Welcome or Unwelcome?

Winks the goblin sits, despondently, on a stool behind the bar in Stran's training warehouse. Wiping down the bar with a rag, he lets a sigh escape his dirty cracked lips. He had already done his daily training routine, and taken the render on its walk to make sure it gets excercise. Now he's bored, and a bored goblin infused with the essence of the shadow plane can be a dangerous thing.

Looking for a little excitement, even though he knows it won't work, he tries to use his innate ability to travel the planes to head to the Plane of Shadow. All it does is give him a headache for his effort.

"Gods-damned mage. Keeping me here. And even if it's none of his doing, may the gods damn him anyway...Of course, maybe they already have, and that's why he's here in the first place too. It's bad enough he got trapped here, but did I have to get involved too? To say nothing of his family. I almost wish for the old Stran back. This one almost never DOES anything. The old Stran took money to kill people, and then when that dried up went out to kill demons because he felt like it. Got some damn good training too. I don't remember too many people that were better fighters than him. Well, in a fair fight anyway. It's a good thing I make it a point not to stab friends in the back, figuratively and literally."

Winks turns around and fills a mug from one of the tapped ale-barrels. After draining half of it he tops it off again and turns back to the bar.

"Nope, the only one I could think of that could match, or exceed, Stran in a fight would be Ret. That damned drow taught him a lot of what he knows. But as they say, 'no teacher teaches everything.'"

A voice pipes up from in front of the bar, "tell me about Ret'indall, Uncle Winks."

Winks almost chokes on his ale as the voice catches him by surprise. Looking over the bar, he sees Serin, Stran's eight-year old son. The boy has dark hair like his father, but streaks of gold are just beginning to peek out on random strands on his head. Winks would find this contrast interesting, if he didn't already know that those of Stran's race, Magiks, always manifest a gold tint somewhere on their body. Stran's gold is in his eyes, Winks thinks to himself, and it looks like Serin's will be in his hair. Serin has a glass ball, which he efortlessly makes float in the air between his two hands.

"You really wanna know about that drow, boy?"

Serin nods, "Father never talks about him in front of me, and when I ask it's always 'when you're older.' Can you tell me anything about him Uncle Winks? Father always says that you and Ret were the closest things to friends that he had before he met Mother."

Winks scratches at an itch above his eye with a long gray fingernail. "Well I guess you will figure some of it out eventually. Come on." The goblin jumps down from his stool and walks around the bar to meet Serin. Wow, he thinks, the boy is almost taller than me. He's going to be tall like his father I'll bet.

He leads Serin to the back of the warehouse, where four portraits hand on the wall. One is of Stran, another Winks, and another of a woman. The fourth has the image of a dark-skinned elf, a sword strapped to each hip. Winks looks at the boy.

"Now, you know that your father didn't have so easy of a life before he met your mother, and even then things weren't all cream and sugar," Serin nods, "but do you really know what he used to do?"

"He was...he...," the boy lowers his head and mutters, "he killed people for money."

"That's right, and I know he doesn't want you to know about it but you're a smart boy, you overhear things and figure it out from there. Me, him, Ret, and," his hand absently waves at the portrait of the woman, "we were all part of a group of killers, a guild. It wasn't one of those fancy guilds like the blacksmiths or the merchants that's actually recognized by a city, but everyone knew about us anyway. We had our hands so deep in the city's pockets they'd never do anything against us. Now Ret, he was the head of our guild, the guy in charge. When it came to killing, he liked to do it face to face, as opposed to people like me that would sneak up behind you and stab you in the neck. He was in the full favor of his god too. The Dark Warlord loved his brutality, the fact that he looked into the face of his victims before cutting it off."

Serin squirms a little from his seat on the floor, obviously not comfortable with the imagery. Winks smiles, getting into his story.

"I'm sure your pops has told you a watered down story of how he got his book back from the crazed mage-priest, and how the four of us tried making a 'peaceful' life for ourselves outside of the city. Yeah that lasted about as long as an elf in the Goblin Woods. I left first, and didn't see your father again until I showed up here, but luckily he filled me in on what happened with him and Ret. See, Ret saw something in your father I guess no one else did. Up until then he relied on his magic to get all of his jobs done, even though you can tell he's a pretty good physical specimen. So Ret decides to get him trained proper in swordsmanship, and takes him to the drow homeland. They refuse to train him so Ret does it himself. The two of them forged something during that time, and I wish I knew what. Friendship is the wrong word for it I think. But anyway, they both joined a purification squad, you know, those groups dedicating to ridding our world of demons, and one night they were ambushed. Your father was the only one who survived, even though he never found Ret's body. I believe it was...vrocks, that's it, and those things are known for completely destroying everything around them. That was actually right before he met your mother."

Serin looks from Winks, to the portrait of Ret, and back to Winks. "Uncle Winks, is that a good picture of him?"

"Well," he looks at it for a moment, "it's alright. They got him right, but they got the most distinctive part of him wrong: his weapons. That one's got him with two longswords, that's not what he used at all. I remember clearly. In one hand he always had a saber with a jagged tip, and the other was a shortsword with a groove in the middle that held liquid mercury. Made it cut harder or some such."

"And those are exactly what he used?"

"Yes, boy! Why do you...keep...asking..." Winks' eyes glance at his right shoulder where the blade of a saber, the tip horribly jagged, is laying on top of his vest. A glance at his left shoulder shows the blade of a shortsword in the same position. He can feel the weight of them bearing him down, and looks back at Serin, a frightened look on his face. "Well, this is a surprise..."

To be continued...

	Author	Topic: Welcome or Unwelcome? (Read 322 times)
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