Ongoing Adventures #2: The Plan

One day ago, Nuff and Renda had presented their dangerous scheme to the rest of the travellers.

‘Thing is,’ the mercenary said, ‘the gnome’s right.’

Nuff folded his arms and nodded smugly.  Dastardly-Fred was drooling in his drug-induced torpor.

Renda continued.  ‘We have to find out if Krotar followed us from the plains.  I say we use this fake Dastardly to set a trap.’

Sir Adrian held up his hands.  ‘I don’t know about this.  If this man is part of the freelancer, his face, shouldn’t we keep him safe until we locate the other remnant?’

Nuff tramped into the middle of the circle.  Standing up, his pointy hat reached only a little taller than the knight who sat next to him.

‘The way I see it, we do know where we can find the freelancer’s mind.  We just need to get there.  This twisted mistake of a man,’ he indicated Dastardly-Fred, ‘is not the freelancer.  This man’s mind is a confused wreck and of no consequence to us.’

Waory, who had been staring at the ground until now, turned to Nuff.

‘You’re suggesting he’s expendable because he’s not who we want?’

‘What we’re saying,’ said Renda, ‘is that there’s no reason we can’t leave the fake Dastardly with some kindly farmer and his wife and watch for a few days.  If only to be positively sure that Nius and Krotar won’t bother us on the way to the Liquid Library.’

‘That's one heck of a mouthful,’ the knight snarked.

***

Today they were at the nominated house.  Waory and Adrian staked out on a knoll above the back paddock, watching the mercenary and gnome as they dragged the invalid to the front door.

They left Adrian’s note on Dastardly-Fred’s lap.  The man’s mouth moved ever so slightly, and even from this far away the knight was sure of what he was saying.

‘I’m Dastardly... of course I am...’

Below them, Renda and Nuff would be finding hiding places for their horses.  While they waited, Adrian brandished the circular footing on which was mounted a shard of glass.

‘And you’re certain that using it to watch them won’t make me as mad as the old Land-Regent?’ he asked the government advisor.  Waory carefully grabbed the device, trying not to get his fingers cut.

‘If you are so concerned, let me watch first,’ he said, though he saw the knight’s expression harden.  ‘What, you think I am the kind of person to harbour megalomaniacal tendencies?’

Adrian spoke his mind, regretting it immediately.  ‘You are a public servant.’

Waory shrugged and flicked the shard, which rang like a muted bell.  ‘Well played.’

***

Erk, the Death of Trolls led the newly christened Stroeg through a maze of dank tunnels.  Here and there, the freelancer caught glimpses of other trolls, though they were often hard to distinguish from the dirt around them.  What exactly did a troll do?

‘I’m what ya call an aspect, friendly soul,’ the Death of Trolls said.  ‘My job is to work with the jotunn tribes.  Unfortunately that means I have no idea what your Death told you in the Dark.’

Stroeg used one arm to stroke his awful face.  ‘I thought I was dead.’

‘Yes,’ Erk replied, turning into a larger cavern, ‘but only mostly.  You’re alive now, anyways.’

The freelancer racked his new brains, trying to remember what Death had told him.

‘I think I’m supposed to... reunite?  Does that mean anything to you?’

Erk stopped and turned to face the room in front of them.  On the other side of the space a great curtain, taller than any of the trolls, covered something on the wall.  The thought occurred to Stroeg that he had little idea of the size of a jotunn, so he couldn’t easily guess the height of anything.

The Death of Trolls shouted a word that the freelancer didn’t understand and the curtain began to rise.

‘We’re in a bit of a pickle right now, friendly soul,’ said Erk.  ‘The jotunn live for a long time, but eventually we do die.’

The freelancer huffed.  ‘Good, otherwise you’d be out of a job.’

Erk squinted and lifted one leathery lip to show off a set of jagged teeth.  Troll body language, Stroeg thought, I think I get that one.

The Death of Trolls continued.  ‘We’re a self-serving and sometimes barbaric race.  Our tribe in these parts has been trying to pull the jotunn into the modern world, but we lost contact with the other tribes around the time of your World Congress.’

‘You didn’t miss much over there,’ Stroeg mumbled.  ‘Suffice it to say there won’t be another one.’

‘Regardless,’ Erk said, ‘we think that magic is slipping away.  Most lines of communication have been lost, families spread out across the underworld or the surface, machines breaking down...’

‘Might you get to the point of all this?’

The curtain had arisen, revealing a large panel, beautifully gilded and covered by shards of glass.  It almost made a cracked mirror except for two missing pieces.

‘We’ve decided to operate the Mirror d’Aseere to locate our missing brothers, but in its fractured state we cannot risk it.’

‘Wait just a second,’ said the freelancer.  ‘I’ve seen a piece of this mirror.  You really don’t want to be using it at all.’

‘Only while it is riven will the mirror eventually cause insanity,’ said Erk.  ‘It will be up to you to find the remaining shards.’

‘Well I know where one of them is...’

‘Yes, with your friends,’ Erk said flatly.  ‘They are not the issue.  The other shard is in the Great Western City, where it would be hard for trolls to go unnoticed.’

‘You mean -’ the freelancer begun.

‘You won’t be here much longer.  Just remember that the spell runs out after three days.’

Before Stroeg could reply, the Death of Trolls punched him square in the snout.

When he awoke, the freelancer was himself again, missing only his Dastardly face.

Ongoing Adventures #1: New Paradigm

To both new readers and old I present the start of Volume 1 of the Ongoing Adventures.  For a better introduction to the principle characters, you can check out the previous stories "In Defence of the Realm" and "Search for Dastardly", both linked on the Ongoing Adventures hub page.

The man was in rather plain clothes – brown pants and off-white shirt with a tunic held tight by a string of rope – but nearby were a set of lightweight gauntlets, and on a rock sat an elegant helmet. He was currently on an outcropping high above the fjord that gashed the land; not an ideal location during the frequent coastal tempests. The breeze was hesitantly growing. Before long the man was shivering slightly.

The reason for his lofty position lay in his hands. What illumination was available from the veiled sun shone onto a handful of rustling paper as the man wrote.

I am called Sir Adrian. My companions tell me that you may have heard the stories. Please take care of this man. He once helped me save a kingdom, but he has lost his mind.

The knight paused. Was it right to do this? He felt like these people didn't deserve it.

A man named Krotar is looking for him. I don't know why, but I have reason to believe that Krotar has lost his mind too.

'We're ready to go,' said a voice behind him.

Sir Adrian, former Knight of the Clockwork City, turned to see the speaker. Renda San was of a sturdy type, dressed in a one-piece leather garment with clipped-on greaves for her legs. These made her look much more like a mythical warrior maiden than should have been legal.

'This isn't worth much,' Adrian brandished the notes and his quill. 'I feel dirty.'

'We won't be far off,' said Renda. 'If anything nasty goes down, Nuff will give us the signal.'

Adrian picked up his spare armour pieces and followed Renda to the camp down the slope. Amongst the trees of the wooded road birds chattered at the horses or sung in tune with Nuff's snoring.

Waory had finished folding the tents and now climbed onto his horse, still uncertain and clumsy after all these days on the road. Renda woke the gnome, whom she rode with on the second horse, and Adrian gave each of them a small root vegetable to encourage the beasts. Sal had completely recovered from her laminitis, so she was comfortable with taking both Adrian and the man who called himself Dastardly. She also seemed to understand that the other horses weren't as fast as her and had kept pace at the back of the group since they'd left the capital of the plains.

'Everyone still up for this?' the knight said. Murmurs of agreement wafted about the clearing.

The false Dastardly gurgled. He hadn't said a coherent word since the old man of a village two days past had given the group a healing herb. His mind was degrading at an alarming rate.

'Onward,' Adrian said with a forced smile.  Onward, he mentally cackled.  Time to ruin somebody's day.

***

The mind and spirit once known to his allies as Dastardly Medieval finally surfaced. Perhaps, though, surfaced is an inappropriate term as its new dwelling place was far from anything resembling a surface.

The mind felt itself lying down. This was at least a physical location, it noted. Nothing was like it remembered. It, or rather he, let out a cry of pain. Death had not been nice.

'Settle down,' he heard a voice say. It was deep but not unkind. 'You've just arrived.'

Lying on a bed of stone. A smell of deep, dank earth. Much deeper than the roads the gnomes had delved.

'Now then, friendly soul, I think you can open your eyes.'

The freelancer did so. He was in cave lit by open fire torches. A presence was nearby, but there was no visual evidence of that fact until a bulky, brown arm swung a bowl on a handle over his head. Little green coals dropped from it and sizzled on the freelancer's face without hurting him.

The freelancer sat up.

'I've got to do it...' he said. 'Death, the Four Ces... it all has meaning.'  He clutched his head and groaned. 'But it's all a jumble.'

'Calm down, please, friendly soul,' said the voice. Directly in front of the freelancer was a craggy snout, like a cross between a crocodile and a pig. The head of the thing must have been a foot long. The thing's face was adorned with tattoos. Many beaded tufts of hair sprung out and dangled, glinting in the firelight. One of four stocky arms was holding the green flame bowl.

'You're a new arrival,' it said. 'We understand that the Ces put you here for a reason.'

The freelancer began to panic, feeling his own face.

'What happened to me?!' He gaped, feeling the long greasy teeth and the rough hairy nose. 'My face! My beautiful face!'

The freelancer grabbed hold of the creature's animal-skin clothing and shook it violently.

'Dastardly Medieval doesn't do ugly! What is going on? Oh, my beautiful face...'

'Settle,' the thing said, waving another arm in the air, wafting a feel of calm through the freelancer. 'That old face wasn't yours to begin with. You are no longer Dastardly, friendly soul. Your name is Stroeg.'

The freelancer was speechless. Useless scraps of information floated around his mind like chunks in soup.

The thing in front of him smiled, as much as the freakish snout could. 'I am Erk, the Death of Trolls. Maybe I can help you understand why you are here.'

Ongoing Adventures #0

This "early bird" instalment of Ongoing Adventures fills in some missing information before the end of Search for Dastardly.


Loss of Face

Not long after the man who called himself Dastardly Medieval died, the woman employed as Death was having doubts about her apprentice's fitness for the task at hand.

'I promise, Master. Nothing will happen to it.'

Death walked to the freelancer's cold body and sighed. 'This is very important, Orticia. Dastardly will want his face intact when he returns from his mission, and the Ces need that leverage.'

'Why do you call this freelancer Dastardly?' the apprentice wondered aloud. 'As Death, you would know that he's really called –'

'Listen,' Death said. She placed her hands near the body. It would be an hour or so before the undertaker returned, and another hour still before Waory was contacted by Sir Adrian the Knight. As Death's hands touched the pallid skin, a ball of light – like a parody of a lens flare in spherical form – erupted from the freelancer's empty head. The face then flattened out and the corpse was seemingly devoid of identity.

'Take it to the river delta Skim,' said Death. 'The vault in that city has a place already set aside for it.' Death knew that she would look at another body in the future and wish that Orticia could have completed the task. However, events progressing exactly to plan was not required and this course of action was still valid. Death passed the glowing light – what remained of Dastardly's identity now that his soul was elsewhere – into her apprentice's hands.

Orticia bobbed her head in obedience and looked at the freelancer's “face” between her palms. 'I will not fail,' she said. Death, having seen her failure, did not nod but disappeared to attend to other matters.

***

'How do I get out of here?'

Orticia had blundered into another dead end on her way out of the plains capital. Often, people will ignore death unless it has some bearing on themselves, so almost no one noticed the frantic woman holding a glow between her hands – until a pair of voices came at her from behind, clearly intent on noticing her.

'What have we here, Fred?' said a raspy voice. 'Is she a witch? She's hard to look at, this one.'

'That's coz she doesn't want to be seen,' said a deeper voice, presumably Fred. 'Where are you going in such a hurry, young miss?'

Death's apprentice tried to remember the rite of nothing. 'Everything crumbles,' she mumbled.

The two muggers encircled the transfixed Orticia. Fred, the bigger one, looked at what she was holding.

'Something of value, little miss?' he said. 'You hand it over, and we won't be quite as rough.'

'Nothing is really there forever!' she said, and ran forwards. The bigger thug gasped dumbly as the woman ran straight through him. He collapsed as a strange light shone out of his mouth.

To her horror, Orticia saw that the freelancer's face had gone, but she didn't stick around to see the results – instead she stumbled blindly through walls as if they were mist until she had beelined outside of the city, several metres under a mound of dirt.

'Fred, what's wrong Fred?' said the shorter of the two thugs, the one with the raspy voice. On the ground the bigger thug stopped clutching at his face.

'I'm not Fred,' he said as he stood up.