• Graded • Dyin' Ain't Much of a Livin' (Unless You're into Necromancy)

[Kasoria]

88th Trial, Ashan, Arc 618
South Etzos
23rd break

I'm the luckiest cunt in the city, thought the man who was about to die.

It wasn't just the jingle of coin in his pockets, telling him with every step that his night had been especially profitable. So profitable, in fact, that he was almost skipping back home before midnight, his inventory wiped out and his boss already happy with his cut. Which meant he had those dark, furtive, sweat-soaked hours to himself. To ply his good fortune and business acumen into wine, women, and song.

Especially the last one. He felt like a ditty or two, and it had been a while since he'd taken his horn anywhere.

It wasn't just the fact he was strolling over the cobbles a free man, either, when a day before he'd been languishing in a dungeon. Languishing. Perfect word for what he'd endured. Broken and hopeless in spirit and body, bruises from those Blackjack cunts still aching on his face and limbs, cursing himself for trying to bribe one of those wankers rather than just run for an alley like his kind usually did when they came swanning around on patrol. And yet, there he was: enjoying the cool night air, passing the ladies with a wink and a smile, enjoying their favorable looks as they heard the clink of metal, telling them he was a Man On The Rise.

"Spare some change, si-"

"Fates, fuck off, will you?" He snapped without even looking down at the shit-smelling collection of rags and hair and excrement, ignoring the extended bowl with its smattering of copper and spot or two of silver. "Told you cunts before about hanging aroiund this block."

"Yessir, thank yeh sir, I'll 'memer that, yes, thank yeh..."

Timmy kept walking and cursing under his breath and felt his hands curl into fists. Fucking disgrace, is what it was. He may have been a purveyor of powders and herbs to any sod who wanted a dose, but Fates knew he didn't shit in the street and dirty up the city just by existing. He paid his rent like everyone else, why did he have to walk past these wankers every day? If the Blackjack really wanted to help, wanted to improve the city, they'd round them all up and put them to work until they died.

Then his hands relaxed, at the thought of the Blackjack. More accurately, recent memories of them. How the Sergeant he'd spoken to had been so attentive, so transfixed with his words as he'd laid it out for him. Just the two of them, in a gloomy cell, with the armored law enforcer scratching down his words into a book. What he did. Whom he did it for. How long. How much. Whens and Wheres and Whos... especially the Whos. They always wanted to know those.

Hence why he was on the streets, and not languishing. Hence why he was changing his clothes, putting on something more stylish to match his good mood. Hells, even a scrawny bloke like him could look and smell divine with the right assistance.

"Timmy, you lucky cunt," he said, sliding the key into the lock of his lodgings and imagining sliding something else into somewhere else, quite soon. "You walk between the fucking raindrops, you really-"

The pain hit him like it always does: sudden, terrifying, devastating more because it obliterated his mood so completely. A sharp, bright, hot agony slammed into his back and Timmy's yelp was almost strangled as he jumped, hands groping and stretching comically, trying to reach-

Then he realized... it wasn't moving. It was just stuck there. Short and keen and pumping his precious blood around it but it was... little. The pain was there and it was a fucker but Timmy turned around and found anger overwhelming it. There was a tipping point, when it came to agony. Up to a certain level, it was just annoyance. Then your mind started working again, the panicked animal regained its sentience, and you turned your wits and your anger to retaliation-

Timmy knew that feeling. He'd been raised in the gutters and alleys and cobbled streets of Etzos. He'd took his beatings and doled them out, customers that turned violent, competition that needed to learn their place. So when he whirled and saw the little beggar man in front of him, standing as tall as one so slight could, he balled his fists and opened his mouth and-

Nature did not take its course. Because he opened his mouth again and... there was no flow. Not in, not out. He tried to breath in the curses and threats but there was nothing but a tightness, an absence that soon morphed into terror as Timmy-

could

not

breathe.

Kasoria blinked quickly. He'd already started counting, and didn't want to miss anything.

He circled the stricken pusher and took in every detail. The way Timmy took a step, then the second one finished him. Muscles rebelling against his mind, collapsing under his will as he fell forwards and landed on his side. The way he started to shake and spasm, brain fighting with his body, failing, countering, failing again. The veins on the side of his neck turned black and purple, pulsing like the tainted tubes that they were. The man's eyes bulged out of his head and froth began to ooze from his mouth, back arching savagely.

The killer knelt down, steadied the doomed, pitiful kid, and reclaimed his throwing knife. He'd taken an easy target, and a broad one, given the fact he was barely a beginner with them. He felt nothing for stabbing a man in the back, and adding insult to injury by doing it from fifteen feet away. His was not a world where victory was measured in stance or style or risk or honorable combat 'twixt even opponents. In Kasoria's world, if you got a chance to kill at a distance, you took it.

Victory was measured by survival in the Etzos underworld. But this victory was an experiment, also. He pulled the blade from the boy's back and could still smell the rank of the Ghost Mushroom smeared on it. He'd been very careful throwing it, that was for sure. Slid it back into its sheath on his thigh just as carefully, then turned his attention back to Timmy.

Wheezing. Chest heaving, or trying to. Hands trembling, shaking, face gone blue from the lack of air in his lungs. White fingers reached up for his cloak and Kasoria's face was a chilling opposite of the all-too-human terror it was looking at. Flat, black eyes peered curiously down, like a scholar observing a beetle pinned to a board. He blinked again, breath even and steady where Timmy's was nonexistent, still counting... still waiting...

Timmy's hand fell away and smacked limply onto the ground. All of him went limp. All of him seemed to sigh and shudder one last time, his soul departing along with all locomotion and the light that burned in his eyes. Kasoria craned his head closer... and saw naught but himself in those dead eyes.

One hundred and four trills. Good to know.

Randolf turned out not to have been bullshitting him, which Kasoria was grateful for. He doubted the hopelessly-addicted gambling junkie would still have his money; by now it was likely lost or wagered (same thing, when you were as useless with Luck as Randolf) on cards and dice and ponies and fight pits. He should have been happy, or as happy as a man like him could be. Satisfied, more likely. But instead the little man sighed and straightened back up... stretched his back out... then his arms... looking like a man limbering up for a hard day's work.

Not too far from the truth.

He reached down, grabbed the wrists of the very deceased but not yet stiff corpse up so he was sitting, and started to drag him to the sewer sluice gently gurgling on the other side of the road. He thanked the Fates that he had a skinny one for this job. He shoved and pushed and rolled the body into the black maw of the hole, until weight and gravity took over for him and-

-whipped the corpse over the edge, down into the blackness and-

Splash. He winced. Fuck. All this and he was going to get wet, too.

Kasoria sighed again and shook his head. Orders were orders, but he didn't have to like them. Vorund would usually trust him to handle "vanishing" a corpse his own way. Tried and tested, involving a liter of lamp oil, a forgotten corner of the underworld, and a candle. Fiery, hungry, thorough, and affordable... and most of all, he didn't have to get anyone else's help.

Again he sighed, and he shook his head, and he bore the demeanor of a working man put upon by irritating orders, as if the murder of another was merely an afterthought. Which, if he was honest, it was. He looked up and down the street and pondered if he'd been spotted. Maybe even observed. Possibly, but no matter. Timmy was a typical swaggering Etzosi hoodlum: loud and obvious and the whole street probably knew him and he doubted any would light candles for his fate. So when he slid into the grate after him, lithe form in no danger of getting stuck, he knew that once the street was deserted again save for a splash of blood, he knew those unseen eyes would turn away.

This was Etzos, after all. You minded your business, and kept out of the business of others.

Down in the darkness, Kasoria cursed and found the soaking thing he'd sent down there. Bobbing in the filth and already stiffening. He got his shoulder under the deceased Timmy, and with a grunt hoisted him up over his back... and started walking. Left, right, left right, focusing on the path ahead and not the creaks in his legs. He had a walk ahead of him, to be undertaken alone, to where the cobbles and tunnels ended, and the trees and open, unpolluted air reigned supreme.

Order were orders, but Kasoria was buggered if he could figure why Vorund wanted to use this mad bloody woman...

Thanks to Rumor for the template

[Lucretia Meadows]

Meadows

Lucretia had time to contemplate as she took a deep breath in and exhaled in a fluid motion easily allowing herself to sink into a relaxing state of calm as she had a seat on a rather bulky slab of stone that emerged out of the dirt.

She was outside the city walls once again, enjoying her moment of solitude as she collected her thoughts and simply put her magic wand to practice as she fiddled with the neck of her violin while her other hand rocked too and fro sliding the horse hair back and forth with careful and deliberate intention paid to wrist movement while her fingers clenched the frog of her bow tenderly as if for concern that it might interfere with the sound..

As the sorceress practiced playing her musical instrument, it was easier to fool around and learn new things when you weren't in public. Feeling as though being eyeballed and judged on your performance, and as a foundation of her craft shed take any time she could to practice. But this was different without instruction she was free to be fool around with simplicity. Notes that were easy, rhythms in her fingers that were also easy she understood her boundaries and played to them mistakes would happen but that was part of the learning process.

It didn't phase the aberrant necromancer much when Kasoria had made his way out of the city sewage grate. But then his timely arrival out of the shit pipe was to be expected as she smiled warmly in his direction.

And for the briefest moment her Harvester Voila had appeared looming over her shoulder the familiar took the form of a shadowy silhouette of Lucretia and while there were no features in the pitch black of its form one could easily surmise where it was looking before becoming ethereal and fading from existence.

A casual show of force without force, she had an allie unseen lurking everywhere but nowhere. Perhaps it was instinctive as a leader to assert some degree of recognition. Like a sword nonchalantly hanging off the hip, might make a bandit think twice whether or not the person behind the blade had the capacity to use it.

Afterall she did not want to appear weak.

"Good evening! I see you brought a friend? Excellent.

Don't mind my Diri it's more curious then dangerous."

[Kasoria]

Magic was a fact of life, but it wasn't just a fact of life. Yes, there were wizards and mages and necromancers and conjurers walking the world. They could read minds, throw fireballs, control earth and air, craft minions from corpses and even travel from one corner of the world to the other by tearing a hole in the sky and leaping through it. They could do all of these things, and more that Kasoria probably hadn't heard of.

But they weren't everywhere. Like rich people. The truly, spectacularly wealthy. They existed, yes, but they were one in a hundred, a thousand, a million. Those mages that could upset the course of nations and Nature itself were as rare as those lords and princes that could raise armies and command commerce to do much the same. Everyone else?

They just used it. To varying degrees of skill.

Case in point: the waif squatting upon a rock, rising up like an iceberg from the sea of mud. The reason it was mud, and not dirt, was because the outflow from the sewers came out nearby. Just one of many man-sized portals, yawning deep and tall and never really stopping. And marching out of it, looking just as foul as he smelled and thought at that moment, was Kasoria... with a "friend" across his shoulder.

Friend. Typical. Another lunatic.

Looking at the girl grinning at him from her perch, wand in one hand, instrument in the other, Kasoria fancied he could feel the crazy radiating off her. He'd heard from Vorund that she was a performer, a musician, an artist, so she already had a slightly skewed perception of the world. But throwing magic into the mix... that never helped with mental stability. Her eyes were too bright, the smile too broad, and he heard no sarcasm or satire in her voice when she described a sack of dead, stiff, already-moldering human as a friend.

Then he saw the shape, the shadow, the mist given shape and form, over her shoulder, and he had to suppress a shudder. That was the part he didn't like to admit, even to himself. That no matter the rank or ability, they dealt in power that was often beyond steel and muscle, the bedrocks of his living for decades. The thing that peered at him from over the girl's shoulder was made of nothing that could be sliced or carved or bludgeoned. And when it faded from sight completely...

"A'right, here's the job-" he heaved forward and pitched Timmy's corpse into the mud between them. There was a wet, slapping squelch, Timmy's arm's flung out like a tossed marionette. "-an' here's yer pay."

He reached into the folds of his shit-smelling cloak and tossed over the second purse that Vorund had provided. The larger one had been for him, of course. He was the one that stalked and observed and did in the little fucker, after all. But this half-mad little lady was handling the vanishing, so she got a piece, too. Kasoria wondered again why Vorund was even bothering, and bothering with a mage of all things, but he pushed the thought away and simply stood there.

Waiting for her to respond. To pick up the purse, check her payment, and do... whatever it was she did.

Wind blew around him. Seemed to reach out with fingers and hands that his eyes were blind to. Was it that thing he'd glimpsed moments before? Was it circling him, watching, waiting, hungry and asking constant permission of its master? Kasoria turned his attention back to the girl on the rock, whose name he didn't even know, and did some quick math.

Not numbers and fractions. Feet and trills. A hundred movements of muscles and limbs that he'd executed a thousand times before. All taking place over the... he would say seven feet of mud and night air between the two of them. Then he factored in how many different ways he could end a life, just with his bare hands, and weighed them against the time it would take for the mage to see him lunge, process her surprise, react, and deploy her powers for defense and retaliation.

It would take a trill for each. Kasoria would only need two. Maybe three. It was a reassuring thought.

"Don't mean t'rush yeh, girl," he said after a few moments, nodding curtly at the pile of flesh, still bearing black, corrupted veins from the poison that killed it. "But I gotta get back with word y'did yer job. So... if y'don't mind...?"

[Kasoria]

"It's done."

"Fucking SHIT, the FUCK?!"

He'd learned that in a place like a city, being quiet, and being still, could cut both ways. Sometimes being such was so incongruous, so unexpected, that you stood out like a severed thumb in a bowl of porridge. Everyone was rushing and moving and scheming and talking and so the one calm spot in the hurricane... well, it was hard not to spot it.

But sometimes, when there were nooks and crannies to take advantage of, and crowds to swell the sight of anyone who might be looking, it was a fine way to stay unnoticed. At night was the best time. He'd spent breaks on end in the shadows of half the alleys in Etzos. Swaddled in filthy clothes and garbage, controlling his breathing, limiting his movements to the slow, patient, rise-and-fall of his chest. Even if he was spotted, from such a fetid spot, people usually assumed he was bug a beggar... doubly so, when he usually dressed like one.

Being still, though. Just... not moving. Not drawing the mind's animal attention by movement... that was something he'd learned, too.

Which was probably why Tylos didn't notice him until he spoke. He should have felt bad about the big man's struck-by-lightning reaction, but... nah.

Tylos had been outside for a few bits, enjoying a dog-eared taper of foul-smelling baccy he'd been saving behind his ear. Vorund didn't like it in the warehouse. Well, no, that was a lie: he didn't like other people smoking it in his business: he puffed away at his pipe as often as he liked. Kasoria assumed the old man just preferred his brand... or he could just be bloody crotchety. Halfway through his seventh decade walking the world, it was as likely to be one as the other.

He hadn't been the first. Over the break, Kasoria had seen a couple of people come out the side door. Both leaving for good. One had passed within a few feet of him, close enough for Kasoria to read the embroidery on the side of his boot, and nary a glance was thrown his way. That was the thing about people: they expected others to announce themselves. Someone who just watched, without a word or a twitch... that was odd. Unexpected. Unprepared for.

Which was what Kasoria had done, and so he had passed below their note. Until he saw Tylos emerge. One of a handful of tough, towering bruisers that Vorund kept handy. Bodyguard and gofer both, as far as Kasoria could tell. Trusted to relay messages and protect his personage, act as a buffer between him and any visitors, but yet to graduate to the messy work that Kasoria excelled at. Some of them never would: blunt, brutal, uncomplicated strength was their forte, and much as Vorund liked to nurture talent, he could also appreciate old-fashioned muscle.

The little man had watched the big man smoke until the face clicked in his memory. He was one that could be trusted to deliver the message. He took a step out the shadows... and still the big man didn't move. Then he spoke, and Tylos nearly leaped out of his skin.

"Fucking Fates and their fucking Cunts, are you mad?!" He cursed as the short-arse vagrant strode out into view, or at least what view the gloomy alley provided, with naught but moonlight illuminating it. "The fuck are you babb-bub-"

Kasoria stepped closer, and tilted his head up so his face could be seen. Clearly. Unmistakably, given the way that Tylos' words tripped across his tongue and then didn't bother getting up again. The thug's eyes widened and the dog-end between his fingers was forgotten. Kasoria smiled mentally, but kept his face serene. Recognition was not something he craved, even remotely... but it was so much easier when people recognized him. Saved him a lot of time.

"You know me?"

"I... Yeah. Yeah, you and the boss-"

"Tell him it's done," Kasoria said, taking it slow, not wanting to overload a simple and clearly nervous mind. "Tell him I handled the problem, and the girl got rid of it. Do you un-"

"Fuck!" Tylos jumped again and flailed as the sizzling taper-end burned down and scorched his fingers. "Stupid sodding thing..."

Kasoria sighed. Audibly. It was enough to make Ty get back on fucking point and nod his head like a broken doll.

"I-I understand. Er, yeah. You, ah, you handled the problem, and-and the... who got rid of it?"

"The girl. That's all you need to say. He'll know what you mean."

He turned to leave and Tylos surprised him. Showed a spark of initiative that, if well-tended, could give him a future beyond glowering at people from behind Bangun Vorund's shoulders, and breaking errant legs. "You... sure you don't wanna tell him yourself?"

Now Kasoria smiled. Just quickly, so much so that Tylos was barely sure he saw it behind his beard. He could have just moved his lips around. Then he shook his head and kept walking.

"No need."

Tylos had other questions, but no answers would be coming. His night over and confirmation delivered, Kasoria didn't pause as he strode back into the dark. Tylos heard footsteps for a few trills, and then they just stopped. Like the man had vanished. He cocked his head and peered closer, but no flicker or glimmer hinted at anything living in the shadows. He sucked his cooked fingertips for a moment and then went back inside, muttering to himself with a grimace.

"Bloody Raggedy Man..."

But he was careful to whisper, and not dare any more than that.

[Inali]

Congratulations!

Kasoria

Loot: 125gn
Injuries: None
Renown: Slight Impact - 5
Devotion: None
Magic: None

Skill Points: 15
Knowledges (Skills):
-Blades (Throwing Knives): The Back is a Nice, Broad Target
-Blades (Throwing Knives): Fifteen Feet is a Safe Range for a Novice
-Discipline: Taking The Time to Make a Useful Observation
-Poisons: How Long It Takes Ghost Mushroom (Weapon Smear) To Kill
-Stealth: Still, Silent, Unnoticed
-Strength: Carrying a Corpse
-Intimidation: Simple words, spoken casually, can instill fear
-Intimidation: Words don’t need to be spoken to gain respect
Knowledges (Misc):
-Magic: Real, But Rare
-PC Lucretia Meadows: Young, Unstable, Musician and Mage

Notes: I know you requested a large bounty for this post, but given the amount of effort taken to kill Timmy and the fact that there was no official Etzos Bounty Board post that detailed the level of danger that Timmy presented, I feel that this is fair and in line with the rewards of bounties from other cities. 125gn is a lot – many people take an entire season to earn that much. If you did write multiple threads before this where you did research on Timmy, procured the poison specifically for this kill, or the amount established by Vorund was approved in another thread, the bounty could be raised accordingly.
The thread was interesting – I liked seeing a ‘problem-solver’ working with a ‘body-solver’. I particularly enjoyed Kasoria’s analysis of magic – I think he definitely has the right level of respect and disdain given his position. Well written all around! I gave you intimidation knowledges since I think your PC definitely has that vibe.

Please place a peer review icon in your original post so others know this thread has been reviewed. PM me with any questions!

@Lucy – Please post this thread in the reviews section with your requested knowledges when you return and we’ll be more than happy to review it for you!