Looks like it. Added back to turn. Ruddy conditionals.
Additionally, we have had a request for extension.
(Incidentally, the discord is a lovely place for storyboarding for the otherwise plastic Hunters.)
(Disclaimer: just because I am the GM does not make my items more canon than anyone else. Just felt like writing.)
Eraman Lee clenched his fists at his sides as he stood before the Tavern. It shouldn't exist where it did. No sane person would have built a Tavern here, and no sane defense planner would have allowed it. The Tavern was located in an open section of the cavern just behind the primary lift that connected to the surface farms. The open space had, in years past, been left open intentionally as a killbox in the event that attackers breached the external checkpoint and assaulted through the lift. Local lore said that the Tavern had started with a few citizens delivering drinks out to soldiers on guard, then setting a few stools and tents down, then stringing those stools and tents together. The powers that be; the loose alliance of guards, haven watch, miners, growers, and administrators, had never had it officially abolished, so the ramble grew. Tents joined together into large rooms, lines hung from the cavern roof supported a sloped canvas 'ceiling', and strings of hooded lanterns lit the entire structure like softly bouncing will-o-the-wisps. The ramble became 'The Tavern'. People called it various things, but no one ever got to 'name' it because no one exactly 'owned' it. People brought bottles of booze, traded coin and barter from the tenders, the tenders paid a few coins to servers and cooks, and charged what they could out of the regulars. No one owned anything here. If they did, there would have been someone to tell to tear it down. As it was all the Watch, the Administrators, or anyone could do was to tell the regulars to up and leave. Which wasn't going to happen.
Because the regulars, the people who frequented the-Tavern-that-shouldn't-exist, the Tavern so close to the surface a strong arm could chunk a rock all the up the lift shaft out into the fields above, were Doctors. Doctors, and their Holy Hunters.
Nobody would be fool enough to trifle with that community.
Eraman swallowed the terror rising in him. He was, in a manner of speaking, about to trifle with that community. He'd prepared for this moment a hundred times, lying awake in his bunk while the other apprentices slept and planning out what he'd do and what he'd say. He knew, one way or another, that he wasn't like his peers. He was good with tools, and his master said he had an eye for the work, which was high praise from the curmudgeonly old man, but Eraman couldn't stand by and cut and shape leather for his whole life - not while Holy Hunters fought and died so he could hide in a cavern. He couldn't be a Hunter himself, but he could take some of the weight off the blessed warriors who had bought Haven its recent resurgence of hope and life. Eraman knew well the stories of the... instabilities and eccentricities of the Hunters, but he could weather that if it meant doing something with meaning. He would introduce himself to the first Hunter he saw in the Tavern, explain what he could do, and pledge service.
With a stomach that churned acid and a heart full of fear, Eraman squared himself with the Tavern's door. In a gesture of eccentricity or defiance, someone had actually given the conjoined-tent-structure of a Tavern a real wooden door. It didn't make sense, but it gave the integrally transient building a bizarre sort of threshold - a rubicon that Eraman could reach out his hand to trespass. If he turned back now, he'd either slip back to the bunks unnoticed or get a tongue-lashing from one of the journeymen if caught. It wouldn't really matter, both would be a safe retreat to a life of ease and relative comfort. If he went forward, he'd be signing up for a life of pain and battle at best, and a protracted but horrific death at worst. Despite knowing what awaited him, Eraman knew the choice he had to make. He'd been too young when the cursed moon rose, too weak, to choose to fight, but now-
"In 'er out ye fuckin' donkey," growled a half-slur from behind Eraman.
Eraman whipped around, stammering an apology at the Haven Watch veteran behind him, the old guardsman's conical hat lopsided on his greying head. The guardsman looked more confused than anything else at Eraman's dallying in front of the door, and Eraman reflexively opened the door for the older man out of politeness, letting him enter the tavern first.
The old soldier narrowed his eyes, as though looking for some implied slight, then crooked his hand in an extremely impolite gesture and stumped past.
Eraman found himself standing awkwardly in the Tavern doorway, the line of no-return he'd talked up so far in his head suddenly blurred and trespassed. Eraman shrugged helplessly and muttered a quick prayer to Laikasa for favorable judgment, then ducked inside.
The interior of the Tavern was everything Eraman had imagined. The draped canvas ceiling was thick and blackened with pipe-smoke, adding a perpetual misty haze. Dried grass and rushes, matted with unidentifiable stains, obscured the cavern floor completely. Several half-open tent flaps on the walls implied 'private' rooms adjoining the main tent area, and the bar itself was a massive structure of tables, chests, cabinets, and counters that had all been nailed together in the center of the room. A dozen patron tables in varying sizes filled out the rest of the main tent, with various groups of guard and watch veterans clustered up closer to the bar while behind them, with a good row of empty chairs separating the groups, several doctors sat in deep conversation.
As Eraman looked around, panic suddenly flared in his chest. In all his imaginings of this scenario, he'd never considered the possibility that he'd get this far and fail to find a Holy Hunter at the Tavern. Frantically he scanned back through the doctor's tables, his eyes eventually settling on a figure seated alone in a thick cloak, the hood still pulled up. They seemed to be doing nothing at all, just staring straight down into the mug in front of them. There was no way to be sure, but it was possible that...
As Eraman watched, the figure growled and smashed their mug with a lightning-fast backhand, shattering the wooden vessel to splinters and spraying a quarter cup of booze across the walls of the tent. For a heartbeat, the conversation stopped. Patrons looked up, looked to the table occupied by the solitary individual, and the conversation resumed as the rest of the patrons collectively disregarded the event. The solitary figure didn't stand, they just remained seated with arms still raised as though inspecting them. Even from where Eraman stood, he could see the strange burls that warped the Holy Hunter's limbs, growths like armor both perverting and shielding their flesh.
Holy Hunter Ochyrosi.
Eraman's heart hammered in his chest. Definitely not the Hunter he'd hoped to pledge himself to.
Still. He had a plan. Just had to stick to the plan. Ochyrosi was a divine instrument. She would recognize and honor his conviction. She would. Definitely.
He just might have a drink first in order to work up a really good head of conviction.
The bar itself had a couple of open clusters of stools, and Eraman seated himself as far from the other patrons as he could. The closer of the two bartenders, a woman who looked old enough to have a decade on Eraman, but young enough to credibly claim she wasn't yet thirty, mercifully noticed him immediately and saved Eraman the trouble of trying to flag her down. He hadn't been in many places that served alcohol, and the dukes apprentice work was worth did not buy anything beyond a few flagons of fungus-based beer for the Holy days and celebrations.
"Hey, new face," the woman said as she walked over to his empty section, leaving a couple other bar patrons to their drinks. She was tall, probably taller than Eraman if he was standing, with shoulder-length gentle curls of sandy brown hair that probably would have lightened to blonde if it got out in the sun enough. Her face was armored in the cheap makeup made from miner's black and crushed redbug from the subterranean river, but her expression was surprisingly kind. "You get lost, kiddo, or did you come here for a drink?"
Eraman tried not to let the 'kiddo' sink in as he took the stool. "A drink," he said, trying to make his voice steady and deep, practicing for when he addressed Ochyrosi.
"M-hm." The bartender crossed her arms under her breasts and leaned up against one of the bolted-together liquor cabinet, arching an eyebrow slightly.
Eraman held her gaze until it started to become uncomfortable. Which was very quickly. "Um. Please?"
The woman laughed, a sound so strange in the Tavern that it paused the conversation for almost as long as Ochyrosi's violent outburst. "Kiddo, do I look like a nun of the Telepathic Heart? What is it you want to drink?"
"Oh, right, er," Eraman felt his cheeks heat as the voice he’d been practicing broke completely. "Just a mushroom beer, please. Sorry."
The woman gave a joking half curtsy and filled a mug, setting it down in front of him and waiting for him to take a drink before leaning back up against the liquor cabinet where she'd been before. "So, new face, you've got your drink, you don't look lost..." She grimaced suddenly, her expression betraying a fleeting pain as she shifted against the cabinet. "And I have to ask, and you know I have to ask, what's a nice kiddo like you doing in a place like this?"
"I," Eraman started, then felt the flush that had only just begun to subside come back and he let the words die. Telling an ordinary person about what he wanted to do suddenly seemed incredibly stupid.
The woman's smile became conspiratorial and she leaned in. "Don't worry, I can keep a secret. Impressing a girl? Trying to get into the Haven Watch? Oooh, black market contact for a Doctor?"
Eraman steadied himself. Fixing his vision on the woman's nose. He could do this. If he could tell this woman, he could tell Holy Hunter Ochyrosi. "I, Eraman Lee, come to pledge my life and service to aid the Holy Hunters in their divine quest against the cursed moon. I have little to give, but I owe everything I am and more to those who fought and died to bring me to safety and prosperity. What little it is, I wish to pledge it to the Holy Hunt, so that I may protect others as I have been protected, and pay back the debt I have deepened with each self-serving breath taken before this moment." Eraman felt a small tug of pride as he finished. He hadn't stuttered, his voice hadn't broken. Hesitantly, Eraman broke his death stare on the bartender's nose and really looked at her expression.
She seemed surprised, but, mercifully, she also looked like she was taking him seriously. "Wow. That's a helluva thing."
Eraman nodded, fidgeting and glancing back to the table where Ochyrosi was now sitting silent and alone again. "I just don't know how to properly address Holy Hunter Ochyrosi to take me as their... squire? Assistant? I don't know." Eraman shook his head and took another long drink of the mushroom beer. It was aggressively terrible, but his stomach had been so twisted thinking of this moment that he hadn't eaten today and the brew was calming him quickly. "All I know is that I can't let other people bleed for me any more. I can't just work an ordinary job like, like some miner, or leatherworker or - "
The woman nodded, following along. "A bartender?"
"Exactly, I -" Eraman paused, his brain catching up to the conversation. "Uh, no, I mean," he broke off, making a plaintive motion in the air while the woman gave him an arched eyebrow. "I didn't mean it like that. Please accept my apologies, miss..."
"Hunter Libra, of the order Sidereo."
Eraman felt himself become suddenly very sober. The mushroom beer went instantly dry in his mouth but began sweating itself out through his palms with impossible alacrity. "You. I didn't. Holy Hunter?"
"Mhm, Kiddo," the woman said, the arched eyebrow relaxing as one of the other bar patrons flagged her down for a drink.
"But, it's.... You don't seem as, well, what I mean to say is that you..." Eraman paused, staring at the woman's back as she walked away and searching for a way to describe the difference between Libra and the other Hunters he'd heard described time and time again in town legends.
"Guanopsychotic?" Libra supplied helpfully, topping off the mug of another patron with a twist of Miner's Milk and turning back to lean lazily on the counter in front of Eraman, arms crossed beneath her. "Completely fucked in the head in a mysterious and darkly tragic manner? Cursed with a burden of responsibility and madness too terrible for a mere mortal to bear?" She smiled, the lipstick armored expression shockingly genuine.
"Err, I wasn't going to say it like that, but yes. You seem really, really... normal. N-not that that's a bad thing!" Eraman stammered quickly, trying to correct course as Libra's smile only grew wider. "I just. You are not what I expected from a Holy Hunter..." Eraman felt his voice trailing off as he finished, eyes falling to stare into his half-drunk mushroom beer. It suddenly felt very foolish to come here. He'd imagined pledging himself to the service of one of the Holy Hunters, helping them carry the terrible burden they shouldered for Haven's sake, but now... Now he couldn't even talk to one without making an ass and an idiot of himself. Apparently being able to open a tavern door didn't change who you were after all. He heard Libra chuckle and push up from the counter, and a moment later a pair of slim shot glasses clinked to the bar beside his beer.
"A round on me, kid. Drink up, and let this Holy Hunter kill a bit of that moon-monster of nervousness you're bringing with you," Libra said, swirling a tall bottle with a tight spigot and pouring a thin stream of honey-colored liquid into both glasses. She flinched slightly in the middle of the swirl, as though stretching a sore muscle, but corrected with only a few drops scattered. "Now. The question you didn't ask is why. Why am I here, serving you up a drink like any other normal working stiff, while Keravnos is babbling at the void inside a Candle, Moonblade is off being tragically sweet with her wife, and Ochyrosi is contemplating ruining another of the tables for the brief and splintery fun of it. One moment, hun," Libra added, settling the bottle of ochre liquid back behind the bar and moving to tend to a few other customers.
Eraman picked up the shot he'd been poured and sniffed experimentally. It smelled sweet and acrid, like sugar and turpentine, with a strange aroma that reminded him of fresh leather in the machine shop. A flexible scent, if he had to put a name to it, though that didn't make any sense even in his head. Experimentally, he sipped at it and immediately gasped at the few drops that hit his tongue. His mouth felt like it was shriveling inwards, with a wave of sour-and-sweet chased backward up his throat by the wash of alcoholic air that followed his initial gasp. With a force of will, Eraman smoothed his expression into what he hoped was less of a pinched lemon-face and into more of a masculine grimace and gently set the shot back down.
"Pick it up, kiddo," Libra said from the side, almost the instant the glass touched back down with the countertop. "Trust the Divine Hunter on this one." She winked at Eraman as she walked back up to the pair of shots on the bar, picking up the untouched one and raising it to her lips before pausing for Eraman to join.
Eraman looked back down at the honey-colored liquid. He could leave right now. He didn't belong here. His master would be furious with him for drinking even the beer, it dulled the senses and unsteadied the hands. It was a strange problem to realize suddenly, but it seemed to embody everything here. Everything he'd done was a mistake. What the Hunter was doing was... humoring him, trying to include him in something he wasn't - or worse, she was just playing with him. Eraman winced, closing his eyes, then released his grip on the shot and moved to stand.
"Kid." The tone wasn't mocking, it wasn't commanding, but it still reflexively raised Eraman's downcast gaze to lock back with Libra's eyes. They weren't smiling now, but neither was there anger or mockery at Eraman's apparent intent to leave. "Please, trust me on this one. Have a drink." Her eyes never left his. Dark and brown, with the edges of crow's feet just beginning to form at the corners, she suddenly seemed much more than the sardonic bartender she'd been a moment ago.
Eraman trusted her. He clenched the shot in his hand and threw it back. He'd never done that before, but he'd seen it done and it didn't look complicated.
Burning amber liquid hit the back of his throat, covering his tongue and smashing into his epiglottis. Eraman gagged instantly, his body reacting instinctively with revulsion to the flavor of a half-fermented lemon slathered in honey being punched forcefully down his throat even before his brain processed the fullness of the wretched taste. Wide-eyed, he spat and retched repeatedly on the bar as Libra took her own shot. Mercifully, she also immediately puckered her face and gasped as she swallowed the demon liquor. She did, however, manage to keep hers down, her eyes closed as her expression processed a nigh-unto-vomiting level of revulsion. Chuckles from around the bar made Eraman's face burn as he spat and reached for a bar cloth, trying to sponge up his mess.
"Imagine," Libra began, her eyes screwed shut. "That you woke up to this flavor. Nothing else. You can't remember meat nor mushroom, not a leaf of green nor a bit of fruit. Nothing else but this. Everyone tells you that you knew what flavors were, that you tasted some really keen things in your time, but that's all done with now and you've been brought back to this." Libra shuddered, opening her eyes and slowly setting the shot down. "It's -" She did a double-take on Eraman cleaning up the bar. "Kiddo, stop that. It's my job to clean the bar and I got you into this mess. Don't steal my livelihood," she added, holding out a hand for the rag.
Somewhat sheepishly, Eraman complied, handing the wet rag he'd been cleaning the bar off with to the Holy Hunter.
"Anyway," Libra continued "That's it. That's your first moment as a Holy Hunter. Then everybody starts telling you how terrible it is that you can't remember any of the nice flavors, but boy, do they have a wagonload of horse shit for you to eat - and there's nobody else in town who can eat it. It's really awful that you have to eat it, but you're the only one who can, so get to work." Libra grimaced, forcefully wiping the countertop. "That's how most of them get treated. They wake up with no memories to hold on to, then get told to go out into the darkest and bleakest shit imaginable and suffer horror after horror, because they're the only ones who can. No, it doesn't hurt them like it does normal people, but that's because they have nothing else to compare it to." Libra stopped, locking eyes with Eraman. "You remember the taste of that shot?"
Slowly, very much wishing he didn't still have the aftertaste of it and bile clinging to his teeth, Eraman nodded.
"And, if I gave you the choice, would you rather eat a mouthful of horse dung, or swallow another shot?"
Eraman hesitated and Libra nodded.
"The very fact that it's a question is my point," she said, tossing the rag aside as real anger rises in her tone. She hushed her voice to a hiss that kept the conversation between the two of them but lent it a deadly intensity. "The reason Hunters are such 'tragic figures' is because everyone treats them that way. They aren't given a chance at another life. Keravnos is broken because no one gave him another chance. The doctors treated him like a weapon, a blessed crossbow bolt to hallow in a shrine until it is let fly, and then quickly forget about as trash when it breaks on the bones of whatever you needed to kill. Everyone else just goes along with that bullshit, but Keravnos - he's not actually crazy, he's just never been given the fucking opportunity to be sane. He -" Libra grunted suddenly, eyes bright with anger suddenly squinted shut as she clenched her hands together over her stomach. After a tense and unbreathing minute Libra shook her head and breathed out slowly, the calming breath tossing her curls forward.
Eraman waited for her to take several breaths before speaking up. "And... you?"
Libra snorted. The smile from before was gone. The humor fled. Her eyes were clouded and distant with pain. "I was defective. Unfit for the Hunt due to the procedure that 'saved' my life. I woke with no memories and a life without purpose, and so was immediately forgotten. That," she added, "is what saved me. That is what made me different."
Eraman waited silently, entranced as Libra breathed in deeply through her nose and out again repeatedly, the pain clearing from her stance.
"I had time. I found old 'friends' and learned about who I was. Someone who had known me since childhood told me about my family. They were... terrible people, to hear her tell it. Sometimes I almost remember," Libra paused, her hands lingering over a peculiar series of crescent-shaped scars on her collarbone "but I really and truly don't. I learned became a children's teacher because I was terrified of other adults. I hated being in crowds. I hated being outside. I hated being in the caves. I hated strangers. I..." Libra shrugged. "I was a very small person. I was. The more I heard of that me that was, the more I became grateful that I simply am not her anymore. I died. In every sense that mattered, that woman I was died. I like to think she was a good person, a scared and damaged individual who tried to help children be less like her, but I honestly don't know." Libra smiled again, a slightly sad half-smile. "I never knew her."
Slowly, beginning to understand, Eraman nodded.
"I learned new things. I got Koletti to teach me to tend bar," Libra said, jerking her thumb at the other woman tending bar, stout woman with a buzzcut the color of steel "and I met new people. Fellow Hunters, fellow townspeople. Big people, small people, everyone in the middle. People like you. I got a new life. Maybe I'll get called on to Hunt one day, and I'll probably die in some Gods forsaken alley if that's the case, but even if that comes to pass - I will have lived. Really. Lived. All that bitter flavor of the cure was washed away by a new life as Libra Sidereo, a life I've chosen to love." Libra's smile deepened for a moment as she finished, content, awash in memories, and then slowly faded away again. "The others, however, never had this chance. They are only told about who once were, what they lost. They get made into living ghosts, shells of people who died, and then everyone treats them as tragic pariahs when they have the audacity to seem haunted. I'm sorry, kid, but they don't need any more people swearing to their service or supporting the grand and noble cause of eating the wagon of horseshit that the doctors gave them."
Eraman felt his chest tighten and he nodded, accepting the chastisement. There were better people, stronger people, to help them carry that burden. People like Libra.
"What they need, kid, is someone to buy them a drink and talk to them. Really fucking talk to them - not about the end of days, not about the horrors that dwell just beyond the wall of sleep, not about an old life that they barely remember - but someone who talks to them about how piss-awful the mushroom beer is, about how Old Terry finally proposed to Widow Donnager. They need people to invite them down to the rat races, to get them to go read a book and weep about some simpering romantic nothing from the old stories. They need people to help them forge a new life with new memories that aren't all linked to the Hunt." Libra turned away then, and for a moment Eraman thought that was the end of the conversation, then she returned with two tall mugs of mushroom beer. "They'd rather feel pain than nothing at all, and that's a big damn problem for everyone. If you want to help, give them something else to feel. Anything. Talk to them, not as some lowly ordinary man to a Holy Hunter, but as two people over two mugs of r-e-a-l-l-y shite beer."
The tight knot in Eraman's chest suddenly puffed away, replaced by a stunned stillness as he looked down at the two drinks in front of him. He'd imagined a hero's journey, clad against the moon's corruption, heading to the surface, passing ammunition and stitching wounds as the tide of battle raged, and yet... somehow this seemed more impossible.
"They're just like you, Kid. They're scared, they're alone, and they want to be something, anything - and so latch on to those goddamn doctors for a lifeline of purpose. That gives them a reason to fight." There was no smile on Libra's face, just an intensity of purpose. "Give them a reason to live. Ochyrosi likes cats. Bring her a beer. Make conversation, force it if you have to, but give her something other than blood and pain and her own scarred reflection. Cats don't give a fig or a feather if you're covered in fingernails. None of these poor Hunters deserve the silence of a disconnected life, but it is what they're going to get if you don't help.
Eraman stared down at the mushroom brew, watching the ripples quiet across its surface.
Libra nodded, rapping the bar. "You said you wanted to help, kiddo, and this is it." She started to turn away, her attention moving to the rest of the bar as Eraman stared silently at the two beers.
"They were wrong," Eraman said, his voice thicker than he meant it to be.
Libra stopped, turning back and cocking her head. "Oh?"
Eraman nodded, trying to quiet the tremble in his voice. "You're not defective," he said, taking one beer in each hand as he stood up from the bar counter.
The smile finally returned to Libra's face, full and broad. "Nah, I'm a defective Hunter, that's right. But, as a person, I think I'm going to fit in here just fine. I think you will too, come to think about it. Good luck, kiddo."
Eraman felt himself smile a little as Libra gave him an encouraging nod, then he steeled himself to turn back around and seek out the Hunter he'd identified as Holy Hun- as Ochyrosi earlier. His master had a cat. He could talk cats.
With a stomach that still churned acid, a heart full of fear, and two beers, Eraman turned to go try and save a Holy Hunter.
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Topic: Ventures By Moonlight | A Semi-Cooperative Dark Fantasy | Always Recruiting (Read 37634 times)