Chapter 18 – A Quiet Stroll (Patreon)

When I got up the following day, I felt like a new person. I had slept through the night without any interruptions, and my body was alert, my mind afire. Except, it was 6 AM, and the trio was still asleep. Loud snores reverberated, and even the tiny Arack produced an impressive ruckus - like the keening sound of a grasshopper, amplified tenfold. Tiptoing out the door, I noticed that the resurrection debuff had thankfully expired - only to be replaced by a 'hungry' debuff. My stomach rumbled in agreement with the debuff. I found my way into the classroom and opened my inventory, eliciting an involuntary groan. Two rations of bread and four of water. I forced down a serving of each, trying not to think too hard on what a 'starving' debuff would feel like.

Sated, I started nosing around a little - I didn't want to start the day off with a bad impress by waking everybody. Among the tables I found a good pile of books written in the kobold language, and just one in common - 'The rise and fall of peace.' That did sound promising, but rifling through the pages, I realized that it was merely a first-person tale of a war, written from the perspective of a halfling. The other books were chock full of gibberish - or at least, so it seemed to me. The letters used in the books were common letters, but their content made no sense to me. It read to me like it sounded. Harsh, rough and indecipherable. The contents on to the so-called blackboard - a couple of boards nailed together, more like - were no different. Still, I was able to make out a few things. One of the hand-drawn images was clearly a map of the area, and even with the gibberish in place, I could tell that there was a lot going on in the surrounding area. No clue as to what, of course.

"Spying, are we?"

The gruff voice from behind caught me by surprise, and I spun around to see Darek squinting suspiciously at me. When my heart calmed down a bit, I responded. "If only. I was skulking around to see if I could learn something useful by myself until you guys woke up. I'd have to learn the language to become a more efficient spy though." I indicated all the texts in Kobold. "By the way, Arack tells me that you're training her combat skills. Would it be possible for me to receive some training from you as well? I'd find something to pay you properly, of course.”

I'm not entirely sure how a 1.3 meter tall reptilian was able to look down on me, but that was clearly what was happening. "I don't do that for just anyone. Behave yourself, and we might be able to figure something out."

Fair enough. I nodded my understanding. "Muriel's showing me the city later on. Could you tell me a little about the surroundings though?"

He nodded. "I could. And that, I don't mind. Only - we are going to start elsewhere."

"We...are?"

"Yes. Take a seat. If you meant what you said earlier, you will need help. Not with geography either, or knowledge about the surrounding enemies or expansions. No, you will need an introduction to our language." He walked to stand before the improvised blackboard, standing straight, like lecturing was something natural to him. "First off, only about half of us speak Common - and among the Anathema, the number is lower. You don't need a lengthy explanation, but gatherer castes and below are not taught Common. Now, enough introductions - I'm going to get some breakfast, and then we will see if there's a chance for you to learn or not."

True to his word, he returned moments later, gnawing on something, and the lecture started. No lengthy grammatical explanations or anything, he just launched straight into rote memorization of different phrases, and I struggled with the unfamiliar sounds. Or - that's what I expected. Instead, I found that keeping track of the foreign syllables and guttural sounds went over surprisingly well. Even when he asked me to repeat some of the phrases back to him shortly thereafter, I didn't mangle them too badly. I'm not sure how that made sense - foreign languages had always come pretty easily to me, but not this easily. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd attribute my success to the fact that this was my life now. Back in school, I'd always been pretty half-assed about my efforts, but now? Now my eventual success might revolve around being able to understand some questgiver who only spoke Kobold, and by Gygax, I wasn't going to fail from a lack of effort. Well, that, or Exogenics had some mind-affecting technology in place, allowing for your skills and classes to affect your learning pace. Heh.

Darek was a pretty decent teacher. He ignored any lesser mistakes, taking pains only to correct my worst errors and point out which words meant what. About an hour later, it felt like a couple of hundred phrases were floating around in my skull, bouncing off each other.

He grunted. "That should be enough for now. Try to use it later today. If you're still here tomorrow, we'll try to put it into system for you."

I thanked him profusely, though I wondered at the craziness of it. Would they actually require me to learn an entire frigging language in order to speak with all the npcs in the city? That was crazy. And if your language skills were nonexistant - would you just be cut off from being able to complete these kinds of quests? I was sure I'd heard that you could learn this stuff from quests. Ah, well, at least I'd gained a quest from it.

[You have been offered a quest: "When in Nerit..." (Chronicler quest)

The kobolds of Nerit are an insular people and not everybody speaks Common. Learn to master the Kobold language before you leave.

Reward:

Variable. Depends on the level of success.

Accept/decline?]

I accepted the quest, albeit with a grimace. Still, whatever it took. Darek had left before me, so I ambled back to the main room, where Muriel was lazing about.

He looked up at me, comfortably reclined on a moldy old mattress. "Ready to meet the real world, rookie?" And thus started my introduction to the city of the Fallen.

The town looked quite different in full daylight. For one, I was able to appreciate just how dilapidated most buildings here were. The rare wall still standing was typically riddled though with cracks or crooked. Whenever somebody had erected or added to an actual building they inevitably looked on the verge of collapse.

When I asked why this was the case, he snapped his teeth closed, before continuing in his usual carefree tone: "Because of arseholes. You know, it isn't enough that we're not a part of society anymore. Thracken forbid that we might actually end up enjoying ourselves now and again. So, sometimes, a group of bastards will tear through the place, make a ruckus. You don't want to appear to be too well-off or just to be having fun – or they'll make sure the fun ends."

"What? But aren't the Fallen supposed to," I flung my hands in the air, searching for words, "be below notice or something?"

"Sure. As soon as you're pronounced Anathema, you don't officially count anymore. Only, what would it look like, if Anathema walked around the city, just enjoying ourselves and having a good time of it, right?" He spat. "So, we get these self-promoted 'guardians of justice' - or however the self-righteous bastards like to think of themselves – who believe it's their job to keep us down. And everybody else just turns a blind eye. Hypocrites."

We walked in silence for a bit while I chewed on his comments. "That's – a lot to take in. I'm sorry."

He shrugged. "Not your fault – and I'm used to it." His eyes lit up to match his predatory grin. "Pits, I excel at it. Most people get beaten down by these circumstances. I - am not most people."

In addition to the surrounding poverty, it was easy to see that the destruction that'd taken place had been much more thorough here on the outskirts compared to the center of the city. One thing made no sense to me though. "Muriel, what's the deal with this street?"

"What?"

"Why are all the walls crooked? The ones that are still standing, I mean."

He looked at me for a long while. "I know you just got here, but seriously - you're that ignorant? How did you even find Nerit in the first place - get lost looking for the capitol? Nevermind, don't answer that." He gestured around him. "What do you think Nerit is?"

It felt like this was leading up to another crack about my ignorance, so I shrugged. "A crappy place to live? Placed in the middle of nowhere? Home to the most theatrical Liberator on Neyrus?"

He barked a laugh. "Right on all counts. Although, don't say that last part too loud – some people around here are still pretty hung up on Thracken even though he's turned his backside on them. No, the answer you didn't know you were looking for is 'a platform'."

I did not know how to respond to that. We were more than a month's walk from any larger body of water. He must be talking about a metaphorical island or some such nonsense. I opened my mouth to tell him as much, right when a few things clicked for me. The huge crater surrounding the city. The destroyed buildings and sudden change from the forest climate to the barren ground of the city itself. "Noooo."

"Oh yes. Surprised it took you this long to figure out, really."

"But - really? I mean, a platform of this size?"

"Arcangelo, you need to work on your game face. Some of the Fallen will chew you up and spit you out, if they get a whiff of just how clueless you are. Yes, Nerit used to be a floating platform, traveling the air over the forest. No, I don't know why it came to rest and the ground. No, I don't care. It's ancient history, and it's clearly not getting back up again."

I turned full circle, watching my surroundings with fresh eyes. Now I knew, I couldn't unsee it. It was crystal clear, how everything was subtly tilted to the side, and the buildings near the edge had suffered a worse shock and were more clearly crooked than the rest. I could - barely - understand how Muriel didn't care about it, but still. The idea of an entire city of belligerent reptiles floating through the air in search for war was just...scary. "Sooo - any other revelations you want to throw at me? And where are we off to, by the way?"

"Pittance Square. It's the one gathering place they allow us. You'll see why"

After that, he went quiet on me, and I resigned myself to waiting, until we got there. It wasn't a long walk. Even with the broken landscape of the ruined city remnants, I almost believed I'd be able to find my way back without using the map. I could hear the place before I was able to see it, and, to my detriment, when I was able to survey the place, the smell also arrived. "What the - gah?" I almost choked from the stench, and held my sleeve over my nose to filter away the worst of it.

Muriel just laughed and kept trotting towards the fringes of the place. "You'll get used to it. Or not."

It looked like it had been a peaceful place, once upon a time. A marketplace, perhaps, with a large pool in the middle that might have served for cooling down on warm days. My, how things had changed. It was an oval space, hard-packed dirt with the occasional old cobblestone visible here and there, surrounded by decrepit ruins on all sides, and the pool in the middle had been repurposed to serve as a garbage container. What really made an impression though, was the crowd. Or throng. Mob, maybe. However I'd name it, the place was completely packed with kobolds - and it seemed like they were all shouting for attention at the same time.

A number of people which I assumed to be merchants had set up simple stalls along the edge of the crowd. In addition to this, it seemed like the crowd contained any sort of medieval entertainment or activity I could come up with and then some. A trio of the fattest kobolds I'd ever seen were smoking some sort of hookah right next to where a scantily clad pair were performing a song and dance routine that was more risqué than the few striptease joints I'd visited in my life. A thick carpet held four serious-looking lizards engrossed in a game of Fingers, while two muscled hunters were keeping onlookers at a safe distance. Drinks and drugs, merchandise of all sorts, it seemed like there were no limitations in place - and while the place was packed with lizards in rags and beggards, some of the visitors seemed way too well off for Anathema. I said as much to Muriel - well - shouted, really, and he nodded.

"Good to see you catching up a bit faster now. That's why they let us keep this place. Cause it's the only spot where the 'good' people of Nerit can go slumming to indulge in their darker passions before they go back to being outstanding citizens working for the greater good of Thracken again."

I could practically hear the sarcasm oozing from him along with thinly veiled hatred. I hazarded a guess: "so, I'm betting you might be the type who makes certain that these fine people get a chance to remember their foray - am I right?"

That got his grin back alright. "Yeah, I'm a helper. It's an balancing act though. You do something too obvious, and they'll come down on you like a Dawnlight Soarer on a Scattermouse. Oh, and we'll want to move on pretty quickly too. Somebody here's bound to know that Talen's looking for you and run off to tattertail in exchange for a heel of bread."

I needed no further encouragement. We moved on, a bit brisker, and I started noticing the looks I was getting. Clearly, being half again as tall as the average kobold added some novelty value. People didn't seem too judgmental though - more curious. Muriel was steering us towards the far end of the court, where the crowd was even thicker, but people were less unruly somehow. I soon figured out the reason why. When we got closer, I could see a handful of boxes placed behind a roped-off area.

A thickset lizard with heavy leather armor stepped onto a box and began to extoll his business in a booming voice. "I'm accepting eight today. Full day of work. Rewards as usual - three days worth of food. Healthy bodies only. Any sickness or scale rot and you'll regret applying. Same goes for weaklings. Now line up, you sorry critters." The last part he shouted at the top of his lungs, and the crowd quickly separated into the hopeful and those who decided not to apply.

Muriel stood still with a frown on his face. "They're going to be removing earth and rock, so miners can get to the ore. Two back-breaking eight-hour shifts back to back, and you'll get enough to feed you for two days, tops. And there's almost always somebody who gets hurt." He shook his head before continuing. "They're some of the better gigs though. Sometimes, when things are looking bad, Darek has to accept one of the baiting missions and those are notorious for being dangerous."

"Baiting missions?"

"Yeah, you want to take out a really dangerous animal, but don't like risking your trained warriors? Just load up on disposable bodies, outfit them with some sharpened sticks, and have them bait the animal while your hunters turn it into a pincushion from afar." My disbelief must've stood out on my face, because he continued. "You forget, Arcangelo. You are no longer a person. You're Anathema. Get used to it."

"That's a tall order. Get used to slavery?" He shrugged, as if it were an everyday thing, which I suppose it was. Still, containing the anger inside me was not easy. Hearing it told was one thing, but seeing how people were treated as expendable commodities and worth less than people really got my blood boiling. With a serious effort, I tamped down my emotions, where they remained, simmering, but by no means forgotten.

“Muriel?”

"Yes?"

"Mind if I take a quick round, see what the possibilities are for myself?"

He shrugged. "By all means. I’ll hang around, make sure you’re not doing anything too stupid."

If I was supposed to make myself known around here, I went for a tour of the square, trying to identify where any possible approaches lay and which avenues to avoid. Truly, it was an educational walk. The first thing I learned was how most of the content in the square was the tiniest step above crap. Any items were poor quality, food looked like anything but food and their clothes – dear God, those pitiful rags. 

I did investigate a few spots. Out of curiosity, I joined the line for the mining gig – but the quest details were chilling. 150 experience for a full day’s work and 150 rep with the castes of Nerit. Urgh. No frigging way was that an option – it’d take me a year to gain the next reputation level, especially since my reputation gain was halved.

The gamblers caught my interest too. Still, a couple of minutes watching taught me that it’d be out of question to begin with. Their skill level was superior to mine by far, and I’d need more than a hand up to earn my keep that way. With Muriel’s help it might not be impossible though – he did say that he was a gambler himself.

There were a few performers dispersed throughout the square. After a while, I seemed to notice a theme and waited for Muriel to catch up. “Those performers – they don’t perform for the Fallen?”

He looked confused for a bit. “What would be the point of that? It’s not like we’re going to pay. Also, why risk it? Some self-proclaimed hero might take offense if we were to enjoy ourselves.”

Wow. So I’d be limited to sucking up to the castes? Exogenics weren’t offering the most enticing jobs here. So far, it looked like I’d have the best results learning how to become a gambler, or possibly setting myself up as a merchant.

Muriel tugged on my sleeve, breaking me out of my introspection. "What?"

"One of Talen's cronies – let's get going!"

I looked where he was pointing, and indeed, one of the hunters who'd been chasing me was forcing his way through the crowd, weapon at the ready. I ignored Muriel's voice and raised the violin. The soothing notes of "Das Wiegenlied" were a stark contrast to the angry tune from before. The look on my assailant's face changed from determination to dull confusion, before he finally slumped to the ground, sleeping. "Anybody else here right now?" I asked Muriel?

"No."

"Good." I walked towards the fallen hunter. The crowd moved around me and the air was buzzing with chatter. The hunter was snoring loudly in the middle of the plaza as if it was the most comfortable feather bed known to reptiles. I stood before him and fished out my trusty old short spear, and then spoke aloud in favour of the crowd. "Kill me once, shame on you. Kill me twice or more, shame on me." With a flourish, I held the spear high. A collective gasp rose from the crowd as I dropped to my knees, bringing the spear down...and stopped. I rifled through the hunter's pockets, taking a few odds and ends, before dusting off my hands and getting back up with a grin on my face. The crowd reacted with stunned silence and a few titters. At my side, Muriel was staring in disbelief, but I patted his back and started walking.

We made it outside the plaza without any incidents, and Muriel led the way through a shortcut that lost the couple of curious kobolds that were trailing behind. A low opening through a half-collapsed wall allowed for passage into the still-standing skeleton of a tiny old dwelling.

He sat back against the wall, but almost immediately sprang back up, pacing back and forth. "That was possibly the funniest thing I've seen this year. You are aware that you've just made an enemy today, right? Derth - that's the guy you lulled to sleep - is never going to live that down. And you going through his belongings, just for kicks?" He laughed nervously.

I was pawing through the handful of stuff I'd pocketed. Garbage. More garbage, Some sort of gem - I'd check that one out later. Oh. Some sort of candied nuts, maybe? I tried one out. "Mmmh that's good. To be honest, Muriel, I don't see what else they can do to me - they already killed me once. Want a handful?"

He stared at me in disbelief for a second, before shaking his head and laughing silently. "Pits, why not. You're insane, Arcangelo. I like your style though."

After a few minutes of companionable munching, I wiped the sugar from my hands. "So - where off to now?"

"Depends. You still intend to somehow gain an audience with the Chief?"

"Yup. Stubbornness is one of my best traits."

"Aha. Sure. Well, in that case there is no avoiding it. We'll have to pay a visit to Oath, that old lunatic."