Post by Ze Flying Wraithetti Monstress on May 20, 2009 17:28:29 GMT -5
Friends are all well and good. Religion is spoken highly of. Money is always useful. But nothing can quite match the comforting weight of a cleaver-sized machete.
Despite being just south of the Empire, Surda was insanely different from it. There were no slaves, no marauding criminals to speak of, and even the Enclave only had two branches in the whole country. Therefore, I hardly knew anything about Surda. The customs were different, the people were aggravatingly nosy, and I was finding the whole country rather disturbing. And so, I kept grabbing my knives every couple of seconds or so for comfort. It was so alien that it was nearly as bad as Du Weldenvarden. And that was one place I would never go to, important mission or not.
And just how important was this mission? Well, considering that Serkan Vritra, the big cheese of the Enclave, had dragged his half-metal body all the way to Dras-Leona to personally deliver it to me, it was obviously something very important, or I wouldn’t have bothered to do it myself. He’d come puffing and grinding and doing whatever cyborgs did into my inn, nearly scared the life out of my poor Iffy, and had choked past his iron lungs to tell me the mission- find Salyn Sarethi, some Surdan noble and good friend of the king of Surda, and present him with an ultimatum. I was supposed to either convince him to join the Enclave or kill him. If I convinced him to join, I got ten thousand crowns. If I killed him, I’d only get five thousand.
Of course, instead of Serkan just telling me why Salyn was so important, I’d had to dig around of my own accord. Serkan liked to make his underdogs work for the answers. I rather didn’t like that about him. I’d found out that Salyn was part of some weird Order of the Virtuous Blood, some kind of cult, and, despite his good standing with Orrin, could apparently easily switch loyalties for a little cash compensation. In fact, he happened to be spying on Orrin for the Empire. I’d found that little tidbit after getting a maid to talk after some… private interrogation. Salyn apparently visited Urû’baen a lot, and the palace specifically. Besides that, he’d been doing a little prying about the Enclave in Surda, so it was quite clear that he would make a fine asset to the Enclave if he joined, and a dangerous enemy if he didn’t.
For the mission, I’d dragged along Mizaros Xelsare, my right-hand man. He wasn’t exactly the ideal sort of underling, though- he was young, hard-headed, and furiously ambitious. Besides that, he was one of the few elves in the Enclave, so I had completely overlooked him when he’d first joined Blackwood Company. However, during an assassination op a couple of years back, I’d gotten stuck between a rock and a hard place when I’d gotten cornered with an arrow fixed point-blank at my forehead. Mizaros had cleaved the stupid bastard’s head off, though, effectively allowing me to keep my face from being spoiled by an arrowhead. Of course, I couldn’t just ignore that, and so I’d fixed him up with a promotion. His hot-headed quirks besides, he was surprisingly muscular for an elf, and his bloodthirsty love for fighting made him a very notable warrior. Therefore, it was nice to have him as a back-up- well, actually, I made him do nearly all of my fighting for me, which was quite nice.
Right now, though, I was split up from Mizaros. He’d gone off to Salyn’s manor here in Aberon to do a little scoping before we went in for the negotiations. It was midday, the sky was clear, and it was a very normal hour for a meeting. I had dressed up quite nicely in an embroidered red vest over a white tunic, with crimson leggings and velvet boots trimmed with gold. The fabric was trimmed with golden cranes. I wasn’t really sure what they were supposed to represent, but they looked nice. I was wearing an elegant dyed fur coat, burgundy in colour, over my outfit to keep out the aggravating cold. Besides that, it successfully hid the knives I had sheathed in my belt. As for my face, I had neatly combed and oiled my hair back, and had shaved every trace of beard of my chin and neck. It felt odd, having no hair there for once, but it was definitely worth it for ten thousand crowns.
I was standing outside in the snow, right outside a large marble manor that looked like it was trimmed with ivy, although I couldn’t really tell since it was covered with snow. It was freezing, and I was starting to get a little irritated that Mizaros had failed to show up yet. I probably looked like a pervert. I’d been standing outside the house for the past twenty minutes, like some lovelorn idiot waiting for his girlfriend to appear. I’d left the warmth of Dot’s Diner- a nearby inn- in the hopes that he was done scoping, but it was clear that he wasn’t going to appear anytime soon. With a sigh, I turned away from the manor and made my way back down the street towards Dot’s.
Dot’s Diner was an odd kind of tavern. For one thing, there was no Dot woman that I’d seen, and second, it was a rough-and-tumble kind of inn, with plenty of criminals, just like my bar back in Dras-Leona. Except here, only the successful type of loons got in- meaning, gangsters and thieves that were doing quite well for themselves. If you looked like you were low on cash, you got the boot. When I pushed upon the door, every patron looked up. After a moment, though, seeming satisfied with my outfit, they returned to their drinks. I quietly slipped past them and into an empty seat at the far end of the bar, as close to the fireplace as possible. Shuddering as the cold leaked out of me, I waited for one of the waitresses to approach me. Hopefully, Mizaros wouldn’t take too much longer.
Words;; 1030
Muse;; Sucky.
Thoughts;; It. Seriously. Fails. BLAH. Sorry for the muselessness. XP[/size]
