From TES issue 55 (January 2009)
Series 4
Quest: The Shield.
Dungeoneer: Jeremy.Advisors: Alexander, Amanda and Anthony.

Home town: London.
Team score: 5 out of 10.

What tiny bunch of tots this lot were! If they truly had surpassed the lower age limit to appear on Knightmare, they had not done it by much. Following right on the heels of Dickon's winning quest, they were always likely to be something of a forgettable team, yet I’ve got round to them in the end… after a mere seven-and-a-half years!

Level One: After dealing fairly competently with the Place of Choice, the team face their first trial of wits, at the hands (or vocal chords, I suppose) of Dooris. Pickle gets really chummy with the advisors at this point, which succeeds in putting them at their ease, and they manage to score three out of three, with only minimal prompting from the rule-bending elf. In the yellowish room that has become all too familiar by now to regular watchers, Jeremy meets Malice and Mistress Goody: "One is well named, the other is not." – Treguard. Unsurprisingly, Malice offers Jeremy the chance to retrieve an artefact for her (a silver chalice, in this case) in return for magical aid; the team readily agree. Malice gives Jeremy the eye shield to assist him in her service, and she goes to great pains to ensure that the poor little chap has put it on properly! Malice then leaves, but Mistress Goody carries on with her sweeping until she has chased Jeremy out of the room.
The Forest of Dunn is the next port of call, where Jeremy meets Motley at the Crazed Heifer. While Motley is telling a joke, which doesn’t go down too well with the punters, the advisors are canny enough to tell Jeremy to filch a cabbage for his life force. Motley then comes over and speaks to Jeremy at greater length; the upshot of their conversation is that the jester gifts the team a spell called JOKE. In Oakley’s glade, the team score a shaky two out of three, but are able to glean enough information to take an hourglass and a bar of gold from Oakley’s tree stump. Predictably, the ruins of Dungarth are the next destination, where Jeremy has to scare away a marauding assassin by shouting at it – he plucks up the courage to do so just in time!
Jeremy then travels on the conveyer belt (bladeless this time) for a while, before stopping it by turning over the hourglass. Treguard hints to the team that it is time to press on: "Oh look, there’s a nice door." – Treguard. Jeremy has to run past a very large lizard before he reaches the wellway room, where Fatilla is on guard. Well, we all know what comes next, don't we? Jeremy gives Fatilla the gold as a bribe, EXCEPT… Fatilla takes the gold and then says he's going to kill Jeremy anyway! With some serious prompting from Pickle, little Anthony manages to spellcast JOKE, reducing Fatilla to a giggling heap. Whilst the guard is incapacitated, Jeremy sneaks down the well and into level two.
Level Two: He lands on a table in the round chamber that has previously been used for the deepest depths of level three in this series, which is rather strange. What is even stranger is the goblin statue with flashing eyes that is staring at Jeremy: "This heathen idol has what they call the evil eye. Whilst it continues to look on you, extreme energy drain is occurring!" – Treguard. Fortunately, there is a cloth on the table, with which Jeremy covers the statue's eyes. Motley and Mellisandre then rush into the room, and after bantering for a while, telling each other that they look like the ugly statue and so on, Mellie gets down to business by asking Jeremy a riddle:

"Riddle-oh-ree begins with a T, it's tortoise on land and turtle in sea, but now you must think of and then must deliver, the name of its cousin that lives in the river!" – Mellisandre.

Maybe everyone thought that this would catch the team out, but it doesn't – they promptly come up with the correct answer as terrapin! Mellisandre rewards them with a Joker card, which would undoubtedly have been useful against Ariadne later in the level. However, the next room is the Block and Tackle and, somewhat unfairly, Jeremy enters the room at a very odd angle so that when he is told to walk forwards, he blunders right over to the side of the room that is collapsing! Unsurprisingly, he has fallen through the crumbling floor within seconds. "A fatal error of timing I'm afraid, team. And now it's time for you to leave us." – Treguard. Timing my eye – what a cruel thing to do to the poor little guy!
Summary: They may have had bags of pluck, as Pickle put it, but they really were in over their heads, to be brutally honest! However, they were quite intelligent and fairly canny, and if Jeremy had walked into the Block and Tackle at a slightly different angle, who knows how far they could have gone? They had all the ammunition they needed to reach level three!

[Previous team: Team 6 of Series 4
Next team: Team 8 of Series 4]

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