Barrett — Roleplayer Guild

(All sound ceases and all lights go out except a spotlight that appears on a solitary figure in the corner, bent over his mug)

All these youngsters come from wide and far,
to sing here in this bloody bar.
They laugh and shout and sing and fight,
but they're in for an awful frigggghhht...

(The last words is dragged on and on, dropping down the octave. As it ends, a full band chimes in with gusto and the man begins to wander around the room with a sour expression. He stops to talk directly into the faces of various eager young adventurers, leaving them looking much less eager)

When they're off to see the world, the world will also see them.
They'll slog and march and stumble, through bracken and swamp and fen.
Their swords will all get blunted, their arrows will all get wet.
They'll go from rich in treasure to buried alive in debt.
	And then, and then, and then, and thennnnn...
	then they'll know the adventurer's life I lead.

The battles will all be bloody, the castles will all be cold.
They'll see many a hoard of treasure but keep not a piece of gold.
They'll fight ogres and trolls and orcs, maybe even some dragons.
And to forget, they'll drink beers in flagons and flagons and flagons.
	And then, and then, and then, and thennnnn...
	then they'll know the adventurer's life I lead.

Tavern beds are always lumpy, the baths are always cold.
But as hard as I try, will these youngsters be told?
I tell them of the hardships, I tell them of the plights.
But all they ever think of is the women and the sights.
	And when, and when, and when, and whennnnn...
	when will they know the adventurer's life I lead?

(The band's theme drops aways as the man returns to his seat.)

Perhaps I'm old and bitter and know naught of what I speak.
Perhaps they'll even find the grand adventure that they seek.

(The man glares into his tankard and shakes his head. The main theme returns for the last line.)

Or, more likely, they'll be dead by the end of the week!

Location: Loup's Home

Hunger.

In the dark, Loup methodically spread butter over a slab of bread. Back, forth, back, forth, back and forth the knife went, slathering the stuff across the surface of the bread. The man, if such he could be called, at the table took a strange comfort from the mechanical repetition. When all else was in flux, you could rely on a carefully made sandwich to reassure you. Butter sufficiently spread, he placed strips of raw pork onto the bread one at a time. They dripped gently, juice and blood staining the hard wood of the table or, rather, taking their place beside myriad other stains. The uncovered, grimy table was another small comfort, a reminder of a time when he wouldn't have thought twice about personally tearing the throat of a pig out and devouring it whole, rather than calmly preparing to eat it with processed wheat and milk.

With a mix of glee and grumble, Loup bit into his meal and reflected upon his situation. The lights were all out but then, they always were. He'd heard the low hum of the power cease and largely ignored it without worrying about why. That had been an hour so ago and he was only now thinking he might need to look into it further. While he rarely used the lights, he rather liked the heating and television was yet another strange pleasure. Both he could survive without of course, he reassured himself, but why do so when it wasn't necessary? There was some part of him that objected to going to the fuse box and poking around, that saw it as yet another instance of giving in and letting the dull blanket of civilisation fall over him. Most of him, however, was wondering what was on right now.

Unease.

There was something wrong though, something putting him on edge. It had been there all day, all week even, something under the skin that was slowly driving his hackles up, such as they were. Loup could've sworn his teeth weren't quite so long last week, nor his nose so sharp and his eyes so smart. All the progress he had made towards human and normal seemed to be slipping away, but he had more than enough left to feel properly conflicted about that. His wolfen, animal pride wouldn't let him see it as anything other than good but as he thought, he traced one finger across a red welt along his guts. Acting like an animal had cost him once already, cost him dearly.

With a crackle and a ping, the power came back on. Not much changed, apart from the phone. Loup could count on one hand the number of times he's used it but now the little light was flashing. If memory served him (memory of films, he'd never been left a message in person) that meant that someone had left him a message. He rose, brushing crumbs carelessly across the table and strode over to the machine. The message turned out to be a summons to the regular meeting that was now the state of an emergency. People were disappearing, vanishing into the night with no trace at all, apparently. Loup highly doubted that, knowing himself how hard it was to enter a home, devour someone and then leave no trace at all.

Still, a meeting. Were his identity widely known, he doubted there'd be any need for a meeting. They'd probably just march upon his home with pitchforks and flaming torches first and ask questions later. As it was, it would do him no harm to find out what the others thought was going on, no harm at all. They might know what was in the air, in the blood.

He licked his lips and ran his tongue over his incisors.

Curiosity...

Location: Robin and Marian's Apartment
Interacting With: Maid Marian (@McHaggis)

"I'm just saying that it's weird, that's all. Not judging or attacking or anything, I'm just saying that it's a little strange to spend half an hour rearranging the ornaments in a house we were supposed to be robbing."

Despite his affected chiding, Robin had a visible and almost audible grin.He was unable to truly disapprove of anything Marian did even when he was in a bad mood and right now, he was on top of the world. He always was, right after a light spot of larceny.

It was the bright spot in an otherwise boring week, a moment of heart thumping excitement between days and days of pulse slowing boredom. Of the many heroes, fables and myths in Mystvale, Robin had perhaps adjusted the least to their new home. Not a day went by that he didn't look out of the window and longingly dream of Anglia. Not just the land or the people, though he missed and worried about his Merry Men terribly, but that constant sense of excitement and vitality that came with being a fugitive, that haunted him as he sat behind his desk.

He'd tried different things to recapture that feeling. Lucy had suggested taking up Archery again and, for a time, that had worked. Standing at the local course, he peppered the furthest target with shot after shot, often with his eyes closed. And with them closed, he could almost picture himself in Sherwood forest, knocking weapons out of the hands of his opponents with a well placed arrow and a smug grin. The feeling of nostalgia had worn off quickly, however, and been replaced with an intensified homesickness.

Video-games had been the next port of call for escapism, but had been even less effective. The sense of disconnect an old fashioned man like Robin had to the actions of his avatar was doubled by his jealousy of the character's adventures. While Robin might be guiding the little man through battlefields and dungeons, it wasn't him who felt the bite of adrenaline or weighted the arrow against the wind as he drew. It was like being taunted, seeing someone else having all the fun and being consoled by telling them how to do it.

It was, of course, Marian who had suggested a solution. They might not be in Sherwood anymore but there were still rich and still poor. She proposed they begin taking weekly excursions into the homes of the wealthy and let their natural instincts take over from there. The were obstacles, of course. Burglar alarms, toughened glass and safes were all new to the pair but they were experienced enough in overcoming problems to breeze past them after a few mistakes.

They would stroll into some expensive looking and presumably well guarded home, disable whatever security features they could find and then snatch up anything valuable looking laying around. They tried to avoid objects of sentimental value, as even the rich in this world seemed to be respectable human beings, more or less. But almost anything else was fair game and they reasoned that things lying around the house were generally easily replaceable by those with the resources to have them in the first place. Then they'd sell them to a fence and donate the takings. Moral? Perhaps not. Fun? Most certainly.

And now they had settled into a comfortable routine. Once a week they'd select a target and repeat the process, picking more and more ambitious targets as time went on, and then they'd retire home with the warm glow that comes from doing good by doing bad. They both took extra joys were they could in the process; Robin liked to try to disable security precautions with his bow wherever possible, while Marian mischievously left different parts of the house subtly rearranged.

Whatever else it was, it was a life. Not the one they'd had before and probably not the one they wanted but certainly a life.

"What's this then, someone's left us a message? I hope it's not Merlin, passive aggressively noting that we weren't at the last town meeting and remarking how nice it would be to see us at the next one."

Barrett Member

Oh, the year was 1778...

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