Tobin was arrested and handcuffed. One member of the unit advised him that he could continue tweaking the code from prison.
Then a nearby door opened.
Behind it stood Tobin's prototype: a gigantic scarecrow built on the same principles as the field models, only much larger and much more dangerous. The thing moved. Thad responded with the speed and restraint for which F.U.B.A.R. would soon become famous.
He cast a fourth-level Fireball inside the house.
The blast engulfed the prototype, most of the agents, the room, and Tobin, who was still handcuffed nearby. The house caught fire. Tobin died instantly. There was a brief period in which everyone processed the fact that F.U.B.A.R. had solved the murder, arrested the culprit, and then accidentally incinerated him before he could be transported anywhere.
The prototype survived.
What followed was less an arrest operation than an attempt to overwhelm one disaster with a larger disaster. The giant scarecrow was hammered by weapons, magic, fear effects, flanking attacks, and whatever else the agents could deploy before it was allowed to demonstrate what a two-hundred-pound agricultural enforcement machine considered reasonable force.
Eventually the prototype broke apart. Components scattered across the room. Somehow, its destruction also helped extinguish the fire. Tobin may have built murderous law-enforcement scarecrows, but at least some portion of his engineering apparently respected fire safety.
Mayor Underbrow surveyed the wreckage and reached the only sensible conclusion: the response had been excessive.
Still, the case was solved. The remaining modified scarecrows would be dismantled. Terry's death and the livestock killings had been explained. Brambleton was safe again. Technically, the agents had not intentionally killed Tobin, a distinction that would undoubtedly matter to whoever had to write the report.
The mayor thanked F.U.B.A.R. for their service and reminded them that the village still needed to discuss the goat situation.
The agents asked about payment.
There would be pies.
Their first official case had ended with one murder solved, several magical constructs destroyed, a suspect accidentally incinerated while restrained, a house nearly burned down, one goat killed during an active investigation, and enough paperwork to occupy headquarters for several miserable days.
Brambleton returned to normal.
The rules remained posted.
And the goats remained a matter of ongoing discussion.